philosophy of science, history of science, and science education

Philosophy of Science, History of Science, and Science EducationAuthor(s): Robert PalterSource: PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association,Vol. 1974 (1974), pp. 313-321Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/495810 .

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ROBERT PALTER

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, HISTORY OF SCIENCE,

AND SCIENCE EDUCATION

Since I have had the privilege of reading the remarks of my fellow-symposiasts before writing out my own, I should like to begin by making the briefest of comments on each of their contributions. Professor Petrie raises the Kantian-like question of how science education is possible - or, more precisely, how, if all observation is theory-laden, science education is possible. His intriguing answer is that "Science education is possible with the aid of the humanistic tool of metaphor." I find it difficult to asses this formulation without further examples of its concrete ap- plication to actual pedagogical problems in the natural sciences. In Kantian terms, one might say that Professor Petrie, having made use of the synthetic method in deducing the possibility of science education, should now turn around and use the analytic method (the method of Kant's Prolegomena), that is to say, he should take a broad range of representative examples of successful science education and show how their success depends critically on certain key metaphors which bridge the gap between the students' frame of reference and the frames of reference of the respective scientific theories being learned/taught.

About such enterprises as this latter, Professor Martin would, I feel sure, say that in the interests of improving science education we must test empirically the value of different key metaphors in the learning/ teaching process for a given scientific theory. Here, as in the case of Professor Martin's other suggested research projects dealing with science education, I must confess myself rather at a loss in imagining possible experimental designs which might enable one to discriminate significantly among alternative educational techniques. My difficulty stems from the fact that no one to my knowledge has even established convincingly the main parameters upon which 'scientific understanding' and 'scientific ability' depend, so that any attempt to measure these traits would seem to be premature at this time.' But I would go further: I am not even sure it makes sense to set out deliberately to produce better scientists by improving science education - any more than it makes sense to set out

R. S. Cohen et al. (eds.), PSA 1974, 313-321. All Rights Reserved. Copyright ? 1976 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland.



314 ROBERT PALTER

deliberately to produce better artists by improving art education. (Not that 'better' has the same meaning in the scientific and in the artistic context - I am sure it does not - but it does seem equally futile in either context to attempt to institute contingency planning for future needs, whether for theoretical or experimental scientists on the one hand or for naturalist, abstractionist, or expressionist artists on the other.) Producing better understanding of science in students by improving the science curriculum is a somewhat different matter, and here I shall myself later propose some modest measures which - even in the absence of a deeper understanding of scientific understanding - might be expected to con- tribute toward the desired goal.

Let me turn now to some more constructive remarks. Like my two fellow-symposiasts I want to refer to some of the views of two of the most influential contemporary writers on science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Now, I hope that I am properly appreciative of the many insights into the nature of science to be obtained from Popper's and Kuhn's writings; and I also hope I am properly aware of the desirability if not the necessity of a systematic epistemology of one's own if one is to engage in any useful criticism of the philosophical presuppositions of their work. Such a systematic epistemology and such a critique I am not now prepared to formulate and defend, beyond the claim that there is at least this much truth in inductivist theories of scientific inquiry (as expounded by such philosophers of science as Bacon, Newton, and Mill): it is possible to generalize from a set of observed data without presup- posing the resulting generalization, or some logically stronger principle, in the collection of the data. On the basis, then, of a set of objectively ascertainable historical facts which Popper and Kuhn either overlook or deliberately ignore, I wish to call attention to the incomplete consensus which generally characterizes the full set of opinions on any given scientific topic at any given time during the history of active inquiries into that topic. (Even excluding the opinions of demonstrably incompetent or cranky individuals, there will generally remain a plurality of divergent opinions.) 'Active inquiries' here I mean to be construed very generously so as to include, for example, the composition of new textbooks on the given topic. Put otherwise, my point is simply that active inquiry has always in the past generated diversity if not conflict of views on a given scientific topic, so that today's consensus on many, if not all, important



PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 315

scientific topics is neither perfect nor static: such consensus as has been achieved is usually enlivened (not, I would insist, marred) by dissent and is in a state of continuing evolution. Diversity or pluralism - at least in my extended sense - I therefore take to be a well-substantiated characteristic of the history of science.

Take, for example, the case of textbooks on the topic, or better the cluster of related topics, often referred to as 'classical mechanics.' Each such textbook represents a more or less orthodox variant on this topic; more or less significant variations will be played by each author on the way foundational questions are treated (i.e., the choice of primitive terms, definitions, and axioms), on the manner in which the theory is given an empirical interpretation, on the use of specific problems to illustrate problem-solving methods, and on the inclusion of exemplary historical episodes. Those committed to Kuhn's conception of normal science sup- posedly characterized by its dogmatic adherence to fixed paradigms will, no doubt, want to reply that a new textbook merely serves to reinforce the prevailing massive orthodoxy; and Popperians will, no doubt, want to discount the vast majority of such textbooks as unadventurous, un- conjecturing, even subscientific, specimens of a literary genre whose existence is an unfortunate though perhaps inevitable consequence of the growth of genuine scientific knowledge. In the present context, my re- joinder consists simply in asserting as hypotheses that scientific ability, possibly, and scientific understanding, almost certainly, are functions of the textbooks (and other ingredients) of a student's scientific education. For a science educator the proper attitude toward textbooks is, after all, neither celebratory nor contemptuous; rather, the necessity for such pedagogical devices must be seen as simply a part of the facts of life in the complex set of social institutions which constitute scientific inquiry today.

I do not wish to be understood, however, as advocating a merely pas- sive or uncritical attitude toward science textbooks; far from it. Although in some respects these books reflect an achieved consensus, in other respects they reflect the author's special and idiosyncratic variant of that consensus. And obviously not all idiosyncrasies are equally valuable. One criterion that I consider of some importance in evaluating a science textbook is how accurately it reflects the current state of research in relevant scientific topics. In point of fact, science textbooks often do not reflect this state at all; the impression fostered by too many of them -



316 ROBERT PALTER

especially the elementary ones - is, rather, that no research at all, or at least none which need be taken seriously, is being done on many of the topics covered in the textbook. Classical mechanics again provides us with a ready illustration. Over the past two decades or so a large number of new and important results have been discovered in the (classical but non-linear) mechanics of diffusion, elasticity, viscosity, and hydrodynam- ics.2 Furthermore, deeper insights into the character of the fundamental laws of classical mechanics have been attained by expressing these laws in terms of that generalized geometry of space-time first introduced in formulations of relativistic mechanics.3 It seems to me that the existence of such developments as these ought not to be hidden from our students, both because of their intrinsic interest and because of their larger sig- nificance as vital clues to the way in which scientific knowledge grows.

This question of just how scientific knowledge grows has lately been much discussed, with two of the leading accounts being those of Popper (conjectures and refutations) and Kuhn (normal scientific problem- solving punctuated occasionally by a scientific revolution). One thing I find lacking in both accounts is verisimilitude, that is, agreement with the actual details of the history of actual scientific investigations. Both accounts, whatever their authors' intentions, tend to call up in one's mind the image of scientific growth in any one field as a single progression or stream in which one hypothesis is continually being replaced by another (Popper), or in which a large number of paradigmatic problem-solutions and a much smaller number of paradigm-violating anomalies accumulate until a new paradigm accommodating both the earlier problem-solutions and the anomalies (not to mention new problem-solutions) emerges to replace the earlier paradigm (Kuhn). One striking thing about these formulations is the way they, surely inadvertently, resemble the Whiggish account of scientific progress allegedly offered by so-called positivist or inductivist historiography and so scorned by both Kuhn and the Popper- ians; in each case, a unilinear sequence - whether of facts and laws, or of paradigms, or of conjectural hypotheses - provides the central metaphor. An alternative metaphor for scientific growth might be derived from the course of biological evolution; and, indeed Toulmin has worked out a version of this line of thought in some detail (1972). Now, it is notorious that biological metaphors can be highly misleading when applied to historical matters; but, if we are properly sensitive to the dis-




analogies, there may, nevertheless, be some heuristic value in illustrating my incomplete consensus thesis concerning the history of science by the evolutionary development of organisms. What I have in mind is simply the multi-linear - and indeed the often highly-branched - structure of biological evolution.4 Consider, for example, the most interesting -

though far from the best-documented - case of man himself. Remember- ing that most of the details of human evolution are still highly specula- tive, let us recall the main outlines of the process as it is understood today. Between 10 and 15 million years ago the earliest known primate with man-like traits (Ramapithecus) emerged along one branch of a hominoid line whose other branches represent ancestors of the living large apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans). The hominoid line represented by Ramapithecus then branched to give rise to several new species (including Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Homo habilis) some of which became extinct and one of which evolved further to be- come eventually Homo sapiens. The latter species then branched further some 50000 years ago to give rise to the various races of modem man. One thing to note about this evolutionary sequence is that the living apes represent a line of evolution that has by now diverged very considerably from the hominoid line that gave rise to modem man (so that it is risky to draw inferences about modem man from the study of living apes). More generally, we see that when a single line of evolution branches it is not necessary for all but one of the resultant divergent lines to be- come extinct: though closely related, the various new species may not be in direct competition for survival (i.e., they may occupy different eco- logical niches). So with scientific theories: the advent of relativistic mechanics and quantum mechanics did not necessarily mean the extinction of classical mechanics as a viable - that is, living and growing - discipline; not did the advent of molecular biology mean the extinction of classical Mendelian genetics; nor - to take just one more example - did the advent of statistical thermodynamics mean the extinction of classical, so-called phenomenological, thermodynamics. Of course, the older discipline in some of these cases has been more or less transformed by the presence of the newer discipline but not - at least not yet - transformed out of existence.

My earlier point concerning the prevalence of incomplete consensus in the history of science is easily taken account of in the multilinear



318 ROBERT PALTER

historical model: a given theory must be represented not by a single line but by a sheaf of lines originating in some common point, itself perhaps the confluence of several earlier lines. This last property clearly differ- entiates the structure of biological evolution from that of scientific growth: in the former, branching usually diverges with time, whereas in the latter convergence also occurs (as when several independent theories are unified or synthesized by a later theory).5 Thus, to take the case of classical mechanics, each current version of this discipline (some principle of identification of distinct versions being presupposed) would be represented by a distinct line and all these lines would originate (to over- simplify drastically) in Euler's paper of 1750, 'Discovery of a New Prin- ciple of Mechanics,' in which the so-called Newtonian equations of motion,

Fxy=Max, FY=May, F,==Maz,

are formulated for the first time as applying to mechanical systems of all kinds (particles, extended bodies, fluids, etc.). Euler's paper was itself, of course, a confluence of early work, in particular the Principia of New- ton and a paper by James Bernoulli of 1703, "second only to the Principia itself in influence on the later growth of the discipline" (Truesdell, 1960, p. 15). Naturally, there were dead ends in the history of classical mechanics and these will be represented in our model by terminating lines; but there are numerous lines today which have not yet terminated and which appear to be capable of further (perhaps indefinite?) extension into the future.

Much of what I have been saying about the history of science is perhaps of little interest from the point of view of high school or introductory college science courses. The incomplete consensus of scientific disciplines today is, I believe, another matter. Selected cases of contemporary conflict and disagreement among equally competent scientists in some specialized field might be extremely illuminating even to students in an elementary science course. An example of what I have in mind would be the current dispute as to the explanation of the red shift in quasars (Field et al., 1973). An even 'farther out' dispute would be that concerning the existence of tachyons (or particles moving faster than light) (Kreisler, 1973). Finally, I share Professor Martin's conviction that one might profitably raise with students the question of how to formulate




criteria for distinguishing science from pseudo-sciences like astrology. I also agree with Professor Martin's view that a pseudo-science cannot be characterized simply in terms of its theories (or other types of statements): untested, refuted, even untestable statements may very well - probably often do - belong to a science (Martin, 1972, pp. 40-43). It is rather the manner in which such statements are tested or left untested and the way in which they are believed or disbelieved which serve to distinguish science from pseudo-science. (Thus, for example, belief in the cosmic scope and the infallibility of his principles is characteristic of the pseudo- scientist.) And, I might add, these distinguishing criteria of test and belief may well be historically conditioned: perhaps astrology was not a pseudo-science at all in Ptolemy's time.

I have just been proposing a role for history of science in science education. Is there not also a role for philosophy of science ? Of course; but it too would profit from some historical perspective - even the perspective of just the last few decades. To put it bluntly, science educators must be careful not to be carried away by the latest novelty in philosophy of science, whether it be the operationalism of the '30s, the testability of the '40s, the covering law model of explanation of the '50s, the paradigms of the '60s, or the theory-ladenness of the '70s. Let our students by all means know of the recent controversy between Popper and Kuhn; but let them also know of the important work of Griinbaum and Reichen- bach, of Hempel and Carnap, not to mention such older figures as Ein- stein, Poincare, Duhem, Bernard, Mill, Whewell, and Newton. In the absence of a fuller understanding of scientific understanding, we can perhaps do no better - but it may well be good enough - than to exhibit for our students the unvarnished details of how science has actually developed and what the best critical minds have said about this development.

University of Texas at Austin

NOTES

1 For a recent attempt to characterize scientific understanding, see Friedman (1974). For a general discussion of understanding in the context of teaching and learning, see Martin (1970, Part III); she stresses the "open-endedness" of the concept of understanding and distinguishes several varieties. Again, the title essay of Ziffs volume Understanding Under- standing concludes with the words: "... one can no longer-avoid the dismal conclusion that



320 ROBERT PALTER

to understand understanding is a task to be attempted and not to be achieved today, or even tomorrow" (1972, p. 20).

The situation with respect to our understanding of understanding recalls that with respect to our understanding of intelligence: much research effort has been expended on measuring IQ and correlating it with other variables but not enough thought has been devoted to clarifying the concept of intelligence itself. (See Block and Dworkin, 1974, pp. 354-9.) We all, of course, share to some extent a common concept of understanding but surely prudence demands that we clarify that concept considerably prior to devising tests to measure it. 2 For introductory - but not up-to-date - accounts, see Truesdell (1952, 1968). The fullest systematic account to date is in the treatise by Truesdell and Noll (1965); new developments are published in the Journal of Rational Mechanics and Analysis.

It is difficult to explain in a few words the general character of these results in non- linear (continuum) mechanics; eschewing mathematics makes it even more difficult. For what it's worth, however, let me try. To formulate an adequate theory of any mechanical system (e.g., a set of interacting particles, a perfect fluid, etc.) requires a precise specifica- tion of the forces - more generally, the forces and stresses - which characterize that system. Until fairly recently the vast majority of such mechanical theories were linear in the sense that two forces or stresses applied simultaneously were assumed to have the same effect as when they were applied successively. This assumption of linearity simplifies the mathematics but is, unfortunately, highly unrealistic for many mechanical systems of great interest, e.g., materials exhibiting such phenomena as plastic deformation, turbulent flow, purely elastic behavior, or purely viscous behavior. Hence, non-linear methods have had to be developed and these have led to mechanical theories which are more realistic, more general, and in some cases more rigorous than any previous ones. (Occasionally, a non-linear theory has striking practical applications, as in the explanation - in terms of the theory of non-linear fluids - of why rotary stirrers are ineffective in stirring paint.) 3 See Trautman (1965). In the light of work such as Trautman's I find rather pointless remarks like the following: "... in some fundamental ways Einstein's general relativity re- sembles Aristotle's physics more than Newton's" (Kuhn, 1970, p. 265). Aristotle didn't use second order differential equations - a rather fundamental difference from both Newton and Einstein! 4 Rensch (1966, p. 97) has coined the term "kladogenesis" for "phylogenetic branching and splitting in general". He also introduces the term "anagenesis" for "the development toward higher phylogenetical levels" (ibid.) Anagenesis corresponds to that aspect of the growth of scientific theories which we might characterize as 'progressive'; and it is this aspect which has been of most interest to philosophers, such as Toulmin (1972), who make use of biological metaphors for scientific growth. But see Note 5. 5 This difference is remarked on by Popper (1972, p. 262). Of course, biological evolution sometimes exhibits hybridization, a process in which two species give rise to a new species (of particular importance in the evolution of plants).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Block, N. and Dworkin, G.: 1974, 'IQ: Heritability and Inequality, Part 1', Philosophy and Public Affairs 3, 331-409.

Field, G., Arp, H., and Bahcall, J.: 1973, The Redshift Controversy, W. A. Benjamin, Inc., Reading, Mass.

Friedman, M.: 1974, 'Explanation and Scientific Understanding', J. of Philosophy 71, 5-19.




Kreisler, M.: 1973, 'Are There Faster-than-Light Particles?', American Scientist 61, 201-8.

Kuhn, T.: 1970, 'Reflections on My Critics', in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, pp. 231-78.

Martin, J.: 1970, Explaining, Understanding, and Teaching, McGraw-Hill, New York. Martin, M.: 1972, Concepts of Science Education, Scott, Foresman and Co., Glenview,

Illinois. Popper, K.: 1972, Objective Knowledge, Oxford U.P., Oxford. Rensch, B.: 1966, Evolution Above the Species Level, John Wiley and Sons, New York. Toulmin, S.: 1972, Human Understanding, Vol. I: The Collective Use and Evolution of

Concepts, Princeton U.P., Princeton, N.J. Trautman, A.: 1965, 'Comparison of Newtonian and Relativistic Theories of Space-Time',

in B. Hoffmann (ed.), Perspectives in Geometry and Relativity, Indiana U.P., Blooming- ton, Indiana, pp. 413-25.

Truesdell, C.: 1952, 'A Program of Physical Research in Classical Mechanics', Zeit. f Angewandte Math. u. Physik 11, 79-95; reprinted in C. Truesdell, The Mechanical Foundations of Elasticity and Fluid Dynamics, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York (1966), pp. 187-203.

Truesdell, C.: 1968, 'Recent Advances in Rational Mechanics', in C. Truesdell, Essays in the History of Mechanics, Springer-Verlag, New York, pp. 334-366.

Truesdell, C.: 1960, 'A Program Toward Rediscovering the Rational Mechanics of the Age of Reason', Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1, 3-36.

Truesdell, C. and Noll, W.: 1965, The Non-Linear Field Theories of Mechanics, En- cyclopedia of Physics (ed. by S. Fluigge), Vol. 111/3, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Ziff, P.: 1972, Understanding Understanding, Cornell U.P., Ithaca, N.Y.



philosophy of science, history of science, and science education

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