What is science?

Standardization will kill us all. It came to the business world in the 1980s in the form of ISO9001 requirements, with procedure upon procedure designed to document procedures. Now it's coming to a liberal arts institution near you, where every speculative thought will have to undergo rigorous experimentation and review. It seems to me that there is a common-sense notion that the social sciences are as different from the natural sciences as the typical political scientist is from the typical chemist, but apparently there is a significant enough faction of academics that are fiercely protective of the word science.

I love debating the meaning of words. Often a seemingly huge difference in opinion can be boiled down to differing interpretations of a word or phrase. The word "science" comes from the latin scira — "to know." Knowledge, and the method that feeds it, shouldn't be limited to things we can count and measure. I think all of us would on some level agree to this, or we would be in a different building. 

Adding more layers to the process won't help the result, and requiring any study to be run through a car wash of processes before it gets the "100% science" tag is wasteful and potentially a grand annoyance for those of us who want to explore how different WWII peace arrangements might have affected modern Europe. Let's be broad constructionists and go back to the Latin, and let anyone making explorations of the mind call themselves a scientist.