I wouldn't argue for it, but I would be extremely reluctant to argue against the assertion that the state of the social 'sciences' today is about the same as it

I wouldn't argue for it, but I would be extremely reluctant to argue against the assertion that the state of the social 'sciences' today is about the same as it was in the Dark Ages. To the extent that any "good science" gets done in the social 'sciences', it is entirely in spite of the entire (social-'science'-specific) underlying foundation thereof. If your results aren't reproducible with (the overwhelming majority of[0]) other samples collected based on the same criteria, your results aren't. 0: specifically, for results claiming a 95% confidence level (p<0.05), if nineteen replications are attempted, you should encounter a replication failure exactly once. I would accept perhaps four or five out of nineteen (or one out of two or three) under the reasoning that the law of large numbers hasn't kicked in yet, but anything with zero successful replications is not science, it's evidence (in this, against the entire field of study).