I mean... a social science is a science by definition, and making an argument successfully within those fields involves proving it via the same methods that are used in natural sciences. It's just not as easy to eliminate variables and come to clean "laws" as easily, as is possible in say chemistry or physics.

There is a lot of gray area, for example is medicine a science? Many treatments or diagnoses are based on probabilistic or empirical models -- that doesn't make them worthless.

When the comments takes only three levels to get to "what is science?"

>There is a lot of gray area, for example is medicine a science? Many treatments or diagnoses are based on probabilistic or empirical models -- that doesn't make them worthless.

Medicine is not generally considered a science.

And never was it implied that things that aren't science are worthless.

Not sure why you're getting down voted. Economics is a science, full stop.

"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Or mathematics.

I would argue mathematics isn't really a science, as it isn't outward looking to the world, rather it is a study of self-consistent rewriting rules. You can obtain any mathematical result without knowing anything about the universe (something also true for, lets say, analytic philosophy).

Sure, but then the distinction between science / not-science hasn't got that much value.

A not-science (math) is the most critical tool in the scientific toolbox, and hence contributed more to scientific progress than any isolated branch of science.

Sure, natural languages also contributed "more to science" than "any isolated branch" but learning a language (for its use rather than linguistics/anthropology) isnt a science. I think it is a useful distinction.

Yeah. My personal theory is that mathematics is a language, which happens to be useful in the description of scientific phenomena.

Are group and ring theory not a science, or are they not mathematics?