The Culture of Science: Is Social Science Science?

The social sciences are facing a crisis: the core assumption of modern social science is that we move forward by rejecting false theories through a process of hypothesis testing. Yet after nearly a century of social science research, not one of the innumerable competing theories of social science has been decisively rejected. Worse, fewer than half of all biomedical findings have been able to be replicated -- the problem is worse in pharmeceutical research, where the vast majority of results are unreproducible. In this book, a prominent social scientist argues that physical and social scientists belong to two distinct social networks, and that the procedures that make up the canon of social science methodology are different from those of the physical sciences. He goes on to show that using the identical procedures as physical sciences for social phenomena work better than standard social science methods

Joseph Woelfel is a prominent sociologist and communication scientist, and the author (with Edward L. Fink) of the classic book The Measurement of Communication Processes: Galileo Theory and Method. He is the developer of much scientific computer software, including Catpac, a neural network text analysis program widely used around the world, and Indstar, a neural artificial intelligence. After a review of all the Social Science literature commissioned by the U. S. Army, the Rand Corporation concluded: ＂In many ways, Woelfel’s theory was the closest that any social science approach came to providing the basis for an end-to-end engineering solution for planning, conducting, and assessing the impact of communications on attitudes and behaviors.＂ Woelfel is currently Professor of Communication at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.