Tech Level appropriate skills

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

That's a very good point, but most people don't seem to think of Philosophy that way, and all the specializations I've seen are of specific philosophies like Taoism or Neo-Platonianism. Maybe use Philosophy (Social) to refer to the various social sciences? Alternatively, Philosophy with the specialization being the name of that skill, like Philosophy (Sociology)?

I don't think that people in the ancient and medieval world thought of social issues apart from a particular philosophical point of view. Taoism, for example, had a viewpoint on what human nature is, what good conduct is, what the consequences of good and bad conduct are, and how societies function and develop. So did Confucianism, and Aristotelianism, and Platonism, and Stoicism. The first stirrings of economic analysis come from the writings of Jesuits working in the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The social was not split off from the ethical; that came later.

In any case, I would avoid anachronistic terms like "sociology" and "economics" (the Greek word from which the latter derives refers to the art of prudent household management; its use for the study of markets and money came later).

A big part of the problem here is that a lot of GURPS words mean something other than what most people understand by them. Consider the terms Acting and Performance, or Honesty and Truthfulness.

Bill Stoddard