Inside wide terms, a social sciences are those that aim for the rational & orderly understanding of man society.

Émile Durkheim sought to define social sciences as victims that attend to the favorite kindthe fact, which he known as a social fact. Around his book A System of Sociological Method he said that the social fact may be recognized by "the power of external coercion which it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals, and the presence of this power may be recognized in its turn either by the existence of some specific sanction or by the resistance offered against every individual effort to violate it."

In a philosophy of social science, of course, that definition or even any more is higher for debate. What Durkheim intended to highlight, though, were a formal sanctions like law, the informal sanctions like shunning, and a norms of society that two kinda sanction enforce.