Same way as the hard sciences - you make a prediction for something that you would never observe if the hypothesis is true, and then you go look for it. If you find it, then the hypothesis must be rejected. I might suspect that hunter gatherer tribes don't go to war, and I might observe many such tribes which don't, but that doesn't prove my hypothesis right. On the other hand, if I can find just one tribe which does go to war, then the hypothesis has been falsified.
The problem is that there are no two equal situations in social sciences, so you won't ever have the same set of initial conditions. I don't know why they call them sciences, but the scientific method is intrinsically incompatible with social phenomena.
jjk166|1 month ago
pepinator|1 month ago