Brajesh Mishra
Dear GreenHalibut,
on the whole I am very pleased that you are looking for the connection of the social sciences to the natural sciences and that your text elicits possible solutions - if I have understood it correctly, about more philosophy in the social sciences. But from my point of view your text also shows on a meta-level the dilemma of the social sciences. Because you keep mixing goals and intentions, of course very well-intentioned intentions, with the knowledge of reality.
From my point of view, natural sciences means above all to make an unconditional, maximally objective comparison of theory with reality, which is not named in your description of physics, but is very crucial (page 5: "Physics focuses on (i) illustration of principle (toy model); (ii) quantifying the qualitative reasoning about the real world; (iii) equations to organize qualitative knowledge on natural processes; (iv) building simplistic models for a complex realistic situation"). Models, comparisons, measurements are all just methods to achieve the best possible match with reality, and thus knowledge about reality.
Desires and goals are always justified, but on the other hand have nothing to do with cognition.
So when you ask social questions, they argue along a goal (for instance in chapter 4.1 "Advancement of basic science for the socioeconomic betterment"). What you and most of social science, as well as philosophy, do not do is ask whether scientific methods and laws might not provide explanations for social questions. For example, the theory of evolution, which is not yet finished and error-free and in particular not yet sufficiently mathematically formulated, but which explains a great deal in biology even in this unfinished form, could probably also provide many insights for social phenomena, such as the geographical differences in the level of social development to which you refer.
But perhaps in the future the development will go the other way round: the natural sciences will be increasingly motivated and methodically enabled to explain social conditions as well, so that a sociology of the natural sciences will emerge.
