> There is no exact science, physics isn't an exact science either.
Which is why I said “exact theory”.
> You need softer definitions like "Hard" and "Soft" precisely because there are no exact results in any science we have. And it is fine to use soft definitions for these things since categorising scientific fields doesn't need to be a science.
There are exact results every day, but those are not delimited cleanly by “fields”: a theory is exact or it is not.
> A hard science is where replication is expected to never fail, if replication fails once then the theory is thrown out. Applying that to social science studies would seem ridiculous, no social scientist would want that, so they want their field to be soft.
And this criterion is never mentioned at any point in the Wikipedia article linked.
It also seems a useless definition as replication can always fail due to flukes, and the confidence numbers chosen for replication, typically within 0.05, are very arbitrarily chosen.
Whether it is “replicated” or not is a rather arbitrary delimitation of an arbitrarily picked number, and 5% is certainly not improbably low to begin with.
Which is why I said “exact theory”.
> You need softer definitions like "Hard" and "Soft" precisely because there are no exact results in any science we have. And it is fine to use soft definitions for these things since categorising scientific fields doesn't need to be a science.
There are exact results every day, but those are not delimited cleanly by “fields”: a theory is exact or it is not.
> A hard science is where replication is expected to never fail, if replication fails once then the theory is thrown out. Applying that to social science studies would seem ridiculous, no social scientist would want that, so they want their field to be soft.
And this criterion is never mentioned at any point in the Wikipedia article linked.
It also seems a useless definition as replication can always fail due to flukes, and the confidence numbers chosen for replication, typically within 0.05, are very arbitrarily chosen.
Whether it is “replicated” or not is a rather arbitrary delimitation of an arbitrarily picked number, and 5% is certainly not improbably low to begin with.