Is sociology a real science?

Capt'n Midnight

i_surge wrote: »

The language used to write sociology books is not the language of science. Wishy washy hyperverbose garbage.

Text :
If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.

bnt

I think it’s indicative that the social sciences have a real problem with the repeatability of study results. Different groups can run the same experiments and come back with markedly different results. Some researchers are explicitly trying to address this e.g. the Social Sciences Replication Project. In general, though: if a Sociology study makes some specific claim about people, I tend to assume that it’s tentative.

joe40

bnt wrote: »

I think it’s indicative that the social sciences have a real problem with the repeatability of study results. Different groups can run the same experiments and come back with markedly different results. Some researchers are explicitly trying to address this e.g. the Social Sciences Replication Project. In general, though: if a Sociology study makes some specific claim about people, I tend to assume that it’s tentative.

I don't doubt what your saying but that is a problem with the people carrying out the research, not whether the subject is a science.
I think we would all agree modern medicine is very scientific but in the early 20th some of the practices were far from scientific. That was a failing of the practitioners not the subject.
I think rigorous, scientific sociology, with careful guarding against bias, could be useful,

i_surge

joe40 wrote: »

I think rigorous, scientific sociology, with careful guarding against bias, could be useful,

Absolutely but the bias problem is deeply entrenched at this point. The practitioners often act against the scientific method and are too loved up with ideology.

Maybe some cross discipline peer review? Get physicists to sense check them or something?

degsie

To answer the OP's question: NO

bnt

joe40 wrote: »

I don't doubt what your saying but that is a problem with the people carrying out the research, not whether the subject is a science.
I think we would all agree modern medicine is very scientific but in the early 20th some of the practices were far from scientific. That was a failing of the practitioners not the subject.
I think rigorous, scientific sociology, with careful guarding against bias, could be useful,

I don’t exactly disagree with you, but I still think repeatability of studies is a key metric here. Using your medicine example: those unscientific practices would not lead to usable results, but they take nothing away from those scientific practices that do lead to repeatable results. If anything, those unscientific practices tended to deviate from the purely medical into the sociological e.g. phrenology, the study of the shapes of heads as an indicator of intelligence. Ditto for Nazi doctors driven by ideology rather than pure science.

joe40

bnt wrote: »

I don’t exactly disagree with you, but I still think repeatability of studies is a key metric here. Using your medicine example: those unscientific practices would not lead to usable results, but they take nothing away from those scientific practices that do lead to repeatable results. If anything, those unscientific practices tended to deviate from the purely medical into the sociological e.g. phrenology, the study of the shapes of heads as an indicator of intelligence. Ditto for Nazi doctors driven by ideology rather than pure science.

Yeah I agree with that, repeatability is a key scientific metric. I don't really know enough about the exact processes used by sociology, they may well be flawed.

I think the subject, sociology, has merit if put on a sound scientific basis. I see how repeatability of studies could be a problem.
But any subject is only as good as the people practicing it.

boombang

I have very little respect for sociology based on the little I've been exposed to (two terms at first year undergrad, the occasional listen to Thinking Allowed on BBC R4 and the occasional presentation at work by a colleague with a PhD in the field).

It seems highly driven by the subjective perspective of the researcher. In general, it seems to have very little ability to produce falsifiable statements that can be rigorously tested. The research I hear on that R4 often seems pretty low quality and of minimal social use.

Maybe I shouldn't rush to judgement on the little I've heard, but I'm yet to hear anything that has altered my impression.

bnt

joe40 wrote: »

I think the subject, sociology, has merit if put on a sound scientific basis. I see how repeatability of studies could be a problem.
But any subject is only as good as the people practicing it.

At the risk of going all Forrest Gump: science is as science does.

Has anyone mentioned the work of Karl Popper yet? He is credited with creating clear yet rigorous explanations of the scientific method. He used the concept of Falsifiability, which can get quite technical, but a quick example is the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: if an effect follows an event, it doesn't guarantee that the effect is the result of an event. There could be another possible cause. So if your paper makes that causal claim, but doesn't address other possible causes, then a single counter-observation falsifies the claim.

This kind of thinking is helpful in answering the original question, I think: sociology is as scientific as the adherence of its practitioners to the scientific method. If a single counter-example can falsify a conclusion in a study, then the study wasn't very scientific. Since much of the work in sociology is about groups, and involves statistics, that adds more opportunities for studies to go wrong. A classic statistical fail is the non-representative sample: too small or not reflective of the population. If a survey about abortion asked mostly elderly white Christian men, how much stock would you place in the results? :eek:

joe40

Richard Feynman giving a very concise explanation of science.

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://fs.blog/2009/12/mental-model-scientific-method/&ved=2ahUKEwizs9qd_4jrAhVkoXEKHeecBss4FBCjtAEwB3oECAAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1G7QDL8tjGBDOiznhoncT8

2ndcoming

I think some of you are being a bit hard on sociology here. It will never be a pure science a la chemistry etc because the parameters of the subject matter (ie humans) are constantly moving. A chemical reaction is provable precisely because the parameters are fixed.

I don't think it's about saying "people are this, we can prove it"; at its best it's about examining why certain groups behave in certain ways, why humanity exhibits certain behaviours, how we can learn from this to move society in a more peaceful and fruitful direction.

Also the post saying a field essentially founded by Marx has been taken over by leftists was a particular highlight :pac:. In a time where our current definitions of right / left have been so warped by America's hyper-simplified "culture wars" where right is everything individualist, libertarian and left is anything that even considers an interest in other people outside how to exploit them for personal gain, this is an unsurprising development.

i_surge

2ndcoming wrote: »

Also the post saying a field essentially founded by Marx has been taken over by leftists was a particular highlight :pac:. In a time where our current definitions of right / left have been so warped by America's hyper-simplified "culture wars" where right is everything individualist, libertarian and left is anything that even considers an interest in other people outside how to exploit them for personal gain, this is an unsurprising development.

I am as critical as anybody of those who shout marxism at everything but that doesn't mean sociology hasn't co-opted a lot of ideology at the expense of objectivity.

I have seen it first hand at a conference, oppression party groupthink, no usable research, pre determined research outcomes.

Wanderer78

Wanderer78 wrote: »

I wonder is this the same logic neoclassical economists use!

Economics is a social science, which also largely ignores empirical evidence.

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

Economics is a social science, which also largely ignores empirical evidence.

If you laid all the world's economists end to end they wouldn't reach a conclusion.


It's very tiring to live in a world where Economics is based on honest actors. Corporate welfare, and the reality that the benefits of outright illegal activity by big business outweigh the possible fines or sanctions means most economic models are completely worthless.

In proper science if the model doesn't explain the evidence you have to ditch the model until you come up with one that can.



In engineering you just need something that will work reliably. So you work out the pump size based on the pressure drops. Then you add 50%. And choose the next size up pump.

Beancounters would only use the first step. And rely on engineers having over-engineered the pump. Which can work but only if other beancounters haven't already taken over the pump makers.

And this is why historical Boeing aircraft have a much better reputation than the current offerings.

COVID

Deleted User wrote: »

Economics is a social science, which also largely ignores empirical evidence.

Wasn't it Charles J. Haughey who referred to economics as the 'dismal science'.

Peregrinus

COVID wrote: »

Wasn't it Charles J. Haughey who referred to economics as the 'dismal science'.

Haughey may have used the term, but it was coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1849. He used the term in support of his argument that slavery should be reintroduced in the West Indies as a way of raising labour productivity. The conventional view of economists at the time (and since) was that people should be incentivised to work through the offer of wages rather than being compelled to work through enslavement; Carlyle didn't like this view, because it reduced the power of government and frustrated God's intention in creating black people, which was that they should work.

If Mr Haughey employed the term, no doubt he did so in support of some equally compelling argument.