Questions:

I've been having an argument with some non-hard scientists and others about the "scientific" character of the social sciences.   Can you (or anybody else on the list) refer me to something on the net that would give relatively simple
explanations of the differences between the hard and soft sciences and the success of the social sciences in meetting their own criteria?   I'm tired of arguing with these folks.   if they saw something from an expert they might take what the social scientists (at least some of them) say more seriously.   I doubt that   any of them is about to read a whole book on the subject.

Answer1:

One difference is that we humans are sapient, and not merely sentient. Sapience is itself interpretable as normativity  - human action and thought is norm-laden in the sense of "what has to be done"  and "what has to be".  Brandom's 2000 book sets out  a case for this view; his 1994 book is a fuller statement. So one difference between natural laws in physics and social laws about action/thought is to do with normative regulation of action and thought - the "has to"; by contrast only regularities hold in the material world.

A second difference is that physical objects and events have a determinate truth-value. We might not in fact know what killed the dinousaurs, nor how many snow flakes are now falling on the top of Mt Everest [any number between 0 and infinity]; still, something did wipe them out, and there is a particular number. By contrast, human action and thought can be systematically ambiguous - what an agent [i] regards as his/her reason for doing X may or may not be [ii] the operative reason why that agent did X, still less [iii] the reason for doing X attributed by other people. Von Wright 1983 is acutely aware of the complexities here. Note that the complexity/indetermination is that of singular events, the reasons for the action of a particular person. This is in contrast to statistical regularities in quantum physics - these too may be indeterministic, but at the population [universality] level.

A third difference is that the transition from neuroscience to psychology is quite easy to make; all the same, it typically is made by an overly uncritical use of causality. Psychological causality is not reducible to biological causality - see Ricoeur 2000 for an elaborated version of this position.

A fourth difference is to do with transitivity - here's my version of this [Smith, 2003]. Although sequences in physics and biology are transitive, this is not the case in psychology, where non-transitivity holds sway.

In a mechanistic model of behaviour, causal chains are transitive. A striking example is the so-called Bruce effect which occurs as the blockage of a female mouse ¯s pregnancy by exposure to the sexual activity of a second male in that   °genes affect proteins, and proteins affect X which affects Y which affects Z which...affects the phenotypic character of interest ±, in this example the outcome of the second male ¯s sexual activity on the female mouse ¯s pregnancy (Dawkins, 1999, p.232; the  ®Bruce effect ¯ is cited on p.229). In this account, behavioural regulation is mechanistic, not normative, and the causality is transitive in that the genes  °for ± sexual behaviour in mice are taken to be causally responsible for the  sexual activity of  ®Bruce ¯ in relation to this female mouse. By contrast, the intentionality of human action is non-transitive. This means that a chain of intentional actions might be transitive, or it might not (for the distinction between transitivity, non-transitivity and atransitivity, see Lemmon, 1966). The relations in intentional chains can be transitive: Bin Laden planned the 911 attack on the Twin Towers; the intention was to destroy them; his further intention was to de-stabilise the Western world. Equally, the causality of intentional  activity  might not be transitive: Bush planned the war on Iraq; the intention was to bring about  ®regime change ¯; one consequence was international disassociation by others in the Western world, notably France. This consequence ¨C the rift between the USA and France - was a consequence of the initial (intentional) action. Even though it may have been predicted or foreseen in the Oval Office, it was not thereby itself intentional (Anscombe, 1961; von Wright, 1983).

References:

Brandom, R. (2000). Articulating reasons: an introduction to inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Ricoeur, P. (2000). Co-author. In J-P. Changeux & P. Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, L. (2003). Internality of mental representation: twenty questions for interactivism. Consciousness and Emotion, 4, 305-24
von Wright, G. H. (1983). Practical reason. Oxford: Blackwell.

Answer2:

In addition to Les' very interesting discussion of the differences between the physical and psychological sciences, let me refer to another, which might be considered an elaboration on the second difference offered. It's the distinction which Fritz Heider made in his classic book, The psychology of interpersonal relations, between two kinds of explanations, (a) causal ones, which have an infinite regress [i.e., you can always regress to the next level of explanation for physical events] and (b) reasons, which are satisfied by arriving at an intention behind the [human] action. [These are not the terms he uses, but this is the distinction. If I remember correctly, he refers to the latter as having equifinality, i.e., served by many different means.]  Personally, I believe that this familiar philosophical distinction between cause and reason [going back at least to Aristotle], is often overlooked in psychology, leading to unnecessary theoretical confusions.  In a recent article by my colleague Tziporah Kasachkoff (a philosopher),and me, we criticized Jon Haidt's intuitionist theory of morality, in part, on these grounds.  Herb Saltzstein

Answer3:

It seems to me that one of the problems is that the word "science" was defined in its classic and most important sense by Aristotle.  His definition offers the paradigm of all the sciences, even though we now know that hope for such perfection is not warranted.  He defines "science" as :  ordered, universal, necessary knowledge of the causes of things.  The semantic problem is that hard scientists these days "cause" means only *producing* cause ("efficient cause" in the old lingo).  But Aristotle included material (whatever that means), formal and final causes as well. Math is entirely about certain non-sensory forms, and as such  Aristotle classified it as science.  Today, even though ma

There are, of course, humongous epistemeological problems for psychology concerning  "other minds".  But nuclear physicists don't look directly into the reality of sub-atomic  particles any more than psychologists look directly into other minds.  The existence and character of "both* sorts of realities are inferred on the basis of sensory data, sensory data which only indirectly reveals their objects. 

Answer4:

Your use of the words, necessary [knowledge] reminds me of a distinction that Orlando Lorenc,o, a Portuguese colleague of ours and member of JPS, has used to distinguish what he considers more and less relevant tests of Piaget's theory.  Orlando believes, as I remember the argument, that many demonstrations purporting to show that Piaget's theory is wrong, do not relate to necessary [analytic] knowledge, but rather to empirical [synthetic] knowledge, and are therefore not tests of the theory.

Answer5:

I have an article posted on the website below and published on three kinds of knowledge:

1.  Analytic  -- no paths of detection for determining what is an event -- examples, math, logic, philosophy.

2.  Experiential or phenomenological  -- one path of detection of events.  The person experiences it.  Religion, art

3.  Empirical -- two independent paths for determining what is an event.  An photon moves a paddle and causes a current in a photo electric cell.  History, science

Answer6:

Necessity:
1: this has long been central to Piaget's research programme, set out in his first book Recherche in 1918
2: This problem is long-standing, known to Plato and unresolved today - see McGinn & Nagel below.
3: In view of the  classical pedigree of this problem, I translated Piaget's Essay on Necessity for Human Development (1986)
I later set out one analysis of this problem for psychology in my 1993 book Necessary knowledge (Hove, UK: Erlbaum), which I think influenced Orlando
4: At any rate, in my 2002 book. Reasoning by mathematical induction in children ¯s arithmetic. (Oxford: Elsevier Science Pergamon Press), I set out further claims by Piaget on this issue [see chap 7-2):

7-2 Developmental mechanism
Questions about the advance from the causal to the normative are questions which are as fundamental as they are unexplained (McGinn, 1991; Nagel, 1997). Such questions were central to Piaget ¯s research-programme.

This research-programme was set out in Piaget ¯s (1918, p. 116; see Smith, 2002a, b) first book. Its standard question was the advance from fact to norm, from the causal to the logical (Piaget, 1977/1995, p.51). A paradigm example was the construction of  necessary knowledge. There were repeated statements of this problem:

the necessity resulting from mental experiment is a necessity of fact; that which results from logical experiment is due to the implications existing between the various operations  (Piaget, 1924/1928, p.237);

the main problem of any epistemology is in fact to understand how the mind succeeds in constructing necessary relationships, which appear to be independent of time, if the instruments of thought are merely psychological operations that are subject to evolution and are constituted in time (Piaget, 1950, p.23);

the emergence of logical necessity constitutes the central problem in the psychogenesis of logical structures (Piaget, 1967, p.391);

necessity is not an observable, based on a reading from objects. Necessity is always the result of constructions inherent in a subject....From this arises our interest in the study of its formation during psychogenesis (Piaget, 1977/1986, p.302).

(the  problem concerns) this transition from a temporal construction to an atemporal necessity ¯ (Piaget & Garcia,  1983/1989, p.15).

5: The problem of necessity is a special case of normativity, amounting to yet a further reason why a merely causal science - such as physics, biology, or "causal" psychology - is different from a real psychology of the human mind [real in that if necessity is left out, a huge chunk of the human mind remains as the submerged part of an iceberg, uncharted by causal models]