Soft science

Soft science is a colloquial term, often used pejoratively, for academic research or scholarship which is purportedly not based on reproducible experimental data and a mathematical explanation of that data. It is usually opposed to "hard science," rather than to non-science. Even within the natural sciences, research which depends upon conjecture, qualitative analysis of data (compared to quantitative analysis), or uncertain experimental results is sometimes derided as soft science (cosmology is one common example). But more often the term is applied to the social sciences by doubters of their objective rigor. In its broadest sense, even largely non-quantitative, non-experimental fields of the humanities like literary criticism or gender studies are disparaged as soft science (though one must take "science" to mean something like the German Wissenschaft , or "scholarship," for the claim even to make sense).

Different approaches to the scientific method can be disitinguished by the research they term "soft science" and what they consider "hard." The issue is important to the philosophy of science (which does not always support the possibility of drawing a distinction between "hard" and "soft") and to science studies and the sociology of science (which study scientists' implicit perceptions of research and methods).

External link

• Soft science: an analysis of news coverage of the social sciences, from Columbia University