>
>These really aren't fair comparisons, are they? If you try to use
>theoretical principles in physics to predict behavior of a particular
>leaf falling on a particular fall day, your "hit rate" will be quite
>low. To say that probabilistic theories are too fuzzy, can't predict
>specific events, etc, is beside the point.
Social scientific theories aren't probablistic in the same sense that quantum mechanics is. QM allows for predictions that are extremely precise, including the areas where, according to the theory, no precise predictions of singular events are possible. Social scientific theories are more like Darwinian explanation, they don't allow for precise predictons at all. They are more narrative. They are powerful retrospectively, once we know the history, but they depend on too much from outside taht is merely contingent.
I know philosophers of
>science have spilled a lot of ink about this (and I expect jks to come
>swooping in any moment here), but scientific theory is just an
>explanation: it explicates the relationship among variables, and the
>explanation generates predictions that can be empirically verified.
>All the other stuff--precision, parsimony, elegance--
>help us to assess the quality of the scientific theory, but they
>are not intrinsic to scientific theory.
Well, I wouldn't agree with the last sentence, but the idea that explanation is the core of a scientific theory has something to recommend it. But there's also the domension of description: we want to know what things are, what is their nature; and prediction is important to scientific theory too. We trade off explanatory power for other concerns, depending on our interests. Classical mechanics isn't true, except under special circumstances, but we ignore this because it is predictively powerful and easy to use, and the additional technical accuracy we might get by using general relativity doesn't matter for building bridges and launching rockets.
>jks
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