Hard science and Soft science are colloquial terms often used when comparing fields of academic research or scholarship, with hard meaning perceived as being more scientific, rigorous, or accurate. Fields of the natural or physical sciences are often described as hard, while the social sciences and similar fields are often described as soft.[1] The use of the term "soft science" is often pejorative, implying that a particular field of study being described as "soft" is not scientific.[2] The hard sciences are characterized as relying on experimental, empirical, quantifiable data, relying on the scientific method, and focusing on accuracy and objectivity.[3]
Different approaches to the scientific method can be distinguished by the research they term "soft science" and what they consider "hard." The issue is important to the philosophy of science, which does not always support the possibility of drawing a distinction between "hard" and "soft", and to science studies and the sociology of science, which study scientists' implicit perceptions of research and methods.[4]
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Within the natural sciences, research which depends upon conjecture, qualitative analysis of data (compared to quantitative analysis), or uncertain experimental results is sometimes derided as soft science. One example is evolutionary psychology.[5]
The graphism thesis maintains that hard sciences such as natural sciences make heavier use of graphs than soft sciences such as sociology. However, Bill Mann claims that technical analysis is an example of a discipline that uses graphs heavily but is not at all scientific.[6]
Hard science is science that uses mathematics and experiments to get knowledge. In hard science, experiments have to be reproducible (if the experiment is done a second time, it will have the same results as the first time).
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