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SOFT SCIENCES
Soft science is a colloquial term, often used pejoratively, for academic research or scholarship which is purportedly "scientific" while its adherence to or rigor of scientific method is considered to be soft, not based on reproducible experimental data and/or a mathematical explanation of that data. It is usually opposed to "hard science," rather than to non-science.
Within the natural sciences, research which depends upon conjecture, 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 refer 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 or related topics such as psychology, the reference are not usually used perojatively because it is accepted that that social science isn't hard science like natural sciences such as physics or chemistry. The term is often employed by social scientist themselves without any projetive implication though some might use it for self-deprecation. 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 make reference to empirical (scientific) matter in sweeping generalised manner which is akin to scientific theory. But in general, history, literature, antholopology, mathematic or law are not regarded as science as their methodology is regarded distinct enough to be separate from science and their field of study existed well before the emergence of science. Some would claim their study to be emperical (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 projetive distinction is made within soft science itself even though the term soft science is not used. So, 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).
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