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A distinction between two types of concepts, N-concepts and S-concepts, is presented. It is claimed that there is a fundamental difference between these two types of concepts and that S-concepts are used only in the social sciences, not in the natural sciences; hence there is a fundamental difference between social and natural science. Also, several different kinds of S-concepts - primary and derived, intra-cranial and extra-cranial, descriptions and evaluations, etc. - are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of physical models in sociology. The author feels that one of the reasons why physical terms are used by social scientists is because physics is best known among the sciences and this makes the reference to its elementary terms easily understandable. The author at the same time also feels that another reason for this may be that social scientists want to draw on the prestige of physics as the most advanced among all sciences. The author says that a social scientists, when asked to measure the terms used might resort to pressing the analogy too far by drawing on the properties of her physical model without having prepared his social system so as to be in some sense isomorphic to his physical system or he may introduce trivial or irrelevant categories or variables in his social system so as to fit more or less. The author feels that reasoning inside a physical model does not only require an abstract effort, it somehow makes use of our experiences with the physical world as well, thus making the use of physical models conducive to theoretical sociological work, but great care must be taken.

This article focuses on the survival in the social sciences of a linguistic technique and a logic which are as inadequate for the solution of present scientific problems as the mechanical tools of medieval man would be inadequate for the needs of the industrial age. The best general illustration of the phenomenon here under consideration is, of course, furnished by the history of the repeated departures from Aristotelian logic in the physical sciences. More recently the idea has taken hold that, whereas logic is usually assumed to be the science concerned with the phenomenon of thought in general, actually this is the province of psychology. Logic from this point of view becomes merely the rules by which one deals with the data of logic, namely, words. This in turn means that the postulates and rules constituting a system of logic may be indefinitely varied so as to be compatible with our observations. In short, any system of logic is justifiable or true if it provides a set of postulates which are internally consistent, that is, from which propositions can be deduced without contradiction. It is precisely this practice which has marked the great epochs of science.