Social sciences and social studies are phrases that get used as if they refer to genuinely separate issues, when one is at most a subset of the other, and the two are so clearly related that only the delusions of looking to linguistic phrases instead of concepts and truths themselves would lead someone to think they are actually distinct. The words "social sciences" are further misleading because sociology, the investigation of how humans interact with each other on the level of miniscule communities or massive civilizations and every cultural size in between, is not itself concerned with science. Laws of nature like gravity, unless scientific laws were to unexpectedly change (which is entire possible since only the laws of logic are true and fixed by necessity), will act the same on a certain inanimate object and environment, and even on the physical bodies of conscious beings. I cannot prove and thus cannot know that a pencil or bottle will fall to the ground if I drop it just as I remember being the case before, since it is not logically necessary that scientific laws will remain static, but I can know with absolute certainty that if this kind of metaphysical change does not occur and nothing about a set of circumstances changes, the exact same initial physical events will lead to the exact same subsequent events.
People, however, are not inanimate objects, or at least I know with absolute certainty that I myself am conscious; other minds might or might not exist. Within the mind, there is perception, intentionality, and the capacity to act or not act in various logically possible ways. A person is not the same as a stone or mountain with no self-guided outward and seemingly no inner thoughts (while most sensory perceptions could be illusions, even if they were not, this would not prove whether or not fellow humans or animals have their own conciousness animating their bodies). How people behave with each other is a matter of ideology, individualistic personality, and the extent to which they yield to whatever cultural variables are present. Yes, people act within an environment where the laws of nature are active, but the sociological behaviors and cultural constructs that various societies feature are not scientific in origin. They are a layer beyond the scientific, and not in the sense of the metaphysically supernatural transcending everything about the universe, but in the sense that they are not driven by scientific laws and that they are created or engaged with by choice.
Like how one must use sensory perceptions to observe weather for scientific purposes, one must use sensory perceptions to observe the outward actions of other people or even to listen to their spoken words, though, like with all things, it is the laws of logic that are epistemologically relied upon to even understand what perceptions are and what does and does not follow from them. However, science has nothing to do with reflecting on and understanding how humans behave in terms of strictly social behaviors, for they are contingent on there being a culture to interact with and are shaped by factors like worldview and personality, not the laws of nature. Geography, history, politics, economics, and linguistics are all within the domain of social studies/"sciences," none of which are epistemologically scientific in nature or foundationally grounded in science as opposed to reason. Regarding the last three things in this list, political systems (not logical truths about political systems, but the actual social institutions themselves), economic systems (again, not logical truths about economics, but whether a country actually practices a certain kind of economic structure), and language are all social constructs, as with businesses and the many arbitrary social norms that span everything from meals to aesthetic trends. Since science is about the laws of nature, not about arbitrary social constructs and norms--or even the individualistic psychology of how specific people introspectively react to their cultures--sociology is inherently, plainly separate from science.
There is still a connection between science and aspects of sociology, yes. For instance, although logic is what truly governs both the metaphysical laws of nature and the epistemological scientific method, scientific phenomena dictate the nutritional content in food, which preparation methods result in which kinds of texture or taste, and so on. What times of day a society pressures people to eat at, which types of food become normalized in a culture, and the economic cost of the physical resources required to obtain and prepare food are not decided by any law of nature. They are chosen and structured by enough individuals to make them norms on at least smaller community levels, and these people could have ended up creating and practicing different norms. Meals are a trivial example because they are nowhere near as foundational to the philosophical foundation of cultures as even political or linguistic factors, though there is a relationship between all of them: prices of food can be tied to some extent to politics and there are specific words people come to use in reference to particular food. Indeed, everything is philosophical and everything that is true or knowable hinges on the abstract, necessary laws of logic, but something like matters like criminal and social justice are far more philosophically significant than what foods people in a society might tend to eat and when. It is just that food is a great example of how scientific laws and the phenomena they produce are not at all the same as sociological trends.
People's lives are still confined by scientific laws or events such as those pertaining to gravitation, yes. Within the limitations imposed by gravity, people still can structure a society in any logically possible way, and neither gravity nor any other scientific law can force them to make a culture capitalist or socialist, religious or secular, nationalistic or multicultural. Sociology, which is the focus of social "science," is not science at all! History and politics and economics are likewise not scientific subjects, but separate or broader philosophical subjects that themselves have to do with human nature, values, and a more holistic side of metaphysics than the laws of nature are. Of course, all truth is dictated by reason and all knowledge is accessible because of reason, with science itself at most just presenting subjective sensory perceptions without even containing the means of proving there is a world of matter beyond one's mind to begin with. It is not the natural world or human civilizations that are the core of all things, grounding the intrinsic truth that all other secondary or contingent things hinge on. Not even the uncaused cause that directly or indirectly permitted the universe itself to come into existence and thus host human life is the absolute heart of all things. Only reason holds that place, and by utter necessity; it could not have been any other way.
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