alt Hacker News Why have two terms for the same thing?
Mathematical and philosophical work simply aren't the same as scientific work, despite **the non-zero overlap.**
Personally, I find the utility of including all systematic human pursuits as one lineage to be much greater than the utility of cordoning off empirical physical science. The latter is the status quo, often phrased along the lines of "for a long time everyone was silly and wishy-washy, and then science came around in the 1600s." For one thing this silences many great voices from the past, and for another I'd say it's behind the current crises around what exactly constitutes "human" or "social" sciences.
For example: the answer to "what is psychology" is a lot easier to productively answer if we start the search in 400 BCE instead of 1900 CE.
Non-zero overlap is a laughably bad reason for dissolving distinctions between kinds of things. Almost everything has overlap. It's the differences that need names.
"Silencing voices" is entirely beside the point. We don't need to invalidate all past mathematical or philosophical work by not calling it science. Except, of course, that quite a lot of it is flat wrong.
"Social science" and psychology are actually excellent examples. Their status as science is questioned exactly because their connection to empirical evidence is so tenuous.