At the heart of S-Theory are four symbols , ‘ T ’, ‘ I ’, ‘ L ’ and ‘ P ’, standing for time , ‘ indicants ’, length and ‘ population ’, each of which describing a particular aspect of data taken from sociology , psychology or other social sciences , and surrounded by superscript and subscript symbols refining their meaning . Although a very sophisticated system , it was not adopted by academics of the era , despite the fact that until the end of the 1950s , the paradigmatic outlook of the social sciences was highly positivistic , whether in psychology , sociology or even anthropology . It was often acknowledged that as the social sciences progressed to an ever-greater level of sophistication , they would become increasingly symbolically represented and utilise more algebraic mathematical concepts and techniques . There were many attempts at this time at creating this form of sociology , most of which are now absent from university curricula , perhaps in part due to the deadly combination of mathematics-hating undergraduates and mathematically unskilled academics ! Some of these ‘ lost ’ approaches are outlined below .
Regarding S-theory , Dodd stated that , “[ E ] very statistical tabulation , graph , map , formula , or other quantitatively expressed data in the social sciences , can , if this S-theory is true , be expressed as a special case of Equation 50 ”. ( Dodd 1942 , 59 ).
Alternative mathematical approaches
John Q . Stewart , while working at Princeton in the 1950s , explored the idea of there being analogies between certain physical quantities and other societal ones ( Stewart 1951 ). As a consequence , Stewart claimed that some physical laws have sociological counterparts . Although similar approaches had been attempted previously , his original contribution was to recognise the partial isomorphism 61 between societal variables and ones taken from the area of physics concerning electricity and electromagnetism . Stewart identified six individual distinct quantities which he claimed were fundamental to a physicalist sociology : time , social distance ( not in the 2020 sense of physical distance between people ), social ‘ mass ’, social ‘ charge ’, social ‘ temperature ’ and the number of social ‘ molecules ’. Some of these terms may seem surprising to a 21 st -century sociologist , but the reasoning which lies behind them is that the mathematically-
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In mathematics , an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping . In sociology , an isomorphism is a similarity of the processes or structure of one organization to those of another , be it the result of imitation or independent development under similar constraints .