A topic in teaching science
An authentic science education asks learners to both learn about some specific scientific ideas and also to learn something of the nature of science – the practices of scientists and the processes by which new scientific knowledge is constructed and developed. There are a number of nature of science (sometimes abbreviated to 'NOS') themes that might be thought important to teach young people about.
Read more about teaching the nature of science
Can science be universal?
Science investigates the natural world, and there is an assumption that although some individual studies focus on local specifics (the chemical composition of lave from this volcanic eruption; the diversity of invertebrates in this wood; the period of that comet…) science is ultimately concerned with identifying principles that apply everywhere.
So, for example, Newton's work led a theory of 'universal' gravitation – something that applied everywhere, not just at some specific place. Yet there has been much debate about the extent to which the universality of science can be assumed or aspired to – not because nature might not offer such regularities (which might be considered a metaphysical assumption underpinning science as an activity – if you do not beleive in universal principles it may be difficult to do natural science), but because science is inevitably a cultural activity.
"An important debate about the nature of science is the extent to which scientific discoveries are dependent on the cultures that produce them. Ideally science is independent of culture, as it is intended to be an objective quest for discovering true knowledge of the natural world. However, …inevitably scientists’ thinking is influenced by the widespread ideas in the society where they they live. So, for example, scientists often develop metaphors and analogies as a basis for scientific conjectures – but they are limited to drawing upon sources they are already familiar with Thomas Kuhn, a physicist who moved into historical studies of science, argued that once a particular way of thinking about the world became familiar, and its affordances had been worked out in detail by scientists, it became much harder to see how some alternative scheme might be at least as useful – even if it dealt better with known flaws in existing theories…
Kuhn suggested that different theoretical frameworks, with their different ways of seeing the world, were incommensurable (could not be measured against each other). He meant it was difficult to evaluate different frameworks objectively, as the evaluator would always be working from within their own existing worldview. Kuhn thought that science could make progress towards knowledge that better represented the true nature of things: but that this process was difficult because scientists can never completely step outside of the assumptions inherent in their habitual ways of making sense of the world. " (Taber, 2017: 31-32)
Culturally alternative sciences?
Feminist critiques of science have argued that science, as it is understood, was developed in societies dominated by men (often women were excluded from education, from any kind of professional work, and so forth), and so the nature of science reflects this. A feminist science could be different. (This is not suggesting that gravitational force would be found to follow a different law or that there would be a different set of chemical elements – but that the prioritised foci might be different, that ways of engaging with nature might be different, and the social organisation of the sciences would be different.)
Similarly, much science was undertaken in a social context of colonialism, in a social context where most people in the nations that were influential in the development of 'modern' science shared views about the superiority of certain national characteristics that seem very naive to most people today. This is seen in some scientific writing which made racial distinctions which are not only clearly invalid, but show how easily bias enters scientific thought when unwarranted ideas are simply taken for granted in a community. Whilst the studies that are now recognised as showing such bias have been discredited, the same attitudes often led to field scientists simply believing that they had every right to access sites in visited countries and to sample and remove any material they found of interest. There is much material in museums in European countries that was supplied in ways that would now be considered totally unethical. (This has long been discussed in relation to archaeological material, but also relates to anthropology, and indeed geology, botany and zoology.)
Arguably, some of this assumed superiority of people from certain national or ethnic backgrounds has contributed to the dismissal of what is sometimes called traditional ecological knowledge, where people who have lived in a particular natural environment for many generations have developed specialised local knowledge (for example, about the medicinal properties of particular plants).
The same attitude has no doubt influenced how the history of science has come down to us. For example, for many years the contributions of Arabic scholars (both in preserving Greek science, and in adding to it) was not given due attention. It is likely that the contributions of many women have been lost or misrepresented due to the widespread perception of science as suitable only for men. (Caroline Herschel is often thought of as helping her brother William in his work; Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze is generally seen as supporting her husband Antione in his work, and making sure his legacy was preserved after his execution in Revolutionary France…)
Work cited:
- Taber, K. S. (2017). Reflecting the nature of science in science education. In K. S. Taber & B. Akpan (Eds.), Science Education: An International Course Companion (pp. 23-37). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. [Download the author’s manuscript version of the chapter.]
