A musing.

[jojojojoanne]

"Opponents of scientism: methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to natural science, have argued that political science: concerned with the descriptive analysis or political and especially government institutions and processes, was/is an example of the pervasiveness of technology and of a search for rationality in a social complex that might be irrational and out of control."

taken fr. Enclopaedia Britannica 2002: political science:current trends.

Any views on this?

[WaldoMcFroog]

Only that it might be better in Science! ;-)

[jake-the-peg]

In other words attempting to apply scientific methods to social issues is fraught with dangers because the systems are not deterministic but chaotic.

An example presumably is Economics.

This of course overlooks that the main story of science in the last 100 years has been precisely to do with chaotic and probablistic systems such as quantum mechanics and Chaos theory (non-linear dynamics).

The development of these sort of tools is well suited for attempting to model policical and social or economic science but with how much sucess so far is questionable.

Many people have tried to use chaos theory to predict stock market movements for example but I don't know how sucessful they've been, I suspect not very

[Theland]

I saw a programme on TV that tried to link Tony Blairs fascination with targets in all kinds of different fields, to studies done on aboriginal people living in Amazonian rainforests!
That explains the chaos of recent years then.