[scottishcow]

Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.

I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.

[claudiawerner]

You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of mathematicians.

If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power, and why.

Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic (both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not.

Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.

[scottishcow]

The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.