• stufkes@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      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?

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        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.

        • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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          5 months ago

          The issue with considering these to be anything like the ‘hard sciences’ is that it is impossible to even try to control for all variables. Plus, whenever sociologists, for example, make a bad prediction, they just write it off as differences in personality or some other similar thing.

          God forbid they actually just falsified their hypothesis. It’s important that people understand how to think about the social sciences, don’t get me wrong, but they’re pretty overwhelmingly ineffective for creating a proper framework for understanding the world around you.

          Theories in social science and theories in hard science are totally different.

          Theories in science have a shit ton of evidence behind them and haven’t been falsified.

          Theories in social science, on the other hand, are all in competition with each other because they all have their positive and negative aspects that make them better for application in some situations than others.

          And yes I know that we still use a newtonian idea of gravity in many cases, but that’s completely different as it just tends to make the math easier in practice. It’s not that we actually still believe in newtonian ideas.

      • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        You make those claims without ever having looked into polisci studies. Not really looking to reject your own hypothesis.

      • exocrinous@startrek.website
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        6 months ago

        Hey genius, if you need experimentation in order for a field to be a real science, then explain how astronomy is a science.

        • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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          6 months ago

          Isn’t one of the point of all those telescopes we built in space and on earth to prove or disprove our hypothesis regarding astronomy? Is that not experimentation?

          • exocrinous@startrek.website
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            6 months ago

            No, it’s observation. An experiment involves manipulating an independent variable while controlling other variables. There’s none of that in space, not counting the ISS and Apollo. That said, you can still test hypotheses using observation. And that’s equally true in both astronomy and in social sciences.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      it should be a sub field of sociology instead of science.

      Sociology isn’t called social sciences, though arguably you could call it that.

      • Donkter@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I think sociology is part of a field called “The Social Sciences” which includes sociology, psychology, polisci etc.

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          that more broadly would make sense to me. But i still wouldn’t consider polsci to be polsci, i would consider it to be a sub set of sociology.

          • Donkter@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            It’s all kind of a subset of sociology. Why do groups make decisions? It’s down to individual psychology. But that’s similar to saying all science is derivative of physics. It’s technically true, but it does us more favors to split it up.