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Richard Feynman comments on the sloppiness of Social Scientists
Feynman,surely,joking,social science Richard Feynman on Social Sciences
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I disagree that "climate science" is the same sort of pseudo science, because climate science is based on actual evidence. That fact the charlatans can make it big of pretending to be climatologists does not make a case against actual climatology.
'I think all of the social sciences are bullshit because they don't gather the data and do the checks and intense work that we do in the hard sciences, but I don't really know because I haven't gathered the data and done the checks and intense work to know anything about what I'm talking about.'
(p.s. I think science all boils down to good statistic and good experimental design; there is no wall between social sciences and hard sciences.)
'Or at least internally consistent results,' Rudy said.
'Okay. Meaning that math was more than a physics of bottlecaps.'
'It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really TRUE or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words--are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?'"
- © Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
my point being that the rigour and internal consistency is not enough, the connection to the real world is essential for it to be called a science... And a lot of the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences or whatever, deny this real world, and just think up thought experiments - they might as well be studying Klingon.
(PS: the taxonomies of disciplines is different from place ot place, so what i'm critisizing is not a certain discipline, but an attitude)
As one who studies and will one day practice Political Science, I'm offended. I can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for the development of democratic institutions with the same certainty that a biologist can tell you about the conditions and prerequesites for bacterial growth to take place.
Both of my degrees are in social sciences (they're multidisciplinary degrees so I dabble in economics, psychology, sociology, demographics, politics and anthropology) and for the most part I agree with him. The more you learn and the more you try to understand with the social sciences the less that you can be certain of.
Let me take your example: you say you understand the prerequisites for the development of democratic institutions, but do you really? I'm sure that you understand how democracy evolved in the U.S and other Western nations, but other states take different paths to democracy. And the institutions that result often look and act different from those of other places. Political scientists can try to quantify what was the underlying cause for a move towards democracy, using the forms and the statistics of scientific method, but they don't arrive at a firm conclusion.
It is in this way that the 'pseudo-science' can become dangerous. It is why Western institutions tried to spread democracy by advocating economic liberalization and symbolic elections throughout the 1990's and today, often resulting in ruined economies, failed and collapsed states, and further conflict. Political scientists arrive with their detailed studies and impose their institutional design on another culture because they believe they have the science to prove that they know best.
In many ways, it is because the hard sciences don't have to account for the unpredictable behavior of humans that they can arrive at any conclusions. Social sciences have no underlying laws and theories because people are necessarily ineffable.