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a Ê Introduction

Social science has the important roles in our everyday life because

through the social science we will able to know the changing of the society

Social science itself can be defined as any discipline or branch of science that

deals with the sociocultural aspects of human behaviour The social sciences

generally include cultural anthropology, economics, political science,

sociology, criminology, and social psychology Comparative law and

comparative religion are also sometimes regarded as social sciences

The social sciences begins in the roots of ancient philosophy In

ancient history, there was no difference between mathematics and the study

of history, poetry or politics Significant contributions to the social sciences

were made by Muslim scientists in the Islamic civilization during the Middle

ages This unity of science as descriptive remains and deductive reasoning

from axioms created a scientific framework

The time frames of the development of the social science are divided

into four stages Those are the ancient history, Middle ages, Islamic

development, and the modern era The modern era are including early

modern, late modern, the nineteenth century, twentieth century, interwar

period and, contemporary developments era

In the contemporary period, Karl Popper and Talcott Parsons

influenced the furtherance of the social sciences Researchers continues to

search for a unified consensus on what methodology might have the power

and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various

midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide

usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks at present though, the

various realms of social science progress in a myriad of ways, increasing the

overall knowledge of society The social sciences will for the foreseeable

future be composed of different zones in the research of, and sometime

distinct in approach toward, the field

Social science may refer either to the specific sciences of society

established by thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, or

general to all disciplines outside of noble science and arts In the late 19th

century, academic social sciences initially were constituted of five fields:

jurisprudence and amendment of the law, education, health, economy and

trade, and art

One of the most influential theories in the contrary development era is

post-structuralism theory The post-structuralist thinkers are including Michel

Foucault and Jacques Derrida The term Post-Structuralism is comparatively

straightforward in the sense that it is possible to limit the term to the work of

those thinkers who were initially seen as structuralists of one sort or another

and whose work developed from that position to a more adaptable and

complex set ofÊ argument Those thinkers give their own contributions to the

development of social science, such as Michel Foucault with his theory of

ideas and Jacques Derrida with his theory of deconstruction

 Therefore the writer interested in discussing what is the contribution

of post-structuralism theory on the development of social science Based on

that reason, the writer would like to uncover the title ³The Contribution of

Post-Structuralism Theory in Social Science Development

B Ê Discussion

1 Ê Social Science

The social sciences are the fields of academic scholarship which

explore aspects of human society Social sciences may draw upon

empirical methods and attempt to emulate the standards of conventional

scientific practice By contrast, other social scientists employ critical

analysis or hermeneutic methods to study objects of enquiry they regard

as inconsistent with the scientific approach

Social science is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a

plurality of fields outside of the physical sciences and the arts These

include: anthropology, archaeology, communication studies, cultural

studies, demography, economics, history, human geography,

international development, international relations, linguistics, media

studies, philology, political science, social psychology, and social work

The term may be used, however, in the specific context of

referring to the original sciences of society established in 19th century

sociology Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber are typically

cited as the principal architects of modern social science by this

definition Positivist sociologists attempt to emulate the natural sciences

as a model for understanding society, and so define "science" in its

stricter modern sense antipositivists, by contrast, use social critique or

symbolic interpretation rather than raw empirical observation, and thus

treat "science" in its broader, classical sense In modern academic

practice theorists are often eclectic, using multiple methodologies

Society or human society is the manner or condition in which the

members of a community live together for their mutual benefit By

extension, society denotes the people of a region or country, sometimes

even the world, taken as a whole Used in the sense of an associaton, a

society is a body of individuals outlined by the bounds of functional

interdependence, possibly comprising characteristics such as national or

cultural identity, social solidarity, language or hierarchical organization

Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between

individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions Like other

communities or groups, a society allows its members to achieve needs or

wishes they could not fulfill alone

a society, however, may be ontologically independent of, and

utterly irreducible to, the qualities of constituent individuals; it may act to

oppress The urbanization and rationalization inherent in some,

particularly Western capitalist, societies, has been associated with

feelings of isolation and social "anomie"

More broadly, a society is an economic, social or industrial

infrastructure, made up of a varied collection of individuals Members of

 a society may be from different ethnic groups a society may be a

particular ethnic group, such as the Saxons; a nation state, such as

Bhutan; a broader cultural group, such as a Western society The word

society may also refer to an organized voluntary association of people for

religious, benevolent, cultural, scientific, political, patriotic, or other

purposes

2 Ê Post-Structuralism

In the late 1960s, just as structuralism was reaching its apex as an

influential theory of language, along came a new wave of philosophers

intent on subjecting it to a rigorous and sustained critique Structuralism,

an intellectual movement most readily associated with the linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss,

examined cultural phenomena according to the underlying formal

systems out of which those phenomena naturally spring That is, both

language and culture acquire meaning only insofar as they participate in a

complex pool of structural relations

This seemingly scientific view of language and culture posited a

systemic "center" that organized and sustained an entire structure The

historical attack against this central premise of structuralism is usually

traced to a paper entitled "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of

the Human Sciences," delivered by Jacques Derrida to the International

Colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 In his essay, later

collected in his influential book Writing and Difference (1978), Derrida

criticized the Western "logocentric" notion of an ever-active,

transcendent center or ground Since language does in fact lack such a

center, say poststructuralist critics, language is therefore inherently

unstable and fraught with ambiguity and "slippage," with the result that

meaning is indeterminate

There are some of assumptions of post-structural thought:

a Ê Post-structuralism is marked by a rejection of totalizing, essentialist,

foundationalist concepts

b Ê Post-structuralism contests the concept of 'man' as developed by

enlightenment thought and idealist philosophy Rather than holding

as in the enlightenment view that 'individuals', are sacred, separate

and intact, their minds the only true realm of meaning and value,

their rights individual and inalienable, their value and nature rooted

in a universal and transhistorical essence -- a metaphysical being, in

short -- the post-structural view holds that persons are culturally and

discursively structured, created in interaction as situated, symbolic

beings The common term for a person so conceived is a 'subject'

c Ê Poststructuralism sees 'reality' as being much more fragmented,

diverse, tenuous and culture-specific than does structuralism

d Ê Post-structuralism derives in part from a sense that we live in a

linguistic universe This means, in the first instance, rejecting the

traditional aesthetic, phenomenalist assumption that language is a

'transparent' medium which hands over experience whole and

 unproblematically; in a 'linguistic' universe 'reality' is only mediated

reality, and what it is mediated by is governed

e Ê all meaning is textual and intertextual: there is no "outside of the

text," as Derrida remarked Everything we can know is constructed

through signs, governed by the rules of discourse for that area of

knowledge, and related to other texts through filiation, allusion and

repetition Every text exists only in relation to other texts; meaning

circulates in economies of discourse This understanding does not

mean that all reality is textual, only that what we can know of it, and

how we can know, is textual, constructed through discourse, with all

its rules; through symbols, linguistic and otherwise; through

grammar(s)

f Ê Discourse is a material practice; the human is rooted in historicity

and lives through the body (Why 'historicity' instead of 'history'?

Because the term 'history' suggests an objectively existing,

cognitively available reality; 'historicity' implies that what we

conceive of as history is tentative, situated, contingent )

g Ê In Foucault's terms, the production of discourse, the (historical,

material) way we know our world, is controlled, selected, organized

and distributed by a certain number of procedures Discourse is

regulated by rules of exclusion, by internal systems of control and

delineation, by conditions under which discourses can be employed,

and by philosophical themes which elide the reality of discourse --

 the themes of the founding subject, originating experience, and

universal mediation Discourses are multiple, discontinuous,

originating and disappearing through chance; they do not hide the

truth but constitute its temporary face Foucault is post-structuralist

in his insistence that there is no great causal flow or plan or

evolution of history, that what happens is mainly by chance

h Ê The Derridean concept of différance links up with Freudian

suppositions and marxist ideas to highlight concepts of repression,

displacement, condensation, substitution and so forth, which, often

by following metaphoric or metynomic links carefully, can be

deconstructed or revealed; what is 'meant' is different from what

appears to be meant Meaning disguises itself This is essentially

structuralist, one of the reasons why 'post-structuralism' cannot be

understood without structuralism

3 Ê Contribution of Post-Structuralism in Social Science

a Ê Michel Foucault

Foucault's works are based on a vision of history derived

from Nietzsche He expressed his indebtedness to Nietzsche for

having outlined a conception of history called genealogy The

method of genealogy involves a painstaking rediscovery of struggles,

an attack on the tyranny of what he calls ³totalizing discourses
and

a rediscovery of fragmented, subjugated, local and specific

knowledge It is directed against great truths and grand theories

 Foucault rejects the Hegelian teleological model, in favour of

Nietzschean tactic of critique through the presentation of {ifference

The gap between the past and the present underlines the principle of

difference at the heart of Foucault's historiography ÊDeal largely with

the structure of scientific discourses There is a whole new regime of

discourse which makes possible the separation of what may be

characterized as scientific from what may bot be characterized as

scientific Looking back on his early work, Foucault conceded that

what was missing was a consideration ofthe effects of power In his

later work, where Foucault is concerned with power and knowledge,

and talk about 'apparatus' which is a structure of heterogeneous

elements such as discourses, laws, institutions The apparatus

contains strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported

by, types of knowledge

b Ê Jacques Derrida

Deconstruction is a method which developed by Jacques

Derrida He developed the environment of his deconstructionist

method based on the general context of Heideggerian critique and

the new existentialist phenomenon of Jean-Paul Sartre Derrida

identifies that the chief object of philosophical analysis is the

metaphysics of presence It causes the revolutionary idea that

language does not refer in some stable and predictable way to the
world outside of it but rather designates its own relationships of

internal difference

One of the important implications of deconstruction is that

the signifier is just as important as the signified, that the world is just

as important as the world it purports to designate as a form of

analysis, deconstruction emphasizes to the failure of philosophy to

achieve or describe presence Deconstruction distrusts the

valorization of presence as the more authentic register of discourse

In grammatology, Derrida argues that the priority of speech

over writing generally assumed by the theorist of language and

human development has obscured the problem of language and its

relation to presence On this view, deconstruction emerged as both a

critique of ³phonocentrism
and ³general science of writing

Writing itself refers to the play of differences within language

(u

), which marks the arbitrary condition of language in

which signifiers endlessly refer to each other

Deconstruction demonstrates that Western thought has

always already been defined by inconsistency, paradox,

contradiction, incommensurability Deconstruction is not nihilistic

To de-construct is not to destroy; it is rather to unveil the seemingly

hidden workings of language that constitute the very basis of

linguistic and textual meaning

C Ê Conclusion

a Ê The writer have discussed about social science, society and the

post-structuralism It is clear that the concern of post-

structuralism can be ignored by the social sciences, and that is

important that their experience and knowledge of their lives must

be taken into account Such knowledge cannot be treated as better

knowledge simply on the grounds that it comes from that same

group Experience and ideas from these groups needs to be

included in our arguments about what we know and how we

know it

b Ê academics often incorrectly assume that post-structuralists are

also more or less post-modernists, but of the philosophers

associated with post-structuralism, none have ever identified with

post-modernism Unlike post-modernism, there does not appear to

be a core of knowledge which can be labeled as "post-

structuralist " authors who study post-modernism, such as Jean-

François Lyotard, describe post-modernism as a condition of the

present state of culture, social structure, and self (the Marxist

subject or Lacanian I) Thus, where post-modernism exists as a

distinct subject of study (describing, for instance, a period or a

style), post-structuralism remains unidentifiable

  

Balashov, Yuri and Rosenberg, alex 2002 › ilosp y of Science: ontemporary

ea{ings London: Routledge

Benton, Ted and Craib, Ian 2001 › ilosop y of Social Science New York:

Palgrave

http://www eng fju edu tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/Foucault_general ht

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http://www ehow com/about_5096062_poststructuralism -history html