I think the differentiation between "science" and "profession" is a bit crude. You obviously don't include mathematics in this, but it is a form of deductive reasoning as far away from science as the arts are. Deductive reasoning is just far less prone to fault than inductive reasoning, be it mathematics or philosophy, and the methods we have developed in some of the natural sciences over the centuries to model real-life behavior on mathematics are really great.
You are right that these largely don't exist in the Social sciences, but this is at least partially due to the much more complex subject matter. Still, both the social sciences as well as the natural sciences are trying to approximate reality through models built on experiments, and are thus fundamentally different from deductive reasoning in closed systems.
Not trying to mince words here, but engineering is applying validated knowledge to solve real world problems, sure, you can call it profession, but the fields generally associated with engineering are still in the business of generating knowledge. Medicine and Psychology heavily rely on the scientific method to validate abstract concepts, while engineering adjacent disciplines like Computer Science heavily really on maths and deductive reasoning to solve problems in the space of algorithms and computers.
You obviously don't include mathematics in this, but it is a form of deductive reasoning as far away from science as the arts are.
I disagree strongly with this. To reduce mathematics (and philosophy in your next sentence) to not-a-science, just because it's based on deductive reasoning is doing it a major disservice.
It is especially because of its deductiveness that mathematics is such a valuable tool for science. It answers the fundamental question "assuming A, what can we prove to be true about A' and A''?". Without that deductive proof, many inductive scientific theories could not even be formulated, let alone disproven.
And then you go on stating that engineering is applying validated knowledge to solve real world problems. Do you realize that much of that validation of said knowledge has been done through mathematical models? That the only reason we have certainty in engineering is because of the deductive rigour of mathematics?
Mathematics & philosophy aren’t sciences because there are no hypotheses, experiments, and results; it’s just thinking and logic.
It’s still incredibly valuable and the basis of many good things.
I would also add that engineering isn’t only working with existing scientific knowledge; we were building steam trains and optimizing them long before we started doing scientific thermodynamics.
Science and math are definitely good friends and so I'm sure lots of analogies between the two could be made, but I believe the comment was getting at the epistemological difference between 'proven' (the happy state in mathematics) and 'not contradicted by experimental evidence' (the happy state in science).
There was an interesting discussion on HN last week that brought up the fact that mathematics has its own crises, namely a communication crises. It was brought up that the proofs can be so dense that errors will be published and go unchecked for a long time. The interesting part is that everything that's needed for "replication" is literally within the paper and the errors still fall through the cracks.
There is still an awful lot of engineering that is model-based without strong deductive proofs. (Mechanical failure theory comes to mind). But the actual origin of "profession" comes from professing an oath to the public good. Meaning the traditional professions (law, medicine, engineering) aren't necessarily aimed at creating new knowledge, but applying knowledge to the betterment (or profit) of society. Sometimes that butts up against problems without known solutions that requires adding knowledge to the field, but that's not really the primary goal, unlike something like mathematics.
You are right that these largely don't exist in the Social sciences, but this is at least partially due to the much more complex subject matter. Still, both the social sciences as well as the natural sciences are trying to approximate reality through models built on experiments, and are thus fundamentally different from deductive reasoning in closed systems.
Not trying to mince words here, but engineering is applying validated knowledge to solve real world problems, sure, you can call it profession, but the fields generally associated with engineering are still in the business of generating knowledge. Medicine and Psychology heavily rely on the scientific method to validate abstract concepts, while engineering adjacent disciplines like Computer Science heavily really on maths and deductive reasoning to solve problems in the space of algorithms and computers.