Recently I was invited to give the keynote lecture at the annual summer symposium of the London Interdisciplinary Social Science DTP, and I was delighted to be there. There were impressive student presentations during the day, and I was reminded again not only of the importance of relations between the disciplines, but also of the importance of students from different institutions meeting and working together.
In my lecture I debated the interesting challenges and opportunities a STEM-based research institute faces when it begins to integrate the social sciences. As I explain, the challenges and the opportunities are both institutional and philosophical.
The Strange Case of Imperial College London; and how the Social Sciences Ride to the Rescue
Keynote lecture to the Annual Symposium of the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre
Friday May 30th 2025
I’d like first to thank Professor Mujamdar, of Imperial College London, and also your very own Doctoral Training Programme[i], for inviting me today. We spend far too much time explaining why this particular institution, or that particular institution is the best for this, or for that, when actually the race to be best probably is not terribly creative, on the whole. So your small organisation, the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Programme, with its aim of bringing students together from across London, is very much to be praised.
I’m going to start my lecture by thinking about conversation – the conversation between the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Surely the two can make common cause. My comments will be wide-ranging, but my case study is Imperial College London, where I work. At Imperial the social sciences are arriving in a big way. I will explain, as far as I can, some of the reasons. And I will ask about the way an institution can make best use of its social science capacity, and its natural science capacity. I will ask: how easy is it going to be, living together?
It seems to me the social sciences are particularly dependent on collegial conversation and trust. Enlightened people will say the same about the sciences, but surely the discussive tone is very evident in the social sciences. Perhaps them LISS, and days like today, carry such importance because, literally, they encourage, and carry, conversation. If our academic institutions are somewhat rushed these days, and anxious to promote their own virtues, then for sure the conversation between students of different universities will be a very important way for research institutions to learn from each other. This talkative aspect of the social sciences, you might remember, was celebrated by the philosopher and historian Thomas Kuhn, who was very interested in what indeed might constitute the boundary bewteen the natural and the social sciences. Kuhn’s tool of comparison, interestingly enough, was the conversation. His argument can be found in what now is an elderly book, a classic rather than a sure guide, his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962.[ii] At the start of that book – which, by the way, is quite readable and is consistently interesting – Kuhn suggested that social scientists can never stop talking and arguing, and in particular, disagreeing.
The debates of the social sciences, Kuhn suggested, are endless and never resolve. The same thing, famously, was said by the eminent ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, in his classic text After Virtue.[iii] Here, MacIntyre is eloquent on the reasons ethical discussion tends to be interminable: they never stop because the antagonists approach the problem – assisted suicide, for example – from different angles, angles that are quite hard to change. For both Kuhn and MacIntyre, the point about the natural sciences is that at some point they stop talking. Once the answer has been found, these authors suggest, the conversation can stop, and we all can move on, and write the textbooks. For Kuhn, because the talk can stop – the situation in the natural sciences – so the settled paradigm can emerge. Whereas the social sciences, always able to develop a new and opposing view, the talk can never stop, and so the settled truth can never emerge.
We might protest that such a picture is to misunderstand the natural sciences, to fail to see that science also can never ‘settle’ to the truth. But we must admit that a search for, and a belief in, the ‘settled truth’ has always been a feature of the sciences. Perhaps science’s ‘truth project’ began in the early 17th century, when Sir Francis Bacon wrote his influential Novum Organum, a letter to King James 1 explaining why it was time to give science its due, fund it properly, and agree it had its unique method that set it apart from the mental wanderings of the classical Greeks.
To oversimplify, in some sense the natural sciences are naturally mute, while the social sciences are garrulous. Crude though this characterisation might be, it gets at the idea that the sciences confront nature, which ignores the human language. The social sciences however, even when quantitative, sit in the arena of human action, and thus depend on our ideas about that most dynamic and shifting of materials, humanity. An articulate critic of this view was the philosopher Richard Rorty, celebrated for his text Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature[iv]. Anxious to see the links between the social and the natural sciences, Rorty was at pains to develop a constructivist understanding of science, where acknowledgement is made of the ‘human factor’ in scientific knowledge. His Mirror of Nature metaphor, representing the idea that science is simply a direct reading of nature, , is interesting for the suggestion again of silence: we don’t think of mirrors as noisy. Rorty wants to replace the mirror metaphor with another, where he describes science as ‘an edifying conversation’. He wishes to bring the talk back into science, because it will make us better scientists. We might be realists, and consider ourselves to be describing the material world, but still our talk is central.
I don’t want now to exhaustively and philosophically probe the distinction, or lack of distinction, between the social sciences and the natural sciences, extremely interesting as this may be. More, let me turn to my case study, and discuss certain themes running quite warmly at Imperial right now, concerning the relationship between the social sciences, and STEM innovation. In a nutshell, Imperial, famous for being a ‘STEM institution’, finds itself more and more dependent on the social sciences. The reason is easy to see, but still quite startling for an institution that since its founding in 1907 has tended not to set up research spaces for the humanities and the social sciences. Why, then, this recent change? Let me explain.
All academics and all academic institutions are very conscious of the concept of impact: our enduring impact on our profession, and on society. At Imperial, as at QMUL and KCL, the concept of impact is huge. When Sir Francis Bacon wrote to King James with some neat ideas about the scientific method,[v] his method of persuasion was really that science, if wrested from the Aristotelians and the theologians, would have enormously enhanced utility. And this is, and always has been, the guiding philosophy of Imperial. The challenge is that scientific impact, in the 21st century, seems to go hand-in-glove with major issues about the relation between science and society. Big areas of interest at Imperial, such as machine learning, climate science, new vaccines, robotics, data science, transport studies, bioengineering and medical devices, security science and societal resilience, are each increasingly dependent on the social sciences. The advancement of these STEM topics depend on a sophisticated understanding of society.
The debate at Imperial is not really about the fact of the relevance of the social sciences – we can consider the matter settled – but the nature of Imperial’s dependency on the social sciences. Again to over-simplify, one of the questions we are asking ourselves at Imperial is whether, implicitly, we see the social sciences as an assistant to STEM – for example organising the focus groups that help us make sure our new robots get good uptake in society; or, whether, in addition, we see the social sciences as active in setting STEM research agendas, shaping it from the beginning, applying the cautionary note and being a critical friend.
Consider the important role engineers, and engineering, have always played at Imperial. Engineers are interested in optimising. There may be contrasting and even contradictory physical forces at play in a system but the role of the engineer is to remove those conflicts and arrange them so that things work together. A bridge is a case in point. All the forces must work in harmony, or else the bridge falls down. Is this how we feel about things at Imperial? Do we think that disciplinary conflict is bad, a sign of imminent failure? Perhaps our ‘received view’ is that the way to optimise our interdisciplinary work is to hope that in essence the social sciences and the STEM disciplines tread the same path. And maybe they do. Yet we should remember a very interesting statement from the 20th century Australian philosopher John Anderson, who urged us ‘not to ask of a social institution “What end or purpose does it serve?” but rather, “Of what conflicts is it the scene”‘ In the same vein, Anderson continues: ‘For […] it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are’.[vi]
So we begin to see the outline of a question, quite familiar I admit, for Imperial. Is there a conflict – ‘an issue’ – between STEM and the social sciences, or are we happily building bridges and watching the traffic flow? Do we simply take as a matter of principle that conflicts between the social sciences and the natural sciences arise because of some easily solved misunderstanding? Or do we work rather harder to see what such misunderstandings may be, for fear that if we simply smooth them over, to keep things ‘optimised’, we simply fend off inevitable trouble, or perhaps worse, radically reduce the possibility of truly creative results from good interdisciplinary work.
Let me quickly turn again to the past, and to a story that is indeed suggestive of trouble. As you will know, this Doctoral Training Programme is funded by the ESRC, the Economics and Social Research Council. It sits along a handful of others: the BBSRC, the AHRC, the NERC and so on, all of them part of an umbrella organisation, the UKRI. You may have wondered, when you see the logo Economics and Social Research Council, whether perhaps there is a typo here. No-one says ‘Social Research’. We tend to say ‘Social Science Research’. Could it be that, somewhere along the line, the phrase ‘Social Science Research’ has been ‘disappeared’, to be replaced by ‘social research’. That is exactly what happened and let me tell you the story. In 1979 a new conservative government was elected, under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a known radical, one inclined to doubt the value of the state, or the BBC, or the Greater London Council, or the Inner London Education Authority, trades unions in general, nationalised industry and so forth. Her tenure saw a great amount of conflict as she took on and battled with what we might call ‘the centre ground’, allowed the mining industry and the steel industry to perish, instituted what was called ‘monetarism’, and asked us to see the public finances as akin to an individual’s bank account. In her ideological push Margaret Thatcher had a number of influential advisors, of whom the most important may have been the cabinet minister Sir Keith Joseph (1918-1994). As Secretary of State for Education, one charged with making some of the cuts that the Thatcher government became famous for, he looked at his suite of research councils and decided that the axe should fall on one of them, the so-called Social Science Research Council, or SSRC. He was being asked to save money, it is true, but also he was vexed by this notion of ‘Social Science’. One of his intellectual prejudices was to doubt the scientific credentials, and the rigour, of subjects like sociology and psychology, and felt they must be kept distinct from the noble term ‘science’. He duly asked the CEO of the SSRC ‘Do the social sciences follow the Popperian paradigm’, by which he meant: Does the SSRC restrict its funding to work that adheres to the model of hypothesis and test model. As we all know, hypothesise-and-test, definitely a feature of science, may not be its only feature. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the heyday of Sir Karl Popper, the mark of science was its reliance on testable hypotheses.
On the whole, thought Joseph, the SSRC is a bogus institution that puffs up sociology and anthropology into great fields that needed large investment, but never test their hypotheses. He thought: let’s get rid of this absurd funding council, save a tidy sum, and stand down a clan of annoying charlatans. He admitted there probably was some good work going on in this area ‘the social sciences’, but very little, and these good people, he imagined, could perfectly well be supported by their Colleges, or by the British Association.
To his credit, Sir Keith Joseph, a scholarly person, did like to consult, and rather than simply wield the axe, in time-honoured British fashion he asked Victor Rothschild, Lord Rothschild, an eminent scientist and businessman, and an FRS, to look into the matter. Much discussion then took place and in the end Rothschild reported that state funding of the social sciences was an important matter, could be considered a valuable investment, and should be kept going. At which point Sir Keith Joseph, heeding the wisdom of those who know better, signalled a reprieve for the SSRC. But he had one condition. It had to change its name. The phrase ‘Social Science’ – in his view a contradictory term – must go. From now on the council, though allowed to continue, must be known as ‘the Economics and Social Research Council’.[vii]
The philosophical point Sir Keith Joseph was rehearsing was the status of different sorts of knowledge. He was touching on something that we all know as ‘positivism’: the belief that in the quest for reliable knowledge that can form the basis of enduringly successful decisions, numbers, objectivity and scientific observation rank the highest. It is sometimes called ‘the hierarchy of knowledge’ and sometimes called ‘reductionism’. The role of the positivist mindset was a theme of discussion recently, at Imperial, at a meeting I organised a few months ago to discuss this issue of the social sciences in a STEM institution. The room was filled with very talkative social scientists, all based at Imperial, all embedded in STEM departments. You will know that we have no departments of sociology, anthropology and linguistics; no department of history or geography; not even a department of economics or of psychology. Now, as I’ve suggested, we cannot doubt that the social sciences are significant at Imperial; but here is the question: what is it like, being embedded in a STEM department, doing social science work, but surrounded absolutely by scientists? This was one of the questions we asked at the meeting.[viii] Another was this: when it comes to social scientists flourishing at Imperial, can we rely on their STEM departments to provide the congenial and creative environment good academic work relies on; or should Imperial find additional ways to support an identified ‘community of social scientists’, perhaps in the spirit of your Doctoral Training Programme.
Here are some quotes from that meeting:
- I think Imperial is exactly the place that can play a role in encouraging radical social and behavioural science research. [It’s] because we don’t have a dedicated social/behavioural science space.
- I think what is special about Imperial is that we chose as social scientists to be here, not in an anthropology department or wherever, but instead came here specifically for interdisciplinary work.
- Although it is good to be embedded in an Imperial College department, social science funders aren’t oriented towards STEM-based projects. This is really where the College could help us, establishing connections with the social science funders.
- In my opinion […] there are entrenched power dynamics that position STEM as a “harder” discipline and social sciences as “softer” counterparts. While this position may be shifting, STEM continues to hold greater inherent value in many contexts across the College. Achieving truly equal collaborations demands mutual respect for the distinct and valuable contributions of every field.
- The criticism I often hear from natural scientists is that social science projects feel like they lack rigor or authority and are “wishy-washy”.
This brings me back to the issue of ‘engineering culture’ at Imperial. On the one hand we are now a place with a significant social science presence, where investment in the social sciences is seen as a good thing. And in terms of mood music, we find in the new Strategy the strapline ‘Science For Humanity’, surely a sign that the social sciences are now in situ. In the meeting I organised, social scientists were united in seeing the value of being embedded in a STEM department. There may be work to be done culturally, but – so I heard – the concept of the embedded social scientist, working within a science department rather than a sociology department, can be just fine.
But – a big but – it must be admitted that in this meeting there was a lot of discussion of the support communities of social science academics need: their ability to work together on methodological issues; their ability to press ahead, with a degree of autonomy, on their own new ideas; their desire to be involved in STEM research from the beginning, not just at the end.
Again, I quote:
- A more integrated approach is required, where the social sciences are recognised as necessary in the conception, design, testing and implementation of any STEM innovation that aims to improve people’s lives.
- We need to pool the methodological resources of science and social science, tear down the methodological and intellectual obstacles between them to move forward.
- What is worrying, is that sometimes social science methods are used in science research, without including social scientists in the process, which may have implications for how we interpret the results of the research.
And now we get to the heart of the problem, which it seems must face all academics and universities seriously interested in interdisciplinarity. If people from across the campus are to work together, it is important to recognise institutional and philosophical boundaries – we could just as well call them ‘traditions’ – rather than pretend they don’t exist. To ‘optimise’ by failing to recognise the problem is just to jinx the research from the beginning.
Now Imperial, anxious to get this matter right, has set up a working group to look at these issues, and report to the University Management Board with some findings and some numbers on the role of the social sciences.[ix] I’m very happy to be on that group and it has been interesting seeing, at an institutional level, how the debate proceeds.
Quite a lot of the work so far has been – of course – ‘mapping’. Where is the social science work taking place, and what is its significance? I have noticed that while always at Imperial we will be drawn to numbers and to solutions, it must be admitted that at our Task and Finish Group, discussions have usually veered in due course from matters of numbers to matters of philosophy. To me this axis, from positivism to something more interpretative, now seems inevitable at Imperial and is very much to the credit of the institution. And, when we do lay down our spreadsheets, important and interesting though they are, and turn to philosophy, the issue we come to first is the concept of utility.
Let’s turn to this point of the utility of the social sciences to STEM innovation, and also consider a related point – one Imperial is currently debating – that the social sciences, working in interdisciplinary relation with STEM, are a source of critique, of innovation and the frame of an objective gaze that can help STEM see the wider picture.
On utility, here is another quote, from an Imperial social scientist.
Currently [at Imperial the social sciences are] more of an afterthought, eg “we created this beautiful solution (in engineering, medicine, AI, etc) now let’s convince people to use it”.
That’s what we mean by utility. And it is not wrong in itself. Of course it is not. Moreover, social scientists are no different from anyone else: They need to earn their living. And even if scientists do have quite a reliable route to the world of utility, academics of all types very much want their work to be valued by others.
Now I hope I’ve suggested that for interdisciplinarity to work well, the STEM/Social Science partnership can never be reduced to some simple transaction. Rather, it is dynamic, ill-defined, and somewhat conflicted. Yet time-consuming and expensive though these tussles may be – dynamic, ill-defined, conflicted – it is this kind of academic work that will make our planet a safer place than it is right now, in terms of health, climate, politics and justice.
Let me tell you a few more stories, to show why I am quite confident about the rich opportunities the social sciences provide to STEM.
I first became interested in the natural science/social science relation when I was a school science teacher, in London, some time ago. I’d studied zoology first, and my postgrad was in History and Philosophy of Science. This was before the days of the National Curriculum, and for reasons I’m not sure I understand, when I started teaching there was much interchange between scientists, social scientists, and science teachers. When I trained, at a department in Chelsea College, which then moved here to Kings, we were expected to ask ourselves the question: why are you teaching science to these children, here in London? What will they gain?
It wasn’t enough to say: so they can go to university; or so they can become scientists. We were trained to ask ourselves, what is the value of science to people who don’t plan to study it a lot longer? And in searching for solutions, we had to look quite hard. Always in front of you were exams. When you are teaching science, there are things to be got through: Newton’s laws, the digestive system, the electron transfer system in photosynthesis. But when I became a schoolteacher the National Curriculum – an idea of the Thatcher government – was not yet in place, and there was more room for teachers to follow their nose. In the freedom we had, issues of politics tended to loom large. With the Cold War still running strongly in the 1980s there was big defence spending on science; Poland was still part of the Soviet Union; we were very conscious of the way science is not simply a bunch of facts but mixes it strongly with geopolitics. Among many initiatives I remember a course available for Sixth Formers, to be used both by STEM students and humanities students, called Science in a Social Context (SISCON). I remember that in the introductory material the authors wrote that with science-and-society issues, expect disagreement, expect discussion. Those authors said that this disagreement and this discussion would very greatly enhance the classroom, and the quality of the science learning.
And that’s what I’ve always found, with the science classroom – that if you can step back from the grind of learning facts, and adopt the interactive and discussive mode, then the deployment of politics, or ethics, or philosophy, very quickly becomes central to the science learning. The same goes for Higher Education. In the university STEM curriculum the social sciences, or for that matter the humanities, should not be lecture 13, after 12 lectures on molecular genetics. The social sciences should be in there from the beginning.
In my experience,at Imperial, until about 10 years ago, the question of how we should deal with the social sciences and the humanities had elements of the long-running Two Cultures debate. We taught the social sciences and the humanities, to broaden our students’ minds, give them ‘soft skills’, and in some sense complement the specialisation of the STEM curriculum. By ‘Two Cultures’ I refer to an influential row, dating from mid-way through the last century, where the novelist and scientist CP Snow, giving the Rede Lectures in Cambridge in 1959, and comparing scientists to humanities scholars, said that in going from Burlington House in Picadilly (the home of the Royal Academy) to South Kensington (the home of Imperial College) ‘one might have crossed an ocean’. For a long time, in spite of some rather obvious problems with Snow’s diagnosis, the ‘Two Cultures’ was a very recogniseable phrase for people planning a science training. As Snow said, his lectures had ‘touched a nerve’.[x] At Imperial for many years the social sciences and the humanities have therefore been taught, at undergraduate level. You cannot take a degree in history, or in philosophy. But you can take modules and gain ECTs for your degree
But what about the partnership of science and social science in research? What are the relevance of the social sciences to scientific practice itself, or to the research ambitions of Imperial?? The first time I began to wonder whether something serious was in the air was around ten years ago, following the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Wilkinson et al, from the Ethox centre at Oxford, put the matter this way: ‘More than any health emergency in recent times, the West African Ebola outbreak has demonstrated the importance of community engagement and the risks of doing it badly’.
Referring to the importance of engaging communities suffering from the virus, they wrote:
In the face of a deadly new disease, and an array of suspicious outsiders who were often dressed head-to-toe in protective suits and spraying chemicals, some people chose to cut themselves off from help. They threw stones at ambulances, rioted and, in one episode in Guinea, killed eight members of an Ebola prevention delegation. Reasons for resistance are multiple, ranging from contradictory messaging, unsafe and degrading conditions in hospitals, and histories of violence, extraction and corruption which fed fears that Ebola (or the chlorine disinfectant spray) was a means of ethnic cleansing.[xi]
This interesting experience was noticed at Imperial. Debate gained ground. Whatever might be the way to prevent, or halt the Ebola epidemic, biomolecular innovation on its own would not be enough. And three other areas of research, much emphasised at Imperial, soon enough showed precisely the same dynamic, where technical knowledge is just one aspect of successful innovation. Among many examples we could choose Covid-19, and the concept of vaccine hesitancy. You need knowledge of the virus, and you need knowledge of society, of political systems, and the media; climate change, ditto; and most recently, what we call ‘security science’ and ‘community resilience’. Just as we mark 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, so once again we have war in Europe, as well as elsewhere. And with war in Europe comes the idea that wars are won by force of arms, but also by ‘the resilient society’. And resilience it turns out, is not just a matter of hardened electricity grids and protected communication systems: it is also a matter of societal trust in institutions, in social cohesion, and faith in the motivation of our leaders.
Take one further example. AI research regularly wonders whether health consultation, including of care needs, could ‘be streamlined’ by machine-led interviews. Instantly you see the issues: might this be a welcome increase in efficiency; or an alienating intervention, further distancing the patient, or the elderly person, from the health service? We might want to keep an open mind on this. But its obvious that the success of research like this will depend not only on the subtlety of the algorithm, but also on the expectations, traditions and feelings of the user. And the way to learn about expectations, traditions and feelings is through the social sciences.
Dr Stephen Webster, Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise)/Science Communication Unit
[i] The London Interdisciplinary Social Science DTP is a consortium of Queen Mary (University of London), Kings College London and Imperial College London: https://liss-dtp.ac.uk
[ii] Kuhn T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, 1962.
[iii] MacIntyre A. After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory. Duckworth, 1981.
[iv] Rorty R. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, 1979.
[v] Jardine L. and Silverthorne M. (Eds.) Francis Bacon: The New Organon. CUP, 2000 (orig. 1620)
[vi] In: MacIntyre A. ibid. p153
[vii] Posner N. Social Sciences Under Attack in the UK, 1981-1983. https://doi.org/10.4000/histoire-cnrs.547
[viii] https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/the-good-science-project/2025/01/16/a-memo-on-the-role-of-the-social-sciences-at-imperial/
[ix] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/about/leadership-and-strategy/provost/vice-provost-research/vpre-led-initiatives/social-sciences-at-imperial-task-and-finish-group-sstfg/
[x] Snow C.P. The Two Cultures. CUP, 1998 (orig, 1959) p54.
[xi] Wilkinson A., Parker P., Martineau F, and Leach M. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
2017 Apr 10;372(1721):20160305. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0305