7 - Science

Summary

Scholars who think social science analysis should imitate physics and mathematics to achieve similar successes assume that scientific methodology is more logically rigorous and more pervasively quantified regardless of the issues with which it deals. But any careful examination of the history of the “hard sciences” makes it clear that the premise is largely false.

It is not the content of these sciences or the range and depth of their opportunities for quantification that social scientists should most admire but rather their willingness to embrace ambiguities, uncertainties, contradictions, counterintuitive hypotheses, and thought experiments. These attributes of the twentieth-century scientific method are rarely noticed or studied except by physicists and mathematicians themselves though they have been central to the remarkable advances in theory and practice that are justifiably admired. Strangely, social scientists often see these practices as incompatible with science and to be avoided. That posture not only inhibits the social sciences from bold and imaginative advances but also incorporates a serious status quo bias.

A major reason for the successes of both physics and mathematics in the twentieth century lies in their acceptance of uncertainty as an inherent aspect of the physical world. Uncertainty is built into their hypotheses and conclusions, most clearly perhaps in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but also in many other hypotheses that deal with cosmology, with the particles that comprise matter, and with the idea that principles of arithmetic cannot always be reconciled with each other.