The term social science is appointed to any subject that refers to human behavior.
“A fundamental difference between human sciences and natural sciences is in the interpretation of the word “science”. The human sciences might be classified as science because they use the scientific method to test the validity and reliability of hypotheses. However, unlike the natural sciences, the phenomena they try to explain might not possess hard and fast laws that admit no exceptions. They might therefore resort to statistical methods to establish their findings, producing knowledge that is less reliable in terms of issuing predictions.”
This is why many believe that they shouldn’t be considered a science. They are open to so many false positives, for example in physiology. Where we’ve seen many professionals tamper with results. This has been an issue because in the hard sciences someone publishes an article about their experiment they could test it in any part of the world. And is a physiologist publishes an article where we monitored the behavior of 5 teenagers for 3 years. It would almost be impossible that someone would try to recreate the same experiment so the community chooses to believe in the results. This opens the opportunity for false results in all of the human sciences.
So Is economics really scientific? Or do they just call themselves scientific to increase their credibility? I believe that within all of the social sciences economics is one is not the most scientific. I think that this is because it uses the scientific method to predict changes is the economy that can or will be proven eventually. But at the same time I feel they do use the term scientific to increase their credibility. To quote Mr.Gardner, at the beginning of the year he told us that if you gave the same problem to 5 different economist you would most likely get 5 different solutions to that same problem. So if there are many answers to the same problem, is that really Science?