Naji Dahi wrote (Fri, 5 Apr 2002 09:12:38 -0800):
> You are right. Psychology is the closest to "hard" science there
> is. Econ, Poli sci, Socio, and others are "soft" sciences.
> Experimentation is not advanced in those fields as it is in psych.
> The fields still realy on statistical manipulation in their
> "scientific" method, ie, forming a hypothesis, soliciting
> indicators to measure the variavles of the hypothesis
> and using a statistical measure (pearson's r, gamma, etc...) to
> "prove" the hypothesis.
Experimentation is not always a good thing: perhaps the last political scientist to make a career out of large-scale experimentation was Henry Kissinger in his work on Southeast Asian political systems. We all know how that turned out.
--Tim Francis-Wright