Síntomas e implicaciones de la necesidad de legitimación científica en las ciencias sociales: Hiperespecialización e incremento de los espacios «NO MAN’S LAND»

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, the scientific field of social sciences has been transforming the trajectory of its institutionalization. This is because the trend towards reducing the number of disciplinary categories that had been identified since 1850 was reversed after the Second World War through a steady increase in names. However, such multiplication does not seem to have been developed proportionally to the necessary communication that should exist between them; suggesting a propensity of modern social sciences to hyper-specialize its subjects and therefore, to increase and extend the gaps between their related fields (also called here “No man’s land” spaces). This circumstance seems to be constituting a blockage in the field’s explanatory capacity, and studying it can contribute to unblocking it. Thus, the present research has focused on providing a micro and macro view of the discipline, on the one hand describing different phases through which it is developed and, on the other hand, by identifying the sociocultural conditioning to which it is exposed. From the analysis of these questions, two aspects have been obtained that seem to characterize the production of knowledge in modern social sciences, which are: a.) the existence of a higher risk of obstruction in the disciplinary construction after the specialization phase- because it is when research activity tends to be more likely to be trapped in hyperspecialization-, and b.) the tendency towards a greater appreciation due to its applicability to social interests of nomothetic attributes as opposed to idiographic ones-whose reproduction in knowledge is produced through mechanisms of legitimization. From these results, we can extract what seems to be a causal relationship between the nomothetic tendency of the current hyperspecialization, the increase of idiographic gaps between related fields, and the need for the legitimization of the theories in the contemporary symbolic universe.