Economists, political scientists and sociologists have long suffered from an academic inferiority complex: physics envy. They often feel that their disciplines should be on a par with the "real" sciences and self-consciously model their work on them, using language ("theory", "experiment", "law") evocative of physics and chemistry. This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it.
The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method - known as hypothetico-deductivism - then in the minds of many, it is not scientific.
Credits: New York Times
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