On Sat, Jul 28, 2001 at 10:53:11AM -0400, John D. Giorgis wrote:
> In the meantime, I will continue to support my definition of science being
> the application of the scientific method to gain information about the
> world as the best starting point for defining science.
I think the others who have been arguing against Economics as a hard science
have an intuitive idea of what they "mean", but perhaps they haven't explained
well. I'll give it a shot.
"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this:
the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment".
--Richard Feynman
It is not any particular PERSON whose prediction determines whether they
are a scientist. It is the KNOWLEDGE of the discipline -- what is the
predictive power of that knowlege?
Take Dan's favorite example (okay, mine too!), Physics. If you ask
what will happen when a baseball is thrown with a certain velocity and
with the wind and what have you, Physics will predict its motion quite
accurately. If you ask what will happen if you shine a coherent beam
of photons with a given wavelength onto two slits with a given size
and separation and then onto a screen, Physics will predict the exact
pattern that will be observed. There are many other examples, of course.
The point is that if you open up a Physics book to a random page, the
information on that page will be able to be used to make many highly
precise and accurate predictions.
Now imagine trying that with an Economics textbook. You might open up
to the law of supply and demand and predict that an oil shortage will
raise the price of oil. Fine (but note you won't be able to make a very
precise prediction, even so). But you are much more likely to open up
to something like the inflation-unemployment relation (I forgot the
name), or worse, to something about the relation between money supply
and interest rates and the effect on the macro-economy.
The point is this: while Economics is capable of making some good (but
relatively vague) predictions, most of the knowledge of Economics cannot
be used to make accurate and precise predictions.
Does that mean that Economics is not science? I don't know. Maybe,
as someone said, it is a science in development. But I imagine it
will never even approach the precision and accuracy of Physics in its
predictions. If Economics is a science, certainly it is a different
class of science. I am inclined to call Economics a soft science or a
social science, and Physics a hard science, as a short hand for what I
explained above.
--
"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
