I also consider psychology to be a 'soft' science, but a science nonetheless.
What I mean by 'soft' is that there is less mathematical rigor in psychology. To be fair, I only took a couple psychology classes as an undergrad, but that was the impression I got. One of them was a class on personality and intelligence. When considering evidence in favor of a theory, like nurture vs nature in developmental psychology, we would learn about 'case studies' that looked at correlations in how different groups (like identical twins vs strangers) in the study would respond to questions or some task given to them. The idea was to find statisticly significant correlations among the groups and then draw your conclusions based on that. If you design your experiment properly and do your statistics carefully then it's good science.
Now contrast that with quantum mechanics which provides a rigorous mathematical machinery that lets you make very precise predictions of how stuff interacts with other stuff on the atomic level. You want to understand the solar neutrio flux? Learn some math and then learn some quantum mechanics and you can do it. You can calculate the solar neutrino flux and then go measure it. You still have to do statistics, but now the trick is to show that the fluctuations are insignificant. That's hard science.
|