Hierarchy Of The Sciences

What is the Hierarchy of the Sciences or Classification Of the Sciences.?? Comte also based his classification on ....law of Increasing Dependency. This principle has a special feature....

The Hierarchy Of The Sciences

From times immemorial thinkers have been trying to classify knowledge on one or the other basis. Early Greek thinkers had made a tripartite classification of knowledge. These were physics, ethics and politics. Later on, Bacon made the classification on the basis of the faculties of man namely, memory, imagination and reason. The science based upon memory is history and the science based upon imagination is poetry. The knowledge based upon reason is science of physics, chemistry etc. 

Each science is concerned with some definite event or subject matter, and these constitute the subject of its study. The class of a science is determined by these events. Comte also based his classification on this fact. He christened his principle of classification as the law of Increasing Dependency. This principle has a special feature. In fact, the facts pertaining to different sciences differ in complexity. Some facts are simple while others are complex, complex facts dependent upon the simple facts are general and are present everywhere. It is on this basis that Comte has classified various branches of knowledge. While developing his classification of sciences, Comte based himself on their objective attributes.

First of all, he divided them into the abstract and the concrete. The former studied the laws of certain categories of phenomena, the latter applied these laws to partial fields. Biology, for example, was the general abstract science of life, and medicine a concrete science applying the general laws of biology. Comte distinguished five abstract, theoretical sciences: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology, and supplemented the main categories of natural phenomena (astronomical, physical, chemical, and biological) with the category of social phenomena, thus giving his classification the ‘character of universality indispensable to its definitive constitution’. The science that is based upon complex facts is called a complex science. The complex sciences are, in turn, based upon simple sciences. 

In order to study a complex science one has to study a simple science. Thus, each science is, in some measure, dependent upon some other science and by itself forms a basis of some other science. Thus a complex science is based upon some simple science and in turn forms a basis of a more complex science. On this serial order the most simple science is placed on the lowest tier followed upward by more and more complex sciences. Thus, the most complex science is placed on the top. Thus, this arrangement is of Increasing Dependency.

Hence, in the arrangement made on the basis of the law of increasing dependency, Comte places ‘Mathematics’ on the lowest wrung and the topmost wrung is occupied by ‘Sociology’. The hierarchy of this classification is as follows:

1. Mathematics,

1. Astronomy,

1. Physics,

1. Chemistry,

1. Biology, and

1. Sociology or social physics.

From this classification it becomes plain that mathematics, according to Comte, is the simplest science while sociology is the most complex science. While mathematics depends the least on other sciences, biology is most dependent upon other sciences. Thus, the social sciences are at the apex of the hierarchy for they enjoy “all the resources of the anterior sciences” and offer “the attributes of a completion of the positive method. All others are preparatory to it. Here alone can the general sense of natural law be decisively developed in the most difficult case of all”.

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You can visit some significant Theories by some Great Theorists: 
Voluntaristic Theory of Action (Voluntaristic Action), Generalized Media of Exchange, Four-Function Paradigm (AGIL Model in Systemic Model), Cynicism (Circulation of Elites), Organicism, The Laws of Three Stages, Order and progress (Interrelation between Social Statics and Social Dynamics), The Philosophy of Money, 

Reference:

• George Ritzer, Sociological Theory.
• Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought. 
• Various

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Related Questions:

What is meant by Hierarchy of the Sciences?

The significance of the classification of sciences from the view point of Auguste Comte.

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