What makes something a scientific concept?
A topic in Learners' conceptions and thinking
What do we mean by saying a concept is scientific? It may at first sight seem a simple question: surely a concept is scientific if it is one accepted by science.
But that definition is problematic in two ways. Firstly what does it mean to be accepted by science? Not accepted to be true or an accurate account of nature. All scientific ideas are meant to be considered conjectural -so a scientific concept is a kind of model, a way of understanding something which is it suggested may reflect reality, but which it may later prove to be inadequate (perhaps when some new evidence is available). The concept of the heat death of the universe is important, but hopefully may prove to not reflect reality.Also, our models often simplify and approximate, but are still useful. The concept of an ideal gas, or an ideal solution – or even of a pure sample of a substance.
Our confidence in the 'truthfulness' of scientific ideas varies. The conservation of energy concept is pretty much accepted by all scientists to be pretty robust. The concepts of worm holes in space-time and negative energy are less secure in that regard. But then the concept of gravitational waves was in that category till quite recently, as was the concept of the Higgs boson.
This raises the issue of whether all scientists (or nearly all, or most, or a fair number of, or?) scientists have to accept a concept for it to be considered scientific. Few scientists today work with the concepts of phlogiston or caloric, so are these not scientific concepts? The phenomenon of cold fusion has been widely discredited, so is the cold fusion concept not scientific?
So if we were to consider a concept scientific only if it is one accepted by science then we have the problems of (i) knowing when a concept has sufficient acceptance among scientists to count, and (ii) we have to accept that concepts will move in and out of the category scientific concepts.
So it seems more sensible to suggest that scientific concepts are those which are proposed and discussed in scientific discourse (so in papers in scientific journals, for example). We can then make further distinctions about which reach the status of being widely accepted, and which retain that status.
The scheme above suggests we can divide those concepts which have been proposed in the scientific literature – scientific concepts – according to whether they have fallen from disuse or are still current, and according to whether they have reached the status of scientific orthodoxy or are still treated as under discussion.
