Soft science is a colloquial term, often used pejoratively, for academic research or scholarship which is purportedly not based on reproducible experimental data and a mathematical explanation of that data. It is usually opposed to "hard science," rather than to non-science. A word or phrase is pejorative or derogatory (sometimes misspelled perjorative) if it expresses contempt or disapproval; dyslogistic (noun: dyslogism) is used synonymously (antonyms: meliorative, eulogistic, noun eulogism). ... Plato is credited with the inception of academia: the body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. ... Research is an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry in order to discover, interpret or revise facts, events, behaviours, or theories, or to make practical applications with the help of such facts, laws or theories. ... A scholarship is an award of access to an institution and/or a financial aid award for an individual for the purposes of furthering their education. ... From Latin ex- + -periri (akin to periculum attempt). ... Hard science is a term which often is used to describe certain fields of the natural sciences, usually physics, chemistry, and many fields of biology. ...

Even within the natural sciences, research which depends upon conjecture, qualitative analysis of data (compared to quantitative analysis), or uncertain experimental results is sometimes derided as soft science (cosmology is one common example). But more often the term is applied to the social sciences by doubters of their objective rigor. In its broadest sense, even largely non-quantitative, non-experimental fields of the humanities like literary criticism or gender studies are disparaged as soft science (though one must take "science" to mean something like the German Wissenschaft, or "scholarship," for the claim even to make sense). The term natural science as the way in which different fields of study are defined is determined as much by historical convention as by the present day meaning of the words. ... The term qualitative research has at least three meanings: Qualitative research is an umbrella term used, especially in the social sciences, to describe various research methods or approaches. ... A quantitative property can be meaningfully measured using numbers; properties which arent quantitative are called qualitative. ... Cosmology, from the Greek: κοσμολογία (cosmologia, κόσμος (cosmos) world + λογια (logia) discourse) is the study of the universe in its totality and by extension mans place in it. ... The Social Sciences are a group of academic and research disciples that study the human aspects of the world, that requires the application of the scientific method. ... The humanities are a group of academic subjects united by a commitment to studying aspects of the human condition and a qualitative approach that generally prevents a single paradigm from coming to define any discipline. ... Literary criticism is the study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. ... Gender studies is a theoretical work in the social sciences or humanities that focuses on issues of sex and gender in language and society, and often addresses related issues including racial and ethnic oppression, postcolonial societies, and globalization. ...

Different approaches to the scientific method can be distinguished by the research they term "soft science" and what they consider "hard." The issue is important to the philosophy of science (which does not always support the possibility of drawing a distinction between "hard" and "soft") and to science studies and the sociology of science (which study scientists' implicit perceptions of research and methods). The characterization phase can require extended and extensive study, even centuries. ... The philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy which studies the philosophical foundations, assumptions, and implications of science, including the natural sciences such as physics and biology, and the social sciences, such as psychology and economics. ... In academic research, science studies (also known as science and technology studies and sometimes science, technology, and society, or simply STS) is an umbrella term for a number of approaches devoted to studying science that emerged from developments in the history and philosophy of science (HPS) and the sociology of... In academics, science studies (sometimes seen as science and technology studies) is an umbrella term for a number of approaches devoted to studying science, and as a discipline its participants often come from a wide variety of disciplines, usually history of science, sociology of science, philosophy of science, sociology of...

External link

• Soft science: an analysis of news coverage of the social sciences, from Columbia University