Re:Twitter Suspends Prominent Alt-Right Accounts
by pron on Thursday November 17, 2016 @02:02PM
(#12980330)
> The entire field appears to be little more than a collection of fallacies in action
It "appears" this way only to someone who is completely uninterested in anything more than a cursory look. After getting my bachelor's degree in mathematics, I went to grad school to study history (which entails studying some sociology), and I can tell you first hand that it is no such thing. Even a shallow overview of the social sciences and the rigorous methodologies they employ will convince you of that. Obviously, those are not exact sciences, and social researchers are well aware of that. But the rigor of their methods is not much different from those employed in, say, medicine. Does every social science result deserve the same degree of epistemological confidence as a mathematical theorem or a physics experiment? Of course not! Are there false or even ridiculous "results"? Certainly, although the field as a whole eventually rejects them. But it is far, far, more rigorous and valid than the beliefs of people based on personal observation and gut feeling. And I hope this is obvious: even an ancient Greek who looked up at the skies and took notes of stars' positions but knew nothing about gravity or Copernicus, knew more about astronomy that a person who isn't even interested in studying the skies and recording observations, regardless of how incomplete the Greek's knowledge was.
It "appears" this way only to someone who is completely uninterested in anything more than a cursory look. After getting my bachelor's degree in mathematics, I went to grad school to study history (which entails studying some sociology), and I can tell you first hand that it is no such thing. Even a shallow overview of the social sciences and the rigorous methodologies they employ will convince you of that. Obviously, those are not exact sciences, and social researchers are well aware of that. But the rigor of their methods is not much different from those employed in, say, medicine. Does every social science result deserve the same degree of epistemological confidence as a mathematical theorem or a physics experiment? Of course not! Are there false or even ridiculous "results"? Certainly, although the field as a whole eventually rejects them. But it is far, far, more rigorous and valid than the beliefs of people based on personal observation and gut feeling. And I hope this is obvious: even an ancient Greek who looked up at the skies and took notes of stars' positions but knew nothing about gravity or Copernicus, knew more about astronomy that a person who isn't even interested in studying the skies and recording observations, regardless of how incomplete the Greek's knowledge was.