>It is virtually impossible to separate science as a system of knowledge
>from its institutional component i.e. people who have vested interests in
>producing science for a living.
I agree with you on the weight of institutions upon disciplines, making scientific endeavor something like an exception rather than a norm of practice in social science. I would also add that there are vested interests of those who finance the work of social scientists to be taken into account.
BTW, I never said anywhere that social science is the same as literary
interpretation; nor did I argue that sociology and other disciplines can't
be scientific. I merely asked:
>>BTW, do you think social science is scientific _in the same way_ that natural
>>science is? (emphasis added)
I am interested in philosophy of science as well as science, and I think the above is an important question, in that it raises questions such as what is the nature of the object of study in social science, what is the proper mode of inquiry in it, what are the appropriate criteria of 'empirical falsification' concerning propositions and theories about the social, and so on.
I am inclined to think that the natural, the social, and the cultural can be all objects of scientific research but that a different domain demands different criteria of scientific adequacy (i.e. adequate to the object of study and the purpose of inquiry).
As for the empirical, I think that social scientists who are marxists are not simply interested in the empirical but also in explaining the manners in which social relations produce the empirical as well (which is the level of abstraction at which competing explanations, embedded in competing theories and research programs, do ideological battles).
Now, regarding your comparison of economics and sociology, I again agree that economists seem to be much better at thought-policing. Nonetheless, a possibly higher degree of internal coherence of economics as academic discipline seems to make it further divorced than sociology from anything like reality and adequately scientific study of it. It appears that wilder and stranger fictions prevail in economics than in studies of literature, not to mention sociology, no?
My hypothesis (which, alas, may not be empirically falsifiable) is that disciplines closer to the heart of the ruling class tend to produce a higher proportion of ideology than other disciplines do.
Yoshie