Thread by @lindsaypcohn

I’ve been trying to explain this for years. I had undergrads tell me their Chemistry prof told them science was experiments so PoliSci was a lie.
Let’s talk about science.

https://twitter.com/mzak123/status/1116737854435143680

The word derives from the Greek for knowledge, and for a long time “science” was used to refer to things we thought we knew through discovery (i.e. not revelation), but eventually it got narrowed down to those areas of knowledge that we “knew” through a certain process.

That process goes basically like this: see something puzzling in the world, ask why that happens, come up w at least two alternative theories/guesses, derive hypotheses that are what evidence you would expect to see if theory 1 is right or if theory 2 is right ...

Then you use those hypotheses to determine/collect the data you need to see which theory more closely matches reality.
In chemistry, the answer is easy bc you can do controlled experiments & isolate variables. Which means you can reach high certainty about causal relationships.

Lots of ppl seem to think that if you can’t do experiments, or if you can’t isolate variables to reach certainty, then it’s not a science. But that’s an extremely narrow view that would exclude things like geology and theoretical physics.

Social sciences have a harder time isolating variables, but they are still applying scientific method in the sense that they are testing a theory against empirical evidence. Political Science in particular has developed a practice of mixing methods to try to reduce uncertainty.

This stands in distinction to other branches of knowledge like the humanities. Philosophy, History, Literature, Religion - these studies produce knowledge, but not through a process of testing theories against independent empirical evidence.

One complicating part is the historical development of political science: it started out largely as a form of philosophy - people forming theories about how the world worked and how best to deal w it, but relying on experience/anecdote/non-systematic evidence.

This began to change in the 1950s w the behavioral revolution, but some US universities adopted the change and others did not, preferring to remain in the old paradigm.