As a consequence of returning to school, I am asked several times a day about what my field of study is. This is a touch awkward, as I have never really believed in the ‘science’ part of ‘political science’. I don’t think political phenomena can generally be effectively studied using quantitative methods. Indeed, I would be a lot more comfortable in a discipline with a name like ‘politics, philosophy, and economics’.
Thankfully, I can often dodge the ‘science’ part by saying that I study ‘environmental politics’. Those with a strong interest in academic taxonomy will sometimes persist in questioning until I name a discipline that is formally recognized at this institution, but most people seem content to accept ‘environmental politics’ as a field of study.
There is science involved in this area of research, certainly, but it pertains mostly to how the physical world responds to human choices, not to attempts to understand human interaction and institutions numerically. The interaction between carbon dioxide and electromagnetic radiation can be well-explained mathematically – the relationship between what scientists know and how governments behave, much less so.
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Environmental politics conveys a clearer and narrower meaning than political science. It also seems more descriptive of a situation when your study goes well beyond the “study of the state” which is one definition of political science. Stoner said “As a discipline, political science, possibly like the social sciences as a whole, lives on the fault line between the ‘two cultures’ in the academy, the sciences and the humanities.”
I wonder if part of holding onto the use of the term science in the social sciences is in part a belief that science has more importance than humanities in our age of reason.
If not more important, at least more worthy of public funding in the eyes of politicians and voters.
Still, I think the social ‘sciences’ often bear a resemblance to what Richard Feynmann described as cargo cult science.
See also: Feynman on bad science