William Wong : AOK-Human Sciences

‘Hard sciences’ are the certain branches of natural and physical sciences that are perceived to be more accurate than its counterpart, the soft sciences. The hard sciences utilize empirical and quantifiable data obtained from the execution of an experiment(s) translated by the scientific method. Physics would be a hard science as an example because it has used data from an experiment utilizing the same amount of gas at different volumes to state Boyle’s law.

While the ‘soft sciences’ yield uncertain experimental results allowing for hypotheses and qualitative analysis of data to be produced. For example, the theory of direct democracy in political sciences has not established by quantifiable data therefore political sciences is not a ‘hard science’.

However there is much difficulty distinguishing between soft and hard sciences because many social sciences, like economics and psychology, use the scientific process to formulate hypotheses and test those using empirical data.

I believe we can only term ‘hard sciences’ and ‘soft sciences’ with a distinction at this time. But there is no one science that always pertains to one of the categories. For example, an experiment in chemistry has yielded anomalous results not due to any inconsistency in executing the experiment, remaining explained. Similarly, many other physical sciences have unexplained phenomena’s even to this date.

From this I believe soft sciences can actually utilize empirical data but not with the current level of science we are at. In Psychology, some argue that you can only describe human emotions or behavior with qualitative data. But I believe we can take one step further and go into a chemically molecular basis to investigate how a body of different atoms can form specific neurons that control behavior in different individuals at different times. There are many examples of this in the past, where scientists were not able to produce qualitative data from experiments thus yielding an uncertain conclusion.

Unfortunately, at this time we as humans are simply not able to translate some of the qualitative data into hard quantitative data.

But can we advance to development where we can obtain strong quantifiable conclusions in all social sciences? It is only with time, can we tell.