Livre d'Or

I think the fundamental difference (currently) between physical science and social science isn't that either one is better or more scientific, but that physical science is much more mature as a discipline, and as a result has had a lot more time to discover what truly works within its bounds.

Consider, for example, that in 1905, Freud wrote Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In the same year, Einstein had his annus mirabilis, writing papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity. I don't think it's just my physicist's bias that believes that Einstein's papers were better science than Freud's. Freud was pretty much just making things up as he went along, whereas Einstein was building on centuries of previous knowledge.

This isn't to say that Einstein was more intelligent or a better person than Freud. It's just that Einstein was working in a well-established scientific framework, whereas Freud was reaching into the unknown. Go back a few centuries, and you see things like Newton's attempts at alchemy, which were also entirely unscientific. Go back even further, and you find early attempts to codify what would become the physical sciences by Aristotle and the likes being conducted in a manner not dissimilar to how Freud worked on psychology. They had nothing to build on, and so they took a stab in the dark at how they thought maybe things ought to work.

Since the social sciences are so young, there are, unfortunately, still a few adherents around of the "make statements as to how we think things ought to work" school of thought, though thankfully these are becoming scarcer and scarcer as time passes, and as the discipline matures enough and finds its own feet and its own methods.

It would be worse than useless to apply physics methodology to a psychology experiment. It just wouldn't work. The things being studied are just too different. For instance, I would expect a good psychologist to have a much better understanding of statistics than a good physicist, whereas I'd expect the physicist to know more vector calculus.

I believe that the true heart of science is the assertion that the universe makes sense and that we can understand it and should strive to do so. The methods used, while often extremely important, are not inherent to my understanding of what science truly is. Any claim to the contrary feels uncomfortably dogmatic to me.