these are questions of fact, amenable to study

Well, kinda. Economics studies these kinds of things and you can see for yourself how much agreement is there about "facts" and how rigorous the papers are.

The problem is that you don't have entirely stable facts and processes like you have in physics. In social studies, technically speaking, each situation is unique and will never repeat again. Therefore a core activity for a social scientist is separating persistent features of the situation (including figuring out on which time scale are they persistent) from irrelevant and labile -- and those are usually swept into one large bin labeled "noise". This is a very non-trivial exercise given that this persistency is often conditional on some factors and that you typically can't do interventions.

So, "amenable to study", yes. "Established beyond reasonable doubt", err... I'm not going to hold my breath.