| 12/15/2010 2:47 pm |
 Junior Member

Regist.: 11/30/2010 Topics: 3 Posts: 9
 OFFLINE | The basic idea of graphism is that Hard Sciences will have more graphs than Soft Science. I just wondered what you people thought about it, if there are any people left...
Anyway, onto the main discussion! This thread was inspired by the Skeptic's Dictionary, which called Jung's Collective Unconscious model pseudo-scientific because it couldn't be tested, which is true. This led me on the inevitable train of thought about the validity of soft sciences.
If some fundamental parts of our own psyche can only be understood by insight or unprovable models, how do we proceed? Or will we have to satisfy ourselves with a copenhagen attitude towards a variety of varying models which fit the evidence best?
The issue here is that they just seem to be probable explanations of phenomenon, and those are very easy to create (Chariot of the Gods anyone?). And ultimately the menu is not the meal, and things like the inability of language to properly express things and our own imperfect understanding will eventually put a damper on our ability to speculate accurately.
This can be said about the soft sciences, but could there be a connection here with the hard sciences? Here is a quote from A Brief History of Time:
In order to talk about the nature of the universe and to discuss questions such as whether it has a beginning or
an end, you have to be clear about what a scientific theory is. I shall take the simpleminded view that a theory
is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to
observations that we make. It exists only in our minds and does not have any other reality (whatever that might
mean).
This is just a start, and I hope my introduction doesn't limit the topic. Apologies for the formatting of the quote in advance. |
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| 12/26/2010 12:15 am |
 Administrator Senior Member

Regist.: 11/22/2010 Topics: 15 Posts: 5
 OFFLINE | I am not convinced that one can separate the 'hard' from the 'soft' sciences entirely. you bring up QM, I think there we find that if we ignore the interior and subjective, then our 'objective measurements' of the world come to some very absurd and incomprehensible conclusions.
I think many would consider psychology to be a soft science; I'm not so certain about this anymore since from psychology has emerged cognitive science and neuroscience. But the findings of psychology have radical implications for our interpretations of the hard sciences, and ultimately some curious patterns occur in the findings of both. |
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| 02/24/2012 5:06 pm |
 NEWBIE

Regist.: 11/22/2011 Topics: 0 Posts: 3
 OFFLINE | hard and soft is better described as emperical science or pseudoscience.
any combination of the two is pseudoscience. |
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