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Comment by dntbnmpls | Hacker News Reader

> Then they goes on to criticize political science and psychology as their poster children for the humanities, except these are social sciences

Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science.

> It's like the author isn't even familiar with academia.

Are you? This issue with "social science" has been going on for a few decades now.

Richard Feymann called social science a pseudoscience a few decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo

The name social science was invented for the same reason creation science was invented because real science had such a good reputation and they didn't so they decided to manufacture some credibility by attaching "science" to their fields.

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> Social sciences are a humanities. The term social science was invented fairly recently by sneaky academics to leech off the credibility of actual science.

> The name social science was invented by hacks just like creation science was invented by hacks because real science ( biology, physics, chemistry, etc ) has such a good reputation and they didn't so they decided to manufacture some credibility by attaching "science" to their fields.

Do you have anything to back this up? According to Wikipedia's rather extensive article on the history of the social sciences, the term first appeared in 1824, and the discipline was pretty well established by the turn of the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_social_sciences

> Do you have anything to back this up?

Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_social_sciences

"The term "social science" first appeared in the 1824 book An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth by William Thompson (1775–1833). Auguste Comte (1797–1857) argued that ideas pass through three rising stages, theological, philosophical and scientific."

What do you think rising through theological, philosophical and scientific implies? The lowest being theological, the highest being scientific?

1824 was around the time of the scientific revolution and enlightenment. Everyone wanted to latch onto the good name of science.

"Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods of research represented a scientific view of history in this model."

"One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy would be John Dewey (1859–1952)."

From history to philosophy to politics, everyone wanted to associate itself with "science" because of the credibility it brought.

Even religion got into the act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science

The article on Wikipedia doesn't support your assertion that the scholars who coined the term "social science" did so "fairly recently," and that they were "sneaky academics" and "hacks."

Well, unless 1824 is "fairly recently" (to be generous, let's say a century ago, when things really got going), and Comte, Durkheim, Weber, and yes, even Marx are "hacks" (they may be other things, but hacks?).

> The article on Wikipedia doesn't support your assertion that the scholars who coined the term "social science" did so "fairly recently,"

Fairly recently is subjective. But the article showed that they coined it because of the cachet attached to science at that time.

You can downvote and find things to nitpick, but ultimately I'm right. Just like creation "science". Political "science" is as much a science as creation "science". That isn't to say political "science" is nonsense like creation "science". It's an academic field that belongs in the "arts and humanities" category.

As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities. There might be some valid criticism of the term "social science" and the field but lumping it in with humanities isn't accurate. While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.

> As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities.

Don't say there is a difference. Name them. I too have a degree in the humanities. That isn't an argument.

> While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.

What's your point? Quantitative and qualitative work occur in science and in the humanities. It's not exclusive to one or the other. The difference between the two is that one deals with natural law and the empirical testing of those laws. While humanities do not. They most deal with the philosophical and the human condition. Morality or the best form of government aren't scientific concerns because they aren't about the natural world and its laws. It's not empiricial testable unlike say the speed of light.

Political science is not a science because it doesn't deal with nature and empirical experiments. Machiavelli was not a scientist because political science isn't a science.

I'd say social sciences are closer to humanities than they are to hard sciences.

True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general direction of hard science ever since. Though necessarily relying much more on modeling and statistical approaches than on formal analysis.

Due to the inherent impossibility of repeating experimental conditions exactly (or in some fields, at all), the social sciences will never join the hard sciences, but instead occupy terrain adjacent to both humanities (where their data is sourced from), and hard sciences (where techniques are sourced from, increasingly for the "computational"- prefixed subfields).

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