Re: brief survey

Quoting Tristan Mc Leay <conlang@...>:

> On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 00:55 +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > You can say _naturvetenskapsman_ "natural scientist", but that's strictly
> > someone working with the physical sciences - a distinction of subject
> matter,
> > not methodology or "objectivity" (for lack of a better word).
>
> But can you find a better distinction between the hard and soft sciences
> than the content matter?
I'm not trying to find good distinctions, I'm trying to describe ones that are
generally made.

> (or, perhaps, whether they present their data
> as graphs or tables). Psychology, for instance, is generally considered
> a "soft science", but many psychologists use a quite hard-scientific
> methodology and I presume are "objective", but in the context of science
> I'm not completely sure what you mean by it. (To the extent that there
> are some who don't use hard-scientific methodologies, that should not
> taint other subfields and other researchers, unless, of course, the
> criterion is by public declaration: Which is fair enough, but then "hard
> science" is a soft science, and it's no surprise that you can't get a
> perfect translation into Swedish of the concept.)
Psychology is a borderline case, so let's look at history. If I say it's a "soft
science", I'm implying that full scientific rigour is not applied to or is not
applicable to it. If I say it's not a _naturvetenskap_, I'm doing little else
but noting it's not physics.

That definitions don't map perfectly should be no surprise, unless one, as
Yitzik apparently did, assumes that there is a single Western idea of what
"science" is.

                                                         Andreas

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