updated: social science's fundamental flaw

the original post proposed the following as a thesis of sorts: "while this is commonly misconstrued as simply being sloppy work on the part of social scientists, the real underlying problem lies with an overlooked methodological flaw in social science. social science studies, via metaphysical manifestations, epistemological issues of its subjects (subjects as in individual people). however, by studying people, social science is unable to define what metaphysical behavior of their subjects is metaphysical at its root and what is epistemological at its root. as such, social science not only is inherently by definition unable to achieve universal truths, but it is also unable to determine how much experimental error is due to pure metaphysics and how much is due to unresolved epistemological issues manifested through metaphysical means."

now, there are a couple problems with this characterization of the mind. first of all, "epistemological issues" simply entails the mind in a first-person ontology, but this does not mean that the mind cannot be manifested metaphysically in a third-person ontology, and in doing so, there is nothing lost in translation or any experimental error to think of -- they are simply different ways of categorizing the same thing. second, the experimental error only exists if one views the mind from a property dualist perspective, meaning that not all of the mental ontology can be causally reduced to a physical ontology. even with this "experimental error", for the sake of social science that tests large groups of people, the error should cancel out because either 1) all the mental properties distinguishable from the physical properties of people are the same, meaning that the "experimental error" is an accounted-for variable of the experiment, or 2) the mental properties are different, but like most things relating to people, fall nicely along a bell curve, causing the establishment of a mean and effectively "canceling out" the "experimental error" to where it can be treated as an expected, steady variable of the experiment. of course, neither of these situations arises if one is a monist instead of a dualist, in which case one believes that there is no separate mental ontology and that all mental properties can be causally reduced to physical ones, and thus, there is no possibility for "experimental error".