Week 4 Day 4 Historiography

Today's reading is chapter 3, continuing from Bauer, on "How Science Really Works". In it he describes the various mechanisms by which science progresses, including what he calls the jigsaw puzzle and the knowledge filter, and compares both against the myth of the scientific method. I am starting to think that Bauer has basically taken one simple yet important idea and stretched it out into several chapters. The point he seems to be stuck on is that science by definition is a human endeavor, and scientists by definition are human and obviously are going to act that way. I feel he is going way overboard in denigrating and deemphasizing the scientific method. I believe it is one of several methods by which science gets done, and probably the most important and common one. Just because not all the great scientists have used it, and just because all the great discoveries have not necessarily come about through it, that doesn't mean it's a myth or a negative thing.

As far as what is new and surprising, the filter and the puzzle concepts are interesting ways of representing how science gets done, but neither is really new or surprising to anyone who teaches or does science. It's just that we may not have consciously called them that or tried to conceptualize the scientific process in those terms. Of course I guess that is also the main idea, in that by naming, pointing out, and describing them the author is forcing me to think about them. In that sense I think this reading is beneficial, and I actually agree for the most part with Bauer. He points out that the objectivity of science is not due to the individuals but the collective body of science policing itself over time. I also agree with him that the history of science must be portrayed accurately, and not molded into a particular set of concrete steps that all scientists have and must follow. This is simply not true, and not should be presented as such.

I think Bauer is also incomplete, from my point of view as a science teacher, because I am at the mercy of the state and federal governments and my school district as to what is considered to be scientific literacy, especially as it relates to the all important standardized testing now so prevalent. I am not sure what to do about that problem, at this point. His graph on page 53 of the increase in the number of science journals is interesting, as is also him bringing up the cold fusion debacle, especially in light of my just having read of no less that Linus Pauling making a fundamental chemical error in a paper. He also cites Kuhn, from one of my earliest readings, and seems to defend his ideas to a certain extent. Of note also is his claim that pseudoscience is such because of the collective nature of science, because anything could be considered scientific if the only standard is whether the scientific method can be applied to it or not.

He closes by attributing the successes of science to the filter and the puzzle, and not to the scientific method. I think as a science educator this reading will help reinforce for me to emphasize the variety of ways science progresses and the collective nature of science. I don't think we can just throw out what is called the scientific method as a basic framework for problem solving in and out of science classes, and especially as long as teachers, students, and schools are held accountable by standardized tests that still treat it as the only way to do science.

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.