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. 

Scientific Way of Thinking

   “Theoretical models can be of great value even if they are never supported by empirical testing.” As Kevin and David argued in the article, social sciences are different from hard sciences, and not every academic field has to be operated by hypothetico-deductivism. People have been emphasizing on the importance of individuality for a long time, especially in the US. It should also apply to the importance of individual academic field as well; individual academic field also should be respected with the aspect that each field has its own criteria just like each human being has its own character and behavior. The term 'social science,’ is itself a study of society and people living in the society. Human nature and behavior are different, so shouldn't its study be?

   Kevin and David mentioned that the analysis of empirical data can be valuable even if it doesn't prove any theoretical model. In my opinion, some of those empirical data will eventually form a scientific theory one day as a deductive way of scientific method. Einstein once said, "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Thus, it is reasonable to say that hypothetico-deductivism, which proves theories by experimenting, isn’t yet a perfect scientific way and isn’t yet the only scientific method. Empirical data is important, therefore, ruling out every empirical data only because it doesn’t prove any theoretical model is seriously dangerous way of thinking as a scientist.

New York Times article "Overcoming 'Physics Envy'"

To me, the most important point underscored by this article is we, in the social sciences, are dealing with aspects of human behavior, which are difficult, if not impossible, to place within empirical values and formulas.  Yet, as the article also points out, many valuable theoretical models and the ideas behind those would be lost to us today if a strict rule of empirical testing were employed across all disciplines of research and theory.

While the world of chemistry, physics, biology and other "natural sciences" follow observable laws that can be constructed as data and causal relationships, human behavior cannot; the aspects of our being that are studied in social sciences cannot be easily structured like computer programming routines.  That does not make the theoretical models or the conclusions we may draw from them any less valid or useful to present and future generations.