>>386928You don't need "fully controlled" experiments to conduct science or make scientific claims. You do have to keep in mind with sociology that people are people and thus difficult to reduce. The whole reason we have "self" is because we don't want to be reduced to a machine or a natural process, because we can figure out without too much thought what that will mean in the long run.
A lot of the discourse is just to paper over the reality that we live in extremely totalizing societies with overpowered institutions lording over us, in ways that were simply not possible at any other point in history. It has little bearing on whether sociology or psychology or the study of humans generally is valid, and doesn't really ask questions about the methodology at work when we talk about society and people.
Usually, when there's a sociology or psychology experiment with questionable methodology, it is because the experimenters have a clear angle beforehand and they're doing a hack job. For example, the asshole who wrote the Bell Curve just couldn't accept that uyghurs were people, and took for granted the really problematic way in which we speak about intelligence in the first place, since the way we treat intelligence in eugenist society has clear political aims rather than a meaningful description of general intelligence and what it actually does. It is not beyond science to understand this problem, and account for it, but ideologues don't want to understand or care about the problem because they see it as the entire point of their whole society. Anything else to a eugenist is inadmissible, sinful, or simply incomprehensible as an objective.
Also, Popper is human garbage and not even a good philosopher by the miserable standards of that profession.