My father (a physicist) used to quote Rutherford to me: "all science Is either physics or stamp collecting". An extreme position perhaps. I now work in a college of humanities and have frequently collaborated with engineers. I have seen first hand how poorly applied scientific thinking has become within the humanities. But I cannot blame them. They are only giving to the uni what has been asked of them.
The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as 'social science' goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.
In the UK Thatcher might have been a driving force.
In Western thinking (entering a rabbit hole) conceiving humanities as sciences is a recurrent theme (say, in the Scepticism of Hume) that Auguste Comte in the 19th century turned into the doctrine of positivism:
- The scientific method (and precision of mathematics) applies to all sciences, social and natural.
- Knowledge can be proved only by observation trough empiric means and deductive reasoning.
The untold reason why humanities now self-describes as 'social science' goes back to Thatcher years in the UK. She was the first to link university funding (and tenure) to research output. Research output was in turn defined by ranked publication and patents. This worked ok-ish in the sciences, but not so well in the arts. The humanities were obliged to ape the sciences in the way they spoke, the way they defined their outcomes and the functions they served. The scientific method is simply not a good fit for the arts.