I have to do some educational research, and I’ve decided to go with a “quantitative” approach over a “qualitative” approach. I consider the qualitative more interesting, but the general feeling is that it’s harder to generalize qualitative data because it’s a small sample size. At the same time, I think the quality of quantitative data is highly suspect – surveys people spend ten seconds on and don’t give a crap about, or really decontextualized “experiments” that have no connection to any real-world activity. So I was going to ask which was more scientific but with reflection I decided neither method is scientific. Social sciences aren’t sciences, they are humanities. There’s nothing wrong with that. The humanities are rich and complex and hard. I found my graduate work in the humanities far more intellectually challenging than the education program I’m in now. The education program is not nearly as challenging, just a lot more tedious.
I say we should embrace the philosophical and moral values that motivate education, live with that, go with it. Read Plato. Read Dewey. It may not be scientific, but it is academic, it is scholarly.
OK, so much for not having long OP’s. What do you think? Are the social sciences really sciences? Or are they pseudosciences?
Philosophy isn’t considered a social science though, is it? I thought it was a humanity.
Some things I consider social sciences and so does the college I am attending: economics, anthropology, geography, political science, psychiatry and sociology.
Are those sciences? Yes, of course. According to dictionary.com science is The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. I have taken courses in all of the above fields and I can assure you that all of them employ all of the above tasks.
And I agree. This is a matter of semantics. In modern times “science” has tended to be interpreted as the natural sciences. Philosophy was what I seriously studied in college. Note that logic is a sub-discipline of philosophy. Is logic a humanity?
I think logic has advanced to the point where it should be its own field. At my school, if you were a taking a logic course, someone might ask what department it was in: it could have been mathematics, computer science, or philosophy. While ideas of logic are used in all of these disciplines, I think it doesn’t really fit in any of them.
It’s not the subject so much as the method that determines whether something is truly a science (at least in the modern meaning).
If you’re studying Freud, e.g. you’re not doing science.
If you’re hypothesizing about behavior, making predictions and doing reproducable experiments - well then you’re doing science. Even if the physicists laugh at you (and they will).
I guess I asked the wrong question. Obviously the social sciences are behaving like scientists, or they wouldn’t be called the social scientists. I guess my real question is, should they be acting like scientists? In my field, education, I find it particularly meaningless to do experiments. The experiments are done with rote learning, out of context, and don’t apply very well to real learning, in context. In my reading I’ve come across more than one person who feels that human behavior is too complicated to do the kinds of studies you do in the hard sciences, and I tend to sort of agree.
Science used to be called “natural philosophy” back in David Hume’s day and was seen as just another branch of the search for truth.
The problem with people engaged in “social sciences” in recent decades is that often they muddy the waters between observable, repeatable experimentation and political ideology.
i.e. whether you are a marxist or a conservative physicist you’ll find that gravity remains the same, that Einstein’s theories are equally applicable and so on. In social sciences the political and philosophical flavour of individual researchers can have a huge impact on the way experiements are conducted and the results they provide - this goes far beyond Heisenberg in physics.
Its true that watching social scientists try and get a grip of the scientific method is a venerable spectator sport for physical scientists, but most would agree with you on just how fundamentally hard the problems are that social scientists would like to be addressing.
Applying empiricism and reason to how people or groups of people think, feel and behave is a problem thousands of times harder than, say, developing a new asymmetric carbon-carbon bond forming reaction which would be regarded as the height of scientific endeavour in chemistry.
For me the topic of the OP comes down to whether you believe that there is suficient progress being made in this direction, or whether social scientists are just a million miles away from rendering these problems in any way tractable and hence wasting everyone’s time. Its possible that the next Newton or Einstein could be a sociologist and maybe that is what is needed, a visionary who can put areas of social science on a rigorous footing.
I think that this person has to come from the physical sciences though. Just as physicists and chemists played an enormous role in the early development of molecular biology and genetics, its going to take crossover from the physical sciences into the social for any sort of revolutionary change to happen. (Showing my science prejudices here I guess, but I just cannot see the undergraduate training in psychology/sociology/anthropology etc producing the goods).
Why focus on the undergraduate training in these disciplines? Is undergraduate training in physics enough to produce meaningful changes?
I think you need to educate yourself further in the methods and literature of the social sciences. I’m quite content that psychological research is sufficiently rigorous.
Indeed. The formal literature in economics and political science is sufficiently rigorous as well. There already is significant crossover between “hard” science disciplines and political science and economics. Political science tends to attract applied scientists who actually enjoy asking political and economic questions and using scientific techniques to test their hypotheses.
The derision of some “hard” scientists is irrelevant. They derisive ones frequently understand topics in quantitative socials science rather poorly, and are only interested in the techniques. In my experience, hard scientists a little more tuned in are very interested in this sort of work and have a great deal to contribute.
It depends on which social science and who you ask. My Anthropology profs said Anthro is a science but Sociology was not. My Sociology prof said it was the other way around.