[maemre]

> Any field that has to append "science" to its name usually isn't scientific e.g. political science, social science.

Although it's a bit of a side-track and you're quoting, what are your thoughts on applying this logic to "computer _science_" or "material science"?

I think it's more about the age of the field:

1. pretty old fields like physics (which just comes from the Greek word for nature), chemistry (comes from the art of making alloys) just have names describing what is studied without adding something that says "study of".

2. a lot of newer sciences (e.g. biology, geology, psychology, sociology) we use -logy as a suffix meaning "field of study", again from ancient Greek. Some of these are natural sciences, some others are social sciences.

3. in newer fields of study, rather than deriving new Latin/Greek names we just use "X science", which is not that different from what's being done in (2) A major exception to this is the medical fields (like oncology) where we still use -logy because Latin/Greek roots are still in common use in medicine.

[onecommentman]

Well, for computer science, it is straightforward. Computer science is the science that lies somewhere between science of astrology and the science of numerology, without the popularity of the former or the formality of the latter. (Not my line, sadly.)