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Is it possible for anthropology to be a science the way we look at physics or chemistry? I'm not trying to bash anthropology, but I think we should be honest wi

by dtwest 7y ago

Is it possible for anthropology to be a science the way we look at physics or chemistry? I'm not trying to bash anthropology, but I think we should be honest with what the "social sciences" really are. I personally don't think economics is a science, despite that being my field of focus. In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading. But maybe we just have different definitions of science?

barry-cotter 7y ago
If epidemiology, geology or cosmology is a science so is economics.
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Geology and cosmology don't change because you talk about how you think they work. Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. It's not the same.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. Mercantilism didn't disappear, it just became less dominant. It's still around, and still sometimes ends up being the philosophy that drives policy, though we tend to call it by other names. “Protectionism” is a manifestation of mercantilism, as is worry over trade deficits. Mercantilism isn't a predictive theory of how economics works, it's a public (economic) policy framework. Smith talking about how he thought that economy worked didn't make mercantilism less dominant, him proposing alternative policy based on that description did, though.
    - earthboundkid 7y ago
      As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.
      - uxp100 7y ago
        But there are elements, molecules and chemical reactions that may not have existed or occurred until chemistry determined it was possible.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate. But there's a whole lot of how people react to what they see in rocks that did. Predictive economics (the science) produces change in economic policy, in the same way that all science effects how people react to events in the domain of that science.
        earthboundkid 7y ago
        Humanities are just different from other sciences because the study of humanities causes humans as a mass to behave differently. In other sciences, we are the agents who cause things to happen and observe the results. In humanities, we are both the agents and the patients and we react based on what we learn. Put it this way, if economics was a regular science, you could make a theory of the stock market and predict prices with the same accuracy as a rocket's trajectory or a chemical reaction or the weather. Because it's not a regular science, what happens when you predict stock prices is that the prices change to factor in the predictions!
analog31 7y ago
In my view, a discipline can embrace scientific methodology without reaching a maturity where it is capable of producing a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Then it's a science, albeit not a particularly successful one. Scientific methodology does not guarantee success. Even in physics, some research programs fail to produce results. Now of course that leaves open the question of how to classify a discipline that has gone on for 50-100 years, happily filling the journals with results, while producing no such knowledge base.
snowwrestler 7y ago
If we look at anthropology the same way we look at physics or chemistry, then the challenge to scientific pursuit becomes clear: complexity. What I mean is, if we consider a human society from a strictly physical perspective, the number of fundamental particle interactions that make up that society are far too high to analyze or simulate numerically. Same with chemistry: the number and variety of chemical reactions that occur within all of the human bodies of, say, Tahiti, is way beyond our ability to directly analyze or simulate computationally. Heck, just going from quantum mechanics to chemistry exceeds our abilities in many cases. What we call chemistry strictly emerges from quantum mechanics, but we can only use QM to directly analyze only the most simple chemical reactions. Then animal biology emerges from chemistry, then anthropology is one discipline that attempts to study the interactions of a particular set of a particular type of animals within an environment. At each step along this ladder we have had to develop new techniques to analyze systems that are too complex to directly analyze with techniques from the previous step. So from this perspective, the issue is not that anthropology is not a science, the issue is that the scientific challenge is so huge that we don't have many useful results yet. It's so huge we might never have results that are as clear and easy to understand as physics and chemistry. > In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading. Science does not require the ability to run controlled experiments; observing existing natural processes can provide evidence to support or refute hypotheses.

by dtwest 7y ago

barry-cotter 7y ago

If epidemiology, geology or cosmology is a science so is economics.

earthboundkid 7y ago
Geology and cosmology don't change because you talk about how you think they work. Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. It's not the same.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Adam Smith wrote a book about how he thought the market worked and then mercantilism disappeared. Mercantilism didn't disappear, it just became less dominant. It's still around, and still sometimes ends up being the philosophy that drives policy, though we tend to call it by other names. “Protectionism” is a manifestation of mercantilism, as is worry over trade deficits. Mercantilism isn't a predictive theory of how economics works, it's a public (economic) policy framework. Smith talking about how he thought that economy worked didn't make mercantilism less dominant, him proposing alternative policy based on that description did, though.
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate.
    - uxp100 7y ago
      But there are elements, molecules and chemical reactions that may not have existed or occurred until chemistry determined it was possible.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > As far as I know there are no rocks that changed due to the gradualism v. catastrophism debate. But there's a whole lot of how people react to what they see in rocks that did. Predictive economics (the science) produces change in economic policy, in the same way that all science effects how people react to events in the domain of that science.
      - earthboundkid 7y ago
        Humanities are just different from other sciences because the study of humanities causes humans as a mass to behave differently. In other sciences, we are the agents who cause things to happen and observe the results. In humanities, we are both the agents and the patients and we react based on what we learn. Put it this way, if economics was a regular science, you could make a theory of the stock market and predict prices with the same accuracy as a rocket's trajectory or a chemical reaction or the weather. Because it's not a regular science, what happens when you predict stock prices is that the prices change to factor in the predictions!

analog31 7y ago

In my view, a discipline can embrace scientific methodology without reaching a maturity where it is capable of producing a reliable body of scientific knowledge. Then it's a science, albeit not a particularly successful one. Scientific methodology does not guarantee success. Even in physics, some research programs fail to produce results. Now of course that leaves open the question of how to classify a discipline that has gone on for 50-100 years, happily filling the journals with results, while producing no such knowledge base.

snowwrestler 7y ago

If we look at anthropology the same way we look at physics or chemistry, then the challenge to scientific pursuit becomes clear: complexity. What I mean is, if we consider a human society from a strictly physical perspective, the number of fundamental particle interactions that make up that society are far too high to analyze or simulate numerically. Same with chemistry: the number and variety of chemical reactions that occur within all of the human bodies of, say, Tahiti, is way beyond our ability to directly analyze or simulate computationally. Heck, just going from quantum mechanics to chemistry exceeds our abilities in many cases. What we call chemistry strictly emerges from quantum mechanics, but we can only use QM to directly analyze only the most simple chemical reactions. Then animal biology emerges from chemistry, then anthropology is one discipline that attempts to study the interactions of a particular set of a particular type of animals within an environment. At each step along this ladder we have had to develop new techniques to analyze systems that are too complex to directly analyze with techniques from the previous step. So from this perspective, the issue is not that anthropology is not a science, the issue is that the scientific challenge is so huge that we don't have many useful results yet. It's so huge we might never have results that are as clear and easy to understand as physics and chemistry. > In fields where it is difficult or impossible to run controlled experiments, claiming to be a science is often misleading. Science does not require the ability to run controlled experiments; observing existing natural processes can provide evidence to support or refute hypotheses.