\u201cNatural Science\u201d is intrinsically asocial. The only exception at the fuzzy borderline is anthropology (which includes ethnology and, according to some, linguistics). \u201cScience\u201d is also ambiguous; in some languages (e.g., French and Hungarian) it means, jointly, natural science, social science and humanities scholarship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Natural scientists, whether theoreticians or experimentalists, think of their work as answerable only to objective \u201cempirical\u201d testing and logic \u2014 the so-called \u201cscientific method.\u201d<\/a> As a consequence, many \u201cnatural scientists\u201d have an implicit or overt scepticism about \u201csocial sciences\u201d (or \u00ab sciences humaines \u00bb as the French call it, or \u201cGeisteswissenschaften\u201d as the Germans call it) as pseudoscience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the \u201cnatural scientists\u201d are right. But far more often they don\u2019t understand, or misunderstand. This has occasionally led to internecine squabbles and even enmity in the Academy. (See Mathematician Andr\u00e9 Weil vs.<\/em> Sociologist Robert Bellah<\/a> at the Institute for Advanced Study and Mathematician Serge Lang vs<\/em>. Political Scientist Samuel Huntington <\/a>at the National Academy of Sciences.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n That the valiant defenders of the sacrosanct frontiers of \u201cscience\u201d are often mathematicians, whose purely formal discipline lacks one of the two pillars of the \u201cscientific method\u201d (which has sometimes cast doubt on the scientific status of their own discipline) is ironic, but perhaps instructive as to why Professor Lov\u00e1sz was so helpless in the face of Orban\u2019s depredations. Not understanding the social sciences, he was hardly in the position to defend them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Joseph Palink\u00e1s, in contrast, an atomic physicist and an Orban fellow-traveller, failed to defend the non-natural sciences in the \u201cphilosopher affair,<\/a>\u201d and has only lately discovered his conscience, now that it\u2019s much too late. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an eery and unpleasant familiarity in the tepid defence (and even active derogation) of their non-natural foster-sister sciences by some \u201cnatural scientists,\u201d such as neuroscientist Tam\u00e1s Freund \u2014 playing into Orban\u2019s hands while still feeling immune from his depredations. Social scientists and humanists would have a lesson to teach them, if they would listen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n