in defence of social sciences

Charles Lane has written an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he argues that the NSF should cut funds for social sciences:

Though quantitative methods may rule economics, political science and psychology, these disciplines can never achieve the objectivity of the natural sciences. Those who study social behavior — or fund studies of it — are inevitably influenced by value judgments, left, right and center. And unlike hypotheses in the hard sciences, hypotheses about society usually can’t be proven or disproven by experimentation. Society is not a laboratory.
The NSF’s budget includes $247.3 million for social sciences. At a time of trillion-dollar deficits, and possible cuts to defense, food stamps and other vital programs, this is a luxury we can live without. Cut the NSF’s entire social science budget. Use half the savings for hard science and the rest to reduce the deficit.

Is there a need to write an apology for sociology as a social science? I don't think so. As long as sociology empowers - as it did for Martin Luther King Jr., BA in Sociology, informs - look at any poll from the Pew Research Center, challenges - go to a meeting of the World Social Forum and provides insights about the world we live in, I am confident in its future.
To oppose soft to hard sciences represents a meaningless activity. It means not to know what a social science is, what constitutes its field of study and how social actors make sense of the developments in social sciences in order to understand and change the social world.
At the same time, I think, Charles Lane is not familiar with the "objectivity of the natural sciences" either. Even a superficial reading of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions or a distant familiarity with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would provide him with the understanding that science in general is a human enterprise subject to errors and limitations.
Further, I think society is a laboratory. Not in the sense that you can operate with people as with stones or rats, but in the sense that society represents in many ways series of patterns of action and interaction that repeat themselves or vary over time. Institutions, inequalities, relations of class, gender and race, all of them are subject to these processes of reproduction and variance. A laboratory existing in the real time. As for the ethical concerns related to scientific practices, that what IRBs are for.
Finally, a somewhat personal point. The argument of sacrificing social sciences to other needs - technology, defence, food resembles the Soviet argument about the need to ignore social sciences as bourgeois (i.e. ideologically biased, as Charles Lane suggests) and to focus efforts on the space race, the factories and the huge nuclear arsenal. The end of that story is well known - unable to communicate with its own society and to understand its tensions, the Soviet Union simply collapsed. And its citizens remained as hungry and defenceless as they were before.



Here is an answer from the Pol Sci community.