[vph]

To be fair, scientists by and large understand the need of replication, and evaluation in general. It's just in certain fields (e.g. psychology) or circumstances with human subjects, it's very expensive or even infeasible to have well controlled repeated experiments.

[Godel_unicode]

If you don't have well controlled, repeatable experiments (a.k.a. the scientific method) are you actually doing science? I think we should come up with another word for these types of one-off studies.

[gumby]

Many fields advance without solid well controlled, repeatable experiments, at least through various stages of development: cosmology, geology, most of medicine, philosophy, science of mind, etc. You don't consider those all "science"?

There's more to science than Bacon.

[freyr]

Those fields have scientific and non-scientific components. The non-scientific parts are not science.

[gumby]

Your statement is tautological. You might want to read up on epistemology and the philosophy of science -- I would start with Karl Popper. As I said, Bacon is not the definition of science.

Bizarrely, my unremarkable comment was downvoted!

[freyr]

> Your statement is tautological

You want to label fields that have both scientific components and non-scientific components (in varying proportions) as "science." The point of my statement is that some of those fields have scientific aspects, and there may be sub-fields I'd categorize as "science," but I wouldn't categorize the field as a whole as "science."

[Godel_unicode]

I believe you were downvoted because you were factually inaccurate about the presence of scientific studies in medicine especially. Controlled, double-blind, repeatable (from a population standpoint) studies are something medicine is good at. Note that there are counter-examples of medical studies which were poorly conducted, but realize that they are the exception not the rule.