Matt Yglesias is kind enough to promote political science:
bq. One feature of the American political media that I’ve oft had occasion to the lament is the lack of influence by the field of political science. It’s generally taken for granted that some familiarity with economists’ research is relevant to writing about economic issues, but people seem very comfortable making broad, sweeping assertions about the American political system that are totally uninformed by research into it. It’s true that political science isn’t really _science_ like physics that’s going to definitively answer every question you might have, but empirical and theoretical inquiry by political scientists can and does shed a lot of light on a lot of important issues.
But this compliment still has a back-handed flavor, as he repeats this often-heard analogy to physics, which can “definitively answer every question” while political science (and, presumably, economics, sociology, etc.) can only “shed light.” I’ve always found this a strange conception of physics or any other “hard” science, for that matter. It doesn’t take long to think of many important questions that physicists haven’t answered. Or you can turn to medicine and think about how little we still understand about the human brain, despite initiatives like this one. Etc., etc.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate this compliment. And Yglesias himself is particularly alert to ideas and findings in political science. But I think a more accurate depiction of “the sciences” wouldn’t establish some hierarchy with physics at the top and the social sciences further down.