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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sepulchrave II" data-source="post: 7473647" data-attributes="member: 4303">[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.</blockquote>

Verification