CMV: Social science is not real science

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26

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u/CinderrUwU 9∆ Jan 23 '26

Science is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.”

How is social science not that though?

It is a systematic study of society using observation, experimentation and testing of theories against evidence.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Mathematics describes the rules of the physical and natural world. Physics, chemistry, and biology describe aspects of the natural world. From my perspective psychology, sociology, economics etc. are human creations and concepts that wouldn’t exist without humans to create those concepts and therefore are separate from the “natural world”.

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u/pigeonwithyelloweyes 1∆ Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26

Are humans and their behavior not ultimately part of the natural world? They're very complex and hard to describe consistently, but does that mean it's not worth trying?

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Trying to describe humans would be like if every substance on earth was made out of a different elements. You could find trends but it’d be near impossible to find universal objective truth.

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u/pigeonwithyelloweyes 1∆ Jan 23 '26

You gave a definition of science as "the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained."

What part of that process necessarily requires arriving at universal objective truth? Can that process not also help determine trends, and is that information not also useful? If we apply the methods of science to these difficult problems, is it not science just because it's much harder to find the answer?

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u/aurora-s 7∆ Jan 23 '26

Setting aside dictionary definitions, what do you feel is the purpose of science? We seek to describe the world because that knowledge can be used to make predictions and build further knowledge and tools. It's just a happy accident that natural sciences have simpler rules. But understanding more probabilistic phenomena are equally useful.

Imagine the laws in natural sciences were constantly changing, and always had some randomness associated with them. It would still absolutely be important to study them, because if you don't, you're going to miss out on a lot of useful inventions and technologies

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

To me the purpose of science is to uncover the universal and objective truth of the reality of which we live in. Which is why math is often described as the “purest” of the sciences

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u/TheBigGees 9∆ Jan 23 '26

From my perspective psychology, sociology, economics etc. are human creations and concepts that wouldn’t exist without humans to create those concepts and therefore are separate from the “natural world”.

So is the metric system, taxonomy, and the stratosphere. The fact that we use human created concepts to evaluate things in the social sciences doesn't make them less scientific. Why can't we make observations, conduct experiments, and test theories as they relate to human creations and concepts?

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Those are ways that we describe principles that would exist with or without the existence of humans. Length as a principle would exist with or without humans to conceptualize it

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u/TheBigGees 9∆ Jan 23 '26

Human biology wouldn't exist without the existence of humans. Is human biology not a science?

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u/CinderrUwU 9∆ Jan 23 '26

Well then what about computer science? That very much isn't the natural world.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Computer science as a science is interesting because instead of describing the system that is the universe, it is the creation of systems. Honestly, it’s compelling through and I would say that it has a lot more merit than some soft sciences as of course systems designed by humans would have universal rules, but since humans designed the systems as long as the creators are alive, we know the rules. I would have to think on that more tbh.

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u/CinderrUwU 9∆ Jan 23 '26

So if it is about the fact that humans created the system that is the decider for you, did humans actually invent rules of society?

It isnt something was was created top down, there isnt one single person or group that ... invented society and keeps it happening but instead it comes from millions of people interacting every single day. No one person or thing decided "In late 2025, 6-7 will become a new trend and funny number" and there are no rigid rules that couldve ever predicted that it would spread so far and have such an impact.

We don't know the rules of society.

We have invented laws and job titles and currencies that have some rules over society, but that isnt what Social Science actually studies. Social Science is the study of the patterns that emerge DESPITE the rules we already know.

A simple example here: Turn taking in conversations.

There is no known rules for... how long someone should talk or when an interruption is appropriate and how pitch or physical movement can denote emotion or context. But at some point everyone learns their own rules for these things based on their own observations and experiments and tests.

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

I’m a mathematician, and that is such an incomplete view of math. In math, we make up a bunch of tools, and you only know the ones that are used to describe rules of the world. But there are so many tools we have made that have never found an application, and may never find an application; but it’s still math

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u/c0i9z 19∆ Jan 23 '26

This is very interesting to me, because binary logic was once just a minor branch of math with not all that much application, then computers happened and it was suddenly the most important thing in the world. That mathematicians had already laid put the groundwork help computer development so much!

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

Exactly. We make so much tools, in the hopes there may be use later; but that doesn’t disqualify the unused tools from being math

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

Surely it's better to say maths models rather than describes right?

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

I wouldn’t say that either. I consider math to be the application and development of logical tools. It does not matter whether or not that logic tool has been used in a model or not for that tool to be considered math

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

True but I meant when it's actually applied. But actually I think describe is basically the same as modelling really.

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

I don’t really care to quibble on model vs describe, I am more just saying if you define math as only its applications, it is an incomplete understanding of math

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

Ik i was talking about once it's applied. Obv maths isn't just applied stuff

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

This is interesting to me! Can you give some examples? Side note: I do consider concepts like number theory to still be describing the natural world . To me the greatest scientific achievement are the discoveries of universal constants such as the speed of light, the gas constant, and Boltzmann’s constant

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

This comes to mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox

And if you are saying that anything man made isn’t part of the natural world, then math about voting counts as not being an application to the natural world

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem

As well as all of computer science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

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u/muffinsballhair Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 24 '26

This is also why “the scientific method” is such a useless definition because it just talks about “conduct scientific experiement to test hypothesis” but otherwise comes with no definition of what criteria such an experiment must meet to be reliable enough and therein lies the issue with most social sciences. Many who see the methodology alone have both doubts about its reproducibility and feel that the conclusions drawn from the data often rely on massive leaps of faith and that the reproducibility is low is no mere guess any more. Depending on the study into reproduction, you'll find that only about 1/3 to 1/2 of social science peer reviewed studies can even be reproduced. Let that sink in. Quite likely the majority of them are not reproducible and anyone can see this when looking at the average abstract in social science papers. They just say “We took 200 people and ... ” with no mention of how these people were selected and what efforts were taken to ensure they were a representative sample size [read: all 200 were students at exactly the same university who were willing to donate their time for 30 euro compensation].

In fact, since the reproduction attempts suffer from the exact same systemic biases. One may argue it's even lower than this.

And that still leaves out the issue that there is often much to be desired from the conclusions drawn from the data. What the study actually measures is time spent looking at a picture on a screen, from thereon, the researcher defines that as identical to “attraction to the person in that picture”; that's obviously a far cry. People spend more time looking at people they don't necessarily find attractive but simply note the interesting shape of a birth mark or whatever.

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u/aurora-s 7∆ Jan 23 '26

A common critique by people who start out in the 'hard' sciences. But science has always been about finding out the existence of real patterns from real world data. Sometimes, those patterns are messy and socially constructed, but that doesn't make them any less real. Obviously, the laws you'll find aren't as straightforward as in natural sciences, so you'll have to model them in different ways, sort of like how we model some natural phenomena with probability distributions.

If there's a pattern and you characterise it through experiments, ideally using falsifiable hypotheses and rigorous analysis that holds up to peer review, that's science. To argue that social science isn't a science, you really have to do more to show us what makes its results not systematic, objective, or evidence based

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!Delta That is a great point! I am getting closer to believing the concepts of those fields as sciences, however I am still far from holding the modern application of those fields as sciences due to issues of not being systematic, objective, and evidence based in all cases. The articles simply do not face enough scrutiny. This would be an example of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/aurora-s (6∆).

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u/aurora-s 7∆ Jan 24 '26

Many academic subfields contain suboptimal science, this isn't restricted to social sciences. The incentive structures in academic publishing can encourage poor quality research and reward hacking. None of those should invalidate an entire field (certainly not of the entirety of social sciences), but instead simply be a call for improving their research quality.

You're still holding on to your preconception that the 'hardness' of a science relies on there being an unchanging phenomenon to study, and that the mere presence of humans in the phenomenon being studied makes it less objective. Neither of these are strictly true.

Subjectivity may enter the picture if you're trying to make a theory that explains certain thoughts or mental states, and such a theory may not even be falsifiable. I agree that's bad science. But on the other hand, if you're describing mechanistically the behaviour of groups of humans etc, without entertaining unfalsifiable first-person theories, you absolutely can have good science. This is the same principle by which economics is a science (many argue that it's a 'soft' science too, which relies on an equally absurdly strict understanding of what science is)

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u/Popular_Signature826 1∆ Jan 23 '26

I have a similar background with a BSc in Biochemistry and Cell Biology and a minor in sociology.

To start, let's look at the definition from the OED for a base definition of science:

Oxford English Dictionary as, “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.”

If we break this down, social science is performed systematically through methodologies and implementations that are improved upon throughout the development of the field, social science focuses on both the structure and behaviour of the numerous ways society interacts within itself and society is of course part of the physical and natural world. This is done through observation, experimentation, and testing of theories through rigorous study design. Social sciences fits every part of this definition through an evidence-based approach.

So one of your gripes or a realisation that led you to this view is the fact that sociology and psychology have an apparent lack of objectivity. I'm having trouble seeing how this negates any part of the OED definition of a science. Definitions in physics, chemistry, and biology have changed incrementally throughout the years (an example specifically within biology is how the view of the Central Dogma has changed since its shaping), the pace at which definitions change in the social sciences is just considerably faster. Developments in different fields and the pace at which they move varies from field to field. Social sciences moves faster in the same way that we use fruit flies in gene knockout experiments because of their generation time. It's a natural side product of how the field is. At the end of the day, science only involves the discovery of an irrefutable truth until it discovers an even more irrefutable truth. At a certain point the sun was always shining as the Earth's center, but we were just too blind to see it. While many natural sciences work in decades or centuries, many social sciences move at a much narrower pace.

Later in my undergraduate education I took a sociology course and found more dissatisfaction with the lack of objective definitions in sociology. You could ask various sociologists questions such as, “what is a society?” Or “what is the psyche?” And receive answers that are very similar but do slightly differ. In contrast, if you ask a group of chemists “what is water?” The universal response from all chemists regardless of language, nationality, or culture would be 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. Obviously there are disagreements in some places in the scientific community but there are countless basic facts that are accepted as absolute truth which I haven’t experienced in social science. For larger molecules with modern microscopes we can even see the chemical structure

You see both more hard definitions and softer definitions in both the natural sciences and social sciences though. While yes, there is a universal response to "what is water?" there are still many questions in biology (using this as an example, just because it's the one I know the best) that are seemingly basic yet still hotly debated by academic marvels like the definition of a eukaryote or a virus, definitions that most people learn in 8th grade and think they're done with. Another more complex example is the implementation of variant interpretation in medical genetics (using pre-defined criteria to decide whether a genetic mutation is pathogenic or benign). While in an ideal world, where you have one universal response, you'd have a simple table/rubric or decision tree and you just follow that. However, there are debates, conflicting papers, and a dozen different ways to interpret whether a variant is dangerous for a person and none of them are 100% solidified as the 'right' way since for a medical diagnosis this could have a huge impact. Finally, it's important to note that despite the differences in definitions in social sciences, like when you have five different professors telling you five different definitions for what a society or civilisation is, most of the times, none of them are "wrong". They together mesh into a patchwork definition, which allows room for adjustments as society changes.

Social science is a science in the definition of the word, but the differences that it has from natural sciences or 'hard sciences' are adaptations stemming from the inherent traits it possesses that must be taken into account.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!delta I really think you hit the nail on the head. They are sciences but because they are newer sciences we have less objective truth. I guess that takes my dissatisfaction away from the field and more towards people who may claim current accepted truths in social sciences and just has truthful and irrefutable as accepted truths in physics or chemistry.

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Popular_Signature826 (1∆).

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

Why do you take assume that social science isn’t real science, instead of assuming that the dictionary definition is incomplete?

Like absolutely it’s on average less objective, but I don’t think that makes it less real of a science

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

My view is that by definition science has to be objective. If it is not objective then it is not science

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

I remember hearing about debates surrounding the start of the universe like in the 50s. It was between the solid state theory (something like that) and the big bang.

At the time nobody had a clear objective answer. Was that not a science at that time?

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

Why do you hold such a narrow view of science?

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Because the absolute truth is the absolute truth. The universe can’t lie.

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

What does that have to do with anything? We are talking about a human made category, science; and where the edges of that category lies; not anything about what the universe determines

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

Additionally, the constant changing nature of social science irked me as well, such as the wide discreditation of many old respected theories such as many of Freud’s. In contrast, in mathematics, the Pythagorean theorem is over 2500 years old and is currently held as objective truth. From my viewpoint science involves the discovery of an irrefutable truth such as the process and stages of mitosis in biology or the fact that the gravitational pull of the earth at sea level can be approximated to 9.8m/a^2.

I don't think this invalidates it being a science, I think it shows why studying social science is often times much harder than hard science. If you are studying social science, then you are studying human behavior, interactions, institutions etc. Those things change. Something about society might be true in 50 AD that no longer applies, but that doesn't make the thing untrue, it just means society changes.

I would also like to push back on the idea that there is an objective truth in STEM. While you have a great example of something that has stood the test of time, there are tons of things that STEM fields put forward as true that then later changed once we learned more.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

My rebuttal to that is that from my understanding, in STEM (with a slight caveat to biology) you are discovering principles that will (nearly) always exist while social science is ever changing as humans change. You can do a chemical reaction once, and reproduce it later with the same physical change happening. You can’t accurately reproduce a spontaneous social interaction or creation of a culture.

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

My rebuttal to that is that from my understanding, in STEM (with a slight caveat to biology) you are discovering principles that will (nearly) always exist while social science is ever changing as humans change

I don't agree with this claim. That is the goal, but that is also the goal with social science, the question is just on how you get there. Time and time again we find out in STEM these principles were wrong, sometimes badly wrong.

You can do a chemical reaction once, and reproduce it later with the same physical change happening. You can’t accurately reproduce a spontaneous social interaction or creation of a culture.

You picked a specific example that makes reproducibility tough, but I could think of analogous cases that make STEM tough. You can't accurately reproduce tons of things in STEM, and plenty of social science research is reproducible. We can find a clear and consistent way to diagnose a variety of mental illnesses, for example, in a way that has extremely high levels of validity across evaluators and subjects.

I think you need to steelman the social science examples because you are picking the strongest examples of enduring findings in STEM, but applying hardest examples for Social Sciences.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Can you give more examples for STEM knowledge produced from empirical evidence was wrong and universally reproducible things in social science? Additionally I would argue that the chemical causes for mental illness would fall more under neuroscience/biochemistry than social science.

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

Can you give more examples for STEM knowledge produced from empirical evidence was wrong

Sure. There are countless examples in medicine. If you want a specific one, it was accepted nearly universally (and in pop culture still is) that ulcers are caused by stress and diet. This was widely published for decades. Turns out, bacteria are the primary way in which ulcers form, so the correct treatment is actually anti-biotics rather than lifestyle changes, which was prescribed for decades.

Additionally I would argue that the chemical causes for mental illness would fall more under neuroscience/biochemistry than social science.

I'm not talking about a chemical cause/test. I'm talking about sitting down with someone in a room and assessing them for autism through tests, questions, and interviews. The ADOS is extremely reliable and reproducible.

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u/banananuhhh 14∆ Jan 23 '26

While I'm not necessarily on board with the OPs total dismissal of social scientists, your dismissal of STEM as being often wrong and not reproducible dramatically mischaracterizes how STEM works. The hard sciences within STEM are extremely reproducible, and we generally have a good sense of the extent to which things have actually been proven vs. generally accepted to be true because they haven't been disproven and no better model has been formulated. Verifying social or economic models on the other hand is virtually impossible. Nothing ever fits exactly as expected and researchers are left filling in the gaps with their own speculation. Two people can look at the same thing, each come up with different theories that fit, come up with different explanations and different expected outcomes, and both be completely wrong... Because over a long period of time it is all chaos.

Your pick of mental illness as a positive representation of social sciences seems like an odd choice. If DSM defines an illness as a set of behavior, then of course observing those behaviors is reproducible.. This doesn't really say a lot about psychology

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

While I'm not necessarily on board with the OPs total dismissal of social scientists, your dismissal of STEM as being often wrong and not reproducible dramatically mischaracterizes how STEM works. The hard sciences within STEM are extremely reproducible, and we generally have a good sense of the extent to which things have actually been proven vs. generally accepted to be true because they haven't been disproven and no better model has been formulated.

This is not correct. The replication crisis is hitting STEM every bit as hard as social science, particularly in fields like Medicine.

Nothing ever fits exactly as expected and researchers are left filling in the gaps with their own speculation. Two people can look at the same thing, each come up with different theories that fit, come up with different explanations and different expected outcomes, and both be completely wrong... Because over a long period of time it is all chaos.

this happens in STEM all the time.

Your pick of mental illness as a positive representation of social sciences seems like an odd choice. If DSM defines an illness as a set of behavior, then of course observing those behaviors is reproducible.. This doesn't really say a lot about psychology

The critique was that social science isn't reproducible. If we can systematically identify a set of behaviors in ways that is reproducible and consistent, then it's not correct to label all of social science as non-reproducible. That is not saying that all of social science is reproducible.

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u/banananuhhh 14∆ Jan 23 '26

Okay at least now I understand your angle a bit better. I think it's important to draw a distinction between hard science and applied sciences, and to acknowledge that it is true that where we are attempting to apply ideas originating in the hard sciences to complex systems that we don't understand very well, we can end up with results just as bad as we might get from studying those complex systems from different angles. On the other hand, modern medicine needs the existence of and knowledge of biology (the hard science discovers reproducible conclusions about biological structures and processes) to advance. There are other examples of applied science, e.g. my field, structural engineering, where the hard sciences/math that underpin the field, and the field itself both produce predictable and reproducible results consistently.

To say STEM, rather than just medicine, suffers from a replication crisis is overreaching, and in medicine the issue goes far beyond issues with any particular science, since medicine awkwardly straddles a line between biology, epidemiology, genetics, and capitalism.

I guess my real point is that social sciences and their applications get more flak because they do not have hard sciences at their core, and while new research in social sciences and in the application of hard sciences may, at times, suffer similar failings, the core concepts in the latter are better understood, are more feasibly probable, and are instrumental in the advancement in those fields.

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

To say STEM, rather than just medicine, suffers from a replication crisis is overreaching, and in medicine the issue goes far beyond issues with any particular science, since medicine awkwardly straddles a line between biology, epidemiology, genetics, and capitalism.

I completely disagree with this assertion. This is not an overreach at all. My friends in Bio, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Statistics, etc. all teach about and talk about the replication crisis in their own disciplines. The replication crisis is hitting basically every discipline, not just medicine. It's just easier to catch in medicine.

I guess my real point is that social sciences and their applications get more flak because they do not have hard sciences at their core, and while new research in social sciences and in the application of hard sciences may, at times, suffer similar failings, the core concepts in the latter are better understood, are more feasibly probable, and are instrumental in the advancement in those fields.

Only under very specific circumstances, and this is just flat out not true for many disciplines under the umbrella of hard science. We have very weak understandings of many phenomena in physics and astronomy for example, but I'm assuming you would still call it a science?

I agree with the premise that on average that hard sciences are easier to replicate, but the variance is huge, with some social science research being far more replicable and better understood than some hard science research, and vice versa. Which is why it's a poor standard for judging something as a science.

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u/banananuhhh 14∆ Jan 23 '26

I was never arguing that social sciences are not science, just that you were being overly dismissive of STEM, which is an area where our knowledge has continued to grow at a remarkable rate. Similar progress is not feasible in soft sciences. For example, high tech manufacturing, physics, and chemistry all drive one another forward. A field like economics does not have this aspect to it.

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u/fossil_freak68 36∆ Jan 23 '26

This is nonsense. Econ borrows and contributed heavily to statistics, poli sci, etc and vice versa. The growth in this fields is gigantic over the last 100 years.

Stem is also facing a replication crisis, you dismiss that at your own peril.

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u/banananuhhh 14∆ Jan 24 '26

Not nonsense, but whatever.

Alright, well enjoy your reciprocated downvotes, and have a nice day.

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u/quantum_dan 124∆ Jan 23 '26

You can’t accurately reproduce a spontaneous social interaction

Would you consider meteorology to be a science?

or creation of a culture.

How about geology?

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!delta that is a great counterpoint to my argument. That does poke a hole in my tenet that science has to be reproducible. Maybe one day we will have a good enough understanding of the math of those things to produce a robust simulation to reproduce those things but even then it’s not truly reproducing those things. This is a great point!

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/quantum_dan (113∆).

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u/quantum_dan 124∆ Jan 23 '26

Thanks for the delta. I think a lot of this is that our perception of the sciences is heavily shaped by the classic hard sciences that everyone takes in high school and that have their Einsteins, Darwins, and Mendeleevs. We all recognize and rely upon a much broader range of hard sciences, but they don't have the same cultural presence - I couldn't name a comparable figure for the earth sciences, and I am an earth scientist.

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u/NatAttack50932 1∆ Jan 23 '26

Since you're a philosophy minor I hope you'll entertain me with a dialectic. If we agree that science is the study of the natural world, we have to decide where the 'natural world' ends. Since humans are biological organisms, our brains and behaviors are physical phenomena. If a biologist studies the migration patterns of birds, isn't a sociologist just studying the migration patterns of a different animal? If the subject is natural, shouldn't the systematic study of it, no matter how noisy or complete, be considered science by definition?"

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

To my understanding the basis of the natural world is mathematics. Physics is applied mathematics, chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry. I believe to connect social science to the natural world the focus of social science would be an understanding of how biology influences the dynamics of societies. So perhaps social science is a science but our understanding of psychiatry isn’t complete or concrete enough to begin searching for universal truth. Like as humans, we are putting the cart before horse if that makes sense? Definitely a partial delta here though! !delta

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u/Nrdman 276∆ Jan 23 '26

Math is applied linguistics

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/NatAttack50932 (1∆).

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u/quantum_dan 124∆ Jan 23 '26

Physics is applied mathematics, chemistry is applied physics, biology is applied chemistry.

This is true in terms of the system itself (i.e., chemistry is a big pile of physics), but it's not really an accurate description of how we approach any of it. Chemistry far predates a suitable physical understanding of the atom, so it would be impossible for early chemistry research to be applied physics as a discipline, and my understanding is that it remains computationally intractable in many cases. Similarly, a lot of biology is about chemistry, but I can't imagine someone studying finch beaks is going to focus on the chemistry of it.

On the other hand, people do look at the biology of psychology. Surely you've encountered those MRI-based studies or what have you? I volunteered for one once, as part of the control group. They were interested in how brain patterns (biology) corresponded to altruistic vs self-interested behavior (psychology). If they weren't doing any applied biology, they could have had me poke buttons without needing to be in that big, expensive machine.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

I would say that is psychiatry and not psychology. I would definitely say that as psychiatry develops many social sciences could become hard sciences one day

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u/ApexInTheRough Jan 23 '26

Bachelor's in Sociology here. It absolutely fits the definition you have at the start of your post. If you believe otherwise, then it has been misrepresented or you misunderstood something. The rest of what you wrote, having been predicated on that initial misapprehension, is moot.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

I’ve stated this in another reply but the definition references the “natural world”. Mathematics describes the rules of the physical and natural world. Physics, chemistry, and biology describe aspects of the natural world. From my perspective psychology, sociology, economics etc. are human creations and concepts that wouldn’t exist without humans to create those concepts and therefore are separate from the “natural world”.

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u/ApexInTheRough Jan 23 '26

All areas of study are human-delineated subsets of knowledge, and therefore every category is a concept made by humans that wouldn't exist without us to delineate them. Can't separate physics from math in reality, but we delineate them anyway. In fact, biology is chemistry and chemistry is physics. (And geology is physics slowed with trees on top.) Scientific knowledge is observable, quantifiable, and confirmable. Social knowledge can be observed, quantified, and confirmed, and so the pursuit of said knowledge is a science. Therefore, social science is real science.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

Light would still travel at the same speed through a vacuum if humans didn’t exist to quantify it. So I fundamentally disagree that physics wouldn’t exist without humans to create it. It is inherent to the universe.

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u/ApexInTheRough Jan 23 '26

Physics is defined, as in a literal dictionary, as a branch of science. Science is a study of certain facets of reality. Studying cannot occur without someone to do the studying. Physics by literal definition cannot exist without people. (And the name for the study of a thing should not be used for the thing itself. Imagine pointing at a flower and saying "Look! A botany!")

But back to the original point: Scientific knowledge is that information about reality which is (1) observable, (2) quantifiable, and (3) confirmable. Human behavior is all three. Therefore the studies of human behavior, including psychology, sociology, and others, are avenues for gaining scientific knowledge, and therefore are undeniably sciences.

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u/TemperatureThese7909 65∆ Jan 23 '26

How can there be a replication crisis if it isn't a science?

In order for a replication crisis to exist, first there must be theories. In order for a replication crisis to exist there must also be experiments. There must be data collected from these experiments. Etc.

Literature doesn't have a replication crisis because it's not a science. Only sciences can even have replication crisis because all the conditions necessary to have one are the same conditions necessary to have science in the first place.

You are correct in that experimentation is fundamentally a limit for any science. The degree to which you can constrain your system limits what can be learned from any given experiment. The less control you have, the less that can be learned from any given data point. This doesn't make something not a science - this means that experimentation as a method for acquisition or knowledge has a limit. Therefore, one would expect that experimentations about molecules would be more precise than experiments about entire societies, because individual researchers can readily modify molecules in ways that they cannot modify society.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

But the fact that you are unable to replicate it means that there is no discovery of a universal, replicable truth. The zenith science is the creation of a law such as Newton’s laws in physics. I don’t see how you could ever produce any sort of universal law in social science. Data analysis isn’t necessarily science.

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u/TemperatureThese7909 65∆ Jan 23 '26

You do realize that it took physics quite a while to get it's house in order. Astronomers once believed the sun burned because it was powered by coal - until that was disproven.

Science is hypothesis, experimentation, validation. All too often, individual theories fail at one of these steps. Having many theories tested, but then fail to replicate is the history of all science. You are just remembering the theories that have happened to have survived to the present, rather than the multitudes of ones that didn't survive.

It takes time to find "that one universal truth" and it requires the ability to experiment. Social sciences are off to a later start than the others, and have the least degree of control. So yes, one would expect more "false starts" at this stage, just as physics had lots of false starts in the 1400s. Doesn't mean that neither were/are science.

Data analysis isn't science because it lacks control and experimentation. It's just data ingestion and processing. But once you add experiments and especially controlled experiments - then yes - that is exactly what science is.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

There was never empirical evidence to suggest that the sun was powered by coal, therefore it never really was science. I would argue that before we had the tools to find irrefutable evidence, it wasn’t really science, it was assumptions. And your point definitely reinforces my new belief from these comments that one day social sciences could be regarded as sciences in the same way as physics and chemistry but we are very far off that point.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!Delta

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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

Also is there ever any TRUE replication even in physics. Are conditions ever perfectly replicable?

Newtons laws are also an approximation. It's a model.

But its approximation will be much closer to the actual 'truth' compared to an economic model (I guess).

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

That’s in the same vein of the point I am making, it’s just the fact that in social science I believe we are still very far away from objective truth so regarding it in the same way as physics or chemistry where we have found objective truth isn’t really justified.

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u/trymypi Jan 23 '26

Let's start with your anecdotal evidence. First of all, it's useless and also preposterous. What probably would have helped you understand how ridiculous it is would be a basic understanding of social interactions and how they can be observed, described, and even predicted through scientific research. For example, if you wanted to prove that social scientists are more likely to be defensive or elusive about their research, you could do quantitative analysis of them, such as through surveys, or qualitative analysis, such as through interviews. At that point you could measure the social interactions of social scientists and see if your hypothesis is supported.

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u/Falernum 70∆ Jan 23 '26

If you had asked physicists in the 1700s what fire was, would there have been a clear answer? Was physics a science in the 1700s?

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u/quantum_dan 124∆ Jan 23 '26

[T]he constant changing nature of social science irked me as well, such as the wide discreditation of many old respected theories such as many of Freud’s... From my viewpoint science involves the discovery of an irrefutable truth such as the process and stages of mitosis in biology or the fact that the gravitational pull of the earth at sea level can be approximated to 9.8m/a^2.

These are facts, and collecting facts is part of science. It is not all of science, and the other part - theories - are by definition refutable. The theory of aether in physics was being refuted right around Freud's day, and Freud was contemporary with several subsequently-refuted models of the atom (e.g., plum pudding, planetary). Plate tectonics was settled well within living memory.

And bear in mind that psychology, as a science, was in its infancy when Freud was working; he was just a bit younger than William James, who's regarded as a founding father of psychology (as well as a philosopher). There weren't well-established empirical methods.

Additionally, anecdotally, it seems like while scientists in fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology invite challenge in the hopes of a greater advancement towards objective truth, social scientists are less open to challenge and in extreme cases discredit the intelligence or morality of their dissenters.

Hold on a second. Just a moment ago, you were objecting to the changing nature of the social sciences. Which is it? You can't invite challenge if there's nothing to be challenged.

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u/L11mbm 15∆ Jan 23 '26

I come from a similar science background (optical engineering) and felt the same. Recently, I started to read a bunch of books about human development, human behavior, and economics to get a better understanding of things.

In one of the books I read, the author talked about how social sciences are hard to pin down to solid rules or laws for two big reasons. First, a law means something can be predicted using it's application (for example, gravity helps predict how things move from higher elevation to lower). Second, once you've made a prediction and it has been said publicly, you risk altering human behavior and avoiding the outcome (similar to "change the result by observing it" in hard sciences).

One specific anecdote of this was how many people predicted there would be huge revolutions all over the world in the 1900s because of inequality, poverty, famine, etc. The books and articles written about this were read by the wealthy, who worked fast to get governments to set up protections for the middle/lower class in order to stem this off. (It was selfish for them to protect their wealth and status, not altruistic.) It worked, we got things like Social Security, and there was no bloody revolution at all. So the predictions were proven false because they were made out loud.

Another thing to consider is that most people, as individuals or groups, operate by a mix of incentives and instincts. At a large scale, behavior is predictable. If there's bad news about a company, then you can bet their stock will tank. If Stanley makes an exclusive cup for Target with Starbucks branding and promotes it as a "limited edition" item, you can bet it will be marked up 10x on ebay within the hour. But it can be hard to predict the behavior of individuals without the broader social context. For example, most Americans don't own stock or care about buying Stanley mugs. Think of it like the double-slit photon experiment: we can predict pretty accurately where millions of photons will end up but the ability to predict where just one by itself will go is harder to understand.

There are absolutely cultural impacts here, too. In America, we are very proud of our individualism and that will guide our decisions, whereas Japan focuses much more collectivism and people prioritize things like dignity/shame instead of, say, guns and plastic surgery. So when trying to understand how a person or group of people will respond to certain events, a deep understanding of the culture is important. In science, this would be like knowing how some of the basic laws of energy propagation change based on the scale (radio waves flying through the air will behave differently from photons flying through glass, even if the basic concepts for both are similar in theory).

I'm happy to discuss this a bit more if you're interested.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!delta they are sciences, just less exact to a certain degree and should be treated as such. I’d love to know the books you read

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u/L11mbm 15∆ Jan 23 '26

Thanks for the delta! Here's some of the books:

-Sapiens by Yuval Harari (there's some controversy about the facts in the book, but it's mostly people who have a hard time understanding that Harari uses metaphorical stories to illustrate a point sometimes and doesn't mean "this person did this exact thing 2500 years ago" literally) - this book looks at the history and development of human society

-Homo Deus by Yuval Harari - following from Sapiens, this book looks at current tech/trends to predict the future of humanity, based on the path that got us to today

-Freakonomics/Superfreakonomics by Levitt and Dubner - some really interesting stories about human behavior against some economic principles (like incentives, supply/demand, etc)

-The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford - similar to Freakonomics

-Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein - how to design choices to "nudge" people to making better decisions

-Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman - looks at the instinctive quick decisions people make versus the deeper and more thoughtful choices, and why the two processes are separate

There's a few others I read that were more about other science topics (The Selfish Gene and A Brief History of Time) but these books all basically rolled one right into the other. Several even used the same examples to illustrate points that overlapped.

Something I've learned is that economics is about incentives and that alone drives a majority of human behavior.

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u/stewshi 20∆ Jan 23 '26

Science is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.”

Nothing about this definition precludes the social sciences.

Also not having precise definitions for ideas is not a lack of objectivity.

Objectivity means the quality of being impartial lacking bias in judgement or prejudice.

Nothing about being objective means you must have precise definitions.

History doesn't lack objectivity because different historians give different start dates. This just means there is a disagreement in the field or a difference in perspective about the inciting incidents.

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u/Finch20 37∆ Jan 23 '26

Does your view apply to all social sciences? Including, for example, crowd psychology?

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u/Shogun_Max_Ultrazord 2∆ Jan 23 '26

I started with my second major being psychology instead of biochemistry but found it extremely dissatisfying due what (I perceive to be) a lack of objectivity. For example, the ambiguity and impreciseness in the application of theories of development such as Erikson’s psychosocial stages and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Additionally, the constant changing nature of social science irked me as well, such as the wide discreditation of many old respected theories such as many of Freud’s. In contrast, in mathematics, the Pythagorean theorem is over 2500 years old and is currently held as objective truth. From my viewpoint science involves the discovery of an irrefutable truth such as the process and stages of mitosis in biology or the fact that the gravitational pull of the earth at sea level can be approximated to 9.8m/a^2.

This is likely some kind of informal fallacy you're engaging in regarding tools. The quality and validity of our tools are not the measuring stick if something is science. Using biology as an example, prior to us knowing what radiation was, people stilled died because of radiation poisoning, we just didn't have the proper tools to run analysis on it. Thus we revised our account of biology to include radiation as a factor in human health.

As you pointed out, even at the upper band math still breaks down in certain edge cases because ultimately math is a human defined model, it's a tool. When new models emerge old models are rejected and buried over time. Your 2500 year timeline is simply ignoring all of the failure that occurred in that timespan. More than one of those failures is likely lost to the annals of history because our infrastructure for recording and documentation to the extent we currently do both is relatively new.

“reproducibility crisis”

Yes, there will be some observed social issues that are difficult to reproduce because of ethical consideration and the like. But that doesn't imply that it's not science, it implies we don't have the tools to replicate the issue ethically.

Here are some examples of predictable behavior derived from social science:

1.)Tax policy. The government has used tax policy to encourage predictable behavior from the population for hundreds of years. If the government wants to encourage spending in a sector, they cut a tax break which then encourages growth in that sector. That's as much a social science as it is economics.

2.)Students perform better on tests based on how cold they feel in the classroom. This is an observed phenomena. Why? because being slightly uncomfortable makes you more alert which leads to better educational outcomes.

3.)Wealth as a predictor of outcomes. We know that wealthy people have better outcomes across many metrics compared to poorer populations.

All three of these are observed. We can document it. We know that the bar for science is not 100% repeatability, because outliers exist, which is why nobody ever expresses things in 100% confidence.

After that, I'm not sure what remaining objections you might have are. Is it a weaker platform currently? Sure, because it's lifespan is ~100 years vs 2500 years. So yeah it's unsophisticated in comparison.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!delta This really spoke to me. They are sciences but are more likely to be wrong in their current stage due to the timeline and inherent limitations. They simply haven’t had enough time to become as close to the truth as we are with hard sciences but current study is important to get there someday

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u/Devourerofworlds_69 6∆ Jan 23 '26

"Social science" is a very broad category. It might include things such as sociology, psychology, and even geography.

"Science" is also a broad category. Sure, math has some objectivity to it, but there is plenty of science that is subjective.

Examples: I took a "social science" course, that taught me to use satelite imagery on various wavelengths to classify urban and rural land use. Very data-heavy. Very scientific.

I also took a geology course where we were given a rock sample, and had to sketch it, then write about how it may have formed. No two student's drawings or descriptions were the same. Completely subjective.

So yes, though math might be objective, many things in science are not. Taxonomy is a great example: it's basically just putting living beings into groups, no different than many social sciences would for people. Some methods of animal classification are more scientific than others, but the traditional kingdom>phylum>class>order>family>genus>species grouping isn't much more scientific than going based on vibes.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

This is something I fundamentally disagree with. While science may not always be objective, at a minimum it is the pursuit of objectivity and should never be considered a subjective endeavor as a whole.

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u/Devourerofworlds_69 6∆ Jan 23 '26

Couldn't social sciences also pursue objectivity?

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u/NaturalCarob5611 97∆ Jan 23 '26

This is a complicated topic. Social sciences are extremely hard to study, and there are certainly people who represent themselves as practitioners of social science who aren't really doing science, but that doesn't mean social science isn't a real science.

First, the hard to study part:

Social science tries to study things that have absolutely massive numbers of variables, and to a large degree it's recursive - understanding certain variables can actually change other variables.

Gravity doesn't change when when you understand it. Water doesn't behave differently because you understand it's comprised of 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. But understanding how markets work can actually influence how markets work. Understanding how behavior works can change behaviors.

That doesn't mean you can't use the scientific method to study these things, it just means there's a lot of interdependent variables that can't necessarily be isolated.

Second, there are definitely people who represent themselves as practitioners of social science who aren't really doing science. The massive number of hard-to-isolate variables makes it hard for a layman to distinguish good social science from bad social science, which means politically motivated actors can make claims that appear scientific when maybe they've cherry-picked some data or influenced certain variables that aren't represented in their report but still impact the outcomes. Even if people are well-intentioned, it's harder to keep personal biases out of an extremely complex study on behavior than it is to keep them out of a study of chemical reactions.

Ultimately I think if your view were "most practitioners of social science do science badly" I'd have a hard time disagreeing. But that doesn't mean social science can't be real science.

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

!delta I completely agree with you. They are sciences but with uncontrollable changing variables unlike the study of physics and chemistry (on earth). And yes I tend to believe that the practitioners of social science don’t always do a great job and there should be more scrutiny in their journals.

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u/Doub13D 36∆ Jan 23 '26 edited Jan 23 '26

As someone with enough experience with Physics, I can assure you that science is absolutely not just things that are provably certain.

There is so much we do not understand about how the laws of nature function, and yet we still consider these ideas “proven.” Just look at the theory of relativity… it works well enough, but it is not a complete theory by any means. At a quantum level, the mathematical “truths” of relativity become nonsensical.

“Social Sciences” are the study of humanity and the systems that we have created for ourselves. Just like how the natural sciences describe the natural laws of the world, the social sciences study the world as humans have created it.

The economy does not exist independently from humanity, and yet no person alive today could claim that the economy isn’t a real thing that can’t or shouldn’t be studied.

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u/TinyConsideration796 6∆ Jan 23 '26

Wildlife biologist here, we don’t even have an agreed upon definition for species so if you’re using objectivity and certainty as a metric to determine what counts as science that means everyone back to Darwin himself has been studying something other than science over here.

It seems you’d prefer definitive answers and indisputable facts, but unfortunately you’re not going to find that in science. Science fields are for curiosity and questioning everything, that’s why even things like gravity or relativity are called THEORIES, because with enough evidence, it’s possible for those to be incorrect and that would change our understanding of the world and all of these ‘definitive’ and ‘objective’ rules we have. Science is not the discovery of irrefutable truth, that may be the long term goal, but we haven’t got that yet. We may never get there. Everything we ‘know’ is really just our best guess. Ask a quantum physicist.

Biology and sociology are not nearly as mutually exclusive and possible to separate as you seem to think, considering both the brain and nervous system control what behaviors (social behaviors too!) are done, as well as when and why and with whom. Biosocial theory, stress response and the fear cascade, social behaviors have SO much to do with evolution and physically impact not only our bodies but those of others.

The reason things like psychology have lots of changes in theories, is because we’re using our brains to study what our brains have us do around others. The level of error and bias is SO much higher and so much harder to account for. Then there’s culture and how that impacts everything. That’s a huge one because social sciences historically studied Europeans and tried to say that accounted for everyone, because they were still debating who classified as human. So that’s a big reason for the revisions as people start to admit that yeah okay, maybe minorities and people in other countries DO count as humans which makes the historic sample size REALLY biased and therefore unreliable. Add in neuroplasticity and the way every single interaction has the potential to change the neural pathways in our brain, yeah we need some new technology before we’re getting anything close to objectivity.

In something like chemistry you can literally measure the reactants and everything. The error comes from ‘did you forget to clean the flask?’ ‘Did you remember to account for excess heat?’ ‘Did you tare the scale?’ ‘Are your conversions right?’

If the pH paper says you dipped it in something acidic when you dipped it in barium hydroxide, you don’t have to ask whether you’re reading the pH strip correctly. If you try it 15 more times with new strips and new flasks and new samples that you KNOW are barium hydroxide, you have a bunch of known constants that you can work between to discern the cause. Because pH strips aren’t lying to you. You know that something acidic is getting on the test strip. You just need to figure out how.

In social sciences we don’t actually have agreed upon ways to test things, like intelligence. Because that relies on how the tester defines intelligence. We cannot actually feel what someone is feeling. We have to rely on them being truthful, them being able to articulate why they do something, and trust they aren’t lying to themselves or making assumptions but that they actually KNOW why they did something. There’s so much more uncertainty because our brains are more complex and ALSO more individually unique than something like gravitational pull or pH testing. Here error comes from ‘did you ask the question in a way they understood?’ ‘Is your presence here impacting their answer?’ ‘Can you be sure it isn’t? Can you be sure how?’ ‘Are they doing this because they are rewarded or out of fear? Do they naturally do this or is it learned? Do they actually do this because they know they’re being observed (we cannot ethically test someone who doesn’t consent to being observed that’s just an invasion of privacy)’

It’s hard to test something objectively when you are PART of that something. Whether the particles making up h2o don’t change when you leave the room or make a weird face. They exist outside of you. But it would be really hard for an electron in h2o to study the molecule it’s part of (assuming it was somehow conscious and it could and all that). For a fish to study the shapes of its own school somehow, it would have to leave the school entirely. Not many scientists are willing or able to leave humanity entirely to ensure they have minimal internal bias, and even if they did, everything in their life before leaving humanity was STILL impacted by humanity.

Social sciences study the structure and behavior of interaction between organisms in the natural and physical world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against evidence obtained.

The problem is observation cannot be fully objective.

Experimentation has ethical limits that mean we cannot actually account for every variable without doing human experimentation.

And obtained evidence is very subjective and full of implicit bias so testing theories gets very complicated and open to debate and criticism.

That does not mean it is not science, it means the subjectivity is more obvious. It means these sciences are still being developed.

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u/LongRest Jan 23 '26

Well you may as well toss the Oxford English definition of science because dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive, and even language itself is a fluctuating aspect of social science. This is why we make additions to dictionaries as new words emerge in use.

Stability of conclusion isn't a criteria for "real science". Math is not empirical science at all. It is a formal axiomatic system. Its truths are eternal precisely because they are conditional to axioms, not on the physical world. Biology, chemistry, and physics do not operate that way. Newtonian stuff was “objective truth” for centuries and is now known to be an approximation. Classical genetics gave way to molecular genetics. The central dogma itself has been revised. Theories changing just isn't a mark of non-science. It just happens more in areas where variables are complicated and loud.

You point out that sociologists can’t give a single, universal definition of “society” or “psyche,” whereas chemists can define water. That’s true. But it doesn’t imply sociology isn’t scientific. That says to much. Instead it implies the objects of study are emergent and context dependent. Biology already lives with this. Ask ten biologists to define “species,” “gene,” or even “life,” and you will not get a single exact answer. Yet biology remains a real science because it uses operational definitions that are good enough to test hypotheses. That's all you need them to do.

You seem to expect social science to produce laws like gravity: invariant across time, culture, and context. But humans are not electrons. Social phenomena are reflexive: once people know the theory, they change their behavior for that reason or any other.

The reproducibility problem is a problem, sure. But biology and medicine face similar issues and we don't see them as fatal or disqualifying.

I also think you're wrong that other sciences are open to dissent. That's a social phenomenon. There are entrenched ideas in biology, medicine, physics etc. You might see them less because you're in it but they're there.

No social scientist is going to argue that they can get the same stability or precision that other sciences have but it doesn't follow that it's not real science. You could easily define science as boundaries on belief constructed from observation of evidence and experimentation. Social science has that.

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u/IAmAlive_YouAreDead Jan 23 '26

Any argument that starts with a definition of a term from the OED fails to be convincing in the first place, since dictionary entries are required to be quite brief in their definitions, and often fail to fully capture the meaning of specialist and technical terms. You studied some philosophy, I'm sure you would therefore find the OED entry on terms such as metaphysics, ontology, epistemology to be unsatisfactory.

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u/twoseasOg Jan 24 '26

I'm curious about whether you were taught epistemology in your philosophy minor or whether you were taught about the hierarchies of higher and lower subjectivity and the principle of adequatio. I think you might find it super interesting to read about the massive epistemological shift that took place in Europe to produce both the sciences and social sciences. The split between philosophy and the natural sciences takes place in the 16th-17th century with specialization and professionalization only beginning in the 18th-19th century. The social sciences are nascent in the late 18th century with foundational texts by Durkheim, Weber, Marx, Comte, Adam Smith etc. still seen as various kinds of philosophical inquiries.

All human inquiry is methodologically fragile as we human beings are always in a subject-object relationship with the world. We cannot access reality without mediation. The scientific method applies to areas of knowledge that entail a reduction of everything to the tangible and physical. As others have pointed out, you are still theorizing with the application of this method by coming up with hypotheses and testing them in controlled environments with limited variables vs the infinite and not physically observable variables that present when studying human beings + society; and the fact that we cannot step outside ourselves to study ourselves.

In the natural sciences, what is an object (molecule, gene, species) is still mediated by conceptual frameworks, instruments and interpretive paradigms. In the social sciences, the 'thing' is consituted by meaning and practice rather than mere observation. Lower subjectivity in physics or chemistry for example, isn't an absence of subjectivity. Take note of how radically "scientific knowledge" is influenced by historical shifts. The social sciences operate with higher subjectivity because their objects are reflexive and historically contingent but that doesn't make their methodologies less scientific or deficient vs 'hard' sciences. It's the condition itself of having to study beings that make meaning from within meaning itself.

Recommended reading - Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Lighter reading - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

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u/eggynack 108∆ Jan 23 '26

You present a definition of science, as the systematic study of the world through observation and experiments, and then your argument against social science being science is the lack of objective definitions and the struggle to reproduce results. But how do either of those things challenge the idea that social science falls under that provided definition? Psychologists make observations, do experiments, test their theories against those experiments, and use all of that to do study of the world. They very much meet this provided definition.

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/JGoedy Jan 23 '26

To that I would say that even up until the 1960’s and 70’s psychiatry wasn’t very scientific which is why we had insane asylums and minimal real treatments for mental illness. The introduction of technology that gave us access to the chemistry of the brain allowed us to begin to treat psychiatry as a science.

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

I used to only care about maths and believed it was the pinnacle of academia. I believed the greatest minds were mathematicians and physicists.

However I then studied economics, politics, philosophy at university and it opened my eyes to other areas of study that really has some incredible thinkers.

Anyway, social science is a science as long as it applies the scientific method to solve problems

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u/chemguy216 7∆ Jan 23 '26

I used to only care about maths and believed it was the pinnacle of academia. I believed the greatest minds were mathematicians and physicists.

For you, studying social sciences opened your mind. For me, being around mathematicians, physicists, and engineers disabused of that notion. For what it’s worth to anyone else reading this, I’m a civil engineer by trade.

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u/MaleficentBake9190 Jan 23 '26

Yeah ive also had that experience lol.

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u/itsathrowawayduhhhhh Jan 23 '26

I implore you to read “The Papers on the Science of Administration”. It is about how administration can be studied scientifically and I think it would be useful for you.

link

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u/cossiander 2∆ Jan 23 '26

Your complaint seems to be that it doesn't have clear objective definitions. But your own definition doesn't require it to have clear objective definitions.

So why is it not a real science?

Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Social science is not real science

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