Introduction

How many 'sciences' are there? Science is thought by many to be the most global-universal thing we've got available to humanity nowadays, other than perhaps football (soccer) teams and the United Nations. It is supposed to be neutral to gender, race, ethnicity, class, network, status, ideology, political system and religion. Since it is nowadays generally held that there is more than one science, i.e. that science is plural, not singular, that there are multiple scientific methods and not just a single, uniform scientific method, the text below is my attempt to answer the above question by giving a basic guide for how to estimate the approximate number of sciences.

As orientation lessons on the history and philosophy of science (HPS) often begin, there are two questions we must ask: which science(s) and whose science(s)? The first question is mainly what I am focused on in this paper. But the second question is likewise important because people hold various opinions about what constitutes 'science' and what doesn't. To some scientists, other scientists don't actually count as 'scientists' because they are considered not scientific enough, i.e. their field is not really a 'scientific' field according to others' perception.

It would thus be impossible for me to give a definitive answer here about exactly how many sciences there are from an objective perspective. Instead what I propose to do is to look at what several people and organizations consider to be 'science,' to ask a few questions about their views and then to offer my own interpretation near the end, including a brief summary. This way, the reader won't think I'm imposing my personal way of defining science as authoritative compared with their own. For some brief background context, the way I will approach the question of how many sciences there are is in light of training and work done on the topic of HPS, science studies and several sociology of science traditions.

Organizing and Categorizing the Sciences

Let us start at a globally-widespread institution that believes in the unity of knowledge still today and in the concept of 'unity-in-diversity,' i.e. the foundational meaning of the 'university.' The Catholic Church contributes to science through its Pontifical Academy of Sciences and names 9 academies distinguished as follows: 1. Astronomy, 2. Chemistry, 3. Earth and Environment Sciences, 4. Life Sciences (which includes 4.1 Botany, 4.2 Agronomy, 4.3 Zoology, 4.4 Genetics, 4.5 Molecular Biology, 4.6 Biochemistry, 4.7 Neuroscience, 4.8 Surgery), 5. Mathematics, 6. Application of Science, 7. Philosophy and History of Science (Epistemology), 8. Physics, 9. Other Disciplines. What I find most interesting in the list is the inclusion of "Application(s) of Science" as a separate scientific branch of knowledge, as well as multiple fields being classified under 'Life Sciences.'

We can also look to those who study science scientifically. The field known as 'science studies' (or naukovedeniye in its original Russian), offers us 'scientific' insights into what qualifies as scientific fields. In some recent cases, this has been visually 'mapped' according to various branches of knowledge . The Knowledge Mapping Laboratory of the University of California, San Diego identifies 13 main branches. Here it must be noted that in the Anglo-American tradition, 'humanities' does not count as a 'scientific' field, whereas in the German-Russian tradition, there is a 'science of humanities' or 'humanitarian science.' In any case, we can identify several main types or branches of science, similar but different from the above example, some of which can be grouped under joint or collaborative labels.

Cynthia F. Kirkeby runs a website called ClassBrain.com which claims to be "tailored to the informational needs and skill levels of the various age groups ." The site speaks of 10 Kinds of Scientists (2006). Basically, scientists are those who study the fields denoted by their professional names; astronomers study astronomy, biologists study biology, chemists study chemistry, and so on.

Looking at a more common, less academic source to see what the so-called average educated person might consider to be 'science,' Wiki Answers responds to the question: "How many types of science are there ?" It claims there are 30 scientific fields. This list defines as independent scientific fields some 'sciences' that in Kirkeby's model and in the above approaches would instead be considered as scientific subfields, rather than autonomous disciplines.

But now that we have reached a view of 30 sciences, can this be said to be an exhaustive list? Could there possibly be more than 30 kinds of science? One source identifies 612 branches of science. Should we grant that all of the fields listed at Wiki Answers are 'scientific,' including Ufology? Or what about SETI (the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) - is that properly considered as a scientific field? What about 'origins of life' (OoL) - is that a scientific field, or rather more closely related to philosophy or even theology or worldview studies? What are the proper grounds for integration and overlap? If some academic fields are best not called 'sciences,' then what qualifies us to reject certain fields as scientific while accepting others?

A Social-Philosophical View of Science

The so-called 'science demarcation game' was part of the 'Science Wars ' of the 1990's and 2000's, brought on by natural scientists questioning the scientificity of social sciences and literary studies. The latter fields had been engaging in an on-going analysis of scientists and scientific practice, including the subfield of sociology of science (SoS), which followed natural-physical scientists around to see what they were actually doing and engaged in interviews and dialogues with them, thus in a sense 'demystifying' scientific behavior and attitudes.

Likewise, SoS for decades had been studying the personal and collective meanings of science and scientific knowledge to people; how the public, how civil society, how individuals view science and its value to humanity. This inevitably led to some challenges to the positivistic, pseudo-neutral and objectivistic approaches to science that are still to be found in some philosophies of science. It thus put scientists on the defensive regarding their legitimacy, their credibility and their appropriate value to society and a reaction was to be expected.

The 'Science Wars,' along with HPS, science studies and SoS have informed the background for this survey about how many sciences there are and what distinguishes them from non-sciences. Personally, I have found it helpful to distinguish roughly 10 kinds of sciences and 8 categories of science (which can be found here), based on my academic work in these 3 fields. But as I said above, it is likely that readers will desire to have their own chosen number of sciences as they designate and assign knowledge fields into their personal 'map of science.'

Here is one basic example: An apparent rift between creationism, Intelligent Design and evolution in debates about origins and processes of change-over-time is also sometimes defined as that between 'operations sciences' and 'origins sciences.' Whereas origins sciences analyze an object or topic after-the-fact or try to reverse-engineer it to understand or explain events that happened in the remote past, operations sciences deal with operations or experiments that are or can be done in the present. This origins science vs. operations science dichotomy, however, has been widely questioned by many critics of ID and of creationism and may be also categorized under different names. Does the reader embrace origins science vs. operations science or reject it as a false dichotomy?

Let me also add a short word of caution regarding the term 'historical sciences,' which is a debatable category. I am not entirely convinced that the term 'historical sciences' makes much sense or whether other alternatives, such as chronological sciences, geographical sciences, musical sciences or worldview sciences should be added alongside it for balance. Regardless of my hesitancy, however, many people consider history as a kind of science, in addition to being a unique category involving certain methods and theories. Let me therefore withhold judgment about whether or not 'sciences of history' or 'historical sciences' are appropriate terms of use.

Conclusion

There are of course many other ways that people have identified and categorized the various sciences and fields of knowledge than those presented here (e.g. the Dewey Decimal System or the Chinese Library Classification). The aim of this paper has been to present a few of the options that are currently available for organizing and categorizing scientific knowledge and for identifying the limits of science. It is hoped that this principle concern will provoke readers to conceptualize and to seek to imagine their own 'map of science' for the purpose of exploring the 'unity in diversity' of knowledge in the electronic-information age.

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