Concept Regulation in the Social Sciences

The sciences, notably biology and medicine, operate with highly regulated taxonomies and ontologies. The Social Sciences, on the other hand, muddle through in a proverbial tower of Babel. There may be some real benefits to an undisciplined set of ideas, but also some real costs. Over the last ten years, political scientists have attempted to get their semantic act by cooperating to formalize their vocabulary. The result has been a dramatic improvement in how scholars diagnose and treat problems of democracy, as well as a set of web applications that have changed the way countries write constitutions. Nevertheless, these methods of semantic cooperation have exposed some persistent challenges of “social engineering,” ones that may have tractable web solutions.