Social Science Isn’t Science

It’s not that the study of human behavior and interaction in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Economics, Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology and Sociology, the so-called Social Sciences, isn’t useful. It’s just that they’re not SCIENCE, and one of our big problems today is that their practitioners use a lot of questionable or rigged scientific data and analysis to advance special interests and hidden agendas.

Science, as it was rationally taught when I was in 6th grade, was based on the use of the Scientific Method, the principles of which have been around since Sir Isaac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. “Social Science”, misleadingly named to give it an air of formality, rigor and credibility that Newton would never have ascribed to it, and to which the Scientific Method can’t be applied, belongs to what serious scientists label as Junk or Pseudo Science.

Today, the Left-infested science curriculum has turned the Scientific Method into mush. Here’s the definition from the website Science Buddies which illustrates what I mean:

“The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Does this mean all scientists follow exactly this process? No. Some areas of science can be more easily tested than others. For example, scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star’s life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. When direct experimentation is not possible, scientists modify the scientific method. In fact, there are probably as many versions of the scientific method as there are scientists! But even when modified, the goal remains the same: to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining the evidence, and seeing if all the available information can be combined into a logical answer.”

This kind of relativist nonsense is but one example of how our kids and grandkids are being brainwashed into believing that there is no right or wrong, no good and evil, everyone deserves a trophy and other Leftist necroses of traditional common sense.

One of the keystones of the Scientific Method is repeatable process. A hypothesis, then a theory, doesn’t become a fact until controlled experimentation occurs in a methodical, empirical manner. But importantly, it has to be reproducible by others using identically controlled methods.

In March 1989 two respected University of Utah professors published a paper insisting they produced so-called “cold fusion” in their laboratory: the production of energy without the usual exothermic reaction that occurs in nuclear fusion or atomic bombs.  Their scholarly work was widely circulated and got the whole scientific and business world in a tizzy. What doomed them was that no-one could reproduce what they say they observed notwithstanding the precise replication of their methods!

One of the other cornerstones of the Scientific Method is that a theory has to be able to be validated.  Another way of saying this is that theory only becomes fact once it can no longer be refuted by experimentation and observation. The social sciences rely on the review of gathered data, rather than the scientific method of hypothesis – theory – experimentation – validation – reproduction – peer review to assert facts that simply aren’t! And what social scientists do is put forth an idea based on some interpretation of the data, whether accurate, selective, falsified or otherwise, and then say, “Prove me wrong” to the rest of world. Their theories almost by definition can NOT be validated and thus can’t seriously be considered science. Oh, and “send me more money so I can continue to do research.” That is the very essence of Junk or Pseudo Science.

So, when Leftists of all stripes spout their dogma and profess it to have scientific backing, I urge you to throw what we call the BS flag! Don’t let the attachment of the word “science” to anything said by a politician, an economist, a lawyer, a psychologist, a sociologist or any kind of bureaucrat, (Right or Left by the way), cloud your judgment. That’s unless it’s REAL SCIENCE as we learned it in the sixth grade , not FAKE science!