Further Discussion: On the Basic Classification of Social Science—Decisional Science and Descriptive Science

This appendix makes some comparative explorations around social science, such as the similarities and differences between science and art, natural science and social science. The exploration focuses on the classification of social science. It turns out that social science is responsible to answer two kinds of questions: “what is it like” and “how should we do”. “it” here represents anything to be concerned, such as an industry, a company, a stock, a city, a group of people, etc. Disciplines that are responsible to answer the first kind of questions belongs to descriptive science, such as history, statistics, accounting, etc.; disciplines that are responsible to answer the second kind of questions belongs to decisional science, such as economics, finance, operation management, etc. The decisional science aims at providing guidance to the decision or behavior of organizations or people, which is a unique branch in social science. Relatively, natural science has only descriptive part, and cannot guide the action of various natural objects. This unique feature of social science is often neglected hence leads to a series of biases and errors in the research method and evaluation standard, etc., as well as the stagnation of some disciplines, such as finance, etc.