The article did not acknowledge the two biggest problems with the social sciences: inability to do many experiments because of ethical reasons, and the fact tha

The article did not acknowledge the two biggest problems with the social sciences: inability to do many experiments because of ethical reasons, and the fact that these disciplines often study human social systems which have mutable "laws". There's not much we can do about the first problem except slowly accrete knowledge through retrospective study of actual events, and maybe fill in some gaps with simulation. The second problem is more solvable. I do believe that there are actually laws in the social sciences, but that they are far fewer in number than the phenomena people want to study. Many social phenomena are simply artifacts of existing systems, and may shed light on behavior in a particular case but are not generalizable beyond that system. The law of supply and demand is a good example of a law that is universal, in many ways because it lies at the junction of physical systems and social systems. The physical aspects of supply and demand, for example the amount of arable land nearby as well as the caloric requirements of a population, can be measured well because of our physical knowledge and provide a decent jumping off place to expand the theory. I disagree that some things are not quantifiable. Everything can be counted, from the number of neural connections in our brains to the number of widgets that a factory can produce. As usual, the limiting factor in science is not a lack of theory but a lack of instrumentation and thus data. I am basically an optimist about the social sciences as our measurement abilities continue to grow. However, we are in the dark ages regarding the tools we have to collect data.