I am a Sociology major with an Anthropology minor, and I get a lot of crap from my boyfriend, a Chemistry/Biology major.

“Sociology falls in with psychology. They are pseudo sciences without merit,” he says. Well, boyfriend and doubters everywhere, I’m here to tell you that sociology, anthropology and psychology are sciences that are social or “soft” sciences.

Hard sciences include the traditional biology, chemistry and physics. These use math and scientific methods to prove or disprove theories about The Universe and the world and how it functions. That is what makes them sciences.

Sociology, anthropology, and psychology also happen to use math (statistics, mostly) and scientific research methods to come to conclusions. So, what is the difference?

The difference is that the soft sciences make conclusions about individual people, instead of the universe they live in. We balance science and the humanities.

These soft-sciences, especially Anthropology, can tend to lean towards one side or the other in their subcategories. For instance, there are hard-science based categories of Anthropology, including Human Evolution and Forensics, but cultural categories, like Religious and Food studies, are considered humanities.

There have been several changes of attitudes in the soft-science community about whether these subjects are scientific or humanity-related.

Between 1900 and 1949, Anthropology was largely regarded as just a humanity. This attitude was supported by Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). He developed the idea of Cultural Relativism.

This means that cultural practices and beliefs are specific to people, and therefore, cannot be generalized or compared to another culture.

The scientific point of view came after, from the 1950’s until about the 1990’s. The theory that best supports this is called cultural ecology.

Cultural ecology is the idea that every cultural aspect is an adaptation to some environmental factor, some aspects more than others.

In the 90’s, this was expanded into neo-evolutionism: Darwin’s theory of evolution is used to explain development in society. This used a hard science as a base for explaining human behavior.

There are several similar examples regarding sociology and psychology over time. They are considered either a science or humanity.

There seems to be a great schism between the two disciplines, but I think that anthropology, sociology and psychology do not need to be categorized in one or the other.

They can stay in the murky-grey area between science and humanities and still be respected as “soft-sciences.”

Jordan Prats is a freshman sociology major. She can be reached at 581-2812 or DENopinions@gmail.com.