Can the Social Sciences Be Made Exact?

The social sciences are in great need of a more precise understanding of how an idea is conveyed from one mind to another. The difficulty seems to stem from an inability to find the fundamental and independent parameters from which the behavior of the brain and the consequent human response can be constructed in a mathematical sense. This problem concerns the electronics scientist as well. He must provide the communication links for conveying information from individual to individual, but he has inadequate knowledge of the human terminals to which he must match his systems. It is suggested that certain strong similarities between the behavior of circuits and of man may provide analogs which would reveal characteristics of the mind that are fundamental and quantitative. A number of such analogs are proposed and discussed.