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Hard science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hard science is a term used to describe certain fields of the natural sciences, usually physics, geology, chemistry, and many fields of biology. The hard sciences rely on experimental, quantifiable data or the scientific method and focus on accuracy and objectivity. The hard sciences are often contrasted with soft sciences, which by contrast have less rigor.
The hard versus soft distinction is not used to indicate that soft sciences are not valid fields of study, but that they do not produce, and usually do not seek to produce, results that are objectively calculable. That is, whereas hard sciences focus on producing results that can be rigorously proven, soft sciences ultimately rely to some degree on a subjective viewpoint. Thus the conclusions of hard science represent objective features of reality determined through concrete experiment (and sometimes thought experiments) by experimentalists with a rigorous training in specialized research methods.
One distinction is drawn also between Western Science and native science. This shows how a worldview determines which kind of science is practiced by the people within this framework.
As an example of a distinction, a physicist may determine that the velocity of an object falling towards the earth due to gravity is equal to g*t, where t is time of falling and g is a gravitational constant. The physicist reports this not as an opinion or viewpoint, but as a fact about the nature of the universe. Other scientists may examine the claim. The claim will stand unless and until objectively disproven by another person as being totally incorrect or incomplete in some way. But if the claim is correct, anyone who tries the experiment will get the same answer. By contrast, a sociologist may make a claim, for example, about the causes of poverty. The sociologist may conclude that the cause is mainly a lack of labor laws. Another sociologist may have a different point of view and publish a paper that concludes the reason is mainly a lack of education. A third sociologist may claim the reason is just a difference in personal industriousness. Any of these points of view may be reasonable, and some may seem more reasonable than others to various readers, but in most cases no one will be able to make the claim that one of the points of view is objectively correct and provable in the way that a theory of gravity is. The conclusions ultimately rely on personal opinions in a way that the conclusions of hard sciences do not.
The hard versus soft distinction is controversial in some circles, but not among most scientists[citation needed]. Although associated with notions of scientific realism, this distinction is drawn more from commonsense than a deep immersion in the philosophy of science. Much work by modern historians of science, starting with the work done by Thomas Kuhn, has focused on the ways in which the "hard sciences" have functioned in ways which were less "hard" than previously assumed, emphasizing that decisions over the veracity of a given theory owed much more to "subjective" influences than the "hard" label would emphasize (and begin to question whether there are any real distinctions between "hard" and "soft" science). Some, such as those who subscribe to the "strong program" of the sociology of scientific knowledge, would go even further, and remove the barrier between "hard science" and "nonscience" completely. This view of science has not been taken too fondly by scientists themselves.
Despite these objections, hard versus soft distinction is popular and widely used among scientists, technicians, and academics because of the way that it captures a distinction between different forms of investigation in the modern research universities and laboratories. Indeed, one clear difference supporting the distinction is the degree to which conclusions in different fields are controversial within those fields (e.g., how much of physics is controversial among physicists, versus how much of political science is controversial among political scientists).