Talk:Hard and soft science

Original Research

The article seems far to heavily based on the opinions of frost, who simply qualifies all social sciences as soft, and natural sciences as hard. The article is inconsistent with itself. For example, the term soft science is often used to describe the life sciences in relation to chemistry or physics and excludes social sciences from discussion as non-scientific fields. Social Sciences like economics are usually more quantitatively rigorous than life sciences, and characterized as being hard "Social-Sciences".

This article I think more accurately characterizes the nature of the term and is presented in an academic context, unlike frosts article which is just an opinion piece written on a professors website. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC198502/pdf/mlab00170-0094.pdf 205.255.240.10 (talk) 22:11, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't see the inconsistency in the WP article. It does not exclude social sciences from the discussion, and it does not say that they are non-scientific fields. It says that some discipline are harder than others. The Storer article classifies physics, chemistry, and biochemistry as hard, botany zoology, and economics as medium-hard, and psychology, sociology, and political science as soft.

'controversy' weaseling

Seeing that the entire controversy section was larger than the entire rest of the article, had only one reference and that was to an economist who clearly pulled the notion of the debate around the physics model out of context. It's not a debate about the scientific proclaims of physics, it's a debate about their humanitarian interpretation which is of course.. a soft science. So I was a bold arse and just clipped it all out as it was there from the start, and already larger than the entire article. I'm suspicious that the article was put there for that purpose, seeing that the rest of the article really doesn't say any thing informative. I propose an entire re-write or simply deletion. Rajakhr (talk) 21:15, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Good call, that paragraph was clealy not objective and written by someone who doesn't understand the essence of exact science. A simple example: Newtons theory of gravity is very precise for ordinary circumstances but Einsteins' theory is a little more precise wich only becomes useful in extreme circumstances. Does that make Newton's theory wrong? No. The same could be said for the guld-particle duality of light. Physisc has a very solid record over the last few centuries. 193.190.253.147 (talk) 01:36, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm assuming that this is where the rewrite tag on the article came from. considering that the issue seems to have been corrected (to which no-one, including myself, appears to be objecting) I've gone ahead and removed the tag.
— V = I * R (talk) 18:36, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that the statements about "soft science" being pejorative should be deleted, unless better cites are found. The sources listed don't really support the text in the article. Roger (talk) 03:25, 11 July 2010 (UTC)

Definition of Rigor

Rigor, defined as 'difficulty', is subjective. How can entire fields of study be deemed more difficult than others, unless said difficulty can be quantified? I find Frost's argument that something is scientific because it is 'difficult' questionable. The social sciences are inherently devoid of mathematics, as they are separate disciplines - one could say the same about how mathematics is devoid of the social sciences. This argument does not further Frost's contention. Furthermore, social sciences also demand exactitude; one cannot simply conjure up a socially scientific scholarly work, they are derived, much like the natural sciences, from empirically valid methodologies. Unless anyone disagrees, for the above reasons I would call for a revision of these definitions. Arielkoiman (talk) 00:32, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Rigor is not defined as difficulty. Roger (talk) 03:12, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

According to the article cited here, it is. Arielkoiman (talk) 13:20, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Wait, you're Roger Schlafly? Holy crap. Um...hi. Arielkoiman (talk) 14:05, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

It appears that your disagreement is with the Frost article that is cited. Frost does not say that some fields are more difficult, but only that some fields are deemed more difficult by the lay public. Perhaps you can suggest a better reference? Roger (talk) 15:25, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

You posit a valid point, that Frost is referring to a perception rather than making a factual declaration. This brings the very nature of this article into question, as it presents Frost's research into public perception as hard fact. Perhaps, then, this article is due for some serious overhaul? Arielkoiman (talk) 05:36, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

One way to look at it could be to compare the number of "technical courses" required within each type of degree. My university defined "technical" in categorical terms, as any/all courses from math, statistics, science, and engineering departments. A bit crude, perhaps, but this idea can be applied more specifically to the curricula. For example, we have a certain number of required courses or credits already built into general education requirements. A major such as sociology tends to require at least one additional course in statistics (often within the sociology department itself, as a second course in social research methodology). Students have the option of choosing additional technical courses, where available, if they choose to focus upon more technical aspects of the field, including more quantitative social sciences such as economics and geography. So if we do a serious comparison, we should be able to identify where a social science curriculum at least qualifies as science, because it tends to provide a foundational course in scientific epistemology (often tailored to focus upon that field's own applications, such as survey research or psychology measurement), at least one course in statistics to allow basic technical aspects to be applied to student research, the study of theory rooted in past research in that field, and a senior research activity. That would be a pretty good case of a soft science - the science is there, but the field still has so much that is exploratory and qualitative that an undergraduate major is allowed to stay at a rather light level of mathematical precision during most of the coursework. A biology major can (but doesn't have to) be limited to the same low level of quantitative rigor, although interestingly, the "hard sciences" tend not to require any introductory coursework in scientific epistemology, so I would guess that this knowledge is introduced in the general education component as well as picked up through the array of higher science courses, and verified with a senior capstone course, rather than specifically packaged as its own course as the social sciences do to provide the scientific framing of their fields. (Fortunately, most of the anti-science fads in the social sciences tend to exist at the higher levels of study, rather than as the core foundational material of the fields, and I for one do what I can to keep this situation, but it is probably true that some social science majors are functioning more as specialized philosophers than as social scientists, where certain departments have allowed such an approach to flourish.) Anyway, there is an array of "hardness" which is available, although often optional, in which for example a sociology major may choose additional courses in statistics, computer applications (e.g. agent-based models), network analysis, demography, quantitative survey analysis, etc., where such courses are available. Many of those options are only available at the graduate level, however, since a breadth of knowledge across the social sciences (and history and the humanities) is vital for a knowledge of the subject of the social sciences themselves - humans and the cultural products and organizations they have created. Thus, just as much undergraduate biology can occupy itself with different specializations rooted in a basic (i.e. taxonomically specifiable) organization of the field and at different scales of analysis (i.e. biochemistry, microbiology, genetics; zoology, botany, animal behavior, ecology, horticulture, entomology, etc.) so also do the soft social sciences tend to focus upon the structures that predominate in human societies: linguistics, archaeology, cultural geography, comparative politics, and of course the huge array of historical courses which should provide a kind of general perspective for higher level investigative studies (in which hypotheses get operationalized and tested, then theory construction and elaboration can ensue). So even where the "soft" studies are not rigorous in the sense that the student is actually working through the math or replicating the research (as does, however, occur in some course activities), it at least is focusing upon its subjects from the perspective of past research and the development of a theoretical understanding in the field (theoretical of course being used here in its scientific sense as the overarching explanations which make sense of accumulated research and data, as consistent as possible with all known facts, rather than an unflattering colloquial sense in which the term sometimes is intended to merely refer to speculative untested ideas). Hard social sciences are increasingly concerned with the application of mathematical, computational, statistical precision, rather than just a loose understanding of the field's ideas, as well as increasing overlap with the subject of the natural/biological sciences. So psychology has its most natural science overlap with biology (physiology, neurology, endocrinology, etc.), even though the concentration upon these subjects may be purely optional for an undergraduate student. Geography is sometimes classified as a natural science, although cultural geography, economic geography, urban geography, etc. clearly involve human social systems and thus can be considered a social science half of the discipline, while physical geography, remote sensing, meteorology, climatology, computer cartography, and the spatial analysis of natural system can be considered the natural science half of the discipline. A geography curriculum tends to have a higher number of technical requirements to make it a "harder" social science than anthropology, psychology, sociology, and political science. (History sees itself as partially humanities and partially social science, but since most history programs do not require coursework in scientific epistemology or statistics, the type of training really makes it part of the humanities - the scholarship should be rigorous, but takes a form that doesn't need to fit within a scientific framework, even though some scholars are historians of science itself.) Since these things are customizable by each student, the "hardness" of each student's studies would be verifiable on an individual basis. A student whose whole approach involves "deconstruction" and critique of science and all other cultural products, and focusing upon the inequalities and perceptions between social groups/categories, is a *humanities* student, although some of these did indeed major in a "social science" field. If that critical perspective is bolstered by legitimate empirical research, especially one that involves some sort of quantitative measurement and analysis, then the student could properly be seen as a social scientist, although the person might also have the fault of being too narrowly trained. The extra quantitative aspects of economists pose an interesting dilemma, since the application of these quantitative measures can easily exceed what they actually deserve, in terms of empirical validity. For example, urban/regional economics includes all sorts of nifty-sounding quantitative ideas, such as location quotients and shift-share analysis, but most of these are very poor (or worse) at actually predicting anything - they are really just provide a more quantitative way to perceive, conceive, and discuss aspects of an area's economy or labor supply. The economics curriculum, unlike geography, does not have an automatic overlap with any of the natural sciences to help ground the field. It's greater quantitativeness may seem promising, but it can also lead people to believe that the field has advanced farther than it actually has. After all, one might see basic taxonomy as the conceptual foundation of biological science. The important thing was the ordering of observations so that research could progress more rapidly. The foundation of chemistry might be seen as the periodic table - something which provides clear and confirmable structures to chemical and atomic knowledge, but does not in itself require complicated math to apply. Scientific verifiability can go a long way even with basic arithmetic, of the form used to do so much chemical stoichiometry. So although it can be important to have a feel for what level of overlap exists between the different sciences, such things can also be misleading - a mathematically adept economist might be just as clueless as a "soft" biologist when it comes to understanding a research paper in particle physics. (A bachelor's degree in economics doesn't actually require very many math courses anyway; the mathematical knowledge of the average economist is not very impressive compared with that of the average physicist. Such can be determined by comparing the quantitative requirements between curricula.) In general, though, there is a kind of continuum in terms of quantitative requirements. A political science undergrad who has not focused upon the formal theory might have only one quantitative course or two beyond what was required in general education, but a scientific sophistication can still be there, and will vary with the student and his/her own selected courses and topics. If people assume categorically that an anthropologist is very "soft," they are probably forgetting that the overlap can be quite substantial between physical anthropology (and archaeology) and natural sciences such as biology and chemistry. A "soft" anthropologist might actually be more in tune with science than an economist is. Math isn't everything - especially where there are huge subject areas still to be explored at a basic taxonomic or conceptual level. Astronomy also got its start that way. All of science starts with observations, the starting point for all pattern-detection! 136.181.195.29 (talk) 14:41, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Comments on Economics

The article says: "A contrary example would be economics, which is theoretically well developed, and often relies heavily on mathematical models, yet often cannot make basic predictions. Economics is usually considered a "soft" science. The ability to perform controlled experiments is usually an indication of hard science." But this very strong statement has no citing whatsoever; I'm sure one can be found but it's hard to cite the manty other who disagree with this assertion if you don't cite the ones who do agree. For this reason unless someone cites the source or objects within the next few days I'm going to delete the paragraph.

Walras101 (talk) 14:18, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree and you (Walras101) should have followed through. More to the point there's a rich field of experimental economics, whose article I have now hyperlinked with plenty of citations. It was was just one of the jerks in the easier-to-conduct "harder" sciences on a dark Freudian ego trip. Probably a physicist. Bastards.

195.191.165.5 (talk) 12:30, 1 September 2012 (UTC)

2 paragraph removal

I do not agree with removing most of this article. The 2 paragraphs are not OR, but conventional wisdom. If some part of this is doubtful, then please explain. I looked for a source saying that physics is harder than psychology, and I found many, including:

But because they based their claims mainly on anecdotal evidence, mainstream psychology, aspiring to be a hard science like physics, rejected them.[1]

Physics is thus a `hard' science, whose principles can be expressed mathematically, and so it is supposed to be the model to which all other sciences should aspire. By contrast, the social and human sciences are seen as the `softest' because they are the least capable of precise mathematical expression, and because they do not neatly fit the definition of what `science' is about set out in the first sentence of this paragraph.[2]

Please put the paragraphs back, or explain removing them. Roger (talk) 05:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

If they were "conventional wisdom", they shouldn't be too hard to source. I think they're actually amateur attempts to defend two concepts that are very poorly defined by giving them a definition. Problem is, those attempts are basically folk etymologies; they don't make a lot of sense and aren't backed up by reliable sources. The two sources you have given merely support that physics is considered 'hard' and psychology 'soft', not that experimentation/prediction determines what is hard and soft (paragraph 1) or that 'hard sciences' are better at "drawing strong conclusions" (paragraph 2). In fact, your second source specifically criticises the first idea:

Science is assumed to be about both explaining and predicting... it can be argued that the `predictive' tag is put there precisely to privilege simple sciences like physics and chemistry

I would like to see this article re-expanded from the stub it is now, but it has to be based on sources, not dubious "common sense" attempts to explain the terms. The underlying problem is that I think very few people in science take these concepts seriously: all the written sources that use them I've been able to find so far are either outright criticism or use them in scare-quotes as simplistic strawmen. Yet previously this article seemed to mainly be concerned with justifying them and there was no indication the concepts weren't wholeheartedly accepted. joe•roe^t•c 10:30, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

I've expanded that article and ended up putting some of these ideas back in (i.e. hierarchy of hardness, experimentation and prediction). Hopefully they're a bit better sourced and contextualised this time. joe•roe^t•c 14:01, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Tags

August Compte has been misquoted, he actually say sociology as the queen of sciences, since it dealt with the most complex issues. The difference is based on a US internal discussion but doesnt reflect the situation in Europe. Serten II (talk) 12:42, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Such nonsense

I have never seen it before. This debate about scientific rigor and quantifiable data has been going on since the 1970s I could care to bring up a litany of peer reviewed journal articles here but it's wasted on such insolence. The objectivists still want to have their cake that they are the only true scientists. If any of you had bothered to do an introductory course on methods as you would do at any decent level of post-graduate study you would see how much nonsense is involved in all of this. Of course qualitative data can never be valid, why did anyone never tell me this? It must be time to set my testamur on fire.

This article is a total load of nonsense and is the general representation of why objectivists continue to wave their phallic symbols around because they believe everything must revolve around quantifiable research. It represents no real world reality and as per a lot of things on wiki is a complete and utter load of garbage and should be reviewed for NPOV as it stands its completely biased towards quantitative data over qualitative data with no explanation, understanding, concept, or knowledge of methods the reason for choosing specific methods and the pros and cons of each particular area, or any particular understanding of science what so ever and this is what happens when articles are written by laymen As it stands this entire article needs to be rewritten from scratch.

I cannot even begin to help with how uninformed whoever the people are addressed this issue in the first place are, it goes beyond my level of being completely off the uninformed scales. Stupidity should cover this concisely, no wait it doesn't but this really is a matter where I am going to assume gross incompetence. The whole criticism of soft science is off the scales --1.120.150.50 (talk) 12:43, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

As one of the contributors to this article in its current form I'm sorry to hear you found it lacking, although might I suggest that calling us "stupid" and "ignorant" is not the most productive way of improving it.

I'm surprised to hear you think the article is a "diatribe" against social science. I'm a "soft scientist" myself (for a living, as it happens – so no this article wasn't written by laymen) and so obviously that isn't my view. It is difficult to approach this subject from a neutral point of view since the terms "hard" and "soft" science tend to be used to by critics of the latter, and not used by more even-handed commentators. So the source material for the article is biased in one direction. However you'll note that the article is careful to label these as *perceived* and *subjective* distinctions, and points out that it doesn't fit well with empirical evidence. Furthermore, I'd point out that nearly half of the body of the article is devoted to criticisms of the language of hard and soft science. While personally I would prefer this faulty terminology didn't exist, it does – it's frequently used in public discussions of science and unfortunately even bleeds into policy, and so we need an article about it.

In terms of your suggested changes, I would say that you seem to be approaching this from a very field-specific point of view (sociology, I'm guessing?) For example, as I hope the article makes clear, the quantitative/qualitative distinction is just one of many elements of the discourse on "hardness" in science, and I think it would be undue weight for the article to dwell on that issue. These are terms that span the entirety of science so it's not really appropriate to bring in methodological discussions from specific disciplines, or use terminology like "objectivist" which is alien to theoretical debates in many disciplines.

In any case, I'm glad to see you've opened a discussion below and I hope it will lead to a consensus to make this a better article. Please do try to keep it civil and avoid personal attacks and assumptions about other contributors, though. Joe Roe (talk) 11:58, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Please continue NPOV discussion here

Anyone who is interested please feel free to continue the dissuasion here. I've gone about tidying up the lead, the criticisms is also a big issue that needs addressing. Quant and Qual are no less valid as methods of research and obtaining data. The issue here is the data sets that you want to achieve. Finding a purely quantitative answer to life problems ignored the natural subjectivities of life. The typical quant response is to have a box on a form to address a roughly generalisable outcome in an attempt to force an expected response. The reality of the matter is that there are so many subjectivities in life that simply cannot be addressed by quant alone and no amount of "sciencing" is ever going to resolve the issue that quant simply does not cover the qualitative issues of life. You can be an objectivist and a rationalist all you like, but this is a wikipedia article and we need to address this issue from NPOV. Really, this entire article is in need of a rewrite and as an IP editor I'm not prepared to take on that task, I have too many other life issues to bothered with fixing issues of misconception on Wikipedia

Please do not remove the NPOV tags until a consensus is made on how to fix this article otherwise we can take this to an RFC which is a long drawn out process that generally ends up going nowhere and getting everyone hot and bothered --1.120.150.50 (talk) 09:06, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

These changes are grossly inaccurate, and need to be reverted. The article currently starts: "Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to contrast scientific fields. This is not on a basis of perceived methodological rigor of the research,".

But this is the opposite of the sources. The first source says: "It is the conventional wisdom in the biological and physical sciences, and within research agencies, that the social sciences are, well, ‘soft’, and lacking in methodological rigour." The next says: "skepticism about the rigors of social science has reached absurd heights." The third says: "Laypeople and academicians alike tend to judge fields such as sociology, psychology, and political science as "soft" because they are presumed to be understandable, devoid of mathematical rigor,"

These articles are defenders of soft sciences, and express dissatisfaction with the conventional wisdom and majority views. But the conventional wisdom is what defines these terms, and that is how WP should define them.

Maybe later on the article can explain how some people think that these terms are unfair or misleading or whatever, provided suitable sources can be found. But the terms hard and soft science are based in part on the perceived methodological rigor of the research. Roger (talk) 18:27, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Please do not edit or further revert this matter until this issue is resolved. The matters at hand are clearly entirely inaccurate representations of the fact. Please see the case for qualitative research at this point notwithstanding more than 2000 citations. Come back and think about it. The article as it were was nothing more than a diatribe against "soft" science, as is the article from Nature. I'll leave it at that. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/257453.pdf --121.222.121.19 (talk) 18:29, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Your source does not justify your edits. Please address my points, or I will revert. Roger (talk) 04:42, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

The sources clearly clarify the matter. Your revert is to nothing more than a polemical diatribe against soft science which is typical of a theoretical objectivist who is completely blind sighted by their own background.My next step should you choose to revert is to invoke 3RR and have you blocked from Wikipedia editing. I don't particularly care who or what your background is, or any claim to notoriety. This article as it was, was nothing other than a piece of polemics from someone who can't see outside of their box. Typical of someone who works in pure objectivity. As the article states quite clearly there is nothing at all disreputable about subjectivity in the context of scientific research, unless your backside is so hard pressed up against objectivity that you're too daft to see the forest for all the trees. You're stuck debating issues the rest of us sought to resolve in the 1970s like most conservatives. --121.222.121.19 (talk) 06:09, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Please address the issues and try to work towards a consensus, instead of threatening me. Roger (talk) 19:44, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

March 2018

Yeah, really! Such emotionalism hardly builds a case for scientific social sciences. I just completed a second master's degree in the social sciences, but unlike many I have also studied natural sciences, and that poster reveals the very sort of cathexis and politicization of the social sciences which deservedly makes people question them. Science is not about badgering others into submission. That's political activism. Science is not about "argument through anger" and accumulating, then venting, frustrations over the perceived faults of "out-group" members who haven't accepted one's goals regarding the absolute need for social/ideological/rhetorical reform. Arguments based on that kind of approach are, again, a form of political activism, not science. The term "soft science" doesn't need to be derogatory, but can simply be an admission that most of the conclusions within social science research tend to be of limited reliability, given the well-known fact that modern societies, and their cultures and institutional components, are constantly subject to change--including changes that occur specifically in reaction to social science research. So the findings that may have been perfectly well researched in the past and present might no longer apply to the societies of tomorrow. For example, survey research has advanced greatly since the days of the infamous "Dewey Defeats Truman" blunder, and yet we have just seen a similarly spectacular failure to predict the 2016 U.S. presidential election results. Old address and phone-based survey research is outdated in the era of multiple devices, and is struggling to adjust to these new changes. By the time the new research is completed on today's social media, what new forms of interconnectedness might then be in place? By contrast, one can still apply Newton's laws to predict mechanical phenomena, just as well as persons could 300 years ago - much better, in fact. Such differences in the accomplishments and generalizability of research findings in these different disciplines are definitely worth acknowledging. 136.181.195.29 (talk) 13:40, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps you didn't notice, but you are replying to a two year old discussion! If you can provide some sources that discuss the topics you mention, then they can certainly be acknowledged to the article. However, I suspect that what you are referring to is really about the methodological development of social science research (narrowly defined) and how it differs from experimental natural science, not the broader rubric of "hard" and "soft" science. The available sources describe that distinction as being largely pejorative and lacking a factual basis, as described in the article. – Joe (talk) 21:00, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

biology is hard science

Biology is hard science, not in the middle. The definition of natural sciences as stated in its article is precisely what is hard science. Also natural science as stated in its article is divided into two branches life science and physical science. The former one i.e. life science is basically biology and being a part of natural science it is absolutely hard science, not somewhere in the middle.

As stated in the biology article, "biologists use the scientific method to make observations, pose questions, generate hypotheses, perform experiments, and form conclusions about the world around them" which is exactly what is hard science. Also if you look at the branch section of articles life sciences and Outline of biology almost all the branches definitely qualify as hard science topics/subjects. Also biology branch like ecology which may seem in the middle is hard science given that it complies with the statement from biology article. While few branches of biology are kinda combined with social topics, biology itself is hard science & the biology part in it is also hard science.

In most schools, students have science and social science(which is also known as social studies). Science includes chemistry, physics, and biology, all three are hard science.

Many dictionary definition including Collins and many others include biology in hard science. Also most non primary sources [3] [4] include biology as hard science, non include biology in the middle.

Citation no 3 used in the article includes biology as hard science. The citation no 4 & 5 used in the article that say biology is in the middle are primary sources WP:PRIMARY. It doesn't look like a reliable source to categorise hard and soft science given that it calls plant and animal science as soft. There is no way one could categories them as in the middle of hard and soft, let alone calling them "soft" science.

I tried to make those changes but they were reverted. Now i have provided a detailed explanation/reason for my changes & time I have restored my version with non primary sources.2409:4071:E96:1C15:B5E8:FBB2:B8F2:D428 (talk) 04:23, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Please read beyond the first paragraph. The main takeaway from the available sources on this topic is that the hard/soft distinction is a poorly-defined colloquialism lacking any empirical support, save for superficial differences like the average number of graphs in papers. In other words, there is no definitive answer as to whether biology is "hard" or "soft" because no serious contemporary scholars in philosophy or sociology of science thinks that's a meaningful distinction. It's ironic then that almost edits to this page in the last few years have been to fiddle with which fields appear where in a short list of examples that were only meant to be illustrative. I've therefore trimmed it back to just saying that natural sciences are usually considered hard and social sciences soft.

By the way, we usually don't consider dictionaries to be particularly good sources, especially when there are more in-depth sources available on the meaning of a word or phrase, as there are here. – Joe (talk) 07:49, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

The terms hard and soft science are just conventionally used terms to distinguish topics that are purely based on scientific method and those that aren't. To put it simply hard science is purely based on facts whereas the soft science is somewhat opinionated(and kinda ideological). Conventionally hard science is used to describe topics like physics, biology and chemistry which is based on pure scientific research. When we say scientifically speaking or what does the science say, we mean hard science & when we say it's a scientific/ non-scientific issue we mean it is/isn't hard science issue respectively. In fact some people would argue that soft science isn't even science but a seperate topic of its own. Now it's kinda hard for me to explain but I'll try. Topics like how ecosystems work, quantum mechanics, history of earth etc are based on scientific facts and are definitive. While on the other hand things like economics, political science,etc are somewhat different.

And it is easy to distinguish which falls where if one understands the basics.

Also while dictionaries aren't good for defining complex topics, it's good for informal terms. So I think it in this case dictionary definition can be used.

So I think the part where it says natural science includes astronomy, physics, biology , chemistry should be restored. Also I don't want to get into any edit war. Hence I won't make any changes before discussing and reaching conclusion. 2409:4071:E96:1C15:B29E:57C:A2A9:E98B (talk) 09:59, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

Again: read the rest of the article. That is what the lead section should summarise, not your own personal (and as a "soft scientist" may I say extremely ignorant) thoughts on the demarcation problem. – Joe (talk) 10:55, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I wasn't asking for any of my "personal views" to be summarised. I was just asking for biology to be included as hard science and the article to state that physics, biology ,astronomy, chemistry are hard science. That's it. Because it's just like other hard science i e. Physics ,chemistry. And as I said earlier that distinction isn't easy to explain so maybe you've misinterpreted my statement (which made you call me ignorant; which I think was uncalled for, cause I was being kind and to the point and never attacked you in any way.Kindly take back that statement).

simply put, natural science ( which includes biology, physics astronomy)= hard, social science=soft. They are just informal terms.

So as the page earlier stated, natural sciences topics which include physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry should be included as hard science in the article is all I am saying.2409:4071:E96:1C15:B983:2CCF:BE72:B95E (talk) 12:43, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

T

For the talk on gender bias, how are we sure the sources cited for how sexism influences hard and soft science isnt gender biased, we can quite clearly see that those who wrote it are female 36.83.185.18 (talk) 23:10, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

After my previous point T

The article linked by said statement leads back to a paper which has not even been accepted apparently 36.83.185.18 (talk) 23:13, 26 January 2022 (UTC)

I think you meant "not been published yet". It is now published here. OsFish (talk) 10:42, 24 October 2023 (UTC)