Talk:Soft science

message: Ha ha! This can't be considered to have a 'neutral point of view', old man.
Seriously, a historian often has to work for 20 years to master the chosen area. Unless you have a narrow definition of 'training', the statement is just wrong, about that. 
Probably there is a better article to be written, on this topic.
Charles Matthews 09:35, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

message: I think this article should be collapsed into the clearly superior article "Hard science."
I think this would be a good idea, except that this and the “Hard Science” articles are so messed up that if you merged the two, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them. 206.195.19.43 (talk) 09:26, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  collapsing 

message: this article is generally underinformed about science in the world, it has a u.s. centrism that does not actually map onto science as practiced in the rest of the world.   it needs research and cleanup.  i made some minor changes to push it away from blatant falsehoods, but it is still very much anti-science and ideologically based in anglo-american scientism.--Buridan 12:19, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It creates an artificial and not broadly accepted division within the sciences in order to undermine the status of a whole section of science doesn't it?  that by definition is anti-science and it fetishizes a very narrow definition of science, privileging it over the broader nature of scientific practics known worldwide.  if you google soft science and anti-science together you find a strong relationship between the people who describe soft science and those that push anti-scientific positions.   --Buridan 19:46, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  npov 

message: Exactly why is soft science categorised under :Category:Science while hard science is under :Category:Philosophy of science?  Wouldn't it be reasonable to expect these two articles under the same category? NerdyNSK 15:23, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categorisation 

message: This article cites no sources or references to show that the term is in use and that the claims made in the article are have basis. Unless the article can be made to satisfy wp:v and wp:or consideration will be given to its deletion. Bobby1011 16:24, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original research 

message: Suggest a merge between 'Hard science' and 'Soft science', under the title 'Hard and soft science'. Almost all sources on the topic mention both hard science and soft science as a contrast, an article on one inevitably will discuss it in terms of the other, with inevitable duplication. Having two articles also misrepresents the situation as a binary classification; most refs consider 'harder' and 'softer' as relative terms (eg, from hard to soft: physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, economics, anthropology - these examples taken from ). A single article would be better positioned to address this. Bazzargh (talk) 14:38, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: An article proposal is here User:Bazzargh/Hard_and_soft_science. I've tried to avoid 'improving' this article too much, I've just mashed the two together. Consider it not as what the article should look like when complete, but as a starting point merging the two articles; the goal here is simply to capture what was in both of the previous articles. I don't think its worth discussing/changing the merged article too much; if the merger goes ahead we can fix it up in the real article and keep the history that way. Bazzargh (talk) 15:31, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: really, shouldn't both be deleted as npov issues?--Buridan (talk) 21:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Why? (see the NPOV FAQ). The term clearly exists, there are multiple papers describing the distinction in their title as well as their subject matter, I've provided cites to a book chapter about it...? There is a problem with an implication that soft science lacks value, but that can be stated, with sources, in the article. Bazzargh (talk) 00:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

text: The problem is that the two articles are descriptions of the same thing, relative hardness, or equivalently, relative softness. We already deal with this for real-world hardness by only fleshing out one of the articles (Hardness) while Softness has become a page disambiguating its antonyms. Expanding the article will necessarily discuss both hard and soft science. Bazzargh (talk) 00:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal