Great, show me one result from the entire field of sociology that was replicated.
I haven’t read all that many sociological works yet (at most 20) but like with psychology you recreate conditions of interaction. The difference between the reproductivity of sociology and for example physics is that when studying the common interactions one can take for example a data set with 100.000 such interactions and extract from them what the underlying laws are, in physics one repeats a test a couple times, The results are the same and so one concludes that is the case everywhere, even for dark matter and anti-matter perhaps. When one studies what this matter does in the specific constellation “human” it is called sociology. All science is the study of reality, just at a different level. So in short: a service level analysis points in the direction of sociology being a science while at a fundamental level it is also a science.
the idea that it is not is generally built on the assumption that humans are so unique that it is impossible to scientifically study them. This is wrong. Humans act according to simple instincts and interests, sure humans are unique but some minor differences won’t make a difference when one is studying one big common principal, or trying to find it, which is what sociology is. Therefore sociology is, by it’s very definition, a science, otherwise one can’t really speak of sociology. Great sociologists have predicted many trends, knowing their outcome before it came to be, the accuracy of the claims of these sociologists in their particular field is further evidence that human interaction conforms to these general laws, determined by the very existence of instincts, interests and evolution. The purpose of sociology is not to study individual humans and find the laws to which the workings of the human mind adhere, psychologists an neurologists doe that, the purpose of sociology is to find out what happens in interactions of large groups of people. With the world being divided into states with different, on occasion very long, histories, there are plenty of isolated instances of laws manifesting themselves aka a certain sociologically studyable event occurring. To confirm microscopic particles work the way we think we do we would have to observe all of them at every moment of existence and document all their properties, not only could one argue, as some philosophers have done, that this still wouldn’t be enough proof but there are also natural laws against this occurring even in a smaller area, one can‘t measure all the properties of matter without at the very least significantly changing those properties through that interaction.
The French used to keep weights which weighed exactly one kilogram. When, after years of storage in vacuums, they were weighed they weighed different amounts. Both those which had been in the same vacuum as well as those which had been in different ones all weighed different amounts. Even today our exact scientific units may somewhat vary depending on the situation, though they are now based on things that are actually constant instead of things that can change, our interaction with constants, measurement of them, can change and with them the units we use for measuring things. This is just one of the reasons why pur knowledge of physics approaches reality but can never match it exactly. Than there is the aforementioned impossibility of exactly measuring everything and a bunch of things which are not possible to measure. There’s Banach-Tarksi. There’s also the workings of electrons and a bunch of other weird stuff which physics is not expected to ever be able to explain (I think a physicist once told me that it was impossible to exactly explain how electrons work by the very nature of our conception of physics).
from all this the conclusion can be reached that A:, sociological results are as reproducible as those of other sciences
B: If held up to the same level of scrutiny as sociology physics is not a science either
and C: that all this studying of reality is all, just that, studying reality at one level or another and as such their nature is the same.
One can look up conclusion from the field of sociology, it should be reproducible, otherwise it is pseudo-sociology in the same way that unreproducible information from physics is not actually physics but pseudo-physics.
