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Personally? No, absolutely not. There should be no differentiating between what can be measured, and what cannot.
I can’t help but look at the reproducibility issue in “Psychology” and notice, what did they do about it? Nothing. It just exists. It’s not real science.
The study of human behavior is more difficult to measure, but can absolutely be held to scientific rigor. In fact, all branches of science have some degree of overlap and interconnection, and thus have blurrier lines than you might expect.
If psychology was held to scientific rigor with controls, statistical power and proper statistical analysis, none of it would get published.
Why not?
It’s not about hardness it’s about how you use it
Absolutely, yes.
The scientific method is an empirical method for acquiring knowledge through careful observation, rigorous skepticism, hypothesis testing, and experimental validation.
Any observable phenomenon should be studied using the scientific method. The alternatives are superstition or ignorance.
Psychology is a good example. It has been limited by our technology and our morals. The human brain is extremely complicated, and we cannot just disrupt peoples lives to create ideal testing conditions. But that doesn’t mean that psychology is not science. It just means that it has unique challenges.
Psychology could be a science, but not the way it is being done currently.
By all psychologists?
I agree that there is some stupid stuff being done in the name of science, 100%. But the discipline isn’t really the deciding factor imho.
If you are interested, here is sabine explaining how academic is fundamentally broken.
Yes. “Hard” sciences aren’t as perfectly objective like TV would have one believe. Plenty of hard sciences are affected by the replication crisis, like geology and astronomy where one can’t set up controlled experiments, same as soft sciences. All of them should strive to develop the best model, break the model, improve the model, repeat.
If you refuse to consider anything other than randomized control trials science, then you believe we don’t have proof that smoking causes cancer.
I believe they did randomized trials with monkeys. Which is heartbreaking tbh
There are lots of scientific groups that work in the so called soft sciences that apply the usual methods of the hard sciences. It’s not about soft or hard, it’s about good or bad.
Well economics damn well shouldn’t.
Why not?
[points to any average economists]
Sure, but economics itself can be studied scientifically.
Can it? Can’t exactly do double-blind case controlled studies.
More importantly though, economics is rarely studied scientifically. If nothing else, allowing the existing economists of the world to call themselves scientists is not deserved. Until economics is approached with the academic rigour of history and sociology it shouldn’t really be called a science.
Economics still can be analyzed scientifically and from a materialist perspective. For example, Marxist economics.
Does it really matter whar we call it?
No.
Unless it can be imperically proven beyond reasonable doubt in order to remove human bias, say, like politics, et al. Otherwise it is glorified opinion. A lot of soft science is so-called science by committee.
Hard science already has an existing problem of soft science think-creep as it is.
