Sorry for the slow blogging, I've been occupied with other things. Hopefully I'll be blogging more frequently again going forward.
This Monkey Cage post gives a great overview of the necessity of NSF funding for political science and why those that are attacking this funding have a weak argument.
The only thing I'd wish to add is that observational sciences, like political science, are what got the scientific revolution underway. Astronomy practiced by Copernicus or Galileo was essentially observational, controlled experiments came later. It's absurd to draw a distinction between "hard" sciences and other sciences, science is about approach, methodology, and philosophy not about whether the source of observations is a test tube, the sky, or the human population of a nation.
I'd also like to add that I can't really think of an explanation for why political science gets so much criticism compared to other observational sciences like Astronomy other than that the critics either don't understand the scientific method or they simply don't like the conclusions reached by applying scientific principles to the study of human society.
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"I'd also like to add that I can't really think of an explanation for why political science gets so much criticism compared to other observational sciences like Astronomy other than that the critics either don't understand the scientific method or -> they simply don't like the conclusions reached by applying scientific principles to the study of human society <-."
ReplyDeleteSocial science is a partisan endeavour in the USA. A majority of the country think it's a "socialist" science. Thought this presentation was pretty good:
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/jhaidt-819710-haidt-postpartisan-social-psychology/
In Europe, social science is usually more respected since the way it views society is more in tune with people's perception of society (partial exception for Germany, where the tendency is that if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist).
Also, the the way I understand the key difference between "hard" and "soft" sciences is the chaotic nature of the latter.
"Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. -> In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable <-."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Economists in particular do their best to ignore the chaotic nature in society through modeling. Models are good, but knowing their limits is even better. A lot of economists don't, and policians love them for it (just tell me what to do!)