<i>&gt; Who measures softness&#x2F;fuzziness of a field?</i><p>There&#x27;s an absolutely unambiguous distinction between the &quot;hard&quot; and &quot;soft&quot; sciences<p>Social scientists hold themselves to fundamentally different standards on things like repeatability and predictive power and methodolgy than other fields. And whenever that difference can be quantified (e.g. statistical results), &quot;different&quot; means &quot;lower&quot;. It&#x27;s just a fact, and it&#x27;s one most sociologists will freely admit, for example. You simply can&#x27;t get the same sorts of results on humans that you can get on e.g. chemical reactions.<p>Unfortunately, soft&#x2F;hard comes along with a value judgement that&#x27;s not necessarily appropriate. But pretending like there isn&#x27;t a clear difference between what are now referred to as the soft and hard sciences is disinegenious.