Humanity and its cultural constructs are more enigmatic than much of the natural world

From Are There 'Laws' in Social Science? by Ross Pomeroy. I woke up this morning trying to arrive at definitions of when we know something to be true (also definitions of when we know something to be useful). I don't know where he gets it, but I like Pomeroy's quoted definition of a scientific law.

A scientific law is "a statement based on repeated experimental observations that describes some aspect of the world. A scientific law always applies under the same conditions, and implies that there is a causal relationship involving its elements."

A scientific law is both testable and can be used to forecast, two critical elements often absent from the domain of the social sicences.

At the end of the article.

The reason why social science and its purveyors often gets such a bad rap has less to do with the rigor of their methods and more to do with the perplexity of their subject matter. Humanity and its cultural constructs are more enigmatic than much of the natural world. Even Feynman recognized this. "Social problems are very much harder than scientific ones," he noted. Social science itself may be an enterprise doomed, not necessarily to fail, just to never fully succeed. Utilizing science to study something inherently unscientific is a tricky business.

I'd argue that it gets a bad rap because its subject is indeed much more complex and yet it uses much less rigorous methods despite the greater need for them. The hard sciences have disgracefully high levels of research retraction or non-replication, but that is essentially a consequence and cost of exploring the frontier of knowledge. As bad as that situation is, the social sciences are far worse - few studies, rarely rigorous and with fixed opinions unsupported at all or supported with inconclusive and badly designed studies.