Every time one of these hot takes comes up: "field X isn't a science," I have 2 thoughts:
1. Neither is the entire field of mathematics (or philosophy or logic or history, you name it). Not everything needs to be a science (in the "empirical" sense) to have value or some claim to truthiness/rigor.
2. Or "field X doesn't have the perfect predictability/reproducibility of a proper hard science." Sure. But neither does my doctor, and yet the challenges in the practice of applied medicine don't invalidate the entire science of biology. Which pill will cure me, how long do I have to live, what do you think my symptoms mean--will get you an "I don't know but here's my best guess..." from any honest doctor. Turns out it's hard to go from the micro level (say a cell or single organ) to the macro level (the body as a complex biological system interacting with the environment) in any field. And some fields operate entirely at the macro.
Systems that are sufficiently abstract, interactive, adaptive, subjective, or social tend to be harder to make generalized conclusions about, compared to something you can observe in a vacuum or isolate under a microscope or put in a double blind experiment.
In some cases, maybe we're just not at a point yet where we can make super strong claims. How young is the field of psychology? Or of economics? Think back to Freud and the whole pseudoscience of psychoanalysis, and then look at how far we've come. We've progressed on a hard problem the way chemistry has moved on from alchemy.
The challenges inherent in the social sciences shouldn't mean we just throw up our hands and give up. We try to make them more scientific, develop new standardized measurements for them. Happiness is harder to quantify than mass. Should we not bother trying? Perhaps we never get to the point of perfect predictability. Living organisms are hard to predict, much less entire systems of intelligent ones. But we can learn at least something.
1. Neither is the entire field of mathematics (or philosophy or logic or history, you name it). Not everything needs to be a science (in the "empirical" sense) to have value or some claim to truthiness/rigor.
2. Or "field X doesn't have the perfect predictability/reproducibility of a proper hard science." Sure. But neither does my doctor, and yet the challenges in the practice of applied medicine don't invalidate the entire science of biology. Which pill will cure me, how long do I have to live, what do you think my symptoms mean--will get you an "I don't know but here's my best guess..." from any honest doctor. Turns out it's hard to go from the micro level (say a cell or single organ) to the macro level (the body as a complex biological system interacting with the environment) in any field. And some fields operate entirely at the macro.
Systems that are sufficiently abstract, interactive, adaptive, subjective, or social tend to be harder to make generalized conclusions about, compared to something you can observe in a vacuum or isolate under a microscope or put in a double blind experiment.
In some cases, maybe we're just not at a point yet where we can make super strong claims. How young is the field of psychology? Or of economics? Think back to Freud and the whole pseudoscience of psychoanalysis, and then look at how far we've come. We've progressed on a hard problem the way chemistry has moved on from alchemy.
The challenges inherent in the social sciences shouldn't mean we just throw up our hands and give up. We try to make them more scientific, develop new standardized measurements for them. Happiness is harder to quantify than mass. Should we not bother trying? Perhaps we never get to the point of perfect predictability. Living organisms are hard to predict, much less entire systems of intelligent ones. But we can learn at least something.