In What Do You Care What Other People Think? (pp. 217-218), Feynman remarks:



"The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of scientific integrity and honesty.

In other fields, such as business, it's different. For example, almost every advertisement you see is obviously designed, in some way or another, to fool the customer: the print that they don't want you to read is small; the statement are written in an obscure way. It is obvious to anybody that the product is not being presented in a scientific and balanced way. Therefore, in the selling business, there's a lack of integrity."



The remarks are made in the context of discussing the cause of the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in 1986. Feynman makes the same point in his 1974 Caltech Commencement Address "Cargo Cult Science, and in quite a few other places. If you have not read "Cargo Cult Science," I highly recommend it; you can search "Cargo Cult" in the Remarks board to see some relevant remarks, as well as where to find the paper "Cargo Cult Science"on-line.

Feynman's remarks above remind me of what I heard from a physicist who I happened to sit next to at some dinner party. He said something like, "In social sciences, they argue for things, make arguments for this and that, and I always find that amusing. You see, we do not "argue" for things in physics."

I suppose social sciences are closer to business than to physics.

Of course, I thought about linguistics when I heard that.

As noted in [44414], I do not address issues of this sort almost at all in my forthcoming Language Faculty Science (for the reason stated there) although I have written quite a bit about them in the past, as can be seen in some of the postings in the Remarks board.