THE NATIONALISTIC/ETHNOCENTRIC FOCUS OF THE DISCIPLINES.

The existence of social science sects and the fusion with their respective myths and ideologies tend to give social science an inward-looking perspective, and one which helps account for its combative pre dispositions and for its discontinuous nature. The same inward-focused perspective is made evident in this, the third step in the effort to mark the characteristics of social science. The present section takes a position essentially the same as the one adopted for sociology by Ayala. He divided sociology into national branches, and then asked rhetorically how one can attach the term national to a discipline which aspires to discover general truth without respect to time or place. There is no German Physics or French chemistry, only national aspects of a unitary discipline and a unitary history. His explanation is that these sciences develop as cumulative knowledge. If some national centre of physics or chemistry should deviate from the international standard, the critical experiment would mediate the difference and establish unity.