What is social science?

[steve_bank]

There is hard science and soft science. Physics is a invariant hard science. Psychology which has an experimental basis is a soft science. It can be based on statistical inference, but there are no deterministic equations and variables as in a hard science.

Hard and soft science both use the scientific method. One can approach a subject intrinsically. Is cosmology hard science? I don't think so, it it is not subject to repeatable expermntal testing.

Hard and soft science - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity.[1][2][3] In general, the formal sciences and natural sciences are considered hard science, whereas the social sciences and other sciences are described as soft science.[4]

Precise definitions vary,[5] but features often cited as characteristic of hard science include producing testable predictions, performing controlled experiments, relying on quantifiable data and mathematical models, a high degree of accuracy and objectivity, higher levels of consensus, faster progression of the field, greater explanatory success, cumulativeness, replicability, and generally applying a purer form of the scientific method.[2][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] A closely related idea (originating in the nineteenth century with Auguste Comte) is that scientific disciplines can be arranged into a hierarchy of hard to soft on the basis of factors such as rigor, "development", and whether they are basic or applied.[5][13]

Philosophers and historians of science have questioned the relationship between these characteristics and perceived hardness or softness. The more "developed" hard sciences do not necessarily have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results.[6] Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. For example, social sciences such as psychology and sociology use mathematical models extensively, but are usually considered soft sciences.[1][2] However, there are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs,[5][14] and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.[15]

The metaphor has been criticised for unduly stigmatizing soft sciences, creating an unwarranted imbalance in the public perception, funding, and recognition of different fields.[2][3][16]

Social science | History, Disciplines, Future Development, & Facts

Social science, any branch of academic study or science that deals with human behavior in its social and cultural aspects. Usually included within the social sciences are cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics.

www.britannica.com

social science, any branch of academic study or science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. Usually included within the social sciences are cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics. The discipline of historiography is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however, consider history as one of the humanities. In the United States, focused programs, such as African-American Studies, Latinx Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, are, as a rule, also included among the social sciences, as are often Latin American Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, while, for instance, French, German, or Italian Studies are commonly associated with humanities. In the past, Sovietology was always considered a social science discipline, in contrast to Russian Studies.

Beginning in the 1950s, the term behavioral sciences was often applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favoured this term did so in part because these disciplines were thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology and physiological psychology, which also deal with human behaviour.

Strictly speaking, the social sciences, as distinct and recognized academic disciplines, emerged only on the cusp of the 20th century. But one must go back farther in time for the origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives. In the largest sense, the origins go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into human nature, the state, and morality. The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social thought, as it is in other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today. True, there have been long periods of time, as during the Western Middle Ages, when the Greek rationalist temper was lacking. But the recovery of this temper, through texts of the great classical philosophers, is the very essence of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in modern European history. With the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries, one may begin.

From the Oxford dictionary

social science, any branch of academic study or science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. Usually included within the social sciences are cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics. The discipline of historiography is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however, consider history as one of the humanities. In the United States, focused programs, such as African-American Studies, Latinx Studies, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, are, as a rule, also included among the social sciences, as are often Latin American Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, while, for instance, French, German, or Italian Studies are commonly associated with humanities. In the past, Sovietology was always considered a social science discipline, in contrast to Russian Studies.

Beginning in the 1950s, the term behavioral sciences was often applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favoured this term did so in part because these disciplines were thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology and physiological psychology, which also deal with human behaviour.

Strictly speaking, the social sciences, as distinct and recognized academic disciplines, emerged only on the cusp of the 20th century. But one must go back farther in time for the origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives. In the largest sense, the origins go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into human nature, the state, and morality. The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social thought, as it is in other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today. True, there have been long periods of time, as during the Western Middle Ages, when the Greek rationalist temper was lacking. But the recovery of this temper, through texts of the great classical philosophers, is the very essence of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in modern European history. With the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries, one may begin.

 

[rousseau]

As an amateur who's been studying the social sciences for a few years, my impression is that the social sciences were born out of the complexity of human society, and the belief that this society required a distinct discipline, or a set of disciplines. I do know more about the history of Sociology, than I do Poli Sci, Economics, or Anthropology, but I imagine it's a similar type of thing across the bunch. So we have researchers compiling quantitative and qualitative data about aspects of human society and behavior that don't quite fit into Biology.

My interpretation is that the problem these disciplines have is that those doing research often don't understand the underlying biology / chem / physics, so they do the science mostly correctly, but often draw incorrect conclusions because they don't understand underlying heuristics. That's not always the case, but it seems to be a problem.

In Sociology specifically, it seems to be becoming subsumed by Sociobiology and evolutionary theory, because really.. human society is absolutely Biological. So there's been a shift away from theorizing, and into a kind of data collection about society.

With the caveat that @Politesse might show up and explain away everything I just said, but this is my understanding.

 

[Politesse]

I see little point in trying to analyze actual academic disciplines with folk categories like hard and soft science. Either you are employing the scientific methodology or you are not, there isn't a "soft mode". At no point in my professional work have I ever been, like "okay, let's science now! But only at half power."

 

[Bronzeage]

I think the line between hard and soft science is much too fuzzy and serpentine to draw as a boundary that's separates the arts from the sciences.

What determines the Rockwell rating of a field of study is it's potential to demand changes in personal behavior.

When Copernicus said the Earth revolves around the Sun, it was interesting, but everybody still got up with the next sunrise and went to work. When a Psychologist says, "Corporal punishment of children results in antisocial behavior in adult life", the rest of us are supposed to stop beating children.

The line gets fuzzy when the "hard" science discovers something that defines things on the surface of the planet. Some guy says the Earth is warming and it's my fault. Suddenly his science is soft and squishy, no matter how many data points he has. This is where we draw the line. If I, as a non-scientist, can reject the science without having to join the Flat Earth Society, it's a soft science.

 

[Politesse]

I think the line between hard and soft science is much too fuzzy and serpentine to draw as a boundary that's separates the arts from the sciences.

What determines the Rockwell rating of a field of study is it's potential to demand changes in personal behavior.

When Copernicus said the Earth revolves around the Sun, it was interesting, but everybody still got up with the next sunrise and went to work. When a Psychologist says, "Corporal punishment of children results in antisocial behavior in adult life", the rest of us are supposed to stop beating children.

The line gets fuzzy when the "hard" science discovers something that defines things on the surface of the planet. Some guy says the Earth is warming and it's my fault. Suddenly his science is soft and squishy, no matter how many data points he has. This is where we draw the line. If I, as a non-scientist, can reject the science without having to join the Flat Earth Society, it's a soft science.

The most vituperous public debates around science, in fact, circulate around issues whose epistemological basis is as "hard" as a porn star's dollar: human evolution, the age of the earth, anthropogenic climate change, the legitimacy of epidemiology. People don't really make decisions based on the metaphorical Mohs scale of an area of science. I don't usually expect a member of the public to have any opinion at all on the theoretical issues anthropologists consider the current frontiers of our field. But they've heard of "holistic medicine" and have some strong opinions about any scientist who tells them their favorite product is quackery.

 

[rousseau]

Traditionally we've given things labels that come across as a pejorative. Calling the social sciences 'soft' definitely strikes me as insulting, but it does serve as an indicator that some have perceived a need for categorization. What those categories should actually be, or if they should even be at all, is harder to say.

But there is a definite distinction to be made between a study looking at particle physics or cellular metabolism, and one that's trying to define the root cause of gender differences, for example. In the latter case it's often hard to separate the study from politics or bias. In the former case you just run the experiment and observe the results.

One of the central debates in the social sciences now is over 'positivism', which asks - are we trying to influence change or are we trying to accurately represent reality. Which of the two you want to do depends a lot on how much you like reality. And a lot of social scientists hope to influence, rather than represent / quantify.

For all practical purposes, the social sciences are actually harder to do well, which is likely why they've been given a distinct categorization. Their results are more open to attack, because they're harder to get right.

 

[Politesse]

I don't think "What discipline produced this fact" is a very good guide to the trustworthiness of information, though. Every field has some questions that are like "what is the boiling point of water in a perfect vacuum?" and some that are more like "is the structure of space-time more like foam or more like static?" Whether or not the person who poses a hypothesis is wearing a lab coat and goggles at the time won't help you sort out either type of question. People would be better served by increasing their scientific literacy in general than they are by being handed a too-simple rubric of which subjects are good and which are bad.

You mention gender, but despite the many controversies that surround it, there is a very sound body of empirical evidence to fall back on in describing issues of sex and gender. Any gender studies expert you might call on is a walking library of information on physiology, anatomy, evolution, neuroscience, etc. They have to be, even if their only real interest is activism; what they are acting on are still observable and observed facts about the body. This doesn't change the public conversation about gender one whit, because when people are talking about gender they are rarely talking about the science thereof, even if they think they are. They're really talking about their mothers.

As social neuroscientist would, if course, correctly predict that they would be. As a species we're capable of rational thought in bits and spurts, but it is seldom driving the bus, and all knowledge is socially encoded.

 

[rousseau]

Fair, but if a sizeable portion of your discipline is inextricably tied to politics and activism, it's maybe worth putting a stamp on the box that says so.

It's likely true that you can't have a social discipline without strong opinions on the subjects being studied, and even the dynamics of a social science department are going to hold sway. But this isn't intuitively obvious to an outside observer who's seeing it as an official academic discipline. Where if you're saying something like - 'all of this is hard, cold truth' - that can be badly misleading.

But really, as you've mentioned elsewhere, the position of the social sciences are so perilous these days I'm not sure pedantry over terminology is a big concern.

 

[Politesse]

Fair, but if a sizeable portion of your discipline is inextricably tied to politics and activism, it's maybe worth putting a stamp on the box that says so.

They all are. You think biologists don't have a natural stake in whether evolution is taught in schools? Physicists, in developing new forms of energy production? Geologists, in the legal status of fracking? Chemists, in whether studies of radioactive materials are legal and how they must be handled? Any field with a practical application of any kind is inextricably tied to politics. All employment is tied to politics. Funding is tied to politics. What topics are approved or suppressed is tied to politics. Whether something gets published in English/Mandarin/Arabic is tied to politics. And likely as a result of this fact, most scientists are tied to various forms of activism, sometimes with their continued employment tied directly to political outcomes. Not all scientists engage in politics directly, but they are much more politically engaged than the average citizen, and all research has the potential to either support or disrupt political assumptions. This is true of all academic disciplines. The myth of the heroic Enlightenment Scientist and His objective disinterest in common political affairs is itself a political construction, an attempt to portray scientific knowledge as more neutral than it really is. In theory, the sciences aim to be neutral and objective, or at least intersubjective. In practice, they cannot ever fully meet this goal, and must engage in constant, thankless effort even to remain as autonomous as they currently are. All scientists must face this difficult fact eventually, whether they are hard or soft in the public imagination.

 

[rousseau]

Fair, but if a sizeable portion of your discipline is inextricably tied to politics and activism, it's maybe worth putting a stamp on the box that says so.

They all are. You think biologists don't have a stake in whether evolution is taught in schools? Physisists, in developing new forms of energy production? Geologists, on the legal status of fracking? Chemists, in whether study of radioactive materials are legal and how they must be handled? Any field with a practical application of any kind is inextricably tied to politics. All employment is tied to politics. Funding is tied to politics. What topics are approved or suppressed is tied to politics. Whether something gets published in English/Mandarin/Arabic is tied to politics. And likely as a result of this fact, most scientists are tied to various forms of activism. Not all, but they are much more politically engaged than the average citizen. This is true of all academic disciplines. The myth of the heroic Enlightenment Scientist and His objective disinterest in common political affairs is itself a political construction, an attempt to portray scientific knowledge as more neutral than it really is. In theory, the sciences aim to be neutral and objective, or at least intersubjective. In practice, they cannot ever fully meet this goal. All scientists must face this difficult fact eventually, whether they are hard or soft in the public imagination.

That's fair. But if you're a chemical engineer the skin in your game is usually to produce verifiable and repeatable results, which is the whole point. If the skin in your game is to produce results that satisfy a social demographic, but which aren't actually accurate, that strikes me as problematic and counter to actual science. Which makes calling it science a problem.

I don't disagree that science in all of it's forms usually has some kind of political aim, but in some disciplines we're aiming for a material result, which can only be achieved with sound methodology. If you're aiming for a particular social result, that kind of implies bad methodology, unless you're quantifying what the stimulus/result actually is in practice.

 

[Politesse]

Fair, but if a sizeable portion of your discipline is inextricably tied to politics and activism, it's maybe worth putting a stamp on the box that says so.

They all are. You think biologists don't have a stake in whether evolution is taught in schools? Physisists, in developing new forms of energy production? Geologists, on the legal status of fracking? Chemists, in whether study of radioactive materials are legal and how they must be handled? Any field with a practical application of any kind is inextricably tied to politics. All employment is tied to politics. Funding is tied to politics. What topics are approved or suppressed is tied to politics. Whether something gets published in English/Mandarin/Arabic is tied to politics. And likely as a result of this fact, most scientists are tied to various forms of activism. Not all, but they are much more politically engaged than the average citizen. This is true of all academic disciplines. The myth of the heroic Enlightenment Scientist and His objective disinterest in common political affairs is itself a political construction, an attempt to portray scientific knowledge as more neutral than it really is. In theory, the sciences aim to be neutral and objective, or at least intersubjective. In practice, they cannot ever fully meet this goal. All scientists must face this difficult fact eventually, whether they are hard or soft in the public imagination.

That's fair. But if you're a chemical engineer the skin in your game is usually to produce verifiable and repeatable results, which is the whole point. If the skin in your game is to produce results that satisfy a social demographic, but which aren't actually accurate, that strikes me as problematic and counter to actual science. Which makes calling it science a problem.

Only some chemical engineers do original research at all, and if they do, it's usually because their employer needs a particular data set as soon as possible, for reasons of profit and loss. Not a situation conducive to careful, objective, neutral knowledge production. The job of the chemical engineer is not to "produce verifiable and repeatable results", their job is to create valuable and easily demonstrable products that will compensate their patrons for the capital invested in their research. If they are working in industry, commercial products. For a government, military products. For a university, they are working to draw grant money... almost certainly from one of the other two sources.

I'm not attacking chemical engineers. We're all in this mess together. But we are all in this mess together.

I don't disagree that science in all of it's forms usually has some kind of political aim, but in some disciplines we're aiming for a material result, which can only be achieved with sound methodology. If you're aiming for a particular social result, that kind of implies bad methodology, unless you're quantifying what the stimulus/result actually is in practice.

You cannot accurately assess whether someone is politically (or more importantly for chemical engineers, commercially) compromised or not based solely on what discipline they studied, or what job is on their name tag. Allegedly hard scientists produce fake or highly dubious data for the corporations that employ them every single day. Most allegedly soft scientists are not activists, and certainly don't fabricate data for political ends. Scholarly misconduct happens, but it is not the result of studying the right or wrong subject.

 

[rousseau]

Fair, but if a sizeable portion of your discipline is inextricably tied to politics and activism, it's maybe worth putting a stamp on the box that says so.

They all are. You think biologists don't have a stake in whether evolution is taught in schools? Physisists, in developing new forms of energy production? Geologists, on the legal status of fracking? Chemists, in whether study of radioactive materials are legal and how they must be handled? Any field with a practical application of any kind is inextricably tied to politics. All employment is tied to politics. Funding is tied to politics. What topics are approved or suppressed is tied to politics. Whether something gets published in English/Mandarin/Arabic is tied to politics. And likely as a result of this fact, most scientists are tied to various forms of activism. Not all, but they are much more politically engaged than the average citizen. This is true of all academic disciplines. The myth of the heroic Enlightenment Scientist and His objective disinterest in common political affairs is itself a political construction, an attempt to portray scientific knowledge as more neutral than it really is. In theory, the sciences aim to be neutral and objective, or at least intersubjective. In practice, they cannot ever fully meet this goal. All scientists must face this difficult fact eventually, whether they are hard or soft in the public imagination.

That's fair. But if you're a chemical engineer the skin in your game is usually to produce verifiable and repeatable results, which is the whole point. If the skin in your game is to produce results that satisfy a social demographic, but which aren't actually accurate, that strikes me as problematic and counter to actual science. Which makes calling it science a problem.

I don't disagree that science in all of it's forms usually has some kind of political aim, but in some disciplines we're aiming for a material result, which can only be achieved with sound methodology. If you're aiming for a particular social result, that kind of implies bad methodology, unless you're quantifying what the stimulus/result actually is in practice.

You cannot accurately assess whether someone is politically (or more importantly for chemical engineers, commercially) compromised or not based solely on what discipline they studied, or what job is on their name tag. Hard scientists produce fake or highly dubious data for the corporations that employ them every single day. Most social scientists are not activists, and certainly don't fabricate data for political ends. Scholarly misconduct happens, but it is not the result of studying the right or wrong subject.

Just to be clear, I agree with you and don't think a majority of social scientists are fabricating data by any means. But my observation is that political leaning / bias can be a greater force in these disciplines, in some cases the researcher might not even realize that they're biased, or that their research is biased. And how could it not be a greater force? When you're researching subjects, and sometimes even going into sub-fields that are directly applicable to your person.

If you're working for a corporation and actually fabricating data, that's just straight up lying.

But you're the expert, and actually in a social science field, so I do weight your opinion more highly than mine.

 

[Politesse]

I just really don't think the public narrative on these issues is at all accurate. Gender studies are a prime example. If you ask the average person, they likely think that gender activism came first, scientific theories about the social construction of gender second; that all of the people involved in gender studies were committed, transexual-loving political feminists before they ever took up the microscope. But the truth is the exact opposite. Almost all of the people who contributed to what we eventually came to call gender studies when it first started taking root a century to a century and a half ago were Jungians or Freudians to the core when they began their work, people who would never have thought to question their culture's constitution of the gender binary if they had not empirically investigated the matter- it was the study of genetics, the study of endocrinology, the study of cross-cultural manifestations of gender, that drove new social perspectives on gender, all along the way. Which is exactly as it should be. Science should be in the driving seat, and it is. Most of my job involves educating people out of popular misconceptions through the application of science, not the other way around.

None of us who are in the social sciences could even afford to be solely "soft scientists". What is a psychologist without neuroscience? What is an anthropologist without biology? What is an economist without materials science, or geology, or ecology? A laughingstock, only. Humans are not magical beings existing somehow outside the constraints of the physical world, and the science of human life must also be informed by the same data sets and methodologies that have produced the hardest knowledge of all. In practice, anyone who endeavors to study the human condition will eventually be forced to choose between acceptance or rejection of scientific methods, data sets, and theories. If you are a social scientist, you chose to accept. If you chose to reject it for the sake of politics, faith, or a paycheck, then you are no scientist, whether you fantasize yourself as being hard, soft, or anywhere in between.

 

[bilby]

As a species we're capable of rational thought in bits and spurts, but it is seldom driving the bus

I beg to differ.

 

[lpetrich]

I see little point in trying to analyze actual academic disciplines with folk categories like hard and soft science. Either you are employing the scientific methodology or you are not, there isn't a "soft mode". At no point in my professional work have I ever been, like "okay, let's science now! But only at half power."

Sure, but the practice of science has a broad spectrum of methods from the subjective to the rigorously mathematical.

In some previous threads, I'd mentioned research that points a hard-soft spectrum.

The characteristics of subject matter in different academic areas. by Anthony Biglan in 1973 - PDF version

He asked 222 scholars to assess amounts of difference between various academic disciplines, thus resulting in a distance matrix for them. He then used multidimensional scaling to find a set of positions that give these distances, and he did principal components analysis to find their main directions of variation. He found:

• Hard to soft (hard: well-defined paradigms, soft: not so much)
• Pure to applied
• Nonbiological to biological

Later research that agrees with that model:

• Validation of the Biglan model | Research in Higher Education - 1982
• The Biglan Classification Revisited on JSTOR - 1993

 

[lpetrich]

“Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences | PLOS ONE by Daniele Fanielli, 2010

This order is intuitive and reflected in many features of academic life, but whether it reflects the “hardness” of scientific research—i.e., the extent to which research questions and results are determined by data and theories as opposed to non-cognitive factors—is controversial. ... If the hierarchy hypothesis is correct, then researchers in “softer” sciences should have fewer constraints to their conscious and unconscious biases, and therefore report more positive outcomes. Results confirmed the predictions at all levels considered: discipline, domain and methodology broadly defined. ... These results suggest that the nature of hypotheses tested and the logical and methodological rigour employed to test them vary systematically across disciplines and fields, depending on the complexity of the subject matter and possibly other factors (e.g., a field's level of historical and/or intellectual development). On the other hand, these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.

The hierarchy: physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences.

Something that DF didn't mention was that possibility of giving some positive spin on a negative result. That is more feasible when a field has well-defined paradigms. For example, departures from the Standard Model of elementary particle physics are all negative results, but they are interpreted as constraints on various models of departure, like grand unified theories.

Bibliometric Evidence for a Hierarchy of the Sciences | PLOS ONE by Daniele Fanielli, Wolfgang Glänzel, 2013

The hierarchy: (mathematics), physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, (humanities)

The authors looked at numbers of authors, lengths of article, numbers of references, references to monographs (books), ages of references, diversity of sources, relative title length, use of first person, and sharing of references.

Moving from mathematics to the humanities, or at least from the physical to the social sciences, papers progressively tend to list fewer co-authors, have longer texts, use less substantive titles, make greater use of first person pronouns, and cite more references, more books, older literature, and a higher diversity of sources. Perhaps most important of all, papers show, collectively, a proportional loss of cognitive structure and coherence in their literature background: in the physical sciences, they share several references with fewer other papers, as we expect if studies cluster around clearly defined problems and methods; moving to the biological and to the social sciences, papers are increasingly likely to share common references randomly, which reflects the greater freedom and flexibility with which scientists establish a cognitive basis to their research.

 

[lpetrich]

DF 2010 mentioned the Biglan three-factor model, stating

These dimensions have been validated by many subsequent studies, which compared disciplines by parameters including: average publication rate of scholars, level of social connectedness, level of job satisfaction, professional commitment, approaches to learning, goals of academic departments, professional duties of department heads, financial reward structures of academic departments, and even response rates to survey questionnaires.

Numerous studies have taken a direct approach, and have attempted to compare the hardness of two or more disciplines, usually psychology or sociology against one or more of the natural sciences. These studies used a variety of proxy measures including: ratio of theories to laws in introductory textbooks, number of colleagues acknowledged in papers, publication cost of interrupting academic career for one year, proportion of under 35 s who received above-average citations, concentration of citations in the literature, rate of pauses in lectures given to undergraduates, immediacy of citations, anticipation of one's work by colleagues, average age when receiving the Nobel prize, fraction of journals' space occupied by graphs (called Fractional Graph Area, or FGA), and others.

However,

Several lines of evidence support a non-hierarchical view of the sciences. The consensus between scientists within a field, measured by several independent parameters including level of agreement in evaluating colleagues and research proposals, is similar in physics and sociology.

DF then proposes a reconciliation: distinction between a core of well-established theories and results and a frontier of research. This core is much better developed in the physical than in the social sciences.

 

[Politesse]

Telling that a supposed distinction in the methodological rigor of the various sciences can only be measured through aesthetic or organizational metrics like number of books published, whether professors "feel" similar to other professors or not, number of pauses during a lecture, whether or not a Nobel prize has been created for a subject...

If you want to accuse a discipline of lacking scientific rigor, you'd think a more rational approach would be to challenge their work on scientific grounds, not aesthetic.

 

[lpetrich]

As to mathematical rigor, consider:

Elementary particle physicists have the five-sigma rule, where they only accept results that are five standard deviations away from the observational background. This is from experience with smaller departures that later went away: Five sigma revisited – CERN Courier

 Data dredging or p-hacking -  HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known)

In the social sciences, a significance value of p < 0.05 is common, meaning a risk of being incorrect about 1/20 of the time.

For a normal distribution, inside of 1 standard deviation, the probability is 68%, 2 stdevs 95%, and 3 stdevs 99.7%.

Outside: 32%, 4.6%, 0.27%, 0.0063%, 0.000057%

But a normal distribution has *very* rapid falloff, a falloff that may not be very realistic: \( \displaystyle{ P(x) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}} e^{-x^2/2} } \) for mean 0 and stdev 1.

A further problem is the  Look-elsewhere effect or the  Multiple comparisons problem where one can get a statistically significant correlation by finding one in a large set of correlations.

 

[lpetrich]

A big problem in the social sciences is the difficulty of quantifying much of what they study. So one tries to find numerical proxies, things that can be worked with numerically.

It may seem that patriotism is hard to quantify, but Peter Turchin in "Ages of Discord" has two numerical proxies for amount of US patriotism. The first is what people US states' counties are named after. Before the Revolutionary War, it was various colonial notables, while in the early 19th cy., it was mainly national heroes, and in the late 19th cy., various local notables. That proxy dried up a century ago, and the second proxy is visits to nationalistically significant sites like George Washington's Mount Vernon estate and the Statue of Liberty.

That may seem absurd, but there is at least one form of entertainment where fans like collecting statistics. Baseball. That is because performance can easily be quantified and one has a variety of statistics to work with.