I understand the idea, but the problem is that chemists are themselves soft. People who study the "hard" sciences are just as subject to bias and error as sociologists. From Cargo Cult Science: Someone plotted it. One might argue that human behavior is so much more complicated than anything that can happen in a Petri dish that more errors in social sciences are inevitable, but (1) I am not convinced that this is true and (2) it assumes that experimenters do not account for complexity when drawing conclusions in their work. In practice, we always begin with a personal judgement about the reliability of the evidence we observe, so we never escape the ouroboros.social sciences like psychology, but not really for harder sciences
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
