”Yeah, But It’s Not SCIENCE Science”

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

As an alarming thread of anti-intellectualism runs through the United States, while government bodies slash funding for increasingly politicized scientific research, scientists are desperately clinging to what makes them scientists. Namely, the scientific method, quantitative data, and the ever-important deductive reasoning.

Scientists feel like they need to defend themselves against political pundits, and who can blame them? Still, many tend to rely upon the scientific hallmarks born of the Age of Enlightenment. As philosopher of science Karl Popper has described it, everything must be falsifiable, meaning it must be observable, verifiable, and reproducible. “Ables” and “ibles” aside, science knows it has a PR problem when pseudoscience such as anti-vaxx views and homeopathy corner the American wellness market.

There is a segment of scientists who are lost in the mix: those who do their science with qualitative data rather than quantitative, who rely upon inductive reasoning rather than deductive, who ask us to accept irreproducible phenomena as evidence.

They are the social scientists, and as their name suggests, they do science, but a qualified science. That pesky “social” is stuck in front of their name, forever dividing them from the “real” scientists who are supposedly entitled to make stronger claims about species that are…