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The journal Sociétés plurielles/Plural Societies covers all fields of study concerned with the plural in society and strongly supports interdisciplinary approaches.

It publishes original articles, in French, English, Spanish, German or Italian, not simultaneously submitted to other journals, after selection by the members of its international scientific committee (peer review).

Call for contributions issue 10/2026

From the exact sciences to the social sciences
and
from the social sciences to the exact sciences Borrowings and divides

‘Soft sciences’ and ‘hard sciences’, ‘natural sciences’ and ‘human and social sciences’, ‘exact sciences’ and ‘social sciences’: these pairs are widely used today and structure the scientific landscape, both in France and internationally. And this despite criticism of the notion of ‘disciplinary field,’ sometimes considered to be a constructed and historically situated entity (Boutier et al.). The purpose here is not to challenge the current disciplinary division, nor the major divide that the terminology in use attests to, but rather to take note of it. Thus, the aim of this call for contributions is to question the borrowing of methods and concepts from one side of this great divide to the other. In doing so, we call upon to question the necessity of partitioning and the advocacy of specific methods in line with the specificity of the object of study.

The direction of movement from the natural sciences to the social sciences is well established. Here we will give only the example of ‘economic sciences,’ which are representative of the current epistemological debate and also less well known. In the 19th century, economist Léon Walras developed a theory of general equilibrium inspired by classical mechanics and Newton’s principles. Rational individuals, and the market, are inexorably driven towards a stable equilibrium. The use of mathematical language brings great rigour to this theoretical construct while emphasizing the universal nature of the ‘laws’ of economics. The Arrow-Debreu model (1954) went even further in its mathematical formalisation, demonstrating the existence of this equilibrium under certain conditions. Today, much of the academic work in this latter discipline implicitly follows this Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. More recently, the use of the concept of ‘transition to a market economy’ in the early 1990s to describe the change in economic and political systems in Central and Eastern Europe once again demonstrates the mobilisation of concepts from the exact sciences, with their idea of a return to a natural equilibrium, a deterministic trajectory from a known stable state to a new known stable state (Chavance, 1990). Other economists have chosen different approaches, which have led them in other directions. One notable example is the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971). He also drew on physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. Unlike the previous paradigm, which assumes unlimited growth based on factor substitution, Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomic approach argues that any production process involves the extraction of low-entropy materials and energy (natural resources) and the release of high-entropy waste (pollution, waste heat). The economy is therefore fundamentally dependent on a finite stock of resources and subject to biophysical limits. This vision, which incorporates the irreversibility of time and processes of change (Hodgson, 1993; Koleva and Magnin, 2017), has influenced ecological economics and degrowth movements, which question the sustainability of the traditional productivist model.

Based on these considerations, we welcome proposals for articles that address the current status of these debates. What is the current use and epistemological justification of quantitative or mechanistic methods? Are we witnessing a turning point in this field? Or, on the contrary, are we seeing mistrust or even resistance to this conceptual and methodological shift? How do digital humanities and computational social sciences contribute to this conceptual shift, and what are the consequences for the object of study itself – humans and society?

The opposite phenomenon, namely the existence of borrowings from the hard/exact/natural sciences, is much less well documented; it is also less intuitive. The idea of an antinomy between, on the one hand, notions such as imagination, subjectivity, relativism and approximation and, on the other, those of precision, objectivity, regularity and generalisation, should be questioned as a kind of “epistemological obstacle” to the theoretical or methodological acclimatization of concepts.

Nevertheless, the history of sciences is not entirely devoid of examples: we need only mention the imagination test (see James Maxwell's fictional demon) and the taking into account of the subject in the experimental and observational framework. Perhaps the most revealing example is that pointed out by Robin G. Collingwood in his classic The Idea of Nature. The author highlights the change that took place in the 19^th century in the way nature was conceived and thought of on the model of history: “By then historians had trained themselves to think, and found themselves able to think scientifically, about a world of constantly changing human affairs in which there was no unchanging substrate behind the changes, and no unchanging laws according to which the changes took place. History had, by now, established itself as a science, that is, a progressive inquiry in which conclusions are solidly and demonstratively established. It had thus been proved by experiment that scientific knowledge was possible concerning objects that were constantly changing. Once more, the self-consciousness of man, in this case the corporate self-consciousness of man, his historical consciousness of his own corporate doings, provided a clue to his thoughts about nature. The historical conception of scientifically knowable change or process was applied, under the name of evolution, to the natural world.” (p. 13)

If history was once the foundation of our knowledge of nature, what is the extent and scope of this conceptual blending today? Are there explicit references in contemporary natural sciences to heuristic devices used in the social sciences (e.g. reconstruction, stratigraphy, analogy, approximation, unique facts or exceptional cases, exemplarity, etc.)?

Practical details:

Dates: submission of article proposals before 30 September 2025 and submission of full articles by 30 April 2026.

Address: programmesp@gmail.com  

Editorial instructions below.

 

References

 

Arrow K. J., Debreu G. (1954), « Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy », Econometrica, 22, p. 265-290.

Bryon-Portet C. (2010), « Sciences humaines, sciences exactes. Antinomie ou complémentarité ? », Communication. Information médias théories pratiques, 28, p. 243-264.

Boutier J., Passeron J-Cl., Revel J. (éds) (2006), Qu’est-ce qu’une discipline ?, EHESS, Paris.

Collingwood R.G. (1960), The Idea of Nature, Clarendon Press, Oxford (orig. 1940)

Chavance B. (1990), « Quelle transition pour quelle économie de marché dans les pays de l'Est ? », Revue Française d'Economie, vol. 5, p. 83-104.

Hodgson G. (1993), Economics and Evolution. Bringing Life Back into Economics, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Koleva, P., Magnin E. (2017), « Économie et discordance des temps. L’exemple de la transition post-socialiste en Europe centrale et orientale », Multitudes, 69, p. 82-90.

Kornai J. (1971), Anti-Equilibrium: On economic systems theory and the tasks of research, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam & Oxford.

Mirowski P. (1989), More heat than light. Economics as social physics: Physics as nature's economics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Veblen T. (1919), The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays, Huebsch, New York.