From: utzoo!utcsrgv!donald Newsgroups: net.misc Title: REAL Sciences Don't Eat Quiche Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.391 Posted: Wed Jun 16 09:45:58 1982 Received: Wed Jun 16 12:35:01 1982 Some of the comments about "technical people" (engineers and us computer scientists) vs. (pinko) social scientists, and psychology as a black art vs. computer science as a REAL science are amazingly silly and narrowminded. First of all, computer science is not as close to engineering as one might think. I hardly think automata theory, complexity theory, and programming methodology, etc., qualify as technical fields, any more than quantum mechanics does. There appears to be semantic confusion as to what constitutes a "science". Strictly speaking, a "science" is a discipline which attempts to develop a paradigm of the physical world (sometimes known as "reality"), using what is commonly called the "scientific method" as a tool. Thus, mathematics and much of "computer science" are not sciences. Neither is engineering or programming: they are merely exercises in technology, or applied uses of scientific results. So Andy Tannenbaum really didn't have to get upset... To Laura & pcmcgeer: just because psychology presently lacks Hari Seldon and psychohistory does not mean that it is not a valid science. Psychology appears to be an organized discipline utilizing scientific methodology, so it qualifies as a science, albeit still in the infant stages. After all, by your criteria it would seem that Physics is not a science because we can't agree on how many quarks there are and lack a unified field theory! The social sciences are concerned with developing a theory of humans and human society, a very restricted, but important, subset of the physical world. One might argue that pyschology and the other social sciences (which the technical heathen of usenet disdain so much) are the MOST important of all the sciences, for they are concerned ultimately with HUMANS (i.e. people!), and that is hardly ignoble. Useneters seem more concerned with Dei ex machina than members of their own species. Don Chan (utcsrgv!donald) P.S. This flame is all the more surprising coming from me, a technical guy with aspirations to the physical sciences, and mostly ignorant of the social sciences.