Soft science

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Soft science is a colloquial term, often used for academic research or scholarship which is purportedly "scientific" while its adherence to or rigor of scientific method is considered to be lacking, not based on reproducible experimental data, and/or a mathematical explanation of that data. The term is usually used as a contrast to hard science.

Within the natural sciences, research which depends upon conjecture (sometimes called hypothesis), qualitative analysis of data (compared to quantitative analysis), or uncertain experimental results is sometimes derided as soft science. Examples are evolutionary psychology or meteorology. When soft science refers to a natural science, it is usually used pejoratively, mainly due to the term's association with social science, implying that a particular natural science topic described as "soft" does not belong to the field of natural science.

When "soft science" is used to refer to social science, the reference are not usually used pejoratively because it is accepted that that social science isn't as objective, and thus as open to interpretation as natural sciences such as physics or chemistry.^{[citation needed]} The term is often employed by social scientist themselves without any projective implication though some might use it for self-deprecation.^{[citation needed]} As a response, some social scientists refer to the "hard sciences" as "simple sciences", and the "soft sciences" as "complex sciences".^{[citation needed]} This is based on the observation that in "hard sciences" results are more black-and-white than in the social sciences, where research is far more qualitative. In its broadest sense, even largely non-quantitative, non-experimental fields of the humanities like literary criticism or gender studies are described as soft science when the said topic makes reference to empirical (scientific) matter in sweeping generalised manner which is akin to scientific theory. But in the United States, unlike Europe, history, literature, mathematics and law are not regarded as sciences as their methodology is regarded distinct enough to be separate from science and their field of study existed well before the emergence of science.^{[citation needed]} Some would claim their study to be empirical (history, anthropology or archeology) or artistic (literature, dramatic art) or interpretative (law) or descriptive (language, accounting) or logical (philosophy, mathematics) or even practical (language, law, accounting) but not experimental. In some field such as linguistic or geography which has incorporated method from social science, there are debate as to whether their field of study can be described as (social) science or not. It should be noted that use of projective distinction is made within soft science itself even though the term soft science is not used. For example, economist may refer sociology to be "literature" or medical doctor may refer psychiatric medicine as not being a "real medicine".

Different approaches to the scientific method can be distinguished by the research they term "soft science" and what they consider "hard." The issue is important to the philosophy of science (which does not always support the possibility of drawing a distinction between "hard" and "soft") and to science studies and the sociology of science (which study scientists' implicit perceptions of research and methods).