Hard Versus Soft Science
The ease of quantification is one of the features used to distinguish hard and soft sciences from each other. Hard sciences are often considered to be more scientific, rigorous, or accurate. In some social sciences such as sociology, specific accurate data are difficult to obtain, either because laboratory conditions are not present or because the issues involved are conceptual but not directly quantifiable.
Read more about this topic: Quantification
Famous quotes containing the words hard, soft and/or science:
“Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Such is the brutalization of commercial ethics in this country that no one can feel anything more delicate than the velvet touch of a soft buck.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough ... had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)