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From: Zerkon on 2 Apr 2010 07:41
On Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:51:36 -0700, Immortalist wrote:

> If social science is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a
> plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences, including:
> anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, linguistics, political
> science, and, in certain contexts, psychology and these are considered
> "soft sciences" as opposed to the "hard sciences" of math and physics,
> then why do some act as if economics were physics?
>
> Does economics, like other soft sciences, suffer from "physics envy"
> since it desires to use an empirical approach more akin to the physical
> sciences than just another branch of the social sciences weaker
> probability methods?

It's more like "Certainty envy".

> Can we attribute policy failures in economic advising to an uncritical
> and unscientific propensity to imitate mathematical procedures used in
> the physical sciences?

No, this is a cover. Only this 'we' attribute failure to policy, others
see the same policy as being quite successful.

>
> What about the many policymakers or individuals holding highly ranked
> positions that can influence other people's lives who are known for
> arbitrarily using a plethora of economic concepts and rhetoric as
> vehicles to legitimize agendas and value systems, and do not limit their
> remarks to matters relevant to their responsibilities; This close
> relation of economic theory and practice with politics may shade or
> distort the most unpretentious original tenets of economics, and is
> often confused with specific social agendas and value systems?

Let's look at an example. "Freedom (or democracy) can not exist without a
free market system". How can such vagaries even be addressed with common
reason much less a science, hard or soft?

Again, honesty and concern for a common good is the assumed base of
rhetoric and concept. A natural assumption among honest people.
Unfortunately...

> But if in all science, hard or soft, a theory is an explanation; for
> instance the theory of gravity where gravity is not a law of nature but
> an explanation of observations; if you drop something, it's going to
> fall; that's an observation: unsupported things fall; but you explain
> that observation with the theory of gravity, which is that the mass of
> what whatever it is you dropped, a pencil or a pen or something, is
> attracted by the mass...it's really a theory of gravity? But remember, a
> theory is an explanation, then what really is the difference between
> hard and soft sciences if they are both hypothetico- deductive models
> derived from inductive predicate logic?

Numbers.




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