Edit your email address. Did not receive an email? Click here for alternative method. ADD Contact Information. ADD Notifications. ADD Interests. You have not completed your profile information. There was an error creating your account. Please Contact Support support cpalms. Answers to this question have historical parts and philosophical parts.
There can be descriptive accounts of the recorded differences over time of particular theories, concepts, and methods—what might be called the shape of scientific change. Many stories of scientific change attempt to give more than statements of what, where and when change took place. Why this change then, and toward what end? By what processes did they take place?
What is the nature of scientific change? This article gives a brief overview of the most influential views on the shape and nature of change in science. Important thematic questions are: How gradual or rapid is scientific change? Is science really revolutionary? How radical is the change? Are periods in science incommensurable, or is there continuity between the first and latest scientific ideas?
Is science getting closer to some final form, or merely moving away from a contingent, non-determining past? What role do the factors of community, society, gender, or technology play in facilitating or mitigating scientific change? The most important modern development in the topic is that none of these questions have the same answer for all sciences. When we speak of scientific change it should be recognized that it is only at a fairly contextualized level of description of the practices of scientists at rather specific times and places that anything substantial can be said.
Nonetheless, scientific change is connected with many other key issues in philosophy of science and broader epistemology , such as realism, rationality and relativism. The present article does not attempt to address them all. We begin with some organizing remarks. It is interesting to note at the outset the reflexive nature of the topic of scientific change. A main concern of science is understanding physical change, whether it be motions, growth, cause and effect, the creation of the universe or the evolution of species.
These philosophical views are then reflected back, through the history and philosophy of science, as images of how science itself changes, of how its theories are created, evolve and die. Models of change from science—evolutionary, mechanical, revolutionary—often serve as models of change in science. This makes it difficult to disentangle the actual history of science from our philosophical expectations about it.
And the historiography and the philosophy of science do not always live together comfortably. Historians balk at the evaluative, forward-looking, and often necessitarian, claims of standard philosophical reconstructions of scientific events.
Philosophers, for their part, have argued that details of the history of science matter little to a proper theory of scientific change, and that a distinction can and should be made between how scientific ideas are discovered and how they are justified. Beneath the ranging, messy, and contingent happenings which led to our current scientific outlook, there lies a progressive, systematically evolving activity waiting to be rationally reconstructed.
Conversely, what one takes to be the demarcating criteria of science will largely dictate how one talks about its changes. What part of human history is to be identified with science?
Where does science start and where does it end? The breadth of science has a dimension across concurrent events as well as across the past and future. That is, it has both synchronic at a time and diachronic over time dimensions. Science will consist of a range of contemporary events which need to be demarcated.
But likewise, science has a temporal breadth: a beginning, or possibly several beginnings, and possibly several ends. The synchronic dimension of science is one way views of scientific change can be distinguished. On one hand there are logical or rationalistic views according to which scientific activity can be reduced to a collection of objective, rational decisions of a number of individual scientists. On this latter view, the most significant changes in science can each be described through the logically-reconstructable actions and words of one historical figure, or at most a very few.
According to many of the more recent views, however, an adequate picture of science cannot be formed with anything less than the full context of social and political structures: the personal, institutional, and cultural relations scientists are a part of. We look at some of these broader sociological views in the section on social process of change. We will begin with the most influential figure for history and philosophy of science in North America in the last half-century: Thomas Kuhn.
For an introduction to the most influential philosophical accounts of the diachronical development of science, see Losee When Kuhn and the others advanced their new views on the development of science into Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science, history and sociology were already an important part of the landscape of Continental history and philosophy of science.
A discussion of these views can be found as part of the sociology of science section as well. The article concludes with more recent naturalized approaches to scientific change, which turn to cognitive science for accounts of scientific understanding and how that understanding is formed and changed, as well as suggestions for further reading.
Science itself, at least in a form recognizable to us, is a twentieth century phenomenon. Although a matter of debate, the canonical view of the history of scientific change is that its seminal event is the one tellingly labeled the Scientific Revolution.
It is usually dated to the 16th and 17th centuries. The first historiographies of science—as much construction of the revolution as they were documentation—were not far behind, coming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Professionalization of the history of science, characterized by reflections on the telling of the history of science, followed later. We begin our story there. As history of science professionalized, becoming a separate academic discipline in the twentieth century, scientific change was seen early on as an important theme within the discipline. Rupert Hall , radical conceptual transformations came to play a much more important role.
One of the early outcomes of this interest in change was the volume Scientific Change Crombie, in which historians of science covering the span of science from the physical to the biological sciences, and the span of history from antiquity to modern science, all investigated the conditions for scientific change by examining cases from a multitude of periods, societies, and scientific disciplines.
What were the essential changes in scientific thought and how were they brought about? What was the part played in the initiation of change by mutations in fundamental ideas leading to new questions being asked, new problems being seen, new criteria of satisfactory explanation replacing the old?
What was the part played by new technical inventions in mathematics and experimental apparatus; by developments in pure mathematics; by the refinements of measurement; by the transference of ideas, methods and information from one field of study to another? What significance can be given to the description and use of scientific methods and concepts in advance of scientific achievement?
How have methods and concepts of explanation differed in different sciences? How has language changed in changing scientific contexts? What parts have chance and personal idiosyncrasy played in discovery? How have scientific changes been located in the context of general ideas and intellectual motives, and to what extent have extra-scientific beliefs given theories their power to convince? What value has been put on scientific activity by society at large, by the needs of industry, commerce, war, medicine and the arts, by governmental and private investment, by religion, by different states and social systems?
To what external social, economic and political pressures have science, technology and medicine been exposed? Are money and opportunity all that is needed to create scientific and technical progress in modern society?
Crombie, , p. These were fundamental changes that overturned not only the reigning theories but also carried with them significant consequences outside their respective scientific disciplines. In most of the early work in history of science, scientific change in the form of scientific revolutions was something which happened only rarely. This view was changed by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas S.
Kuhn whose monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions came to influence philosophy of science for decades. Kuhn wanted in his monograph to argue for a change in the philosophical conceptions of science and its development, but based on historical case studies. The notion of revolutions that he used in Structure included not only fundamental changes of theory that had a significant influence on the overall world view of both scientists and non-scientists, but also changes of theory whose consequences remained solely within the scientific discipline in which the change had taken place.
This considerably widened the notion of scientific revolutions compared to earlier historians and initiated discussions among both historians and philosophers on the balance between continuity and change in the development of science. In the British and North American schools of philosophy of science, scientific change did not became a major topic until the s onwards when historically inclined philosophers of science, including Thomas S.
Kuhn , Paul K. Feyerabend , N. The occupation with history led naturally to a focus on how science develops, including whether science progresses incrementally or through changes which represent some kind of discontinuity. Similar questions had also been discussed among Continental scholars. In France, the historian and philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard also noted that what Kant had taken to be absolute preconditions for knowledge had turned out wrong in the light of modern physics.
These conditions were still required for scientific reasoning and therefore, Bachelard concluded, a full account of scientific reasoning could only be derived from reflections upon its historical conditions and development. Based on the analysis of the historical development of science, Bachelard advanced a model of scientific change according to which the conceptions of nature are from time to time replaced by radical new conceptions — what Bachelard called epistemological breaks.
Beyond the teacher-student connections, there are other commonalities which unify this tradition. In North America and England, among those who wanted to make philosophy more like science, or to import into philosophical practice lessons from the success of science, the exemplar was almost always physics.
The most striking and profound advances in science seemed to be, after all, in physics, namely the quantum and relativity revolutions. But on the Continent, model sciences were just as often linguistics or sociology, biology or anthropology, and not limited to those. What we as humans know, how we know it, and how we successfully achieve our aims, are the guiding questions, not how to escape our human condition or situatedness.
Foucault described his project as archaeology of the history of human thought and its conditions. Hence, in his analysis of the development of the human sciences from the Renaissance to the present, Foucault described various so-called epistemes that determined the conditions for all knowledge of their time, and he argued that the transition from one episteme to the next happens as a break that entails radical changes in the conception of knowledge.
For a detailed account of the work of Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucalt, see Gutting One of the key contributions that provoked interest in scientific change among philosophers of science was Thomas S. History was expected to do more than just chronicle the successive increments of, or impediments to, our progress towards the present. Instead, historians and philosophers should focus on the historical integrity of science at a particular time in its development, and should analyze science as it developed.
Instead of describing a cumulative, teleological development toward the present, history of science should see science as developing from a given point in history. Kuhn expected a new image of science would emerge from this diachronic historiography. In the rest of Structure he used historical examples to question the view of science as a cumulative development in which scientists gradually add new pieces to the ever-growing aggregate of scientific knowledge, and instead he described how science develops through successive periods of tradition-preserving normal science and tradition-shattering revolutions.
The predominant phase is normal science which, while progressing successfully in its aims, inherently generates what Kuhn calls anomalies. Science is not only a body of knowledge, but also a way of knowing. Our vision of K-8 science features this understanding as one of the four strands. We have elevated this focus to the status of a strand for several reasons. We view understanding of the nature and structure of scientific knowledge and the process by which it is developed as a worthy end in and of itself.
For more than a century, educators have argued that students should understand how scientific knowledge is constructed Rudolph, One rationale that is often invoked, but not empirically tested, is that understanding science makes for a more informed citizenry and supports democratic participation.
That is, citizens who understand how scientific knowledge is produced will be careful consumers of scientific claims about public scientific issues e. A second justification among educators is that understanding the structure and nature of science makes one better at doing and learning science see review by Sandoval, That is, if students come to see science as a set of practices that builds models to account for patterns of evidence in the natural world, and that what counts as evidence is contingent on making careful observations and building arguments, then they will have greater success in their efforts to build knowledge.
Schauble and colleagues , for example, found that fifth grade students designed better experiments after instruction about the purpose of experimentation. We begin the chapter with an elaboration on science as a way of knowing, sketching the goals of the enterprise, the nature and structure of scientific knowledge, and the process by which it is constructed.
That is, it represents currently accepted ideas about the nature of scientific knowledge that are important to teach in grades K Building on this model of science, we first turn to the cognitive research literatures to examine the intellectual resources relevant to this strand that children bring to kindergarten.
In this chapter, we first discuss how during the K-8 years, they build on these understandings to develop some initial epistemological ideas about what knowledge is and how it is constructed.
Next, we consider how they begin to think about what scientific knowledge is and how it is constructed. Before delving into this research, one major caveat is in order. It allows us to point to developmental trends and base-level competencies that can be expected in a given age span in normally developing children. A few studies have begun to explore the effects of teaching approaches on the development of epistemological understanding.
We offer a limited discussion of this literature here. Later, in Chapters 6 and 9 , we discuss in more depth studies that provide insight as to supportive classroom conditions and provide better proxies for what is possible when those conditions exist.
Before considering the research that may elucidate the intellectual resources and challenges that learning this strand might pose to children in the K-8 years, we briefly review approaches the field has taken to articulate the underlying model of building scientific knowledge. In this explication, we consider the goals of the enterprise, the nature and structure of scientific knowledge, and how knowledge is developed, with a focus on what is most relevant for student learning.
For a more complete discussion of our view of the nature of science, see Chapter 2. While we acknowledge there is no simple correspondence with this model of science and the epistemic goals of the curriculum at any particular grade level, consideration of both relevant cognitive research and instructional design is informed by close consideration of the normative model.
Osborne and colleagues have proposed taking a consensus view to identify the ideas about science that should be part of the school science curriculum. They conducted a study to examine the opinions of scientists, science educators, individuals involved in promoting the public understanding of science, and philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science.
They identified nine themes encapsulating key ideas about the nature of science that were considered to be an essential component of school science curriculum. These included science and certainty, analysis and interpretation of data, scientific method and critical testing, hypothesis and pre-.
First, Sandoval asserts that viewing scientific knowledge as constructed is of primary importance that underscores a dialectical relationship between theory and evidence. Students, if they are to understand what science is, must accept that it is something that people do and create. Rather than relying on one or several rote methods, science depends on ways of evaluating scientific claims e.
Third, scientific knowledge comes in different forms, which vary in their explanatory and predictive power e. Fourth, Sandoval asserts that scientific knowledge varies in certainty. Acknowledging variable certainty, Sandoval argues, invites students to engage the ideas critically and to evaluate them using epistemological criteria.
Another approach to defining the aspects of understanding the epistemology of science that science curriculum should inhere is to consider the aspects of epistemology that have been linked to enhancing the development of science understanding. For example, there is evidence that when students come to view argumentation as a central feature of science, this can have considerable positive effects on their understanding and use of investigative strategies see, e.
Songer and Linn have also analyzed the effects of a dynamic versus a static view of science and found that a dynamic view is conducive to knowledge integration.
Hammer has identified a relationship between views of knowledge in terms of coherence, authoritativeness, and degree to which knowl-. Gobert and colleagues have studied the epistemology of models of students in the middle grades, high school, and college, including their understanding of models as representations of causal or explanatory ideas, that there can be multiple models of the same thing, that models do not need to be exactly like the thing modeled, and that models can be revised or changed in light of new data.
Similarly, Schwartz and White studied seventh grade student learning using a software environment that allowed the students to design, test, and revise models. They examined a battery of pre- and postmeasures of physics content knowledge, inquiry, and knowledge of modeling. While these studies examine but a few slices of epistemology, they suggest that certain features of epistemological understanding can offer students powerful leverage for science learning.
These studies also suggest an important way to think about defining what students should learn about epistemology and the nature of science and call attention to an area worthy of future study. Also contributing to the complexity of this picture, multiple literatures with fundamentally different methodological tactics and analytical lenses have contributed contrasting models of the limitations and emerging competences of K-8 students.
One line of research in the developmental literature involves a continuation of the theory of mind frame into the elementary school years.
At the same time, the literature suggests, children continue to elaborate on their understanding of mind and different mental states throughout elementary school. Students were asked to articulate differences between the accounts, consider reasons for the differences, and discuss whether both accounts could be correct. They were scored in terms of epistemological level, from treating the two pieces as factual accounts that might differ only in specific facts reported, to understanding that they reflect contrasting interpretations, filtered through world views.
They found that no sixth graders responded in terms of the higher levels. However, work that continues in the tradition of Perry maintains his general findings that, over the early to late adolescent years, individuals display shifts in their general stance toward knowledge and knowing. At some point, usually during adolescence, youngsters become aware that others may disagree with them on matters about which they hold strong beliefs.
This relativism is regarded as an early reaction to the recognition that knowledge is conjectural and uncertain, open to and requiring interpretation. In later adolescence or early adulthood, some individuals may pass through relativism to embrace a contextualist commitment to reasoned judgment, although this move is by no means typical or inevitable. The individual continues to understand that knowledge is neither certain nor complete but comes nevertheless to accept that, with good judgment and careful reason, it is possible over time to achieve successively closer approximations of the truth.
Much of this research has been performed with college undergraduates, and the homogeneity of the participants may in part account for the degree of general agreement in the findings about the overall nature of change.
However, different models propose different numbers of sublevels along the way. Moreover, there are some disagreements about the extent to which change is regarded as universal or not, the ages at which shifts typically occur, and also the extent to which it is regarded as stage-like and structurally integrated, or composed of a series of relatively independent beliefs about knowledge and learning. Most of the models appear to assume that epistemology is trait-like, so that it is a relatively stable feature of the individual.
However, a few e. At first glance, some of these ideas appear to be inconsistent with research that suggests that much earlier—indeed, by the time they begin elementary school—children already are well aware that individuals can hold different beliefs about the same objects and events.
Beliefs are not simply copies of reality; they are products of the activity of knowing—therefore, they are subject to verification and are potentially disconfirmable by evidence Perner, If young elementary schoolchildren understand these.
Chandler, Hallett, and Sokol suggest that, although young children are aware of representational diversity, this does not mean that they consider it a necessary or legitimate aspect of knowledge.
Instead, they are more likely to believe that there is one right answer and that other interpretations are simply wrong or misinformed. Hence, the criteria for knowledge cannot easily be specified, and all knowing is associated with an unavoidable degree of ambiguity. And once again, the relations between the lines of research are complex. It is straightforward to imagine how holding either absolutist or relativist epistemologies could lead to a distorted view of the nature of science.
For example, Carey and Smith point out that many students do not understand that science is primarily a theory-building enterprise. They may learn about observation, hypotheses, and experiment from their science textbooks, but they rarely understand that theories underlie these activities and are responsible for both the generation and interpretation of both hypotheses and experiments.
The commonsense epistemology that young students typically hold is unreflective; to the extent that they think about it at all, children often think of knowledge as stemming directly from sensory experience, even though they do know that some knowledge is inferred rather than observed Sodian and Wimmer, , and they are even aware that the same object may be interpreted differently by different observers Taylor, Cartwright, and Bowden, Carey and Smith suggest that children may not make clear distinctions between theory, specific hypotheses, and evidence, and they may expect to find simpler and more direct relations between data and conclusions than are warranted.
Even a ubiquitous object like a smartphone depends on many fundamental discoveries. Its powerful computer depends on integrated chips made up of transistors, whose discovery depended on an understanding of quantum mechanics. The GPS in a smart phone depends on correcting the time from satellites using both the special and general theories of relativity - theories that people once thought would have no practical value.
I wonder how many understand all the discoveries that make the little box work. Computers are also driving developments that will continue to challenge our view of the world. Machines that learn are already among us and are changing the world in which we live. They offer great potential in areas including healthcare and improving other public services, and may soon result in driverless cars and very sophisticated robots, but we need to make conscious decisions about how we want smart machines to allow humanity to flourish.
Discoveries themselves are morally neutral, but the use we make of them are not. One discovery that shifted our view of the world in two distinctly divergent directions was nuclear fission. Its discovery led to the development of the most destructive weapons known.
Some argue that the fear of destruction has been a powerful motivator for peace, but this is hardly a stable solution as can be seen with today's situation with North Korea.
On the other hand, nuclear fission also promised a reliable source of energy that was once optimistically predicted to be 'too cheap to meter'. Science is the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. That pursuit of knowledge has also shaped the way we view the world, as has the application of the knowledge.
It has transformed our lives, generally for the better.
0コメント