This is why we can’t have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method—it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good.
So, you say people are trying the scientific approach. My guess is, the nature of the problem is such that nothing much came out of these attempts. No great insights were gained, no theories were discovered. Real scientists had nothing to show for their efforts, and this is why the these fields are now not owned by real scientists, but by people with other skills.
For an imperfect analogy, say an ancient civilization left a lot of incomprehensible texts. Say a lot of effort went into deciphering these texts, and to everyone’s surprise it was discovered that some of these texts were English encrypted with some cyphers that the cryptographers cracked. So people skilled in the mathematics of cryptography started working on other texts, and many of them were consequently decrypted. But there were some classes of documents that the cryptographers were helpless against. Maybe these texts were really random garbage, or maybe they were encrypted with cyphers which are well beyond the current reach of our technology.
Now imagine a crook comes and says he has found the true meaning of a text. He calls himself a cryptographer and produces an “explanation” which is drivel but which superficially sounds like what the cryptographers say. If he tries that with one of the texts that have been decrypted for real, it will be hard for him to compete with the actual solution. But for the texts that remain a mystery, crooks will be the only game in town.
This is why we can’t have social science. Not because the subject is not amenable to the scientific method—it obviously is. People are conducting controlled experiments and other people are attempting to replicate the results. So far, so good.
So, you say people are trying the scientific approach. My guess is, the nature of the problem is such that nothing much came out of these attempts. No great insights were gained, no theories were discovered. Real scientists had nothing to show for their efforts, and this is why the these fields are now not owned by real scientists, but by people with other skills.
For an imperfect analogy, say an ancient civilization left a lot of incomprehensible texts. Say a lot of effort went into deciphering these texts, and to everyone’s surprise it was discovered that some of these texts were English encrypted with some cyphers that the cryptographers cracked. So people skilled in the mathematics of cryptography started working on other texts, and many of them were consequently decrypted. But there were some classes of documents that the cryptographers were helpless against. Maybe these texts were really random garbage, or maybe they were encrypted with cyphers which are well beyond the current reach of our technology.
Now imagine a crook comes and says he has found the true meaning of a text. He calls himself a cryptographer and produces an “explanation” which is drivel but which superficially sounds like what the cryptographers say. If he tries that with one of the texts that have been decrypted for real, it will be hard for him to compete with the actual solution. But for the texts that remain a mystery, crooks will be the only game in town.
This may have happened.