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As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities. There might be some valid criticism of the term "social science" and the field but lumping it in with humanities isn't accurate. While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.



> As someone who did my graduate work in humanities and not social science, I think there is a world of difference between social science and humanities.

Don't say there is a difference. Name them. I too have a degree in the humanities. That isn't an argument.

> While there are tons of people who use mixed methods, quantitative and qualitative work tend to be very different in focus and even how they are written.

What's your point? Quantitative and qualitative work occur in science and in the humanities. It's not exclusive to one or the other. The difference between the two is that one deals with natural law and the empirical testing of those laws. While humanities do not. They most deal with the philosophical and the human condition. Morality or the best form of government aren't scientific concerns because they aren't about the natural world and its laws. It's not empiricial testable unlike say the speed of light.

Political science is not a science because it doesn't deal with nature and empirical experiments. Machiavelli was not a scientist because political science isn't a science.


I'd say social sciences are closer to humanities than they are to hard sciences.


True, but that's more of a current snapshot than a categorical determination. It's more like the social sciences started breaking away from the humanities many decades ago, and have been increasingly pulled in the general direction of hard science ever since. Though necessarily relying much more on modeling and statistical approaches than on formal analysis.

Due to the inherent impossibility of repeating experimental conditions exactly (or in some fields, at all), the social sciences will never join the hard sciences, but instead occupy terrain adjacent to both humanities (where their data is sourced from), and hard sciences (where techniques are sourced from, increasingly for the "computational"- prefixed subfields).




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