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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays a clear contradiction exists between a social world in which images are everywhere and a sociology that scarcely considers any kind of visual representations. This «blind sociology» takes into account neither the visual construction of the social, nor the social construction of the visual. In addition, this «blind sociology» does not use image to carry out social research. Most sociologists think that words and numbers are appropriate modes of representation to produce social knowledge but that images are not. This article is an epistemological reflection on the possibility and necessity of incorporating images into the processes by which the social sciences produce knowledge. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Picture Theory of Meaning and John Berger's theory about the coherence of the images show that images not only can, but also must be incorporated into the processes of knowledge production. The dual nature of photographic images permits us to use them in two different ways. Photographic images can be incorporated into social research as indexes, given the existential or empirical connections that link the different parts of the image with real objects. But we can also incorporate photographs as icons, given the homology between the situation represented by the image and real facts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The model is today a crucial idea in the social and physical sciences. Revisiting several philosophical or historical works on models, the author gives some elements for a genealogy of this category ranging from the use by Maxwell and Boltzmann in Physics to the debates of the Vienna Circle on model theory in mathematical logic. Later, the irruption of the concept in Social Sciences around World War II connected with applied mathematics, computer science and simulations, structural modelling and operational research. The study of new objects as ecosystems, climate and the world economy, which can not be represented within the framework of a theory has needed different approaches to knowledge, either theoretical or empirical. The model and the software must seek to integrate these various elements of knowledge, taking into account the aims of the modelling activity: arbitrages, decisions about actions and the management of systems, rather than to consider the model as a cognitive mediator between theory and observation. Modelling is a social and political activity linked to the motivations of the actors and to collective decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]