To the extent that social sciences are sciences, they wouldn’t take something like this as axiomatic. They might treat it as a hypothesis, and look for scientific ways to test it.
The sciences would come in after this point. Neuro sciences are fairly well understood at least well understood enough to know that certain activities and exposure to different things stimulate various chemicals that we respond to in various ways both good and bad. .
I wasn’t quite sure how to take this crispy mini wheat of opinion columns.
Ahem. That was about Humanities, related but not the same.
Both Humanities and Social Science study human beings, our cultures, and societies. However, Humanities have a subjective, critical-thinking or opinion-based approach. Social Science has an objective approach based on research and scientific evidence
Arts and Humanities are based in more subjective argument and interpretation; Social Sciences often draw on qualitative and quantitative data, and Physical and Medical Sciences from empirical data.
I think the division between humanities and social sciences on that basis to be old fashioned. Of course scientific rigour is hard to apply to everything and attempts to do so have varying validity. Modern scholars use varied approaches, applying statistics to Shakespeare. Music can be pretty mathematical. Anthropology speculative based on shadowy evidence and remote tribes. Plenty of opinion in psychology and economics given a mathematical justification based on conditions too limiting to always apply to our complex reality.
This reminds me of a friend of mine in college, double-majoring in chemistry and physics, who had to take a couple of English classes to fulfill his elective requirements. His paper on Moll Flanders included several graphs and charts.
If you’ve ever wanted to see a statistical analysis of Moll Flanders’s sexual activity in bar graph form, Jay was your man.
Maybe, but until you convince the educators and universities, that is just an opinion. (It has to be said that the STEM fields are even more old fashioned, but the divisions and approaches to how they separate and are taught in academia have a lot of history and reasoning behind those separations. It is like that with Humanities and Social Science).
Well, it is. I’m a hobbyist, playing piano and flute, but I do have to be aware of intervals, of keys, of the layout of a piano keyboard (which actually answers any number of question regarding keys, if you know the layout of the black and white keys, and your know your scales as regards your major keys and your minor keys). All of that is arithmetic, though.
I’m replying to my own thread of, lo, more than a year ago, because my thinking has evolved a bit. I picture that same spectrum, but then I want to put philosophy on it. Philosophy obviously belongs on the beginning before mathematics, but then it also obviously belongs on the finish after sociology. So, weirdly, the whole thing becomes a cycle.
This reminds me of a joke:
Philosophy professor: “The whole is greater than the part.”
Student: “Yes, that is so.”
Philosophy professor: “And the part is less than the whole.”
Student: “Yes, clearly.”
Philosophy professor: “Therefore, philosophers should rule the world.”
Student: “What? I do not understand.”
Philosophy professor: “It is obvious. Let us go over it again…”
On a map of subjects/disciples, mathematics would border physics on one side and philosophy on the other. There’s considerable overlap in how mathematicians and philosophers work: both involve logical argument, deductive reasoning, and thinking really hard about things. And some of the great mathematicians have also been philosophers (Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Russell).
The difference between mathematics and philosophy is that mathematics proves things. ISTM that philosophers are rehashing the same questions over and over without coming to a provable conclusion.
The way I usually close the circle is …Physics is applied math. Math is applied logic. Logic is applied philosophy. Philosophy is applied psychology. Psychology is applied biology.
Hmm. Doing the same thing over and over, getting the same results and for the same reasons. Isn’t there a word to describe that?
Mathematics is a world governed by rules, and it operates within those rules; absolutely nothing can happen that violates the rules. Many people found the precision and the absolute certainty very enticing and hoped that, in some fashion, everything could be formalized and operationalized and reduced to mathematics. Gödel threw a bit of a spanner into that, but there’s still a sort of wistful informal wish that somehow all fields of inquiry and investigation could behave that way.
Philosophy lets you pose some rules as axioms in order to explore what would be the conceptual outcome if we started with those assumptions. In the actual discipline of philosophy, many unstated axioms tend to operate, so the attempted purity of only assuming those things posited as axioms doesn’t hold up, but at least it lets us step back from simply diving into data and assuming that the data means what it means intrinsically; it lets us shine light on our starting points and therefore call them into question.
The various physical sciences each concern themselves with trying to expand our understanding within a certain field of inquiry; each field has a set of theories which have proven to have explanatory power for understanding the existing data and for generating hypotheses that research can verify — the theories that persist are the ones that keep getting confirmed by the research. The practitioners use mathematics to model the data and perform the research, and use philosophy to remain aware of their fundamental axioms, the concepts they started out with. What they have in common is that unless the variables are clumsily operationalized, or interpreted in a biased way because of some external political or social meaning attached to the finding, the material being studied yields data that means the same to Researcher A as it does to Researcher B.
The social sciences concern themselves with the study of us, the same critters that the researchers are composed of. This tends to create a parallax problem. (Parallax is an astronomical term; technically it means the difference between the perceived position of a stellar object seen from earth in winter and the perceived position of the same object seen from earth in summer; parallax is virtually nil and ignorable for distant objects but plays a larger role in more nearby celestial objects.) The social parallax problem is that social subject matter is perceived differently depending on the viewer’s social location. Philosophically speaking, we’re much more prone to carrying around unconscious axiomatic beliefs, largely because we have to: when studying transuranium elements in a chemistry lab, you have the luxury of not investing in any preconceived belief until you see what the precisely measured data tells you, but when living a life as a human in a society you have to model a belief about what’s real and what matters and why before you lose your baby teeth, and these axiomatic beliefs invade the attempt to operationalize data and define your variables.
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During the cold war Russia was strong in STEM and weak in social sciences which made them susceptible to all manner of crackpot or at a minimum trendy theorizing, including Lenin-Marxism. Though authoritarianism can take a greater share of the blame.
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Paul Krugman:
An Indian-born economist once explained his personal theory of reincarnation…: “If you are a good economist… you are reborn as a physicist. But if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.”
A sociologist might say this quote show what is wrong with economists: they want a subject that is fundamentally about human beings to have the mathematical certainty of the hard sciences. And without doubt there is too much mathematics in the economics journals, because mathematical elaboration is a time-honored way of dressing up a banal idea. But good economists know that the speaker was talking about something else entirely: the sheer difficulty of the subject. Economics is harder than physics: luckily it is not quite so hard as sociology.
Peddling Prosperity (1994)
- I’d say that an endeavor is scientific if it uses the scientific method (or if it’s an analysis of scientific experimentation - science journalism is an edge case that can fall on either side of the line). Lots of sociology is scientific: papers test hypotheses using large datasets such as The National Survey of Families and Households. Lots of helpful work is not: concepts such as role models, reference groups, self-fulfilling prophecy, and descriptions of groups such as, well scientists, have value separate from their experimental evidence. As do all hypotheses.
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The replication crisis in psychology doesn’t imply that psychology isn’t scientific. It does imply that too much of their scientific investigation is bad science.
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Parts of history involve testable hypotheses and careful measurement. But most of it is storytelling and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. Historical scholarship can be pretty influential, rightly I think.
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What share of non-crackpot physics is non-scientific? Ignore edge cases such as string theory.
I’ve read lots of philosophy, and philosophers, since Aristotle at least, prove things all the time. The problem is that five philosophers prove five mutually contradictory conclusions.
One might say the same thing about five economists. I have been lucky enough to know some brilliant people. Many had studied physics and its applications; only one became an economics luminary. The fact physicists generally give more exact results than economists does not mean economics is a harder subject. Physicists know the limitations.
Until the last century or so, this was also true of a lot of math. Euclid’s work, for instance, is riddled with hidden assumptions. I remember, for instance, when I was reading The Elements as a teen, coming to a proof that the intersection of two planes was a straight line. That immediately got my interest, because I know of a counterexample. Turns out, he assumed that the intersection was a line, and then proved that it was straight.
My mental dividing line isn’t really between the social/physical sciences.
What do the hard sciences, math, and engineering have in common? It’s that they all have a ratchet effect. That is, they all make forward progress and rarely backslide.
Math accomplishes this with proofs. Proofs require absolute certainty that one step leads to another, so that one can be confident in the entire thing. Although erroneous proofs sometimes slip through the cracks, it’s rare, and has not yet let to entire branches of math collapsing due to shoddy foundations. So it ratchets forward, and mathematicians today can be wholly confident in building off results from centuries ago (although Chronos’ note about hidden axioms is valid).
The hard sciences accomplish this with experiment. Experiments are generally repeatable, and can be highly isolated (so they aren’t influenced by irrelevant factors). It takes only a single contradictory experiment to invalidate a theory, so the ones that persist are highly resilient. When past theories are replaced with new ones, it’s almost always the case that the previous theory becomes a limiting case of the new one (low speeds, high particle count, macroscopic objects, etc.). So even theories that are “wrong” remain useful, while new theories cover new ground.
Finally, engineering ratchets forward with the technologies that result. Although it’s largely empirical, it’s still true that planes or computers or whatever wouldn’t work if the knowledge base was completely wrong. Even with incomplete understanding, one can make incremental progress simply by seeing how well something works. And it’s relatively easy to test the performance of an airplane or computer.
But the social sciences mostly don’t seem to ratchet. They slip backwards as much as forwards. Nothing is ever known for sure, even with the caveat that it may be incomplete or a subset of the full picture. At every scale, there is just no stickiness to the knowledge. Even very specific results are almost impossible to reproduce.
This is obviously not a problem in other realms, like the arts. We don’t expect music or literature to constantly progress (whatever that could even mean). But it does seem like a problem if you’re calling yourself a science.
It may be that forward progress in some of these areas isn’t just difficult, but rather impossible. If so, that puts a different spin on the value of these subjects.
It is entirely possible to do good science in all of those fields.
The difference is that when dealing with falsifiable claims there is a self-correction mechanism. You night get away with a wrong result or a little while like Millikan did, or reject a correct theory like plate tectonics, but eventually reality asserts itself. So you are protected from having your field drift on the politivcal winds, or be subjected to ‘great man’ biases that persist for decades.
Any field that bifurcates itself into ‘camps’ that are defined primarily by their political affiliation, and those camps can’t agree on even basic facts and theorems of their field is not really a science. If the literature in a field is so convoluted and thickly written that no one can agre on what it even says, that’s not a philosophy or a social science.
When a large percentage of supposedly replicable papers in your field fail to replicate, I’m not sure what you have. Not much, maybe.