Some fields have merely already incorporated that critique better than others.
The institutionalist critique is not at all concerned about searching for unobservables and "calling it science."
Clearly you are only willing to recognize a portion of our critique. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
While there is a set of people who don't like calling social science, "science," (and which apparently includes you) that is really not a central part of the critique -- that is a mere semantic part. The counter-argument to them is that much of physical science is not really "science" then either -- much of medicine, genetics, etc., including a lot of theoretical physics. But that would be taking the argument too far, I hope you would agree. So I refuse to get hung up on yours or anyone else's obsession over a word, choosing instead to go after the heart of the critique, which remains valid: Especially in social questions, which usually involve unobservables because of the subjective, social nature of social science, an observer's institutional bias must be taken into account in some way in order to preserve some degree of honesty.
For example, Karl Polanyi, an important contributer to the institutionalist critique, did not expend a lot of effort pointing out how natural science was valid but social science was not. Rather, he argued that neoclassical economics is a political philosophy first and foremost and that distinctions necessarily biases its so-called scientific conclusions. Much work in History of Science uses the same strategy to critique virtually all of the natural sciences as well, particularly the applied parts of it in engineering and medicine.
So the critique is not centered, or really shouldn't be if some of you are, on categories of "real" science versus "fake" science. Rather the critique is centered, where is is useful, on the concept of honesty in any rational inquiry.
It is true that much of what goes out under the banner of social science is the fruitless chase of the unobservable, pursued sometimes by calculating the incomputable, sometimes by deploying the indecipherable in the attack on the inexcusable.
But much of what goes out under the banner of social science is indeed science, offering and contesting cause and effect explanations of observable social behavior and activity. Sadly, less commonly in my field of economics than in the other nomethetic fields of the social sciences. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
However, a lot has changed in the field since him, even if his critique still has validity. Heckman, for example, has re-focused much of what is considered economic inquiry precisely to question of cause and effect based on observables. However, the primary focus of social science remains on what one can deduce about unobservables -- justice, well-being, inherent traits -- from observable data. This differs from much work in natural science in one way very little: even if a phenomenon is unobservable to human senses, it's presence can be deduced from theory and observation of what can be observed. However, the key difference in social science are that the unobservable components are dependent upon social contexts, which are not the case in most questions of natural science.
Anyway, Migeru has warned me to not discuss this anymore in this thread. Good discussion.
