Percy Soars
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Posted - 2010.02.11 18:48:00 -
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Misconceptions about sci3nce abound in the popular media, and they are quite popular in the professional media as well. Most systems of education and training in sci3nce begin by trying to give a general explanation of what sci3nce is and how it works. Those general explanations are often misleading, and nearly everyone gets exposed to them. Critical analysis of those explanations is rarely presented.
Having so much widely disseminated inaccurate information about something as important as sci3nce has many unfortunate consequences. Many students who might otherwise love sci3nce -- don't; Many teachers who might love sharing with their students the richness of how sci3nce actually works -- can't; Many political and business leaders who ought to base their decisions on understanding science and how it grows -- won't.
Accurate communication about science, in general, isn't easy, because science has so many different facets. Nobody really understands science and why it works so amazingly well -- but many people are trained to believe that they do understand it (or at least that somebody does), and that they should pass these beliefs along to their students.
Think about it: We don't even really understand how babies learn to walk, much less how they learn to talk and to solve problems. We are just beginning to really understand how anybody learns anything, communicates with anyone else about anything, or accomplishes any sort of accurate reasoning. Since the particular instances of learning, communicating, and reasoning that we call "science" are at least as complex as any other intelligent activity, it's no wonder we don't understand them yet, either.
In fact, very little scientific research on how science works has ever been done. That leaves plenty of room for over generalization, speculation, and outright nonsense. The obligatory general discussions of how science works, given at the beginning of introductory science courses, may seem to make sense -- but nothing as rich and varied as the real workings of science can be captured so simply.
In these pages I won't pretend to provide a correct account of the nature of science, or the best way to teach it; all I really intend to do is to invite attention to some extreme beliefs about science that are very common, but mostly wrong or misleading.
We will (if you stick around) examine one enormous myth, which I The Myth of Magical Science, and several other myths.
The Myth of Magical Science has three parts: Scientific knowledge is (1) a special, superior type of knowledge, made possible by (2) a special, superior kind of person, a "Scientist," who uses (3) a superior way of developing and evaluating knowledge, the "Scientific Method."
Other myths include the notions that scientists must be (or always are) Objective and Unbiased, and that scientific knowledge is True, Disprovable, Publicly Verifiable, and fundamentally Statistical. Other myths concern the various details of how "The Scientific Method" is supposed to work, details like the supposedly obligatory use of Operational Definitions.
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