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According to Wikipedia, science is "systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the uni

• wtdata 7y ago
  Exactly. That's also something that is used as an argument, which is a strawman: You are refuting the validity of a number of fields if you don't accept them as sciences. There are plenty of very valid disciplines of human knowledge that aren't sciences (and they seem perfectly fine in not being sciences since they have a clear aim and methodology for their work that, by impossibility of what they do, just can't follow the scientific method). History is a clear example.
  • cygx 7y ago
    History is a clear example. Hypothesis: Troy existed Prediction: there's a buried city in asia minor Test: dig it up
    • mc32 7y ago
      Does it become archeology at that point, or archeology and paleontology in support of history?
      • AstralStorm 7y ago
        Both and more. (Linguistics, physics and genetics can chime in.) History is a big umbrella study domain, not one science. For example, it also embraces epistology, studies of warfare and studies of art. It builds hypotheses based on output of harder sciences and sparse evidence, which is also evaluated for veracity, as examples of low quality examples taken as evidence are becoming more visible all the time.
    • JetSpiegel 7y ago
      "Troy existed" is just one of the low level hypothesis History proposes. Hypothesis: What happened in Armenia was a genocide. How do you disprove this? There are arguments for and against, but ultimately this would require reading the minds of the leaders at the time. You can also present logical arguments (which I totally buy, this is just an example), but there is no way to test this. There is only one historic timeline, so History is not a science.
  • Chris2048 7y ago
    > You are refuting the validity of a number of fields if you don't accept them as sciences. It's refuting their validity as sciences. Science is often taken as more authoritative and objective as other subjects, so the label matters. I may be a perfectly good dentist, the fact I am not a neuro-surgeon doesn't invalidate my worth as a dentist; But If I claimed to be a neuro-surgeon I should be investigated before I cut open any skulls.
    • wtdata 7y ago
      I know, that was my point, I probably explained it wrongly. I meant that by stating that social sciences aren't actual sciences and have profound problems, one is in no way stating that disciplines that aren't sciences (like History, the example given) aren't not valid pursuits of human knowledge.
    • AstralStorm 7y ago
      Even a dentist is supposed to base their treatments in evidence based medicine. It is a specialty thereof.
• TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Linguistics explanations and predictions often are testable. The wug test is a famous example. For historical linguistics, yes, you can't summon new historical evidence out of the void, but you still have a huge amount of existing evidence to work with, and you can always go looking for that which has been overlooked: you have the entirety of written history at your disposal.
• Ygg2 7y ago
  Math absolutely makes testable explanations and predictions about a universe. Nowhere does it say it needs to be the universe we inhabit. You start with a set of axioms. Then you derive and prove theories that are explanations and predictions made by those axioms.
  • buboard 7y ago
    > Math absolutely makes testable explanations and predictions about a universe. more like math attempts to make a verbal map of how our brains understands the external stimuli. It is usually physics that makes predictions about the external world, math doesn't need to do that.
    • Ygg2 7y ago
      I do not think it is necessarily external stimuli. Math can make various spaces that are nigh impossible for humans to comprehend, and can even require computers to understand. E.g. basically math solves a problem for N-dimensional spaces. I have problems thinking in 3D, not to mention 256-dimensional.
      • buboard 7y ago
        > that are nigh impossible for humans to comprehend, ha. even though the mechanisms may be intractable for humans eventually the inputs and the outputs of math transformations must be dumbed down to be understood by human brains or else they are useless (to humans). neural nets come to mind