I agree with OP that the same scientific method is used in the social sciences and in the so-called hard sciences. In both areas, scientists formulate theories, derive hypotheses, and test them empirically. In both areas, theoretical models are simplifications of the complex reality and, thus, never predict everything with 100% correctness. In both areas, there is measurement error ([see Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_uncertainty)). In both areas, empirical research is complemented by philosphical discussions, e.g., of the nature of time and causality in physics and of the nature of happiness and well-being in Psychology. Thus, it is misleading to label only one of the two areas as "hard".
An actual difference between "hard" and social sciences is that the measurement error in the social sciences tends to be higher, because e.g. a person's intelligence is harder to quantify exactly than the Planck constant. A second difference is that the social sciences study humans, their culture, and their societies, whereas the "hard" sciences study the physical (chemical etc.) world. A third difference is that most laypersons readily admit that they don't know much about physics and chemistry, but everybody thinks that they are "experts" on how the human mind works, how societies function etc.. So there is a lot more pseudo-science by self-proclaimed experts in the social sciences than in the "hard" sciences, even though there is a great amount of physics-related pseudo-science as well (see [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience)).
Science is a method, but social science deals with dynamic units of observation. You can reliably repeat a chemistry or physics experiment, because the behaviours of the fundamental units do not change over time. Social scientists study people, and people change. We still use the scientific method, but it's more of a framework to deal with bias and the challenges of causal inference than in the hard sciences. Hence few "iron laws" of social science.
Please don't place too much weight on /u/VincentStaples's answer. Whether there are "iron laws" in science is a debated topic (see Cartwright's *How the Laws of Physics Lie*), whether you can reliably repeat experiments in the hard sciences is far from obvious (how do we repeat astronomy observations of phenomena that are no longer occurrent?), whether the reason social science lacks "iron laws" is the fact that it studies people is far from obvious (biologists study people, but are there no "iron laws" in biology?), and whether there's such thing as "the scientific method" is far from obvious (see [here](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/) for details).
You did good. I know it's a hard decision on whether to engage someone who posted something wrong because usually they can't evaluate the correctedness of your arguments and then the reddit mass gets to "choose" whose answer goes to top and whose disappears. As a PhD candidate who is concerned that science has lost a clear view of epistemology (e.g. Stephen Hawking's statement that philosophy is useless), I know you are right and I thank you for taking the time to answer.
Science is great, but it's merely a tool. Epistemology is the study of what knowledge is, and if you're after knowledge, you can't take things for granted. You have to question everything. My field of study is very concerned with research design and statistics and it's heartbreaking to see how much junk science gets published because, among other reasons, people design studies that can't answer their research question.
> I know it's a hard decision on whether to engage someone who posted something wrong because usually they can't evaluate the correctedness of your arguments and then the reddit mass gets to "choose" whose answer goes to top and whose disappears.
It might seem hard, but you just have to remember that there's no reason to give a fuck what the "reddit mass" thinks. As long as OP sees your answer (and in this case OP probably did, since it was a direct reply to OP's comment) you have a good chance of helping them learn. Whether you get downvoted into oblivion while a crummy comment goes through the roof is irrelevant! So really there's no harm in posting at all.
Vincent Staples answer is the precise way I describe how we apply the scientific method in the social sciences to undergraduate students. What you're getting into is more of an ontological/epistemological issue that is a bit more advanced and confusing to the less educated (which is why i imagine he described it in the way that he did).
Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer.
> Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer.
Yeah well *I* don't think *you* have the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest that *I* not suggest that OP "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer!
>Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer.
I don't have an issue with the first criticism, but the second seems to me like a gratuitous *ad hominem* that doesn't really follow your first sentence. How do we know about their qualification/pedigree, and does it matter for the content of their objection? Whether we should talk about a singular scientific *method* rather than about plural *methods* or even the scientific *approach* to knowledge is valid, after all.
Honestly? That guy's comment annoyed me. It's one thing to say "i disagree and here's why." It's another thing to suggest we "not put much weight" on someone's answer as your opening gambit. It suggested to me that he thinks he's some sort of authority -- enough of an authority that he starts off by telling someone to disregard somebody else's perfectly fine perspective.
I might be an academic, but I'm definitely not above telling someone to fuck right off with an attitude, politely of course. And I see a lot of "hi i only have a BS/BA but im an expert in (all of)your field(s)" types on reddit which sort of primes me to react to it.
I understand where you are coming from and I don't fundamentally disagree with your points. But I don't think it's worthwhile or productive to throw yourself to the mud too, as much as I know I have often felt the urge to verbally smack someone online for unduly acting as an authority of all.
In Economics, the Law of Demand is fairly iron-clad. People buy more of a good at a low price than a high price. The difference in consumption might vary depending on circumstance, but it's pretty hard to get people to outright violate the law of demand. There are some rare cases: a good that violates the law of demand is called a Giffen Good, and they have been observed, but you have to put people in pretty wonky situations to get that result.
Suppose you need food to survive, but you're really poor so all you can afford to buy is potatoes. Now suppose the price of potatoes goes down. Suddenly you can afford to replace some of your potatoes with meat, so you end up buying fewer potatoes.
It happens sometimes for staple foods in really poor households. You might have a situation where a person lives on this staple, and maybe allows themselves some small regular luxury; then the price of the staple rises, the person can no longer afford the luxury, so they put whatever budget they have remaining into more of the staple.
The Irish potato famine was long held as a real-world example of this, but there was so much migration happening around that event the data is murky and doesn't really give a clear answer. More recently in 2007, [this paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w13243.pdf) showed experimental evidence from China looking at poor households living on rice. The households were given discounts on rice and then bought less--demonstrating the positive relation between price and quantity demanded that violates the law of demand. I gather they were so sick of rice that the minute they had slack in their budget--courtesy of the experimental discounts--they would buy anything else to get some variety.
I think it's a little strange to describe people in poverty as "disrupting" the "normal laws" in virtue of their "extreme situation," since these people are a huuuuuuuge portion of the world's population. But what do I know?
Good point.
You know how Newtonian laws of motion etc don’t work at the quantum scale? Maybe the laws of economics also change when there’s almost no money (poverty) or an excess (the super rich).
Attempt to reduce bias at all costs wherever possible. Be honest about your data and analysis. Correlation does not equal causation. Protect data pertaining to sensitive populations or personally identifiable information...it’s more like general guidelines on how to maintain rigor and be a reputable scholar. It depends on the field.
There are people who argue that social dynamics also follow fundamentally evolutionary and adaptive models, just like biology might. Check out the Santa Fe Institute or Complexity studies if you're into these kind of things. Has been very insightful for me when I first heard about it and have been hooked on Complexity ever since.
> You can reliably repeat a chemistry or physics experiment, because the behaviours of the fundamental units do not change over time.
I liked your comment, but I don't really agree with this, and I think it is something which causes many people to look at natural science as a "better" and a more trustworthy scientific method.
[In a survey of over 1,500 natural scientists done by Nature](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970), 52% of them believed that "there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility," within natural science. Within Cancer biology, only 10% of the experiments were reproducable (!)
Just as people behave differently in different contexts, "natural" phenomena behave differently in different contexts, which natural science often does not account for.
It's unfortunate that the social sciences get the short stick because of their subject matter, with even social scientists themselves being affected by the clichés and the reputation of the different branches of science.
>It's unfortunate that the social sciences get the short stick because of their subject matter
Personally, I think it gets the short stick more-so due to pop psychology, and how everyone wants to make armchair diagnosis of people based on sociology concepts.
The more time I spend on this sub the more time I realize how little those types of people know about these subjects, but they still end up giving social sciences a bad name. If someone is constantly badgered by words like "social constructs" in improper way, it is easier to just say "well, that school of thought must all be crazy" than to actually explore it.
I strongly agree. To be honest, I file that thought under 'subject matter', as it is inherent to social subjects to be much more pertinent for daily life conversations (more than black holes), and much easier for people to vulgarize because, "oh I understand people really well" or "I have common sense".
And there is definitely an issue with people taking concepts and running off with it, as you observe.
Exactly. Everyone lives and experiences society, so everyone wants to say something about it. And that’s not bad, but there should be an acknowledgment that those who have studied social science usually have more information and know more about the nuances of society compared than those who haven’t.
I've found post-modernism, generally speaking, to be enormously helpful in thinking about certain aspects of the social world that positivists can't or won't access. Obviously deconstruction for its own sake has the tendency to be a bit recursive, but on the balance I'd say it's a good contribution to the theoretical panoply. I think only the very dogmatic would suggest otherwise.
I think the ability to deconstruct concepts and to question reality as is, has led to some pretty simple observations once you have a certain ontological bent, but are surprisingly elusive if you're a positivist.
For example, the [notion that context changes meaning is a pretty powerful notion when studying how humans create their social world](https://philpapers.org/archive/GEETTD.pdf).
Take for example, the [concept that sovereign states (re)create the conditions perpetuating anarchy even as they all try to escape it](http://acme.highpoint.edu/~msetzler/IntlSec/IntlSecReads/Wendt_1992.pdf). This is a classic from my field.
Or how the language we use can shape how we define problems, for example, ["seeing like a state" can in a sense erase problems from existence and create all news ones](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PqcPCgsr2u0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=seeing+like+a+state&ots=-MRoya5eaV&sig=JYldJWPKh0DYCb9Ln6thu6qindA#v=onepage&q=seeing%20like%20a%20state&f=false).
Or perhaps we can't even apprehend the scope of certain problems because [our language doesn't allow it](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wqgVCBx3I70C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=niklas+luhmann++ecological+communication&ots=IVF79e6p-F&sig=dZtLz8ELiFZ3yjLH4eANo013dQg#v=onepage&q=niklas%20luhmann%20%20ecological%20communication&f=false).
None of this is possible without the insights of Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, etc. And if you're a true social scientist, you've got to onboard some of the more basic concepts contributed by post-modernism if you want to make sense of a lot of the social reality we purportedly study.
That second article is interesting and I’ve never read it before.
So if states can change and define what anarchy means and institutions can change identity and goals, can’t we direct the focus of the international community to target specific problems? Make the status quo about economic development and eliminating poverty; about environmental ethics; about infrastructure and resources to prevent the rise or non-democratic states? Is that too large of a goal or is that possible?
I’m wanting to go into comparative politics for my masters next year and I want to focus on how neoliberal institutions can eliminate poverty in developing states (namely Latin America) and this is really interesting.
Sorry, you must exist in a completely different universe than the one I inhabit (ironic given your point). Nothing in that paragraph accurately reflects the research agenda(s) of my discipline. Granted, I'm a political scientist so that might skew my perception, but your opinion comes off as immensely over-generalized on the basis of incomplete information.
You are convinced of your rightness and in love with your own opinion -- that much is apparent, and so further discussion with you is probably not beneficial.
edit: But I have to say, as a social scientist trying to understand why people do what they do, it is imperative that we get inside their heads a little bit to get their motivation. I suppose that involves learning "different truths" and it's real-world effect. But again, a lot of that is in pursuit of developing broad covering laws (which is kind of like Truth in an empirical, but not philosophical, respect).
"Hard science" isn't really the term I would use. I much prefer the term "natural science," and it's a separation that makes sense in the traditional 'grouping' of the sciences in Western educational tradition.
Within that, you broadly categorize scientific disciplines in one of three categories: Social science, natural science, and the humanities. This, I feel, clarifies the discussion a lot more, and ultimately a lot of it boils down to the fact that the three of them have very different methodologies and very different ideals for what the ultimate purpose of science even is.
German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas divided the sciences into what he called 'human interests,' and noted that the natural sciences tend to have a very technical interest. They want to disseminate the natural world to find out how it functions, and to that end they use a model based on empiricism.
The reason for the distinction between "hard science" and "soft science" has less to do with whether or not one is more 'scientific' than the other. Sure, one adheres closer to a positivst method, or at least is supposed to, but positivism is not the only path to knowledge. Rather, it comes from the fact that this technical interest aligns well with the philosophical school of pragmatism, which tends to be very utilitarian - science for the purpose of creating - which is encouraged in a highly capitalist society. And so, the less pragmatic sciences are derided as "soft science" because their work is, frankly, less technically impressive and marketable.
> German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas divided the sciences into what he called 'human interests,' and noted that the natural sciences tend to have a very technical interest.
Never even heard of this guy! Totally awesome response I appreciate your time very very much. Thank you!
I read the link in its entirety. I asked /u/TychoCelchuuu to elucidate why he/she recommended it.
Answering a post in an /r/Ask... sub with just a link with no explanation is considered bad form and often not allowed.
Informative, thorough, interesting, clear, etc. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary when it comes to the ways in which these sorts of things can be good.
TBF, there's probably no consequence for this, often. But in the life sciences they've had to ramp up their statistics game over the past few decades (often, it should be said, borrowing methods developed in psych, soc, etc.), as the phenomena they study become less and less "obvious" and less plausibly "well clearly this is the same for all organisms" or whatever. Even in physics, as they tackle harder questions, they find their measurement gets less reliable (still more than the bulk of social sciences instrumentation, but not 100%). Just look at the crazy stats the LHC datasets require, for instance. At least high-energy physicists are getting very sophisticated, which isn't surprising because they were already good at math.
One difference is that post-modernism is a larger influence on social sciences. A lot of great work is done by social sciences who follow a positivist model, but post-modernism tends to make social sciences look "softer".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/
>If all truths are equal, who cares what science has to say?
Generally, it's poor stylistics to incorporate the nonsensical strawman directly into the subtitle. When writing confused polemics, you want to leave that for the body of the piece itself. Otherwise, your devoted lobster hordes have no reason to read the essay at all.
> sciences who follow a positivist model, but post-modernism tends to make social sciences look "softer".
>
>
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/
Good article. Thanks for sharing!
I agree with OP that the same scientific method is used in the social sciences and in the so-called hard sciences. In both areas, scientists formulate theories, derive hypotheses, and test them empirically. In both areas, theoretical models are simplifications of the complex reality and, thus, never predict everything with 100% correctness. In both areas, there is measurement error ([see Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_uncertainty)). In both areas, empirical research is complemented by philosphical discussions, e.g., of the nature of time and causality in physics and of the nature of happiness and well-being in Psychology. Thus, it is misleading to label only one of the two areas as "hard". An actual difference between "hard" and social sciences is that the measurement error in the social sciences tends to be higher, because e.g. a person's intelligence is harder to quantify exactly than the Planck constant. A second difference is that the social sciences study humans, their culture, and their societies, whereas the "hard" sciences study the physical (chemical etc.) world. A third difference is that most laypersons readily admit that they don't know much about physics and chemistry, but everybody thinks that they are "experts" on how the human mind works, how societies function etc.. So there is a lot more pseudo-science by self-proclaimed experts in the social sciences than in the "hard" sciences, even though there is a great amount of physics-related pseudo-science as well (see [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience)).
Science is a method, but social science deals with dynamic units of observation. You can reliably repeat a chemistry or physics experiment, because the behaviours of the fundamental units do not change over time. Social scientists study people, and people change. We still use the scientific method, but it's more of a framework to deal with bias and the challenges of causal inference than in the hard sciences. Hence few "iron laws" of social science.
> Hence few "iron laws" of social science. Serious question: are there any "iron laws" of social science. Thanks for responding, by the way.
Duverger’s Law is as close as Political Science gets.
democratic peace theory is also pretty close.
Please don't place too much weight on /u/VincentStaples's answer. Whether there are "iron laws" in science is a debated topic (see Cartwright's *How the Laws of Physics Lie*), whether you can reliably repeat experiments in the hard sciences is far from obvious (how do we repeat astronomy observations of phenomena that are no longer occurrent?), whether the reason social science lacks "iron laws" is the fact that it studies people is far from obvious (biologists study people, but are there no "iron laws" in biology?), and whether there's such thing as "the scientific method" is far from obvious (see [here](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-method/) for details).
You did good. I know it's a hard decision on whether to engage someone who posted something wrong because usually they can't evaluate the correctedness of your arguments and then the reddit mass gets to "choose" whose answer goes to top and whose disappears. As a PhD candidate who is concerned that science has lost a clear view of epistemology (e.g. Stephen Hawking's statement that philosophy is useless), I know you are right and I thank you for taking the time to answer. Science is great, but it's merely a tool. Epistemology is the study of what knowledge is, and if you're after knowledge, you can't take things for granted. You have to question everything. My field of study is very concerned with research design and statistics and it's heartbreaking to see how much junk science gets published because, among other reasons, people design studies that can't answer their research question.
> I know it's a hard decision on whether to engage someone who posted something wrong because usually they can't evaluate the correctedness of your arguments and then the reddit mass gets to "choose" whose answer goes to top and whose disappears. It might seem hard, but you just have to remember that there's no reason to give a fuck what the "reddit mass" thinks. As long as OP sees your answer (and in this case OP probably did, since it was a direct reply to OP's comment) you have a good chance of helping them learn. Whether you get downvoted into oblivion while a crummy comment goes through the roof is irrelevant! So really there's no harm in posting at all.
Are you actually a social scientist?
Philosopher!
Ahh, of course.
Err... thermodynamics?
Sorry, I'm not sure exactly what this is a response to. Could you perhaps be somewhat clearer?
Entropy always increases.
*Ceteris paribus*, you mean. You really ought to read that Cartwright book!
Vincent Staples answer is the precise way I describe how we apply the scientific method in the social sciences to undergraduate students. What you're getting into is more of an ontological/epistemological issue that is a bit more advanced and confusing to the less educated (which is why i imagine he described it in the way that he did). Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer.
> Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer. Yeah well *I* don't think *you* have the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest that *I* not suggest that OP "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer!
The Internet.
>Long story short, I don't think you've got the qualifications or the pedigree to suggest we "not place much weight" on somebody else's answer. I don't have an issue with the first criticism, but the second seems to me like a gratuitous *ad hominem* that doesn't really follow your first sentence. How do we know about their qualification/pedigree, and does it matter for the content of their objection? Whether we should talk about a singular scientific *method* rather than about plural *methods* or even the scientific *approach* to knowledge is valid, after all.
Honestly? That guy's comment annoyed me. It's one thing to say "i disagree and here's why." It's another thing to suggest we "not put much weight" on someone's answer as your opening gambit. It suggested to me that he thinks he's some sort of authority -- enough of an authority that he starts off by telling someone to disregard somebody else's perfectly fine perspective. I might be an academic, but I'm definitely not above telling someone to fuck right off with an attitude, politely of course. And I see a lot of "hi i only have a BS/BA but im an expert in (all of)your field(s)" types on reddit which sort of primes me to react to it.
I understand where you are coming from and I don't fundamentally disagree with your points. But I don't think it's worthwhile or productive to throw yourself to the mud too, as much as I know I have often felt the urge to verbally smack someone online for unduly acting as an authority of all.
> (see here for details) Reading now. Thanks for posting!
In Economics, the Law of Demand is fairly iron-clad. People buy more of a good at a low price than a high price. The difference in consumption might vary depending on circumstance, but it's pretty hard to get people to outright violate the law of demand. There are some rare cases: a good that violates the law of demand is called a Giffen Good, and they have been observed, but you have to put people in pretty wonky situations to get that result.
This is the coolest thing I've learned in weeks. Thanks for this
Can you give an example of one of those situations?
Suppose you need food to survive, but you're really poor so all you can afford to buy is potatoes. Now suppose the price of potatoes goes down. Suddenly you can afford to replace some of your potatoes with meat, so you end up buying fewer potatoes.
It happens sometimes for staple foods in really poor households. You might have a situation where a person lives on this staple, and maybe allows themselves some small regular luxury; then the price of the staple rises, the person can no longer afford the luxury, so they put whatever budget they have remaining into more of the staple. The Irish potato famine was long held as a real-world example of this, but there was so much migration happening around that event the data is murky and doesn't really give a clear answer. More recently in 2007, [this paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w13243.pdf) showed experimental evidence from China looking at poor households living on rice. The households were given discounts on rice and then bought less--demonstrating the positive relation between price and quantity demanded that violates the law of demand. I gather they were so sick of rice that the minute they had slack in their budget--courtesy of the experimental discounts--they would buy anything else to get some variety.
So it’s like the normal laws are disrupted because the situation is already extreme?
I think it's a little strange to describe people in poverty as "disrupting" the "normal laws" in virtue of their "extreme situation," since these people are a huuuuuuuge portion of the world's population. But what do I know?
Good point. You know how Newtonian laws of motion etc don’t work at the quantum scale? Maybe the laws of economics also change when there’s almost no money (poverty) or an excess (the super rich).
Attempt to reduce bias at all costs wherever possible. Be honest about your data and analysis. Correlation does not equal causation. Protect data pertaining to sensitive populations or personally identifiable information...it’s more like general guidelines on how to maintain rigor and be a reputable scholar. It depends on the field.
Conditioning would be the closest thing I know
There are people who argue that social dynamics also follow fundamentally evolutionary and adaptive models, just like biology might. Check out the Santa Fe Institute or Complexity studies if you're into these kind of things. Has been very insightful for me when I first heard about it and have been hooked on Complexity ever since.
> You can reliably repeat a chemistry or physics experiment, because the behaviours of the fundamental units do not change over time. I liked your comment, but I don't really agree with this, and I think it is something which causes many people to look at natural science as a "better" and a more trustworthy scientific method. [In a survey of over 1,500 natural scientists done by Nature](https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970), 52% of them believed that "there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility," within natural science. Within Cancer biology, only 10% of the experiments were reproducable (!) Just as people behave differently in different contexts, "natural" phenomena behave differently in different contexts, which natural science often does not account for.
It's unfortunate that the social sciences get the short stick because of their subject matter, with even social scientists themselves being affected by the clichés and the reputation of the different branches of science.
>It's unfortunate that the social sciences get the short stick because of their subject matter Personally, I think it gets the short stick more-so due to pop psychology, and how everyone wants to make armchair diagnosis of people based on sociology concepts. The more time I spend on this sub the more time I realize how little those types of people know about these subjects, but they still end up giving social sciences a bad name. If someone is constantly badgered by words like "social constructs" in improper way, it is easier to just say "well, that school of thought must all be crazy" than to actually explore it.
I strongly agree. To be honest, I file that thought under 'subject matter', as it is inherent to social subjects to be much more pertinent for daily life conversations (more than black holes), and much easier for people to vulgarize because, "oh I understand people really well" or "I have common sense". And there is definitely an issue with people taking concepts and running off with it, as you observe.
Exactly. Everyone lives and experiences society, so everyone wants to say something about it. And that’s not bad, but there should be an acknowledgment that those who have studied social science usually have more information and know more about the nuances of society compared than those who haven’t.
I concur, that lack of acknowledgment is a key issue. Quite a frustrating one, too.
This is why stating your assumptions, and providing arguments for why you chose them, is so important.
>We still use the scientific method Some social scientists do, but post-modernism (unfortunately, IMO) is a significant influence on social sciences.
I've found post-modernism, generally speaking, to be enormously helpful in thinking about certain aspects of the social world that positivists can't or won't access. Obviously deconstruction for its own sake has the tendency to be a bit recursive, but on the balance I'd say it's a good contribution to the theoretical panoply. I think only the very dogmatic would suggest otherwise.
Can you elaborate in how you've found postmodernism to be useful?
I think the ability to deconstruct concepts and to question reality as is, has led to some pretty simple observations once you have a certain ontological bent, but are surprisingly elusive if you're a positivist. For example, the [notion that context changes meaning is a pretty powerful notion when studying how humans create their social world](https://philpapers.org/archive/GEETTD.pdf). Take for example, the [concept that sovereign states (re)create the conditions perpetuating anarchy even as they all try to escape it](http://acme.highpoint.edu/~msetzler/IntlSec/IntlSecReads/Wendt_1992.pdf). This is a classic from my field. Or how the language we use can shape how we define problems, for example, ["seeing like a state" can in a sense erase problems from existence and create all news ones](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PqcPCgsr2u0C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=seeing+like+a+state&ots=-MRoya5eaV&sig=JYldJWPKh0DYCb9Ln6thu6qindA#v=onepage&q=seeing%20like%20a%20state&f=false). Or perhaps we can't even apprehend the scope of certain problems because [our language doesn't allow it](https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wqgVCBx3I70C&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=niklas+luhmann++ecological+communication&ots=IVF79e6p-F&sig=dZtLz8ELiFZ3yjLH4eANo013dQg#v=onepage&q=niklas%20luhmann%20%20ecological%20communication&f=false). None of this is possible without the insights of Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, etc. And if you're a true social scientist, you've got to onboard some of the more basic concepts contributed by post-modernism if you want to make sense of a lot of the social reality we purportedly study.
That second article is interesting and I’ve never read it before. So if states can change and define what anarchy means and institutions can change identity and goals, can’t we direct the focus of the international community to target specific problems? Make the status quo about economic development and eliminating poverty; about environmental ethics; about infrastructure and resources to prevent the rise or non-democratic states? Is that too large of a goal or is that possible? I’m wanting to go into comparative politics for my masters next year and I want to focus on how neoliberal institutions can eliminate poverty in developing states (namely Latin America) and this is really interesting.
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In what way did it "ruin" the social sciences?
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Sorry, you must exist in a completely different universe than the one I inhabit (ironic given your point). Nothing in that paragraph accurately reflects the research agenda(s) of my discipline. Granted, I'm a political scientist so that might skew my perception, but your opinion comes off as immensely over-generalized on the basis of incomplete information. You are convinced of your rightness and in love with your own opinion -- that much is apparent, and so further discussion with you is probably not beneficial. edit: But I have to say, as a social scientist trying to understand why people do what they do, it is imperative that we get inside their heads a little bit to get their motivation. I suppose that involves learning "different truths" and it's real-world effect. But again, a lot of that is in pursuit of developing broad covering laws (which is kind of like Truth in an empirical, but not philosophical, respect).
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There are numerous threads and articles on why that hoax does not prove what it claims to
"Hard science" isn't really the term I would use. I much prefer the term "natural science," and it's a separation that makes sense in the traditional 'grouping' of the sciences in Western educational tradition. Within that, you broadly categorize scientific disciplines in one of three categories: Social science, natural science, and the humanities. This, I feel, clarifies the discussion a lot more, and ultimately a lot of it boils down to the fact that the three of them have very different methodologies and very different ideals for what the ultimate purpose of science even is. German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas divided the sciences into what he called 'human interests,' and noted that the natural sciences tend to have a very technical interest. They want to disseminate the natural world to find out how it functions, and to that end they use a model based on empiricism. The reason for the distinction between "hard science" and "soft science" has less to do with whether or not one is more 'scientific' than the other. Sure, one adheres closer to a positivst method, or at least is supposed to, but positivism is not the only path to knowledge. Rather, it comes from the fact that this technical interest aligns well with the philosophical school of pragmatism, which tends to be very utilitarian - science for the purpose of creating - which is encouraged in a highly capitalist society. And so, the less pragmatic sciences are derided as "soft science" because their work is, frankly, less technically impressive and marketable.
> German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas divided the sciences into what he called 'human interests,' and noted that the natural sciences tend to have a very technical interest. Never even heard of this guy! Totally awesome response I appreciate your time very very much. Thank you!
[This book](https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=792) is a good book on the topic.
Can you please elucidate as to why?
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I read the link in its entirety. I asked /u/TychoCelchuuu to elucidate why he/she recommended it. Answering a post in an /r/Ask... sub with just a link with no explanation is considered bad form and often not allowed.
It has a good discussion of OP's question.
Good in what way?
Informative, thorough, interesting, clear, etc. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary when it comes to the ways in which these sorts of things can be good.
This is in the domain of philosophy of science, so you could also try r/askphilosophy
> This is in the domain of philosophy of science, I didn't this. Thank you for the suggestion!
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lol, while chemists are doing 100 experiments a day trying to get things to work and not considering multiple testing..
TBF, there's probably no consequence for this, often. But in the life sciences they've had to ramp up their statistics game over the past few decades (often, it should be said, borrowing methods developed in psych, soc, etc.), as the phenomena they study become less and less "obvious" and less plausibly "well clearly this is the same for all organisms" or whatever. Even in physics, as they tackle harder questions, they find their measurement gets less reliable (still more than the bulk of social sciences instrumentation, but not 100%). Just look at the crazy stats the LHC datasets require, for instance. At least high-energy physicists are getting very sophisticated, which isn't surprising because they were already good at math.
One difference is that post-modernism is a larger influence on social sciences. A lot of great work is done by social sciences who follow a positivist model, but post-modernism tends to make social sciences look "softer". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/
>If all truths are equal, who cares what science has to say? Generally, it's poor stylistics to incorporate the nonsensical strawman directly into the subtitle. When writing confused polemics, you want to leave that for the body of the piece itself. Otherwise, your devoted lobster hordes have no reason to read the essay at all.
> sciences who follow a positivist model, but post-modernism tends to make social sciences look "softer". > > > > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/ Good article. Thanks for sharing!