this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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[–] Donkter@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I think sociology is part of a field called "The Social Sciences" which includes sociology, psychology, polisci etc.

[–] GiveMemes@jlai.lu 1 points 5 months ago

The issue with considering these to be anything like the 'hard sciences' is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.

God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It's important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don't get me wrong, but they're pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.

Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.

Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven't been falsified.

Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.

And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that's completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It's not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

that more broadly would make sense to me. But i still wouldn't consider polsci to be polsci, i would consider it to be a sub set of sociology.

[–] Donkter@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's all kind of a subset of sociology. Why do groups make decisions? It's down to individual psychology. But that's similar to saying all science is derivative of physics. It's technically true, but it does us more favors to split it up.

i think calling it "political sciences" is probably reasonably accurate.

But yeah. Naming is just hard.