>>No, it boils down to the guy in the cart, and the existence of the cart. Both continents would have probably been better off doing what they want for themselves, without any cart to pull.
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>>As for those social so-called "sciences"... c'mon. They'd be doing the same thing they are doing anyway, just to a different tune.
>
>Hey, watch it... I have a Master's degree in Sociology...

I'm watching but I can't see... so if you can help me, what's its basic axiom? What's its underlying theory?

My point is that in my neck of the woods these were called "social sciences", but I thought it was a communist plot to elevate Marxism and their own social theories to the rank of actual science, and guess what - we had mandatory sociology, political economy and a couple of civics and defense related courses on every college. The guys who were studying that didn't have physics, maths or chemistry as mandatory.

But then the more I learned on those, the less I was convinced they were sciences. Areas of human knowledge which apply scientific method as far as it goes, fine, but not sciences. Because most of the time they aren't exact, they are statistics, projections, can't check each other's work, can't repeat an experiment, there are too many variables to consider, you're never sure whether the results you got come from your introduced variable or some unforeseen factor etc. The matter presents a problem of far higher level of complexity, by orders of magnitude, that it's still unfeasible to write anything down and vouch for it. It's still too dependent on the milieu, mores of the times, culture etc, what you may find in one country, may not even be true for most of that country or even the city where you did the research.

Once I saw a classification of problems by complexity - simple, complex and friggin complex (because I forgot the actual words used :). Simple problems are just the basic mechanical or chemical laws - how to make fire, how to plant seeds, how does gravity operate (not what makes it work!) - things which may be described by a couple of equations or the algorithm written down on a single page.

The complex problems are those of, say, engineering or group organization - how to build an ocean liner, how to conduct an orchestra, how to run a company, how to play chess, how to write a novel. The variables run into hundreds, and the algorithm may be a size of a book, but you still know what to do. Sometimes, you can solve a highly complex problem by simplifying it into a just complex - you can run an army, but not of individual soldiers, but rather of depersonalized "troops", you can run a country by looking at the map, graphs, reports etc, without necessarily knowing what's going on in most of it. Abstraction yields reduction yields simplification to a level of a regular complex problem.

Then there are really complex problems, like understanding the human body from cell level up, building a complete planetary meteorological model, semantically correct machine translation etc etc. I guess humanities (as sociology et al are called here) as such highly complex problems will become sciences once there's a solution at this complex level, i.e. when they can have an exact explanation of how and why things happen in human societies. Until then... I actually don't envy you guys. We mathematicians have it simple - we can just imagine a set of axioms, follow a logic and see what we get, and then someday someone will put it to some practical use. You have people, much more complex.