The August 2019 edition of the the Texas National Security Review featured an editorial by Frank Gavin, the chair of the editorial board, in which he discussed his experience of working with a bunch of nuclear scientists and engineers on a faculty search for MIT.
He discussed how he as always felt out of place, being trained as a historian, yet always working in national security and social science circles. He attended conferences and never had an appropriate pithy label for what he did:
In the past, I have looked at this “identity crisis” as a problem. Who was I? At conferences, when people introduced themselves, I was unable to match their pithy, recognizable titles. “Ideologically-uncommitted, methodologically-promiscuous, historically-minded scholar who thinks about strategy and statecraft with an eye toward improving policy” was no match for “political scientist,” “comparativist,” “restrainer,” “neo-realist,” “post-modernist,” “constructivist,” “Europeanist,” “think-tanker,” “methodologist,” “liberal internationalist,” “progressive,” “never-Trumper,” or “national security professional.”
After initially feeling out of place on a search committee for an MIT faculty position, he came to appreciate the lack of disciplinary boundaries among the scientists:
They didn’t care about labels or even disciplines and demonstrated a strong curiosity and interest in how a historian analyzed the world. Their ranks included physicists, material scientists, computational experts, chemical engineers, and others whose expertise mixed and matched from a variety of fields. When judging candidates for the faculty position, their first question was not about disciplinary training or method. They focused on who asked the best questions and who could actually innovatively solve difficult, important problems.
[N]o one cared about advancing the “discipline” for its own purposes. To them, “disciplines” and academic fields were a means to an end — vehicles to better ask and answer important questions, and to advance understanding and resolving problems in the world. No MIT nuclear scientist was ever impressed by someone demonstrating theoretical or methodological prowess if it didn’t actually identify or solve a problem that mattered. And all of them felt quite comfortable moving between and fostering engagement between the academy, government and regulatory agencies, and the private sector.
What he has discovered is that scientists are scientists. Science and engineering lack the religious wars you find within the social sciences and humanities. They all have the same epistemological grounding, which means they are free to float between disciplines and mainly focus on asking good questions (i.e., making good hypotheses that can be tested and are falsifiable).
I came into social science (international relations) from science and engineering. Early in my career I worked as a geographer in the Ecosystem Science and Technology Branch at NASA Ames Research Center and an environmental engineering firm before switching to a more remunerative career in tech. The social science I practice is inveterately positivist as a result. This is because science is what scientists do. On the whole, they are unconcerned with philosophy.
My big complaint with the reading I was assigned in my social science research training is that it is philosophy, not training in how to do research. Of the four books assigned in my research training at University of Leicester in the Politics and International Relations department, each had a different philosophical axe to grind against science. If, as the old joke goes: political science is the discipline dedicated to refuting Huntington, then research training in the social sciences, particularly anthropology, sociology, and political science, is dedicated to eliminating the scientific method from the disciplines.
Science and engineering does not suffer this defect of competing epistemological grounds. An engineer wants to know if the bridge will stand up, not whether under some mathematical axiom systems the bridge will stand up and under some other axiom systems the bridge will fall down, or worse. What bridge? The bridge is an artifact of patriarchy and must not be built!
Gavin has discovered this distinction between the social sciences and hard sciences and engineering: there exists epistemological diversity within the social sciences that produces religious wars.