Chemists don’t squabble about what oxygen is, but if psychologists convene a conference on a fuzzier concept like “trust,” says Colin Camerer, an economist at Caltech, they’ll spend the first two days disagreeing about what the word actually means.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I agree that many important terms in the social definitions are poorly defined. Examples include trust, culture, and happiness. Ethnicity, which is very important in political studies, may not be well defined. I am not sure that such terms as extroversion or openness are well defined. Even IQ may not be that well defined.
Security prices are well defined. As a result, theory and empirical research in finance tends to be more robust than elsewhere in economics. However, even finance has its less well-defined concepts, such as “expectations.”
I should point out that the problem of poorly-defined terms arises not because social scientists are less intelligent or careful than natural scientists. The problem is that social science has to deal with phenomena of the mind. Oxygen is part of the physical world. Trust and extroversion exist in the mental world.
I have noted that in all of the social disciplines there is a bias in favor of explaining outcomes on the basis of physical phenomena, such as natural resources and physical capital, rather than on the basis of mental phenomena, such as culture and institutions. In part this may reflect frustration with the challenge of defining terms when describing mental phenomena.
Although exhortations to social scientists to define terms may be helpful, I think it is important to understand that exhortations alone cannot solve the problem. Mental phenomena are harder to pin down.
On the one hand you want something clear enough to make it possible to adjudicate competing claims. On the other hand, whenever definitions of fuzzy concepts are up for debate, people are smart enough to see a few chess moves ahead and it’s extremely hard to resist the temptation to advocate for a version that stacks the deck in favor of their preferred outcomes.
There is a 2000 International Relations article by Steven Bernstein and colleagues entitled, “God Gave Physics the Easy Problems.”
Like “capitalism”. Not only are economists all over the map as a group, individual economists use the word to mean different things, such as everything from corporate to industrial to small business to “private ownership of the means of production”.
Shouldn’t we compare between similar levels of complexity? For example, will we solve recessions before we cure cancer? You may still be right as the prognosis for cancer is starting to look promising. There are fewer psychological biases to deal with in medicine and they let you run experiments and randomized clinical trials.
If you consider the Hadron collider, I bet there are a lot of definitional discussions all the time. They just aren’t hashed out at conferences or letters to journal editors. Hard science also seems a lot more individualistic and it’s division of labor more formal. There is little reward for spending time gaining consensus. The work still has to be done. In social science, gaining consensus seems to be what much of the work consists of.