Social science as a science and social scientists as scientists.

Immediately we need to define what we mean by science and so do operationally for the
work we do in social science.

See your Intros on working scientifically..hard/soft sciences.

The key notion in science is the "falsifiable hypothesis": a clear statement about the
world. You can run an experiment, and if the results of that experiment disagree with
your hypothesis, you know that your hypothesis is wrong. You never really say
anything is "proved" in science, only that you have a hypothesis which has stood up to
all the tests you've tried so far.

Science itself is based around the scientific method, and since the social scientists are
forming hypotheses, testing them, and basing conclusions off of those tests they
certainly qualify as scientists.

In physics, there's a very clear way to make such statements about the world. You write
a mathematical formula for the way things behave. And then you can design
experiments, take numbers, and then you know if your hypothesis is correct. The
experiment may be very expensive, or take years to do, but at least conceptually you can
do it. They call it a "hard" science for that reason: you can make hard and fast
statements about the world and be very certain about the results. Physics deals with very
simple things: atoms, planets, rocket ships in flight. They may not sound simple, but
compared to people, they're just trivial. A single person is a billion billion billion times
more complicated than a rocket ship, and groups of people are more complicated than
that. So it's very hard to make precise statements and write them mathematically.

This can lead to a criticism of soft sciences as being so soft that they can only produce
over-soft outcomes: vague, elastic, generalistic tendencies which do not help answer
hard and fast questions. And do so on the basis that clear and fast answers are simply
not available because of the nature of the beast. The more a field is about people, the
softer it is. And the more we understand about how people behave (through
evolutionary psychology, neurology, pharmacology, and other fields) the harder social
sciences become. People make up society.People are not fixed,like so many other things
in the world are. The human psyche, makes the variables infinite.So the science (study
of-taken literally) is ever changing, adapting to the different stimuli that make society
function/change. There can at best, only be rules of thumb, but not the types of solid
physical evidence that supports other sciences. Thus, the argument is we need to
accumulate as much knowledge as possible in the social sciences research to even begin
to obtain real insights into the way people go about things. This, as I show later, may
well be a fair answer but such accumulative requirements have consequences for the
way our work is consumed and interpreted.
After all, we want our theories and our practice to be listened to. Ideally, in our trade,
we want our research to filter through to acquisition and teaching practice. So our
objective as applied linguists working in any research paradigm, be it qualitative,
quantitative or both, is that we have our results read, understood and in some way acted
upon. In other words, we need not only to design and carry out our experiments well but
also make the consumer of these experiments sit up and notice.

Here is where predicting what is likely to happen is so important. People and

government agencies with the money like to know what is likely to happen if they throw
lots of time and particularly money at your practical suggestions or theories about
future language learning or teaching based on your results. When it comes to generating
reliable scientific knowledge, there is nothing more important than frequent and detailed
predictions of future events. We may have a theory that explains all the known data, but
that may be just the result of our having fitted the theory to that data. The strongest
support for a theory comes from its ability to correctly predict data that it was not
designed to explain.

And that is where those working as social scientists encounter a problem: While
the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences
do not. The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled
experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved. For one thing, we
are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly
interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to distinguish and study
separately. Also, moral considerations forbid manipulating humans the way we do
inanimate objects. As a result, most social science research falls far short of the natural
sciences standard of controlled experiments.

Without a strong track record of experiments leading to successful predictions, there is

seldom a basis for taking social scientific results as definitive. My conclusion is not
that our policy discussions should simply ignore social scientific research. Indeed, we
need to find ways of getting people to sit up and listen. This is not necessarily done by
shouting louder or by insisting that human subjects simply preclude this kind of
recommendation and experimentation. W need to develop a much better sense of the
severely limited reliability of social scientific results. Media reports of research should
pay far more attention to these limitations, and scientists reporting the results need to
emphasize what they dont show as much as what they do.

Perhaps more importantly, we need to show those who need to sit up that we accept the
limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social sciences experiments and
that their conclusions can seldom be primary guides to setting policy. But at the very
least, we also need to show that a social scientific scrutiny of the human, rather than
natural, world doesn't easily lend itself to generalisable laws, cast-iron predictions, nor
can it always preserve a distinction between fact and value. Defenders of social science
need to say that, and to argue that careful, theoretically and methodologically rigorous
exploration of these subjects are fundamental to a healthy society even if finding
unarguable evidence is extremely difficult. We, as social scientists, however, also need
to demonstrate we are working in a methodical, organized scientific fashion in order to
achieve those ends.

Accumulated knowledge is essential to the expansion of scientific knowledge. But that

accumulation needs to be organized before and managed after its execution to avoid it
becoming merely a pile of knowledge perhaps synthesized by the occasional meta-
analysis.

A key element for me is the way scientists should interact with the rest of the scientific
community. All too often I read an experimental paper which begins with a review of
the literature. Pure science benefits greatly from a close community and in many ways. I
might even say it depends on that close community for life. A diverse community is
better able to generate new research methods, explanations, and ideas, which can help
science over challenging hurdles and shed new light on problems. It needs large groups
of people working on the same, or a closely related, problem as its lifeblood. Large
groups of people working on a diverse set of problems loosely related to the original
one will bring us similarly large accumulated amounts of loosely related data which
by their very diversity are almost impossible to classify or analyze satisfactorily. We
simply need to work together. Then when we shout together, the voice is sure to be
heard. Working closer together also has the advantage that on those occasional cases in
which personal biases sneak in, they are kept in check by our diverse scientific
community.

Science is simply too broad for an individual on his or her own to handle! Even research
within a single narrow field (e.g., L2 error correction) may cover an immense array of
specialized topics, from the individual causes of deviance to the successful nature of its
correction one group of different learners in one L1 classroom. That specialized
knowledge is divided up among different researchers, who are best then to then share
their expertise by working together. Collaborations and division of labor are
increasingly important today, as our scientific understanding, techniques, and
technologies expand. There's simply more to know than ever before! And as we learn
more about the world, more research is performed at the intersections of different fields:
error correction success with left-handed learners..type of deviance of bilingual
Eng/German child learners and so on. But before we go off on these tangential
intersections and accumulate even more loosely connected data lets adopt one of
the best qualities of scientists patience through slow, methodical step by step work on
one area of common interest, a research question if you will or hypothesis agreed on by
our closed community and which we will all work on in our own contexts at the same
time. The result will be essentially comparable data between the community and
therefore data which is comparable is data which can be satisfactorily theorized and
adequate implications drawn from it.
We can then move on, piecemeal, in the same way other scientists work. Because
science characteristically takes time to build on itself. We wouldn't have general
relativity if we didn't have classical mechanics. And we wouldn't have classical
mechanics if we didn't have Galileos studies of motion and revolutionary ideas about
astronomy. A similar deep history spanning decades could be given for almost any
scientific idea in our own field, too. Our scientific community provides the contributive
knowledge base on which science is built.

Of course, contributing to a community also implies establishing and following the rules
of that community. In a scientific community all working towards the same contributive
aim, participation in the scientific community involves scrutinizing the work of others
and allowing your own work to be similarly evaluated by your peers. This system of
checks and balances verifies the quality of scientific research and assures that evidence
is evaluated fairly and double or triple checked for that veracity. In science, all ideas
must stand up to rigorous scrutiny and we have to learn to put or ideas out there to be
scrutinised. The culture of science does not value dogma and does not accept that there
is only one way of going about finding the answers to our questions. Scrutinizing,
questioning, and investigating important ideas helps ensure that only ideas supported by
evidence and based on sound reasoning are accepted by the community.

My point here is that there must be a system built into such a community so that
the proper checks are made on each others work for confirmatory evidence or
otherwise. Ideally this takes place long before the traditional referee reports on a
submission to a journal! This is the least our waiting public used to and hungry for
those generalisable laws and cast-iron predictions expect. We might not be able to
provide such things to their satisfaction but we can at least show we have worked
together to seek out some common agreement and suggestions and have scrutinised our
results before letting them loose out there for policy-makers, course designers, text book
writers and the like to sell on.