[Air-L] anthropology is not a science?

[Christian Nelson]

I'm not surprised by the definition of science as the statistical  
study of relationships between variables. Lots of academics in the  
social sciences define it so. But that doesn't make it a good  
definition. Even the kind of scientists that variable analysts in the  
social sciences look up to as role models--those in biology,  
chemistry and particularly physics--do not restrict themselves to  
statistical methods for the investigation of causal relationships.  
And more than a little of the sociology of science literature  
indicates that scientists of many stripes often observe their  
definition of science in the breach. Indeed, definitions of science  
aren't always that useful for describing science, often because they  
are really created to perform political "boundary work" that denies  
some people the scarce resources available to "scientists" (whatever  
they are) by such entities as universities, grant agencies, etc.

On Jan 14, 2008, at 5:15 PM, Denise N. Rall wrote:

> Dear Air-ers -
>
> While I come late to this topic, I concur with Nick
> that the e-science can be misleading - as I indicated
> forcefully to Sally Wyatt at the e-Science/e-Research
> roundtable in Vancouver.
>
> e-Science suggests that internet research is
> answerable to the scientific method (disproving the
> null hypothesis). Some e-Research does that, much does
> not.
>
> And before folks go crazy with that, social science
> has frequently employed the scientific method,
> particularly in psychological studies. Our
> understanding of the discipline, social science,
> employs the term science as Wissenschaft, or a
> generalised sense of knowledge, as in what can be
> discovered or known about a given topic.
>
> In that sense, e-Social Science can still describe a
> domain of knowledge much more comfortably than
> e-Science. One would have to seriously re-work the
> word science, as was attempted by Gibbons et al. in
> 1994. Some may feel they were successful, I do not. No
> lesser scholar than Bruno Latour said, "science is the
> hard object, the more we seek to learn about it, the
> more it resists our efforts" (quote from memory,
> seminar in Said School of Business, Oxford, "Four +
> one uncertainties in social science" in 2002.
>
> The articulation of e-Research was suggested by a 2005
> seminar of Christine Borgmann speaking to the OII. The
> link is:
> http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/events/details.cfm?id=91
>
> I know other worthy scholars are working on this
> topic, and despite the hard work of Michael Nentwich,
> (2003) I think that Nick and others will stay with
> e-Research out of necessity, perhaps. But I applaud
> their efforts in this area.
>
> Cheers, Denise
>
>
> 	
>
> Denise N. Rall, PhD
> Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA
> Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344
> http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/
> Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
> http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
>
>
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