Is Social Science Scientific?

The first day of class in a political science research methods course I took during the fall semester of my senior year at THE New York State University, the professor asked a question that makes practitioners of the social sciences uncomfortable and gives practitioners of the so-called “hard” sciences an undue sense of superiority: “is political science scientific?” It wasn’t something I’d taken the time to think about before and while I felt like I knew the answer, I wasn’t sure how to express the way I felt. I hung out with a lot of engineers from the Watson School at Binghamton during my undergrad and I was always bothered by their dismissive attitude towards those of us who loved the social sciences. Needless to say there is no debating that we do in fact practice science.

It is not uncommon to hear critics of social science saying things like “what you do isn’t real science” or “human beings are too unpredictable” or “your variables are impossible to quantify.” I feel bad for these people because I don’t think they understand what science actually is. To me, the “scienciness” of your work is not determined by the subject you are studying but by the manner in which you frame your hypotheses and the rigor with which you construct your arguments. A good scientist, no matter the field, has a perpetually inquisitive mind, is always seeking to explain the causal mechanisms of specific phenomena as best as possible, and is always looking to improve upon the existing explanations of his or her surroundings. You don’t need a white lab jacket to think like that.

Those in the hard sciences who declaim the merits of social science miss three important factors. First, the hard sciences are hardly without their own fierce internal debates and theoretical tribalisms. Physicists, chemists, and biologists all still operate in a world of uncertainty. As Thomas Kuhn has explained, scientific revolutions occur with great frequency, even in the hard sciences. New discoveries are made all the time casting aside heretofore empirical facts. Sometimes, the hard scientists are wrong.

Second, if human beings are too inconsistent to be quantified, what are we supposed to do? Human beings are not going anywhere. Should we just stop studying them all together? I understand that parsimonious theories of human behavior are elusive, but that does not negate the disciplines of psychology or sociology (or political science). Some things that absolutely must be studied cannot be observed in laboratories. That does not delegitimize them.

Third, good practitioners of social science, I think, are actually capable of a higher form of scientific integrity. When you know beforehand that your field of study involves variables that are hard to quantify, it is easier to put forth a qualified, nuanced set of conclusions. You come to a better appreciation of the scientific method when your field of study eludes the process.

Science is really a framework for analysis and nothing more. That one set of variables is easier to empirically measure than another says nothing about the importance of the work. So, the to answer my professor’s question is yes, but it depends on who is doing the work, not on what is being observed.