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As a working physicist I think the authors suggestions are not likely to improve education. Discussions of Kuhn are just not appropriate for secondary school s

• krona 6y ago
  I know half a dozen or so PhD's in microbiology at one of the leading research institutions. They don't understand the philosophy of science beyond what I was taught aged 10-11. I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the grasp of a secondary school student, considering their importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.
  • ta988 6y ago
    Thats because many PhD are just glorified technicians (same technicians we purged out of our labs doing one of the worst mistake of the last decades I believe). So we get all those PhD learning 3d printing, microcontrollers, programming for creating new devices, tools and whatever else. Where for technicians it would have been a much shorter turnaround. Of course the individuals learn new (basic level) skills. But it also impedes discovery and leaves a whole category of people out of the door. In PhD I was once told I couldn't put the technician on the authors list because he was paid to do his job...
    • ravel-bar-foo 6y ago
      The line between scientific and non-scientific contributions can be fuzzy. One would not put the supplier of a chemical in the authors list ... unless the synthesis and distribution was done as part of a collaboration and it is the compound which makes the experiment possible. But then, there is a lot of leeway in "collaboration"
      • ta988 6y ago
        Authorship is a constant battle. You don't put the supplier no, but the technician that ran half of the experiments and also improved them? Of course they should be.
  • konjin 6y ago
    I got half way through a physics phd and the only time anyone quoted Khun was as what happens when you read science books without understanding mathematics.
  • watwut 6y ago
    Philosophy of science and doing science are two much different things.
  • mncharity 6y ago
    Years back, I went to a couple-of-day conference/seminar that was microbiology outreach to humanities and public. There were some in the audience who really wanted to find a Kuhnian narrative for the transformational progress in microbiology over the last few decades, and were very unhappy with an answer of no, sorry, driver was technology dropping costs by many orders of magnitude, transformationally changing the experiments and questions that were affordable to pursue. So perhaps microbiology is not the best context for suggesting Kuhn as useful?
• Nav_Panel 6y ago
  At my high school we had a small "science research" program, where students would read lots of papers and write a review, and also try to get a part time position at a local lab. I'm thankful for that program even though I don't work in Science currently. Many of my peers are terrified of reading journal articles, but I'll dive right in. In terms of philosophy, a big portion of the Kantian/Enlightenment project was about grounding or justifying Science as epistemological practice. But that's not really what the Public needs, because "Science" now is not "Natural Philosophy" reaching for the things-in-themselves, but an institution with norms, financial and political incentives, etc. Better to read Lyotard ("Postmodern Condition") than early Wittgenstein for this kind of thing.
• SamBam 6y ago
  Hard disagree. The nature of "science" should be woven into all of these courses. That will be what all students can take away from the science classes, not just the students who decide to stick with them after seeing if they "enjoy" them. (And do we teach English or history simply to see if kids will "enjoy" them later?) Most good schools actually already do this as part of their standards-based curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards [1] has "Practices" as one of its three key strands, which focuses on how to ask questions like a scientist, what evidence is, how you design an experiment, etc. The nature of "inquiry" is applicable to all future understanding of what scientists do, more so than memorizing whether mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. 1. https://www.nextgenscience.org/ https://www.nextgenscience.org/
  • konjin 6y ago
    We need more science literacy, not humanities trying to stay relevant by dragging science down. Teaching students sentential and first order logic would be a much better start since they would at least know what they are trying to prove, then some probability so they know what a 5% chance actually means and casual inference if you're feeling overly ambitious to realize why correlation might (or might not) be correlation.
    • mrpf1ster 6y ago
      What a very closed minded comment. Humanities and science are deeply intertwined, especially philosophy. Not to mention disregarding an entire category of human expression and experience as "dragging science down". Humanities is just as relevant as science, and so often influence each other that it almost makes no sense to distinguish them. I highly doubt that by teaching children logic and probability we will solve science denialism. Cramming more science facts or abstract math equations into student's brains doesn't do much for their critical thinking and reasoning skills. Encouraging children to ask questions, reason based off of evidence, and inspiring a love for figuring out how our world works should be the main goal of any science class.
      • konjin 6y ago
• jonathanstrange 6y ago
  As a working philosopher, I agree. More specifically, the following passage in the article seems inconclusive to me and based on a common misrepresentation of Kuhn's work (I've heard things like that many times): > At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist on the overall neutrality, “logicality,” and objectivity of science. As a result, there is much about the history of science, as well as about contemporary science, that “science as inquiry” misrepresents. The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad. Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to attempt to eliminate it as much as possible. "When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as likely showing that one or more scientists have bias." That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or more theoretical advances have to be made? Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements, the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of operationalism.
• kinghtown 6y ago
  I think society could use an extra hour of school, at least twice a week. This sort of thing would be a great class which has no homework or exam pressure. You get credits for being there and participating in discussions.
  • zepto 6y ago
    A lot of private schools pride themselves on having this kind of thing.
• mhh__ 6y ago
  On the subject of enjoying science and mathematics, I know that if I had gone the usual route through school there is absolutely no way I would be studying anything remotely scientific a few years down the line. I took a liking to physics over a summer, almost purely by chance. That's it. The way (this is UK specific) we teach science and mathematics is so detached from anything you'd see at university I'm genuinely amazed the Universities haven't started trying to strangle the exam boards. Brace Yourself: The UK Physics A-level does not require any calculus at all. None - no scientific method, no discussion of any quantum mechanics etc. etc.
• Balgair 6y ago
  > These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this. My SO was a HS science teacher, so I have some second-hand experience, whatever that is worth. This very much tracks with my SO's experience in both very poor schools and in 'good' schools. It would be amazing to have the time, money, and resources to teach kiddos about the philosophy of science. But just getting through the facts is hard enough. I'll save you the belly-aching about home environments, intra-classroom management, funding, pay, snow-days, etc. Even if/when we get back to all in-person teaching and then get the kids back up to grade level, adding in the philosophy of science to uninterested teenagers isn't likely to produce any measurable results. My iota of advice: Just vote to increase any school funding you possibly can (bonds, liens, mill-levies, etc). As many parents found out this last year, teachers don't get paid nearly enough for this. The rest will get sorted on it's own.
• mncharity 6y ago
  > These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this. Has anyone heard of a setting for discussing doing transformatively better than this? Not in PER sense of "if only we could teach intro physics classes successfully", or bio's "if only undergraduates had a firmer grasp of central dogma", but more like Larimore's[1] suggestion, in the context of preK science education, that students have a human right to make sense of their world, now. Big hairy audacious goal. And the heavy lifting for it, would have to come from the science community. As in, kindergarten students have a right to be told the Sun isn't yellow, to not be given popular intro astronomy college textbooks which have that wrong, and to not grow up to be first-tier astronomy and physical sciences graduate students who are still confused about that, and about color in general. Students have a right to chemistry education content which chemistry education research doesn't describe using adjectives like incoherent. A right to content which reflects current insight and understanding of the physical world, not "it's traditional to teach it this way" wretchedness. Consider a dedicated professional teacher, in a hypothetical country, whose education system is focused on call-and-response rote memorize-and-regurgitate, who argues the implausibility of teaching US-style intro-physics problem solving. That can be both individually correct, and still reflect a profound collective failure of their community and society. Now consider a system focused on plug-and-chug toy problem solving, with no feel for reasonable values, narrow scopes, and topical descriptions divorced from current understanding. That can be both a professionally-pursued local maxima, and still reflect a profound collective failure. Including a failure to explore how to do transformatively better. Imagine a speculative early-primary atoms-up progression, one emphasizing atoms as nucleons, and building from nucleosynthesis, through a sense of physical size/scale, to a broad grasp of modern material science. Insane amount of interdisciplinary work. But I even found ways to explore it, sort of kind of, and explorations like it - mainly conversations with "the usual suspects" before/after research talks around MIT and Harvard. Then covid. Now... has anyone heard of an online setting for discussing transformative improvement of science and engineering content? Even if we're back to normal next year, I'd appreciate finding a less ad hoc and restricted setting. Thanks. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Larimore+2020+preschool+vision&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lar...