zlacker

Since you used the word resisted, it sounds like you're suggesting that there is an existing demonstrable and falsifiable underpinning for one or more of the social sciences which has not been adopted. What would that be?

>>vajrab+(OP)
It would be more accurate so say that they've resisted looking for one. And even that's a bit unfair, since doing proper experiments (with basic features like a control group, never mind replication or blinding) in sociology, economics, or political 'science' is somewhere between crushingly expensive and outright impossible.

>>vajrab+(OP)
Soddy himself is a partial answer, in the case of economics, though I find Georgescu-Roegen generally a more complete treatment. The fact that Nobel-prize-winning economists are on record stating that economics still has no coherent theory of growth (the subject of its most notable foundational text) is ... significant. Steve Keen has been addressing that and strikes me as solidly convincing:

https://invidio.us/watch?v=BAjN6bG7XzM

(There's a paper, I'm not sure if it's published, I received it directly from Keen, will research.)

There's Thorstein Veblen's provocative question as to why economics is not an evolutionary science: https://archive.org/details/jstor-1882952

There's the difficulty economics has, generally, in even settling on basic questions: what is wealth (is it a stock or a flow? how is it measured?)? What is money? What is value?

W. Brian Arthur notes in one of his books that virtually all economics is aimed at policy, and that as a consequence there's very little purely theoretical foundation. (His own contribution has been on complexity economics, with several interesting contributions and two notable seminars.)

Of the set of sciences here, political science is the one I can comment the least on, though if it should also happen to revolve and evolve largely around policy rather than theoretic discussion, it may be afflicted by similar dynamics as economics, and a casual observation suggests it is.

My reading is that the social sciences generally should probably be formulated as systems sciences, and there've been some attempts, mostly solidly rejected, at doing so. Norbert Weiner's exceedingly cringily-named On the Humane Use of Human Beings (the book is vastly better than its title suggests) was an attempt at this. There's another by Alfred Kuhn (no relation to Thomas), of the University of Cincinnati, The study of society : a unified approach (https://www.worldcat.org/title/study-of-society-a-unified-ap...)

The systems dynamics approach of Jay Forrester and others would be another.

The organisation of M.I.T.'s study of psychology, "Brain and Cognitive Sciences" (formed through departmental mergers in 1986) reflects one approach.

My view of pscyhology and sociology is that they are studies of behaviour, of individuals and groups, on the basis of perceptions, information processing, and interactions, subject to evolutionary and other influences, as well as various pathologies.

Many psychological disorders seem to me more akin to cancer in physical medicine, as opposed to infectious diseases: they concern symptom clusters which may have multiple and diverse underlying etiologies, rather than of specific cause-centered disorders.

The distinction is that if you can identify a specific underlying causal agent (say: bacterium or virus, or some environmental insult), you can focus treatment on eliminating or attacking that specific cause.

If you have a symptom cluster with multiple possible etiologies, you risk falling into the One True Way trap, thinking that one identified cause is all causes.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on depression and the various ways in which various types of behaviour-regulating neurotransmitters can malfunction is an example of the underlying messaging complexity within psychology:

https://invidio.us/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

I'm less versed again on sociology, and would speak less to its specific failures and more what I've noted looking through survey texts: that there doesn't seem to be any single underlying organisational premise. Again I'd suggest that this be as a systems science, here looking at groups of people (from couples/teams to all of humanity), and various behaviours. "Evolution" here would include both biological and cultural transmission of information.

>>a13692+V7
A bit of both.

The increasing specialisation both between and within academic domains, grants-making processes, various forms of gatekeeping and academic jealousies, all contribute to this.

The capitalist-communist antipathy throughout much of the 20th century also created major impediments, on both sides. Each camp was highly ideologically motivated, each used a consolidation of political power to drive academic policy and practice, and each side tended to both cultivate groupthink around certain concepts and mark others as taboo.

The Soviet Bloc notably preempted explorations in biology. The Western states greatly suppressed anything remotely touching on Marxist concepts (of which there is both bad and good). There were some shared areas of neglect (notably environmental concerns) and of focus (nuclear energy, weapons, jet propulsion, and space flight).

The interactions of power, ideology, and academic interests is ... pretty fascinating of itself.