A 2013 spontaneous polling of “economist” Gheorghe Savoiu and “physicist” Ion Siman, conducted by Libb Thims, while driving around Romania (polling done in a car while driving), in route to a socio-econo-physics conference, of their respective opinions of hard/soft rankings. |
“Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.”
A 2010 view on hard-soft “hierarchy” by a philosophy professor, who comments “if I were to draw a line between the hard and the soft, I'd probably place it between biology and psychology.” [5] The diagram shown places the divide farther to the left, being that biology, the study of "life", which is a defunct term according to modern hard science, is thus a defunct subject. |
A cartoon style rendition of the perceptual ranking of the sciences by purity, hardness, exactness (see: exact science), or realness (see: real science). |