Week 4 Day 3 Historiography

Today's historiography assignment is chapter 2 in Bauer. Honestly, I just finished reading this chapter, and am at a bit of a loss as to how to begin. It seemed Bauer was throwing out a lot of "common-sense" items that any open-minded, humble, and knowledgeable science educator takes more or less for granted anyway. I think one of his main points is that science by definition is the domain of human beings, with all the positives and negatives that necessarily involves. I guess part of my problem with this chapter, as Dr. Magruder and I discussed in person previously, is that I tend to have a generous and liberal view of the so-called scientific method, and even though I think it is an excellent framework and starting point for science students, I have never labored under the delusion that all science has always been done that way. I recall times my students might question how viewing specimens microscopically and drawing them could be considered an "experiment", or building DNA models from clay or beads. I would explain to them that there are a multitude of ways that "science" gets done, and I don't think it's by chance that I also started reading The Double Helix today!

However, despite what I typed in the first paragraph, the title of the chapter, "The So-Called Scientific Method", pretty much gives the reader the thrust of the text. Bauer mentions Bacon and Popper, and I would like to point out here that I have always discouraged my students from using the words "proven" or "disproven". I believe one should always leave the window cracked ever so slightly in case a point needs to be reevaluated in light of new data. He goes on to distinguish and discuss theoretical and experimental science, and I got a chuckle from the notion that biologists divorce three times more often on the average than chemists, physicists, and geologists. The term "anecdotal evidence" came to mind immediately! It is interesting how Bauer breaks down the scientific communities and subdisciplines and compares and contrasts them, including the relative amount of mathematics required, and whether this bears on how "scientific" an area of study actually is. This is relevant to me, because I try to impart to my students the meaning of qualitative versus quantitative data, and how they can each be important relative to the type of study being done. I think another consideration that Bauer should touch on, as I'm sure he does, is pure versus applied science (technology), and the idea of studying something just to find out about it as opposed to trying to find a solution to a specific problem. It's also important to address that those applications may be good or bad, depending on what they are and the viewpoint of the observer.

Bauer goes on to say that we currently have a much better understanding of the history of science, and this is important because he is emphasizing much of what I learned earlier in this course concerning rated "X" history, Whiggism, pseudoscience, and pseudohistory. He states that we call those that are science literate that because they subscribe to many of those things I just mentioned. He makes another interesting point, and that is that physicists are most often promoted to leadership and administrative positions, and this is problematic for several reasons. I have to agree with him here. He concludes with the notion that the myth of the scientific method actually promotes less than ethical behavior, hubris, and short-cutting.

Bibliographic Note:

Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1994). Bauer, chemistry professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, upends current contentions about science literacy in a small, dense book that could be the nucleus of a restructuring of how science works in our culture, or, in the author's terms, how its reputation works.