György Rózsa: Information: from claims to needs (Joint edition published by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Kultura Hungarian Foreign Trading Company. Budapest, 1988)
I. The socio-professional aspects of the development of the scientific information with special regard to social sciences
65 These two different interpretations of the social sciences - the integrated socialist version and the western classification (social science and humanities) - and their impact on SSID, do not impede international scientific cooperation in the SSID. A good example of this is ECSSID. 2. The three main functions of the social sciences A closer study of the functions of social sciences will show - regardless of the above mentioned differing interpretations - that the social sciences as a whole and each of their different branches have three main functions. The first one is ideological, the second one is the exploration of social reality and the third one is the preparation of decision making. The social sciences do not exist as "pure sciences" (l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake). Different ideas are always, in some way, reflected in social life and the social sciences are influenced by scientific research. The three above mentioned functions of social sciences rarely appear independently from one another, they are usually interrelated. However, as we shall see later on, the differences between the three functions are manifest in the field of information, namely in the different demands of those who use information. Whether we regard the social sciences as a whole or divide them into the social sciences and humanities, each branch is characterized by its own, particular way of work, which - as we shall explain later on - exerts strong influence on the process of information and not only among the particular branches of the social sciences but among the natural and the technical sciences as well. In this respect let us refer to the application of physics in archaeology, the growing use of cybernetics in social sciences, for instance in lexicography, to say nothing of economics, or sociology that have, by now, their "traditional " fields of application. Today, there is practically no field in the social sciences, not even museology or archival research, that is left out of this process. The three functions of the social sciences — along with the recent improvement of measuring methods and the new technology in information — lead us to draw certain conclusions concerning the future development of SSID. This, however, cannot be done without examining the different, previous periods in the development of SSID. 3. The three historical periods of scientific information The formation and application of scientific information is governed by the same rules in the social sciences as in other fields of science and in society in general.* In his theories on the surplus value, Marx explains that the competence of the existing population is an invariable precondition of all production i.e. the principal * For further information on this chapter see György Rózsa "Scientific information and society" (The Hague, Mouton, 1973)
