I don't know about the level of agglutinativity (is that a word? :) of
Swedish, but I would think it would be something like "gain knowledge"
or "learn the world"

On 9/13/05, Andreas Johansson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Quoting Tristan Mc Leay <[log in to unmask]>:
> 
> > On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 00:55 +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> >
> > > You can say _naturvetenskapsman_ "natural scientist", but that's strictly
> > > someone working with the physical sciences - a distinction of subject
> > matter,
> > > not methodology or "objectivity" (for lack of a better word).
> >
> > But can you find a better distinction between the hard and soft sciences
> > than the content matter?
> 
> I'm not trying to find good distinctions, I'm trying to describe ones that are
> generally made.
> 
> > (or, perhaps, whether they present their data
> > as graphs or tables). Psychology, for instance, is generally considered
> > a "soft science", but many psychologists use a quite hard-scientific
> > methodology and I presume are "objective", but in the context of science
> > I'm not completely sure what you mean by it. (To the extent that there
> > are some who don't use hard-scientific methodologies, that should not
> > taint other subfields and other researchers, unless, of course, the
> > criterion is by public declaration: Which is fair enough, but then "hard
> > science" is a soft science, and it's no surprise that you can't get a
> > perfect translation into Swedish of the concept.)
> 
> Psychology is a borderline case, so let's look at history. If I say it's a "soft
> science", I'm implying that full scientific rigour is not applied to or is not
> applicable to it. If I say it's not a _naturvetenskap_, I'm doing little else
> but noting it's not physics.
> 
> That definitions don't map perfectly should be no surprise, unless one, as
> Yitzik apparently did, assumes that there is a single Western idea of what
> "science" is.
> 
>                                                         Andreas
>