[MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], re: reification. I have pondered your posts, and the point is well made. I had never before encountered the term in the context in which you used it. As it happens to be one of my favorite words, I felt it necessary to do some digging. I am no statistician, but I don’t need to be; I fully understand the fallacy of treating a model of a thing as the thing itself. But this line is more interesting:
Because 400 years ago, astronomy was that literally. Like alchemy, it needed to shake off the woo-woo, and enter respectability.
My sense is that with economics, sociology, psychology, we are observing phases in nascent sciences; the disciplines are still struggling to cohere. Psychology is hardening – largely because of neuroscience – but it still has a long way to go. The traditional physical sciences are more established, and have had longer to iron out their wrinkles – perhaps that is why the soft edges of the soft sciences are frustrating to those who are grounded in the hard.
I would submit that history is one of the youngest sciences; historians seem singularly resistant to any kind of systematic inquiry and display an almost paranoid avoidance of mathematics. Bayesian reasoning is beginning to appear at the fringes; it is not being well-received – because history professors are ignorant and lazy. My evidence is purely anecdotal.
And what I think matters not one whit. If a discipline really is a science, it will self–correct and improve, and demonstrate its value – such is the virtue of science; if not, it goes the way of homeopathy, confined to a few fringe cranks who seek ever-deeper meanings in its arcane formulations.