Science concepts

Scientific concepts

The natural sciences involve the study of the natural world, in order to describe, understand and explain natural phenomena.

In one sense, everything in the universe can be understood as 'natural', but by convention the products of human culture are seen as concerns of the humanities and social sciences and not studied in natural sciences.

Science and scientific concepts

Explanation means going beyond just describing phenomena, but also seeking to understand them in terms of common patterns (for example, as reflected in posited laws of nature) and more basic principles and patterns. There is always a limit to scientific explanation as an explanation depends ultimately (even if only after several levels/rounds of explanation) upon some principle that cannot itself be explained, but which is considered to have been firmly established – such as conservation of energy. Scientific explanation though seeks to place the wide diversity of phenomena observed under a coherent set of a limited number of basic principles. A core feature of science is the wide range of scientific concepts that have been developed to help label, describe, characterise and explain phenomena.

What are concepts?

A concept is a mental entity – a way of making sense of some aspect of the world.¹ At one level a concept is a kind of category (having a concept of X means having a basis for deciding if something observed should count as an example of X or not). Is X an example of – for example – an element / an ohmic conductor / an application of the principle of the conservation of energy / oxidation / electromagnetic radiation /  a fungi / a crucial experiment / convection / a vestigial organ / heating / a transition state / fractional distillation… (you will note we could continue this list considerably – in each case being able to ask the question implies there is some concept that can be applied…)

If concepts are mental entities, they only exist in minds, and they are not open to direction observation! A lot of research has been carried out in science education to explore learners' concepts (for example, by interviewing learners) but these are indirect methods as mental objects cannot be directly observed. Even in introspection (that is, in reflecting on our own thinking) it may not be possible to fully characterise how we understand some concept – and how we apply it, sometimes even automatically.

Concepts are relational – our understanding of one concept (e.g., metal) can be understood as the full set of association we have (directly, and less directly) between that concept and others we see as linked (e.g., conductor, hard, dense, temperature, magnetism, cation) is various ways (e.g., is an example of…, is part of…, leads to…, excludes…, sometimes…, occurs with…, often…, etc.). So even if we have a neat definition for  concept  (a magnetic material is…) Given that we might think of someone's concept of X as comprising a vast and dynamic network of links with different 'connection strengths',then there is surly a sense in which people concepts do not fully overlap. People do not have precisely the same concept of metal or element or gamma radiation or predator: rather people's concepts overlap of varying degrees.

What are scientific concepts?

In concepts only really exist in our minds, and are not fully aligned between people, then what does it mean to say that a particular concept is a scientific concept? In simple terms it is those concepts proposed and set out in the scientific literature, but these accounts are only representations (in text) of the author's actual concepts and so imperfect, and they only reflect the thinking of their authors, and cannot be expected to perfectly match the thinking of other scientists, and they change over time as more science is undertaken and more is learnt and understood.

Of course, there are many concept labels which are effectively used to communicate between different scientists as they share a sufficiently similar concept to be -in effect – referring to the same thing (even when there are likely to be examples and cases where they would not agree on how the concept should be understood and applied). Yet, especially when concepts are recently introduced, there are sometimes substantive differences in how different scientists are using the same concept label.

So, it is reasonable to say that there are scientific concepts which are defined and applied in the sciences (and which students are sometimes expected to learn) as long as we keep in mind that we are dealing with something we cannot see directly,and which has an elements of fuzziness – so when we talk about the concept of neutralisation or the concept of a monoculture or a gene we should not forget this is a shorthand way of saying something like 'the gene, as it is generally understood by most practising biological scientists today' and there may be time when there are relevant aspects of important concepts where there are still active disagreements between experts.

Read about the concept of concepts

Do concepts need to refer to real things?

Many of have a concept of 'test tube', and we may come across actual physical objects which we feel fall under that concept. 'Crystallisation' is a process rather than an object, but we may still identify actual events would wish to classify with that concept. But scientists from concept as explanatory tools, and these may be hypothetical – or even known to not exist.

Historical concepts

As science proceeds it is clear that ideas that once seem useful may fall into disuse. So there are historical scientific concepts that are no longer seen as useful for describing natural phenomena. Among the more famous ones are phlogiston, caloric and the luminiferous ether. These concepts did useful work in scientific discourse (as parts of explanations, as the basis for suggesting experiments, and so forth) but are now considered to have rejected from the scientific canon.

Read about historical scientific conceptions

Alternative conceptions

As suggested above, there are no actual canonical concepts which can be accessed as reference to decide if someone's conceptualisation is 'alternative' – indeed strictly if we all have a somewhat different patterns of associations for any scientific concept label, then everyone's conceptions are alternative to everyone else's!

Learner's concepts are likely to be less extensive (less linking with other concepts) and less sophisticated than those of relative experts such as teachers and research scientists. So the term 'alternative conception' usually means that a relative expert (such as a teacher or researchers) has judged that some aspect of the learners' conceptualisation is contrary to what that expects considered the a (largely) shared common core of expert versions of that concept.

That leaves plenty of scope for fine judgements (is a student conceptions just simpler than the expert's, or is it actually substantially at odds with it?) Often, however, these judgements are relatively straightforward.

For example, there is (virtually if not) unanimous agreement among chemists and chemistry teachers that bond fission is always an endothermic process, so a student who had a conception of bond fusion that included the proposition that energy is released when a bond is broken in the ATP molecule (adenosine triphosphate) can be considered to hold an alternative conception (even if they based their belief on something they read in an erroneous textbook).

 Read about conceptions of the atom

Read about conceptions of chemical bonding

Read about conceptions of chemical stability

Read about conceptions of energy

Read about conceptions of mass defect

Read about conceptions of precision

Read about conceptions of orbital motion

Read about conceptions of the octet rule

---

Work cited:

• Taber, K. S. (2019). The Nature of the Chemical Concept: Constructing chemical knowledge in teaching and learning. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry.

---

¹ There is much scholarly literature on what we mean by concepts and their nature. The approach here follows the account set out in much more detail in 'The Nature of the Chemical Concept' (Taber, 2019)

---