Quote from: Alpaca John on May 28, 2013, 07:11:00 PM

Quote from: myrkul on May 28, 2013, 06:36:10 PM

And yes, politics is a science.)

We both know that the two of us are not gonna have a fruitful discussion, so I'm not gonna get into one again, but I will tell you this.

I have a degree in political science. Anyone who does can tell you (or: should be able to tell you) that the name is misleading, since politics does not adhere to typical scientific standards; it's not falsifiable and it's not repeatable (especially not in an enclosed environment).

Neither is Praxeology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology) but it is most certainly a science. The root goal of science is to be able to develop theories of the natural world, with the goal of making predictions. As with anything outside of the hard sciences, it's very difficult or impossible to make a controlled test of a hypothesis; this does not mean that a well formed theory cannot be used to make effective predictions. Praxeology is damn good at making predictions. Other social sciences have varying degrees of usefulness in this regard.

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That does not mean that political science (or any other non-beta type of science) is useless, or at least I do not think it is. I think it can certainly teach us useful stuff, but it is very important to realize that it is not science in the "traditional" sense of the word. We cannot prove anything in a scientific manner; the usefulness rests in the discussions more than anywhere else. We can pose ideas and discuss hypothesis, in this way we can even get to some sort of estimation of probability, but we must always realize there just is no real way of knowing anything in any scientific way.

Well, If I had kep[t reading, I would have noticed that you already agreed with me.

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In other words, political science is paradoxically only useful if you first realize that it's actually not science at all.

In this case, I think you are projecting modernism - the believe in progress as based on science - on non-scientific concepts like politics, or freedom. If political science tells us anything, it is that we can not do that. We can not say whether or not the concept of freedom has progressed, at least not in a scientific way as you seem to be suggesting.

I disagree with this last part, at least partially. While we can't prove anything, we can certainly demonstrate that the general trend has been towards greater freedom for the individual, however that is defined.