> Isn't that a bad thing? I mean, doesn't holding a "wide variety of views"
> mean that at most one of them is right, all the others are wrong, and that
> they don't have enough evidence to constrain the space of their theories?
> This isn't actually my argument in this instance, but it deserves pointing
> out.
There is not much hard evidence in social sciences, so, yes, the evidence
does not constrain the theory space nearly as much as in most physical
sciences.
> In any case, my statement holds true, not because of conformity among
> academics in the soft sciences, but because the central,
> taught-in-textbooks dogma of those academic fields is flagrantly wrong.
I actually don't know what dogma you're referring to. What is the central
dogma of all social sciences? I have studied them extensively and I somehow
don't know.... What standard textbooks are you referring to, in particular?
> > In fact this statement of your strikes me as a flagrantly wrong attitude
> > that is directly attributable to corruption by political influences ;>
>
> Perhaps. I'm not sure you're entirely free from SSSM contamination
> yourself, which may account for some of it.
The data in social sciences is sufficiently scanty that there is a lot of
room for multiple interpretations, and hence lots of room for personal or
political bias to affect one's choice of interpretation
ben
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