It is understood as auxiliary sciences or auxiliary disciplines to those that, without being entirely devoted to a specific area of study, are linked to it and provide assistance, since their possible applications contribute to the development of said area of study. For example: statistics, literature, mathematics.
These auxiliary disciplines can come from entirely different fields, as in the case of other sciences, or they may be disciplines whose specific objective is part of the range of interests addressed by the science it serves as an auxiliary.
The difference is that in the first case there is a collaboration between sciences, while in the second it is about disciplines created to explore specific sectors of the field of study of a given science, serving as sub disciplines.
Auxiliary Sciences of Social Sciences
Since the social sciences are not exact Sciences, but approach their study objects from an interpretive perspective, they often resort to disciplines and applications from other fields of study that allow them to approach their own from different perspectives or with greater accuracy and rigor. Transdisciplinarity is not rare in this type of science.
In this sense, many of them take conceptual tools on loan without this meaning starting a new mixed discipline, although it is not uncommon for this to allow them to undertake a significant number of branches or sub-disciplines, as is the case of History, whose focus is on disciplines of another nature such as the humanities, or even like other sister social sciences, throws the various Histories of Art, Law, etc.
The following are traditionally considered as the social sciences: Political Science, Anthropology, Library Science, Law, Economics, International Relations, Ethnography, Ethnology, Sociology, Criminology, Political Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Education, Archaeology, Demography, History, Human Ecology and Geography.
List of Auxiliary Sciences of the Social Sciences
- Statistics. Numerous Social Sciences are based on statistical tools to support their approach to human communities, social typologies or even clinical cases (psychology). The so-called actuarial sciences provide them with measurement tools that are important in supporting hypotheses and theories regarding man.
- Literature. Beyond the quite obvious example of the History of Literature or the History of Art, literature has often served as a source of narratives and symbols for disciplines such as psychoanalysis (the Oedipus complex, for example) or psychology, since In its symbolic and semantic richness, the arts of writing are a useful field for conceptualization and creativity, values that are not alien to the Social Sciences.
- Math. It is enough to think of the example of graphs representing trends or proportional or statistical information to verify the usefulness that mathematics provides to the Social Sciences. This is particularly useful in Economics, in which formulas and calculations are often required to express the relations of production and consumption of goods.
- computing. There are few sciences that today escape the modernizing boom of the technological revolution, and therefore few that do not have more or less close ties with computing, as a facilitator of word processing tools, data management and even computer science. use of specialized software, as in the case of Geography or Library Science.
- Psychiatry. Numerous approaches to human societies (sociology) or the human psyche (psychology) make use of the diagnoses and medical tools of psychiatry, whether as a source of a theoretical framework on which to base their own speculations.
- Semiology. The science of meanings is a useful tool for not a few Social Sciences, such as Geography, for example, to which they offer the opportunity to reflect on the way of conceiving the world and the meanings associated with it. Many of these sciences require analysis of this type in their specific study methodology.
- Social comunication. Media discourse is a frequent object of study in numerous social sciences, from Psychology, Sociology, International Relations and even Linguistics. In that sense, many of the critical tools of Social Communication are useful to them.
- Philosophy. Since there is a branch of Philosophy called: Philosophy of social sciences, it is not difficult to evidence the cooperation between the science of thought and the so-called “soft” sciences. This branch studies the methods and logic behind the set of these sciences whose objective is the interaction between man and society.
- Musicology. The formal study of music belongs to the field of the humanities, but its association with history is not only frequent, but also productive: the history of music is used as a record of certain forms of art and of the relationship between man and divine, which are illustrative of the mentality of a bygone age. That is why there are mixed disciplines such as ethnomusicology.
- museology. The science of managing museums and their internal logic is also not alien to the Social Sciences, from which it takes exhibition material and historical, sociological and critical foundations with which to sustain its curatorship of works of art. At the same time, the museum provides Social Sciences such as Anthropology with physical material and a discursive space in which to show themselves to the public.
- Medicine. The anatomical knowledge that medicine provides is useful for the fields of Linguistics and Psychology, and it is not uncommon for other social sciences to seek in it elements with which to work the different human systems.
- Management. Since this discipline studies the methods of human organization, it is understood that it is very close to the Social Sciences, to which it often contributes its theories on the conduct of groups, its principles of effectiveness and a systemic approach of importance for Political Sciences. , to cite just one example.
- geology. The study of soils can be a vital tool for archaeologists, whose main object of study is usually buried by time in various types of soil and therefore requires some type of excavation.
- Marketing. This discipline studies the dynamics of the different existing market niches, advertising, the logic behind the consumption system; all this extremely useful for sociological, psychological or economic approaches to our societies, since consumption is also a way of relating to them.
- Social work. In many ways this discipline is an application of the precepts of social sciences such as anthropology, sociology and psychology, if not political science and law. It deals with promoting social change and intervening in subjects for the improvement of society as a whole.
- Town planning. This discipline undertakes the study of the planning of cities and urban environments, and in this sense provides vital keys for multiple historical, sociological, psychological and economic approaches. In many areas, in fact, people vote for considering it just another social science.
- Theology. The study of existing forms of religion may or may not seem far from the field of social sciences, but it is not. Anthropology, history and others of the group see in this discipline an important source of theoretical inputs and texts that serve, in turn, as an object of study.
- Architecture. Like urbanism, this discipline dedicated to the art of constructing habitable space offers many new conceptual tools and perspectives to the social sciences that are interested in the way of life of the man in the city, including archaeologists who are interested in the ruins of ancient cities.
- Modern languages. Given that this discipline attempts to systematize the study of translation methods from one language to another, as well as their learning dynamics, it is useful to enlarge the field of study of disciplines such as Education or Linguistics, which make learning and language their objects of study, respectively.
- vet. In a similar way to the case of medicine, this science provides animal experimentation tools that are particularly useful for psychology, since many of its doctrines have been interested in behavioral experimentation with animals to establish their theories about intelligence or learning. .