[aniro]

English does not lack this distinction.

"Hard Sciences" refers to scientific inquiry that is empirical in nature and has results that can be reproduced and confirmed independently. eg: most physics and chemistry

"Soft Science" refers to the rest. eg: psychology

[ksdale]

These categories exist, but parent's main example was diet/nutrition, which should fit into the hard science bucket because it's chemistry/biology, but currently involves a lot of soft science-y type studies because it's got so many moving parts.

I'm not sure making a distinction like that is particularly useful, in any case. I think perhaps that people who have studied a lot of science can already make the distinction fairly easily, and having phrases like hard and soft science just serves to create assumptions where they needn't exist.

[LeifCarrotson]

Some would group biology into a soft science because the margins for error must be relaxed or softened; one cannot eliminate potentially confounding factors from a biological experiment because each organism is unique and fractally complex.

Another categorization is the "natural sciences" and the "social sciences". Natural science is often split into "life science" and "physical science", again because biology is difficult.

[h2odragon]

Nutrition isn't a "hard science" because people digest food differently, and that varies over time. We adapt. Your first week of a bean diet will be harsh but after the 3rd year you're probably ok. or dead. Some people wouldn't ever adapt to it.

There's "hard science" there but to throw a rope around the whole field is more of an exercise in faith, that there is One True Diet for All People.

[bmitc]

I am not a big fan of these distinctions. In fact, they're completely backwards when you look at it from the perspective of difficulty of the sciences. The so-called hard sciences, like physics and chemistry, are far easier than biology, ecology, psychology, etc. These difficulties should not mean that they are lesser as implied by the normal usage of "hard" vs "soft" sciences.

> empirical in nature and has results that can be reproduced and confirmed independently

All sciences conform to this. It's just that reproducing results in physics and chemistry is much, much easier and feasible than in the other sciences.

[trashtester]

"hard" doesn't refer to the difficulty level of "hard sciences", but the solidity of the evidence. Basically the same as "hard" evidence in a court case (video footage of a murder, procured from a trusted source, with witnesses and murder weapon intact, as opposed to mere circumstancial evidence).

[edmundsauto]

Why do you think it's about the subject, and not a reference to our ability to understand the non-linear outputs from a huge number of inputs?

Personally, I believe that psychology could be a hard science if it weren't for the limitations of our tools.

[trashtester]

For now, psychology is too hard (meaning difficult) to be a hard (meaning solid) science.