History of Science Lecture Series featuring Steven Shapin
Friday, February 24
5:30 p.m. 
Wolfensohn Hall 

Join us for a History of Science Lecture Series featuring Steven Shapin on Friday, February 24th to discuss "The Social Studies are Better Than the Natural Sciences." 

The claim is absurd: everybody knows that the order of value goes the other way. By many commonly-cited criteria, physics is better than sociology. On their side, the natural sciences have Method, experiment, and quantification; they progress and they produce powerful technologies; their knowledge is objective and consensually held; they can predict and they can formulate laws; they can defy common sense. The social sciences may aspire but they cannot match the powers of
the natural sciences

How, in what circumstances, did this come to be what "everybody knows"? There are longstanding traditions of classifying and ordering the branches of knowledge, but not all classifications have been accompanied by the same evaluations; not all classifications have aimed at evaluative contrast; and not all the recognized "sciences" have the same reference as they now do.

I describe some specific historical circumstances from which claims of superiority of the natural to the social sciences emerged; I discuss how and why those assessments were made; I take a disengaged view of how they could be made differently; and I speculate about how that evaluation might even now be changing.