Social sciences, a big failure?

[Cartesian]

I ask this question in the context of contrasting social science with applied science.

First, I am no expert nor professional in either of them, just some silly reflections I was having today and I needed to share.

Lately I have this feeling that social sciences had stuck in time. Somehow, in my limited view they didn’t catch up with applied sciences.

Let us look for example to Physicists, they are having their momentum, since perhaps Einstein they seem to be unstoppable. Higgs Boson is just one example, and whatever may still come when CERN reopen. Even natural scientists, who at least never stated explicitly such big dreams, are doing very well, close to eliminate diseases such Polio, men living longer, vaccines and so on.

Now, when I look to social scientists, they seem to be vanishing. They seem to have been left behind. I don’t see much confidence anymore, achievements, social scientists bragging about their ideas. And there are many problems: laws that don’t apply to some people, inequality, bullying, poverty, unfair laws (abortion) and so on.

Am I wrong in thinking that social sciences have slowed down?
Or perhaps they were too ambitious after all, they bit off more than they could chew?
Will religion fill the gap of social sciences in a bottom-up approach?
Or am I being pessimist, social sciences will still have their time?

 

[Oreoracle]

Interesting topic. I’ve wondered the same myself.

Now, when I look to social scientists, they seem to be vanishing.

The number of social science majors is still very large. I think the social sciences have just been assimilated into applied disciplines. For example, language classes, business courses, and history classes all contain sociological material. Aspiring teachers take education courses wherein the psychology of, say, troubled teens is discussed. It’s hard to make a career as just being a “social scientist” unless you intend to be an author of social science books or something.

And there are many problems: laws that don’t apply to some people, inequality, bullying, poverty, unfair laws (abortion) and so on.

The world is the way it is not because we don’t know how to fix it, but because it isn’t profitable to fix it. Again, it’s hard for a social scientist to make a living just expressing their ideas. It’s up to politicians to act upon those ideas or ignore them.

 

[Area_Man]

I ask this question in the context of contrasting social science with applied science.

Now, when I look to social scientists, they seem to be vanishing. They seem to have been left behind. I don’t see much confidence anymore,achievements, social scientists bragging about their ideas. And there are many problems: laws that don’t apply to some people, inequality, bullying, poverty, unfair laws (abortion) and so on.

Am I wrong in thinking that social sciences have slowed down?
Or perhaps they were too ambitious after all, they bit off more than they could chew?
Will religion fill the gap of social sciences in a bottom-up approach?
Or am I being pessimist, social sciences will still have their time?

One of the challenges of the social sciences is that it’s much harder to have a high degree of confidence in your findings. One reason is that the social sciences are bound by rules of ethics that some physical scientists are not bound to. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing. Biologists studying staph bacteria in the lab are allowed to breed, experiment on, kill and discard the organisms they work with. Thankfully we don’t allow psychologists studying humans to do that.

Another reason is that, to a large degree, social scientists study aspects of human behavior. Human behavior is so complex that it is very difficult to study in a laboratory, or to accurately simulate inside a computer. There are simple equations that perfectly describe and predict the orbit of planets, chemical reactions, the flow of electricity in a wire… There are models that will, to a high degree of accuracy, describe and predict the weather, or the forces a rocket will experience launch. There is, and likely will never be a set of equations or a model to accurately describe and predict complex human behaviors.

 

[balto]

One of the challenges of the social sciences is that it’s much harder to have a high degree of confidence in your findings. One reason is that the social sciences are bound by rules of ethics that some physical scientists are not bound to. I think we can all agree that this is a good thing. Biologists studying staph bacteria in the lab are allowed to breed, experiment on, kill and discard the organisms they work with. Thankfully we don’t allow psychologists studying humans to do that.

Another reason is that, to a large degree, social scientists study aspects of human behavior. Human behavior is so complex that it is very difficult to study in a laboratory, or to accurately simulate inside a computer. There are simple equations that perfectly describe and predict the orbit of planets, chemical reactions, the flow of electricity in a wire… There are models that will, to a high degree of accuracy, describe and predict the weather, or the forces a rocket will experience launch. There is, and likely will never be a set of equations or a model to accurately describe and predict complex human behaviors.

I hear what you’re saying that the ethics of the social sciences would hinder progress in that field (and I also agree that this is a good thing ). Pertaining to your comments about human complexity being a factor, I think the main reason why we haven’t seen as much progress in the social sciences is because humans are not solely physical beings. There seems to be a lot of compelling arguments that propose that the human mind is essentially immaterial, which would mean that the social sciences cannot accurately predict human behaviors because they are only considering the physical side of humanity. The best you can do is observe trends, which is what seems to be the case with the social sciences. The social sciences are still useful, but their applicability is more limited than physics for instance.

 

[O_S_C]

Let us look for example to Physicists, they are having their momentum, since perhaps Einstein they seem to be unstoppable. Higgs Boson is just one example, and whatever may still come when CERN reopen.

Am I wrong in thinking that social sciences have slowed down?
Or perhaps they were too ambitious after all, they bit off more than they could chew?
Will religion fill the gap of social sciences in a bottom-up approach?
Or am I being pessimist, social sciences will still have their time?

The physical sciences are easy because their objects are simple, un-individual and a-historical. The social sciences are difficult because their objects are complex, unique and has an individual history.

Also the social objects exists in open systems and cannot be isolated in experiments. They must be isolated in thought, through abstactions.

There are other problems as well when it comes to social science, i.e. it often relies on faulty ontologies, like positivism or on subjectivist thinking. Fortunatly there are some promising traditions, such as the Critical Realist movement.

And there has been of course som excellent scientists in the field, most of them long dead though, like Karl Marx for example.

 

[polytropos]

I didn’t respond to the poll.

There is a great chapter in Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous book After Virtue about the failure of the social sciences. It isn’t so much that they failed but that the successes of natural science led people to believe that the social sciences would be able to deliver law-like generalizations. I think it is now clear that the social sciences cannot do that (given human nature, it should have been clear to begin with). That does not imply that they have wholly failed or are worthless and should be discarded, but they (along with criteria for their success) need to be reconceived.