A lot of astrophysicists will be relieved to hear that. And tell Clarke, while you're at it.
I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop here...
[clunk!]Is that a testable hypothesis? d8-)
Your perception that they're "trying hard to impose" is not my perception, but vive la différence.
There's a lot more to be gained by noting the similarities between physical sciences and others before focusing on definitions and putting fields of science into boxes. All science at the frontiers is a blind seeking, and what is sought first is descriptive and analytical. When a cosmologist doesn't know what he's looking for (the source of dark energy, for example), he's at least as much in the dark (sorry for the pun) as an economist who's trying to analyze risk aversion. It turns out that understanding risk aversion is a matter of social psychology, so the economist gains understanding by fishing in the dark until he gains an insight -- in this case, the insight that another field of science can identify the phenomenon that's perturbing his analysis. He was looking for something along the lines of "rational action" -- the economist's traditional turf -- until he realized he was looking in the wrong place. Great science is done by the scientists who have the unanticipated insights and look in unsuspected places: charmed and blessed guesswork, as some of them have said. Risk aversion is not so lofty as a subject, but seeking insights outside of deductive science can be very lofty indeed.
Instrumentalism and its exclusive focus on testable hypothesis and predictability has a congealing effect on the mind. At the frontiers, not much is instrumental. It's mostly jazzing around by brilliant people. Then come the hypotheses. Sometimes they're even testable. Then the brilliant science enters the slog of empiricism and dreary labwork. Some engineers who look at science through their own set of lenses come to believe that it isn't science if it doesn't produce testable hypotheses that enable reliable predictions. They're wrong, of course. Within their narrow working world, almost everything is testable and will lead to predictability. But science is much larger than that.
When will astrophysicists be able to test the hypothesis that those distant planets they're discovering among the stars will have not only the conditions for life, but life itself? Maybe never. The planets are too far away. The means to detect life on them may never be found; a method may not exist at all. If they're never able to predict the existence of other life with certainty, will we decide someday that they weren't really scientists at all?
Of course not. Likewise, the social scientists who seem *always* to be on their frontiers, because they are limited in how they can detect and measure the effects of vast numbers of variables -- complexity. And, like quantum physicists, they're also dealing with random events and perturbations of unknown complexity -- the butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil, the unknown unknowns. Are they fractal or simply chaotic? Is there a way to test it? To make predictions?
Maybe, maybe not. Meantime, we go with the best knowledge we have, like doctors using the best antibiotics they know of to cure diseases on which those antibiotics don't work. We try our best. So do other life scientists, and social scientists.
We're the ones who press them for answers, not the other way around. We always want answers and we blame the sociologists, or the economists, or the medical researchers, for not having the answers we want. When they take their best shot and it doesn't work out, we blame them for imposing their policies on us.
But the political process is how we decide upon policies. The social sciences and life sciences just provide the best current knowledge. Sometimes -- often -- it's wrong. But it's the best we have. What's the alternative? To rely on complete ignorance?