Is ‘social science’ actually science?
On the one hand, social scientists use scientific methods. On the other, there is a great deal in the social sciences (e.g. economics, psychology and sociology) that is not experimentally testable or falsifiable. The theories in those disciplines are not philosophically equivalent to, say, the theory of gravity or the theory of natural selection. If they were, then they’d be part of science tout court, not social science. Indeed, one could argue that there are aspects of our humanity that are too human for anything but the humanities to make sense of (and thank God for it).
There are some social sciences that shade into the life sciences – a lot of psychology and anthropology, for instance. But even where there is no overlap, the extent to which social sciences rely on quantitative data merits a distinction from the humanities too.
Though careful measurement and statistical analysis can’t always be used to arrive at falsifiable theories in the proper scientific sense, quantitative methods can still deepen our understanding of a phenomenon. After all, that’s how biology, chemistry and physics got their start before they became fully-fledged sciences.
And yet numbers can be dangerous. They can confer an impression of objectivity where one isn’t warranted. Indeed, there’s no better way of convincing others (and yourself) of your own B.S.1 than by expressing it in mathematical form.
This is especially true of one social science in particular – economics. Writing for Foreign Policy about the state of the discipline today, Fareed Zakaria begins by noting its elevated status:
“It has become first among equals in the social sciences and has dominated most policy agendas as well. Economists have been much sought after by businesses, governments, and society at large, their insights seen as useful in every sphere of life… At the root of all this influence is the notion that economics provides the most powerful lens through which to understand the modern world.”
Many leading businesses and political organisations not only employ economists, but also a ‘chief economist’. Rather fewer employ a chief psychologist, let alone a chief sociologist.
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SubscribeThe problem has been economists’ obsession with trying to place price at the heart of economics. A theory of price requires mathematical modelling of people’s decision-making, which means that it’s going to fail if we can’t perfectly predict exactly what everyone is going to do (which we can’t). If we instead use balance sheets, and in particular net worth, as our fundamental concept, we can have a mathematical model of the economy which is independent of the decisions and actions of the participants, and we have something almost analogous to the principle of conservation of energy.
Most actions which increase one person’s net worth also decrease another person’s by exactly the same amount, and have no effect on anyone else’s net worth. The only exceptions are production (increase one person’s net worth without decreasing anyone else’s) and consumption (decrease one person’s net worth without increasing anyone else’s). The model can scale from a Robinson Crusoe right up to the world economy because there’s no fallacy of composition. Bubbles are quickly revealed as being based on insolvency, which is the only fundamental cause of crisis.
You can see some videos about the approach here