Guest essay by Steven Burnett
This is an essay regarding the fundamental differences between the hard and soft sciences. While I don’t emphasize climatology much in the essay, I believe this may provide some insight into the chasm of evidence and approach between the two.
Recently, more climate consenters have been starting to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that the discrepancies between models and reality are, in fact, significant. While there are still some holdouts there have been more than a few mainstream discussions about some of the “softness” in climate science.
In a way it’s an olive branch to the climate skeptics. While there are crazies on both sides of the climate debate, I find that the core of climate skepticism stems from articulating the differences between the hard and soft sciences. I have studied and been degreed in both, and would like to offer up some explanations and examples of the differences between them.
I have been a scientist since before I had proper memory formation. My father, an engineer, and I used to go for walks and he explained the physical world the way an engineer sees it. So, as the story goes, by the time I was 13 months I pointed to a condensation trail by an airplane and explained to my mother what it was and how it was formed.
My first childhood Hero was Egon Spengler, a ghostbuster, and I pulled out my encyclopedias and looked for definitions of all the terms used in the movies and cartoons. I was then introduced to Back to the Future and my interests moved from nuclear particles to space time. Naturally my hero moved to Einstein. But it wasn’t just movies that influenced my development as a scientist. I had children’s books on Louis Pasteur, Dr. Ballard, Edison and Galileo. Each of these scientists drastically moved humanity’s understanding forward, despite enormous criticism of their theories and hypothesis. Needless to say my scientific heroes weren’t particularly popular in their day and age.
As a child I was listed as gifted learning disabled. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s, dysgraphia, and ADD while I was young. I thus had poor social skills, a short attention span, and couldn’t write legibly. As an extrovert, having trouble with nonverbal communication was a massive struggle. I turned to my books, encyclopedias, and the library to attempt to understand and solve the problem. There is an incredible amount of information and not being able to focus appreciably on a single source led to research threads through multiple disciplines. At the end of the day my choice was simple, experiment with social techniques or give up. I chose the former.
I still perform regular experiments and log the data. All results are mentally catalogued, anomalies flagged and reviewed until I thoroughly understand what nuances I missed. The system isn’t perfect, I can intone or inflect improperly, I can also mistakenly use accurate but socially improper lexicon as my vocabulary is immense. Failures can lead to hostility, repudiation or ostracization. Society is more unforgiving than many realize, but my experiments have been fruitful. The application of successful techniques has helped me mitigate eccentric behaviors and evolve or cultivate strategies which help me appear normal. The proper application of the scientific method in my daily life is the difference between being functional and not.
Being able to screen good hypothesis formulation, experimental technique and results was an integral part of my development. Determining logical fallacies and errors, standards of proof and reproducibility was the difference between keeping friends and losing them. It is also how I fundamentally distinguish behind the hard and soft sciences.
The whole reason for this essay came from me stumbling upon the Wikipedia article attempting to distinguish between the two and being frankly dumbfounded. I have to reproduce the second paragraph in full so that everyone truly understands my issue.
“Philosophers and sociologists of science have not been able to confirm the relationship between these characteristics and perceived hardness or softness in empirical studies. Supposedly more “developed” hard sciences do not in fact have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. Commonly cited methodological differences are also not a reliable indicator. Psychologists use controlled experiments andeconomists use mathematical modelling, but as social sciences both are usually considered soft sciences, while natural sciences such as biology do not always aim to generate testable predictions. There are some measurable differences between hard and soft sciences. For example, hard sciences make more extensive use of graphs,[4][11]and soft sciences are more prone to a rapid turnover of buzzwords.”
In short philosophers, and sociologists of science, both soft science fields, haven’t been able to confirm the differences. They point to a lack of consensus in the hard sciences, controlled experiments and mathematical models. The analysis is about as meaningful as finding no difference between a peewee and professional basketball game because they both shoot rubberized orange balls at hoops. That is exactly the problem with the soft sciences, they can get the results they want by only evaluating the characteristics they choose.
Ironically I have been degreed in both the hard and soft sciences. I possess a bachelors in chemical engineering and psychology. Asking someone what they want to do for the rest of their life at 18 is a bit tough to answer especially when your knowledgebase and interests were as tremendously varied as were mine.
I started as a biological engineer, thought it was a ridiculous amount of work compared with the political science and business majors I roomed with and switched to psychology. I wasn’t too far into the psychology program before I realized I despised psychology and by extension the other soft sciences. I only graduated with the degree to spite the psychology program, I’m not joking.
The soft sciences spend the first two weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method. When my research methods professor used Carl Sagan’s essay a dragon in my garage as a means of saying that nothing can be proven or disproved, I dropped my textbook on the floor, so it would make a rather loud sound, stopping the lecture. I then dropped it again, and remarked that maybe next time it will stay up because we totally can’t prove the existence of gravity. Looking back it wasn’t very nice, but there is only so much rage I can contain.
That isn’t the only instance of things that resulted in a massive mental face palm in that program. In the soft sciences it’s accepted that the phenomena are inherently complex, thus it is acceptable to formulate a study that does not eliminate variables beyond the one being studied. Statistics is used to sort for the significance of a result.
For instance in a survey there is no regard given to the difference between people who choose to respond vs simply throwing it out, and all responses are considered correct regardless of the topic’s nature. Imagine performing a survey on human sexuality that asked about frequency, number of partners and propensity for cheating. Accepting any of the responses as representative of the population as a whole is not only unverifiable, it’s also very likely to be wrong.
Personal bias enters any discussion of results frequently. There is very strong evidence from monozygotic twin studies and others that IQ is strongly correlated with genetics. Because of the implications regarding racial IQ discrepancies, we received rather lengthy lectures about any variables, missed test parameters and the like, every time these studies entered the curriculum. Even though IQ heritability has generally been confirmed as 85%[1], regardless of the test used, the idea of nature vs. nurture is still considered a legitimate debate topic in this “scientific” field. More importantly the variables we were warned about are accounted for in the original studies.
Of course it’s perfectly acceptable to present an ad hoc change of the definition of intelligence without a preceding lecture and caveats about possible problems or complications. If it tickles the political fancy it’s taught, even if there are no empirical studies to support the hypothesis. Gardner’s hypothesis was only one politically correct theory taught with no evidence.
Carol Gilligan is a published feminist who wrote about male bias and suppression in adolescent development. Neither she nor her disciples have ever been able to validate her claims. In the textbook Adolesence and Emerging Adulthood, her theories would receive a dedicated page or more, and were filled with notations about how “her writings have received a wide audience”, or, that a school was “so impressed with Gilligans findings that school authorities revised the entire school curriculum”. By comparison the fact that both girls and boys self esteem declines in adolescence, that she only uses excerpts of interviews in her research, or that no corroboration of her results can be found, were minimized. The section concluded with the paragraph,
“although Gilligan’s research methods can be criticized for certain flaws, other researchers have begun to explore the issues she has raised, using more rigorous methods. In one study Susan Harter and her colleagues examined Gilligan’s idea of losing one’s “voice” in adolescence…. ….However Harter’s research does not support Gilligan’s claim that girls’ voice declines as they enter adolescence.” [3]
In the hard sciences, a lack of evidence and poor methodology usually excludes theories and researchers who promote them from the textbooks and the classroom, but in psychology, I was still tested on them.
Unfortunately soft science is spreading into the other domains. In my capstone course we had to watch the thoroughly debunked Gasland documentary. We heard about fracking fluids, well contamination and maybe just possibly earthquakes caused by the process. When I presented three studies that thoroughly destroyed the claims the professor dismissed them with a wave of his hand. We were required to take a course called energy and the environment, which is best described as green masturbation. When you present solar roads, indoor farming, renewables, and local agriculture, as a required engineering course without any sort of cost benefit analysis or numerical pretense what else can you call it?
Overall though, in chemical engineering we have very exact equations that give us very exact answers. These equations are derived from hundreds of experiments, outlining the variables for each substance used. Fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, heat transfer, physics, chemistry and other hard science disciplines have had to prove themselves correct by testing for the opposite conclusion. My thermodynamics textbook didn’t begin with a lecture about how scientific it is, it opened with the statement that the study of thermodynamics exists only because we haven’t found any instances where a system operates differently.
When neutrinos were detected moving faster than the speed of light it was a big deal. The result would have overwritten over 100 years of experiments saying it couldn’t be broken, it still hasn’t just FYI. When cold fusion experiments couldn’t be validated their proponents were laughed out of any major publication. In the hard sciences when the results of a hypothesis diverged from reality they were discarded and checked for errors, but it would still only take a single reproducible experiment to validate or invalidate the concept.
The same problems that plague psychology are rampant in climatology. Tribalism is strong enough that most are willing to break out into red or blue war paint. When faced with an incredibly complex problem they only design their experiments (climate models) to handle the variable they are interested in. Confounding variables, be it ENSO, the AMO, cosmic rays, TSI, ocean heating, surface albedo, UHI, and other impacts are ignored even though they have demonstrably significant impacts on their measurement parameter. When faced with falsifying data, the data is ignored or marginalized. There is no significant internal forensic review of the experimental construct once it can be declared dead, and they essentially keep cashing the checks and publishing as if the hypothesis are valid.
Please understand it’s not that soft sciences are pointless, they’re simply worthless. Examining what makes humans, society or even the climate tick are noble endeavors. The failure to demand reproducible or falsifiable results, reject failed hypothesis, or allow for and defend work that is riddled with personal or political bias is what undermines these fields, it’s what makes them “soft”. More succinctly the problem with these fields isn’t entirely methodological, it’s cultural and it exists at every stage of training.
Inevitably, the ignorance of logical fallacies and degradation of the sciences begs the question why. Perhaps its tied to the ever increasing percentage of American’s who are going to college. After all, more students means more professors. Perhaps it’s a hiring bias[2], and subsequent group think, or maybe hiring more professors simply means they have to lower standards. By the same token, making more money available for grants may allow for more shoddy research. My hard science background was rooted in survival, perhaps not needing to worry about your next meal is bad for scientists. Like Kohlbergs sixth stage of moral development, maybe it’s simply too difficult to uphold the standard. It’s Ironic that after all my research, and all my studies, that the most compelling insight likely comes from the ghostbusters.
If I may wax poetic for a moment, the hard sciences are like a rock while the soft sciences are like sand. They are fundamentally composed of the same stuff, but it’s the structure that makes them different. You must find a comfortable spot to rest on the rock but sand conforms around you. An uncomfortable rock must be dealt with, sand can simply be brushed away. Rock climbing requires training and equipment, a walk on the beach does not. I have had the opportunity to do both, and from personal experience, rock climbing is both harder and more fulfilling.
References
1. Bouchard, Thomas J. “Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits. A Survey.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13.4 (2004): 148-51. Print.
2. Inbar, Y., and J. Lammers. “Political Diversity in Social and Personality Psychology.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7.5 (2012): 496-503. Web.
3. Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.
Thank you for your informative post. I also have had experience in both hard and soft sciences, in my case Chemistry and Management Science, and what you say resonates.
For example in Organizational studies, it is a principle that a widely shared perception is reality. That is, as an individual or leader, you may see things differently, and may be persuaded by facts that disprove the general perception. But if you act without respecting the perceived reality, you do so at your peril. The parallel with “consensus” science is obvious.
I appreciated your insight that social sciences deal with realities so complex that all relevant variables cannot be excluded, whereas hard sciences proceed by studying one variable at a time. This is exactly how the CO2 “control knob” was invented. All other variables were dismissed as evening out over time. It was never mentioned that CO2 and temperature observations are only correlated for a short period, the last quarter of the 20th century. Now there is a scramble to affirm some variables which offset warming (to explain the pause), and to make certain to discredit any factors, like AMO, that could have contributed to past warming.
Excellent article!! I took 27 semester hours of psychology courses as electives as they were a cake walk compared to the engineering, statistics and quantitative methods courses I was required to take in undergrad and graduate school and can very much identify with Mr. Burnett’s article and Mr. Burnett, himself. I would only add that Climatology, and the soft sciences in general, seem to have degraded significantly since my college days. Decay of intellectual honesty would seem to be the main culprit. But then it is obvious from many of the references Mr. Burnett makes in his article that many years separate his academic experiences from mine.
Also, acceptance of the concept of ‘networking’ as a legitimate tool for seeking and selecting individuals for positions in academics and industry has legitimized political and personal relationships above skills, intelligence and experience in personnel selection, leading, to some degree, to many of the problems noted.
“there is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and to describe. There is human action.
It is a fact that up to now nothing has been done to bridge over the gulf that yawns between the natural events in the consummation of which science is unable to find any finality and the conscious acts of men that invariably aim at definite ends. To neglect, in the treatment of human action, reference to the ends aimed at by the actors is no less absurd than were the endeavors to resort to finality in the interpretation of natural phenomena.” – http://mises.org/books/ultimate.pdf
An excellent article. Well worth reading more than once. Thanks and thanks to Anthony for hosting it.
Although I appreciate the hard-vs.-soft-science distinction, my experience leads me to emphasize the difference between the scientists, not the sciences. There are a great number of people who have been able to master enough of a hard science to pass the tests and get the credentials but who are unwilling or unable to apply the scientific method. Conversely, but probably less relevantly to this blog’s subject matter, there have been some in economics and probably even sociology who apply the scientific method meticulously.
I bring this up because our society currently suffers greatly from that fact that the overwhelming majority of our ruling classes mistake the pronouncements of “scientists” for the fruits of the scientific method. Yes, lack of rigor in the soft sciences is a problem, as is the tendency for citation of a “study” to end debate prematurely. Even more of a problem, though, is the tendency for hard-science credentials to give weight to transcendentally silly hypotheses. The hard sciences may not be the disciplines most afflicted with the tendency of its credentialed to speak with more confidence than their knowledge justifies. But the results of that tendency within the hard sciences may be worse.
“I then dropped it again, and remarked that maybe next time it will stay up because we totally can’t prove the existence of gravity.”
I really hope you didn’t add that one to the “do not do” part of your notebook. Greatest response to idiocy ever!
Empirical “Hard” v “Soft” science
“Hard science”: Optical sciences such as at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Time and Frequency Division where:
“Soft science”: “Climate science” where > 95% of 34 year projections by Global Warming Models are greater than actual global temperatures.
Aerospace Engineer Burt Rutan demonstrates the perspective of a “hard” scientist/engineer on “climate change”. aka Anthropogenic Global Warming PDF and WUWT TV
That is exactly the problem with the soft sciences, they can get the results they want by only evaluating the characteristics they choose.
…
The soft sciences spend the first two weeks of a course talking about how they are a science, and the next 13 weeks destroying every pillar of the scientific method
A most enjoyable essay. I’m bookmarking it as a Watts Best and sharing it.
Great post. As an electrical engineer I can relate to the frustrations in dealing with the soft sciences both in college and now through my exposure to much of climate ‘science.’
I’ve been practicing the scientific method in the private sector for more than three decades. Many would say this makes my work an evil, profit-driven, heartless activity. But in reality, we’re looking for truth — a technically and economically correct answer. Our funding is driven by the need for a correct, practical, affordable solution for a technical need. If a hypothesis is found to be wrong, my employer cannot afford to ignore this fact, regardless of how much everyone wanted it to be correct. Like it or not, economics says that you do not implement a solution that does not work – you go out of business if you do. The hypothesis is discarded regardless of personal feelings.
If you’re in a venture funded by the government — by definition primarily a political enterprise — the consequences of finding a politically undesirable answer is more dire than finding a technically or economically undesirable one. The researcher’s organization may not be able to afford a politically intolerable answer, regardless of the technical correctness. There may be few consequences for publishing technically incorrect information, but publishing politically unpopular information – regardless of its accuracy – may be suicidal.
My hypothesis (just a hypothesis, mind you – it may well be wrong): Whether a given branch of science evolves into “Hard Science” or into a “Soft Science” is mainly driven by the primary source of funding for it.
Yup; Climate Alchemy is a soft science. It’s all based on the assumption that a planetary surface emits net IR energy to a GHG-containing atmosphere at the same rate it would in a vacuum to a sink at Absolute Zero. This is total bunkum as any professional engineer or physicist will confirm.
any look at a climate science course shows 50% of it is mitigation policy for global warming. which fits with the 97% researcher who said they had reviewed plenty of papers and most were about mitigation rather than anything that dealt with ‘the science’.
““Philosophers and sociologists of science have not been able to confirm the relationship between these characteristics and perceived hardness or softness in empirical studies. Supposedly more “developed” hard sciences do not in fact have a greater degree of consensus or selectivity in accepting new results. ”
Yes.
The inability to draw hard fast sharp lines between science and non science, between ‘hard’ science and ‘soft’ science is well know. It is the problem known as epistemology. What do we know, what are the forms of knowing, and how do they differ.
If you think you have a solution, a medal in philosophy is awaiting you.
Put another way, if you examine the empirical evidence of what various sciences actually DO, then you will find no sharp lines, no uniquely defined categorizations. Part of this is due to the problem of classification and natural categories. Is science a natural kind?
Another way to look at it is a rationalist approach, wherein you just “think about” what “science” should be. This approach fails in a spectacular way, go ahead and try.
Great article. Somehow you navigated the system. Congrats. Today you would likely have been drugged into conformity.
WUWT hits another home run. Thanks Mr. Burnett for this illuminating essay. Terrific thread of comments too.
It was said above: “In science this statement is in fact correct…. nothing can be proven or disproved.”
Nonsense! That is except when context is dropped and the assumption is made that proof means to be shown to be true without context. Proof MEANS to specify the context and facts of reality in which the proposition is true. Go outside of that context and ignore critical facts of reality, then all bets are off (ie. the so called soft sciences). The critical fact ignored is that, for man, knowledge is contextual. Meaning that any given unit of knowledge is Knowledge because it is without contradiction with all other units of knowledge that are known (in context) at the time. Said context can expand but previous knowledge is still true but now better understood with more detail.
One of the more perverse aspects of the pretense of contextless knowledge is the presumption that, in the future, anything can become anything else without consideration of cause, action, or circumstance (ie god did it, stuff happens, somehow, just because et.al). Hence, the conclusion follows that even if it is demonstrable in the past and present, it may not demonstrable in the future. More succinctly stated: A equals Non A for all cases of A.
Question: if the above is true, how could one know it to be true? You can’t because the position destroys itself. The mind that accepts it has committed intellectual suicide. Extinction is soon to follow. See the dark ages for instructive detail.
This essay brought back a memory of a professor in engineering who thought Statics, Dynamics, and Strengths courses (Hard Science and Engineering). He was known to be a hard grader and students lobbied partial credit on assignments marked wrong, usually without success.
One day, there was a newspaper article about a ski-lift accident. The engineer who designed the dolly wheel assembly and cable had neglected to account for cable sag. Therefore there was higher tension than expected on the fitting for the hauling cable. The professor posted the newspaper article and a force diagram of the cable and trolley assembly on E-2 paper. Below that he posted something like the following:
It is a lesson that sticks.
Thank you so much for your article. I really enjoyed it. I have always thought this way. I am not a scientist. Neither of my parents were college educated. But I always looked at the world the way you described you do.
When I went to college as an older adult for the first time, I gravitated towards geology. I have a BS in it. I have never worked in the field, instead getting a teaching certification and taking more courses to become certified to teach all sciences in high school in grades 7-12.
I am very rigorous and critical of these soft sciences. I have always maintained these soft sciences cannot give us a true picture of things. I’ve said the same of statistics. Fuzzy math. However, I see their usefulness, as I do other soft sciences. But they are only as useful as human beings make them. And unfortunately they are used more for ill, IMO, than they are for good.
I often find myself alone in the company I keep when it comes to evaluation of information.
As a public school teacher, I am inundated on a daily basis with ‘educational data’. This term disgusts me every time I hear it.
The politics in a public school system, to be sure, is revolting enough. But when they defend their politics using educational ‘data’ I have to refrain myself from showing my disgust, because when I have been very vocal about the worth of this so-called ‘data’, it has been used against me by administrators in unpleasant ways.
I’m sure you can appreciate the conundrum I always find myself in when trying to explain to parents in the most gentle and diplomatic way possible that Little Billy’s test scores are more than worthless. Because of course, if he is labeled as being proficient in science, then why is he failing my class?
And the decisions being made in regards to funding are outrageous because it is based upon this ‘data’.
I am forced as an educator to attend seminar upon seminar and class upon worthless education class perusing through ‘data’ that is some of the most meaningless on the planet. Educators who are not science teachers babble about the importance of these fruitless exercises as if they are saving the world with this stuff. They are robots without an original thought in their skulls.
And though there are still many science teachers across the spectrum of disciplines who are just as outraged by these things, that number is rapidly declining. More and more ‘science’ teachers are getting BA degrees in a science and have no sort of scientific training to speak of. Hence, they push these ridiculous notions that you mentioned.
I often comment the day a student’s test scores are used to primarily evaluate my effectiveness as an instructor, I’m heading for oil field work. I still wonder if I could really do it. Because somehow, maybe irrationally so, I believe my presence in the two communities I teach in may somehow help change a few people into solid critical and rational thinkers. That is if parents don’t lynch me first because they think I am too ‘hard’ and that A’s for effort should be given freely.
I guess I am still on the fence about this.
Thanks again for the great article!
Did someone open a window? The fresh air is exhilarating! Marvelous. GK
rogerknights says:
May 20, 2014 at 8:59 am
from Henry Bauer’s Science or Pseudoscience? page 14:
“the distinction between natural science and social science is clear enough for the present purpose: between, respectively, certain and merely probable consequences of a given set of circumstances. That’s the essence of it, and for many purposes it is a world of difference.”
No, the general laws of physical science can be probabilistic; however, the probabilities are objective not subjective and certainly not Bayesian. The soft sciences have no general laws of either variety. Climate science is similar. It contains general laws in the theory of radiation but they must be supplemented with laws about such phenomena as cloud behavior, laws which simply do not exist at this time.
Stephen Rasey says:
May 20, 2014 at 8:19 am
Isn’t this article powerful evidence for my claim that Anthony is the world’s best blogger?
This article resonated for me as no other. I too was trained at the interface of soft and hard science, and continue to live at this border between methodologies: as an undergraduate at Harvard College I majored in “Experimental Psychology”, think B. F. Skinner and rats and pigeons in specialized boxes, and now I am a physician, using hard science and technology for my tools, but interfacing with sick, dying and suffering peoples as my work. The art part of medicine is definitely more in the soft science realm.
The Harvard Psychology department distinguished itself from its neighboring department, Psychology and Social Relations, and the somewhat more distant Sociology department, by pushing the hard scientific method to a fanatic degree. Fuzzy thinking, as some called it was banned. Significance with p at .05 was barely tolerated—–we were to strive for p<.01. And I think some very good science was done.
Yet even the fetish for hard science, which to this day I admire, was undermined often by the personal agenda-based need to extrapolate findings in rats and pigeons to the ever so much more complex social animals like Humans. The classic of the era was BF Skinner's utopian book about the "Control of Human Behavior". But the extrapolations from rats and pigeons to humans was sometimes more wishful than scientific.
As a senior in college I ventured over into the Psych and Soc Rel department for a course called "On Aggression", as in Konrad Lorenz's book. Sadly, the whole topic was treated as what we now call post normal science. An assumption of the course was that aggression is an evil that must driven out of human behavior. Starting with that discussion there was no possibility of discussing whether aggression has been critical to human evolution and sustaining human progress and in that light discussing aggression as a phenomenon subjectible to hard scientific study. When I wrote an essay suggesting that many "psychologists" enter the field in order to answer questions about themselves, or to gain levers of control over others, because they perceived themselves as vulnerable to aggression, in this case, I was ostracized by others in the seminar as almost beyond the pale.
It is so sadly true that the agenda-driven science of "climate change" is like the agenda-driven findings in psychology. What used to be called Earth Science or Geology or Science of Oceans and Atmosphere, and which was and still can be truly a hard science (think of Bob Tisdale's posts) is used for the personal and political agenda's of the Mann's, Gore's, and others, and facts be damned.
Badger40 says:
May 20, 2014 at 9:38 am
Seems to me that, of all hard sciences, Geology would be the most fun to teach. At least, it would be if your school supports you with proper resources. Also, it seems to me that Geology incorporates Hard History rather than Soft History or today’s ubiquitous Faux History. Geology also incorporates aesthetics. Your job has to be just too much fun.
I think “Two dogmas of empiricism” is pretty much required reading on this matter.
Also: The Wikipedia article is right in that claims of distinction between hard and soft science fail empirical (i.e. hard science) tests miserably and reliably.