119 



VI. Contemporary Views of the Social Science Community 



During the first 2 years of consideration of the proposed National 

 Science Foundation, 1946-1947, communication between the social 

 science community and the Congress was not extensive. In the 1945 

 hearings before Senator Kilgore's subcommittee, 1 day had been de- 

 voted to testimony by social scientists, and the 1947 hearings before the 

 House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce received 

 testimony showing a wide consensus within the scientific societies 

 (including both physical and social sciences) in favor of permissive or 

 even explicit inclusion of the social sciences in the NSF. The general 

 propositions were unquestioned that the social sciences lagged behind 

 the physical sciences, and that new inventions in technological 

 hardware generated problems that the social sciences were called on to 

 solve. But the Congress was left with many uncertainties. 



For example, the social sciences had not been subjected to the same 

 scrutiny by the Bush committee as had the physical-biological-medical 

 sciences. They were not clearly defined in scope. As the NSF concept 

 gradually became delimited to the encouragement of basic rather than 

 applied research, the role of the social sciences became less distinct: 

 there was some question, for example, that research in the social 

 sciences could even be separated into basic and applied categories 

 or that there was any such thing as basic social science research. The 

 existence of an array of meaningful basic research objectives in the 

 social sciences had not been demonstrated. There was no clear char- 

 acterization of the process by which basic discoveries in the social 

 sciences led to useful results in the applied field. (Nor, for that matter, 

 in the physical sciences either, but the dramatic hardware develop- 

 ments of World War II had certified as real the process in the physical 

 sciences.) 



Some of the attempts to apply the hypotheses of social science, it 

 was held, ran counter to practical experience. There was a general 

 sense of uneasiness that the potential — or actual — results of social 

 science research might challenge deeply entrenched value-centered 

 beliefs. There was also some question as to whether in the field of 

 social studies the term "science" was applicable. For example, John 

 M. Potter, president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and an 

 historian, suggested that "when we use the term 'the social sciences,' 

 we are expressing a more or less realizable hope, rather than indicating 

 blood kinship between political economy and physics:" 



The extension of the exact methods of science into the doubtful regions of human 

 peiplexity is devoutly to be wished. But the scientific study of man's affairs is 

 still so little advanced toward the level of our examination of physical nature 

 that it might seem more dangerous than advantageous to set up a Division of 

 Social Sciences within the same National Research Foundation. We probably 

 face many more decades of tedious and disappointing study, of tentative experi- 

 ment and frustrated enterprise, before the methods for the study of society can 

 without risk be so firmly crystallized.^^ 



Another social scientist, Alfred E. Cohn, ^\Titing in the Political 

 Science Quarterly, assailed as bureaucratic and undemocratic the 

 basic idea of a Federal foundation to support science. He criticized 

 as generally diffuse and largely irrelevant the testimony before the 

 Kilgore subcommittee ("* * * probably not the best way of securing 



M Hearings on Science Legislation (S. 1267 and related bills), op. cit., p. 939. 



