Re: Making money from Java


<docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dnqmpo$dhu$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Psychology used to be classed as a 'soft science', along with
> anthropology, sociology and the like... I was taught that disciplines
> which could not have a 'control' in their experiments were 'soft
> sciences'. After all... what would be the 'control' for the experiment of
> an individual life?

I don't have a formal, rigorous definition of "science", but I believe
that any body of knowledge that has the label of "science" should have been
primarily (if not exclusive) developed via the "scientific process"; that
is, objective observations made via experiments which are independently
verifiable.

If someone says "I have a theory about how electrons work, and I came
about this theory because I did such and such experiment and arrived at
these results", someone else, on the other side of the world, reading about
it over the Internet, should be able to say "Let me try the same experiment
and see if I arrive at the same results".

Most of psychology, anthropology, etc. does not fall under this
definition, but psychologist, anthropologists, etc. sometimes get touchy if
you try to tell them what they are doing is not "real" science.

Then again, I call myself a "computer scientist", but I don't think I
can call anything I've done in this domain an "experiment". What I do is
more like pure thinking and reasoning, with no external observations. I
guess this would put "computer science" not under "science", but rather
under "mathematics" or perhaps "logic/philosophy"?

- Oliver


.

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