Consilience

The social sciences haven’t made as much progress as the natural sciences because they haven’t yet established first principles, don’t yet use consistent experimental designs, and don’t communicate well with each other. Social scientists also tend to use their research in defense of political positions: “They are easily shackled by tribal loyalty" (199). The social sciences are much more complex than the natural sciences, and it’s easy to make errors. Still, most social scientists were surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent ethnic strife there; they were puzzled by the dismantling of the US welfare state in the 1990s; and they fail to make good predictions about the behavior of Islamic fundamentalism. This is partly due to their refusal to study the deep origins of human behavior, and by political ideologies that hogtie open-minded research.

The social sciences have collected immense amounts of data, but they are still descriptive sciences, much like the early centuries of the natural sciences. They lack a truly scientific premise or theory on which to build an ironclad science. Instead, they engage in hermeneutics, or the interpretation of texts or data, with various scholars arguing for their individual viewpoints, using statistics as rhetorical devices.