"Natural Sciences and Social Sciences", For Graduate class Research Methods

The distinction seems so obvious I'm not sure I have anything to add. Science is a method of investigation. It puts evidence and rationality ahead of instinct and emotion. Science declares that there is a universe that is real and potent apart from the desires or needs of any human. Socio-religious knowledge puts human needs and desires at its center. Science recognizes that the universe is knowable but not perfectly knowable. Socio-religious knowledge expects the universe to be knowable and seeks to find a moral order that is absolute. Science posits that we can know what is real and true, if we are willing to observe, take evidence, and form our models from these observations and this evidence, if we are willing to let ourselves be wrong. Socio-religious models depend on the need of humans for explanations where the only evidence is contingent, emotional and instinctive, and since that knowledge is created under threat of not surviving, it cannot be wrong.

The greatest distinction is between socio-religious reasoning and scientific reasoning. Religious ideas are always produced as an answer to the contradictions found between the existing vision and the current circumstances (Karen Armstrong, A history of God, 1993). Scientific ideas are produced to address contradictions in evidence. So the critical difference is that while all reasoning is driven by the quest to explain human experience, pain, death, birth, creation and loss, scientific reasoning is limited to using models built from evidence that can be observed by any observer. Many, probably most, people can't step aside from the evidence of intuition and emotion, and their knowledge is cultural. It promotes survival. (When it stops explaining, when survival cannot be secured through it, its holders will become more and more erratic and desperate.) The activity of Science is engaged without the certainty that it will be useful or consistent with prior knowledge.

The paradigmic natural science is physics and the earliest employers of the Scientific method were studying the physical world. Copernicus, Galilei, and DeVinci, and before them Islamic scholars and the Greeks of classic Athens, are exemplars of this method, who studied the physical world. The success of the method of observation (such an astounding privilege to study the world without expecting your knowledge to have immediate utility!) set the pattern for later investigators, including biologists, medical practitioners, and social scientists.

Social scientists are people who study the person and processes of the same subject that would create socio-religious knowledge. They reflect on questions held by all of their subjects, but the evidence they use must be empirical, based on repeatable observations. They investigate a universe, human relationships, structures, arrangements, cultures, institutions, that are amorphous and changing, and their results could threaten someone's access to wealth. They can never create a unified and final theory of all things social, in contrast to physicists, who can hope for a near approximation of a perfect model. They hope to provide some insight that will help reduce the misery that people create for each other, but the evidence of the social scientist, carefully gathered through methods that seek to eliminate the bias of emotions and culture, are not understood by the majority of people who are trying to survive with their wits and culture. All of the dangers the scientific method overcomes pushes back against the efforts of the social scientist. Thus anti-vaxers and Q-anonymous.

The State of Vermont, and the people of the state, fit the pattern of the liberal vision: a free press, secure and popularly accessible ballots, use of data to make decisions, transparency wherever possible in government, and the commitment of its leaders to that liberal vision. Social Scientists are welcome and esteemed here. The elite conspiracy to hoard wealth exists, but it is less prominent. There are good people in government and our communities who protect the liberal traditions of openess, democracy, public trust, and a commonwealth. Here, the evidence of the Social Scientist is welcome, even if they do rely on a socio-religious construct that esteems them.