Political Science is the study of political systems and behaviours employing the scientific method. It’s a sub field of social science and a very new one, at less than 150 years old. Political philosophy is of course much older.
employing the scientific method
Really? They have control groups? Blind and A/B testing? Hypothesis that they set out to reject?
I’m sure they have methods but are they scientific?
The answer to all your questions are
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes - Whatever goes against my political allegiances.
Yes - They all just have an n < 50.
Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.
You make those claims without ever having looked into polisci studies. Not really looking to reject your own hypothesis.
it should be a sub field of sociology instead of science.
Sociology isn’t called social sciences, though arguably you could call it that.
I think sociology is part of a field called “The Social Sciences” which includes sociology, psychology, polisci etc.
Depends. A proper computer science course is basically math with machines. At the highest level, it may have zero programming at all, and the machines in question are entirely abstract.
Software Engineering is, well, engineering (setting aside the whole debate on what makes a “real” engineer).
It used to be that universities crammed both under “computer science”, and you had to look at the curriculum to figure out which one they were actually teaching. They tend to separate the two more clearly these days. Neither is really “science” in the strictest sense, but the term stuck now.
That’s why informatics is by far the superior term. Computer science is such a boring terms anyways, you don’t call maths “number science”, biology "living beings science " or chemistry “atoms science” either.
All of thoose are different. Computer science, computer engineering, software angineering and informatics are all different conceptually
My geophysicist friend laughed at me for a little long when I said “I’m a computer scientist”.
I never took that degree/job position or whatever seriously anyway. I’ve always giggled at software engineering too. I just call myself a programmer.
One is your education and one is your job. It’d be like me chirping someone with a geophysics degree who’s working at Starbucks.
Yeah, polisci has gotten as far as the “observation” part of science and kinda has to stop there for moral reasons.
“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.
Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.
And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.
Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).
That’s pretty much where I was going. What are soft sciences supposed to do when experimental methods are either impractical or unethical? Give up?
If anything, fields like physics are in a privileged position where they can do the scientific method to the letter. Acting snooty about it is simply insulting and unhelpful.
