Epistemology and Science Education

Understanding the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Controversy

Roger S. Taylor, Michel Ferrari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136885990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How is epistemology related to the issue of teaching science and evolution in the schools? Addressing a flashpoint issue in our schools today, this book explores core epistemological differences between proponents of intelligent design and evolutionary scientists, as well as the critical role of epistemological beliefs in learning science. Preeminent scholars in these areas report empirical research and/or make a theoretical contribution, with a particular emphasis on the controversy over whether intelligent design deserves to be considered a science alongside Darwinian evolution. This pioneering book coordinates and provides a complete picture of the intersections in the study of evolution, epistemology, and science education, in order to allow a deeper understanding of the intelligent design vs. evolution controversy.

This is a very timely book for teachers and policy makers who are wrestling with issues of how to teach biology and evolution within a cultural context in which intelligent design has been and is likely to remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.

Part I: Epistemology

Chapter 1: Demarcation in Science Education

Toward an Enhanced View of Scientific Method¹,²

Richard A. Duschl and Richard E. Grandy

Introduction

What is science? What is not? What constitutes a scientific observation? A scientific theory? Scientific evidence? What are the limits of science? The ongoing century and a half debate about evolution theory and creationism, and in particular the recent revival of equal time in the classroom “teach the controversy” debate surrounding the idea of intelligent design, continues to stimulate conversations motivated by the preceding questions. For at its core isn’t scientific inquiry about entertaining and debating competing ideas, models, and theories with the goal of sorting out the truth about how nature functions, how it is constituted, how it is construed. Creationist stances take just this “compare the theories” type of view when asking for “equal time” and for “teach the controversy.” Demarcating science from non-science or even successful science from non-successful science is not a straightforward process, as developments in history and philosophy of science demonstrate (Thagard, 2007). Newer images of science grounded in naturalized philosophy challenge many of the standard criteria that have been used to demarcate science as a unique way of knowing.

Any characterization of scientific inquiry raises the question of whether science as a way of knowing is distinctive from other ways of knowing. Philosophers of science refer to this issue as the demarcation between science and other forms of inquiry (Eflin, Glennan, & Reisch, 1999). There are two related but somewhat distinct demarcation questions. First, some individuals see a distinction between legitimate science and activities that purport to be scientific but are not, for example, astrology, creation science, and so forth. Second, there are some who see a distinction between scientific inquiry and other forms of legitimate but non-scientific activities such as historical research or electrical engineering. Advocates of teaching the nature of science in science education programs feel that it not only is possible to make a sharp general demarcation, but that it is an important part of teaching science to teach that demarcation (Lederman, Abd-el-Khalick, Bell, & Schwartz, 2002; McComas & Olson, 1998; Osborne, Collins, Ratcliffe, Millar, & Duschl, 2003). Others are skeptical that such a demarcation is possible.

One way to argue for demarcation is to claim scientific inquiry involves mechanistic explanations. This is clearly too narrow as magnetism and gravitation are not mechanical. Another is to argue that scientific explanations are causal. This suggestion has two problems; one is that it seems to rule out statistical explanations that are not necessarily causal. The second is that three centuries of debate over the nature of causation in philosophy have produced no consensus on what constitutes causation.

Another view is that scientific explanations/hypotheses must be testable. While this seems right in spirit, decades of attempts by philosophers to make this concept precise have also consistently failed. Yet another tack is to argue that the distinction between scientific and non-scientific hypotheses is real, but is not a matter for which we can formulate explicit rules for general application, for example, a scientific method. The only individuals able to appropriately make the distinction between testable and non-testable hypotheses are those who are deeply embedded in the practices of the specific science and have sophisticated knowledge. Today with the aid of powerful computers there are domains of science that do not begin inquiry with stating hypotheses but rather are guided by patterns of discovery from huge data sets (e.g., astronomy, human genome project).

We are not suggesting that it is impossible to distinguish scientific inquiry from pseudoscience. But we believe that to the extent that the distinction can be made, it has to be made locally, from the perspective of the particular field at a specific time. A naturalized approach to understanding science means that researchers observe what scientists do, not just what scientists say about what they do. The naturalized approach to the philosophy of science strongly suggests that the nature of scientific activities has changed over time and we expect change to continue. Knowledge of the relevant scientific principles and criteria for what counts as an observation are important elements in distinguishing science claims and developing demarcation capacities; for example, distinguishing science from pseudoscience. However, we are skeptical that a general demarcation criterion can be abstracted from the concrete historically situated judgments. And yet, in the context of creationism and evolution there is a desire to claim a demarcation on the grounds that the core theoretical belief system of one is religious and of the other is scientific. An alternative approach is to examine the scientific practices within a community of scientists—specifically, those scientific practices that as Thagard (2007) posits serve to broaden and deepen explanatory truths.

When Darwin’s dangerous idea was first introduced the arguments he put forth in The Origin of Species regarding the mechanism of natural selection changed forever the relationship between science and religion, man and nature, and our interpretation of natural laws. In Kuhnian terminology, a scientific revolution had begun. Darwin’s The Descent of Man only served to deepen the debate and widen the gulf between religious and scientific perspectives about the nature of science. The Great Synthesis in Biology introduced mechanisms to explain both the diversity of life and inherited stability of life. Molecular biology and population biology further deepened our understanding of the cellular level and organism level mechanisms that account for evolutionary and co-evolutionary dynamics. Such fine-tuning of the understanding of evolution theory, or any scientific theory for that matter, is a critically important component in the growth of scientific knowledge. New tools, technologies, techniques, and cognate theories contribute to the progressive development of the scope of a theory. However, the dialogic processes that take place between discovery and justification and that constitute the refinement of tool, technology, technique, and theory choice are often ignored in science classrooms and communications. Such dialogic processes, though, are critically important dynamics of the growth of scientific knowledge and of scientific revolutions. The between discovery and justification refinements and debates among communities of scientists constitute elements of an enhanced view of the scientific method. Such a view recognizes, where “received” views of the scientific method do not, the critical epistemic frameworks used when developing and evaluating scientific knowledge, and the social processes and contexts that shape how knowledge is discovered, communicated, represented, and argued. Failure on the part of the “intelligent design” to engage in epistemic and social processes is a fatal flaw.

The current “teach the controversy” debate being played out in classrooms, school districts, colleges, universities, and the courts serves as a strong reminder that the theory of evolution scientific revolution is alive and well and showing no signs of losing momentum. The century and a half dialog around Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Dennett, 1995) provides a window to examine the epistemological and ontological polemics in philosophy of science. For school science and public debates about science, it provides a window to examine features about the nature of science that might be incorporated in teaching “ideas-about-science.” A goal of this chapter is to advocate for an enhanced scientific method, a view that privileges the role of dialogic processes in the growth of scientific knowledge. The enhanced scientific method view emerges from a consideration of seven core tenets about the nature of science put forth by the logical positivists, which we outline below (Grandy & Duschl, 2008).

Views about the Nature of Science

The science education research on learners’ and teachers’ views about the nature of science (NOS) is mixed (Ryan & Aikenhead, 1992; McComas & Olson, 1998; Driver, Leach, Millar, & Scott, 1996; Lederman et al., 2002; Lederman, 1999; Osborne et al., 2003; Smith & Wenk, 2006). When data are gathered employing survey instruments that probe learners’ views of science outside of any specific context of inquiry, the results indicate that students do not develop accurate views about the theory revision and responsiveness to evidence nature of scientific knowledge. Driver et al. (1996) in a thorough investigation of 9-16 year olds found that the majority of pupils at all ages thought good science was that which involved investigations using phenomena or sense perception data; for example, seeing is believing. Few of the students held the more sophisticated model-based views of science. Smith and Wenk (2006) found similar results in a study of college freshman. The majority of students held an epistemology in which theories are understood as tested hypotheses. Missing were views seeing theories as complex explanatory frameworks that guide hypothesis testing. Windschitl (2004) also found similar results with preservice science teacher educators.

Osborne et al. (2003) conducted a study on what “ideas-about-science” should be part of the school science curriculum. Employing a Delphi study of experts’ opinions, nine themes encapsulating key ideas about the nature of science were considered to be an essential component of school science curriculum. These nine themes when compared with the themes proposed by McComas and Olson (1998) show strong similarities (see Figure 1.1). What differences do exist reside in themes dealing with the extent to which cultural and social factors impinge on the practice of science and with the diversity of scientific thinking.

Figure 1.1 Views about nature of science (NOS) and “ideas-about-science” to teach in K-12 science.

This body of NOS research raises questions about whether the image of scientific inquiry found in the school science curriculum is sufficiently comprehensive. We will argue that there are important epistemic and social practices missing from the image of science presented by current NOS research (Grandy & Duschl, 2008; Eflin et al., 1999). A focus on investigative methods of science dominates the school science curriculum; not much emphasis is placed on dialectical processes that shape the role theory, evidence, explanation, and models have in the development of scientific knowledge. Such perspectives represent a more contemporary view of the science from scholars (cf. Giere, 1988, 1999; Solomon, 2001; Longino, 2002) “who portray science as a multidimensional interaction among the models of scientists, empirical observation of the real world, and their predictions” (Osborne et al., 2003, p. 715). What is missing, and what we have learned about the nature of science, is the important dialogic processes about what comes to count as the observations, measurements, data, evidence, models, theories, and explanations; dialogic processes that function between the contexts of discovery and justification and that represent a critical element of the nature of scientific inquiry. When we look at the dialectical and dialogic processes that contribute to the “intelligent design” position, we find, like the judge in Dover, PA decided, that “intelligent design” is not science.

Toward an Enhanced Version of a Scientific Method

Over the last 100 years new technologies and new scientific theories have modified the nature of scientific observation from an enterprise dominated by sense perception, aided or unaided, to a theory-driven enterprise. We now know that what we see is influenced by what we know and how we “look”; scientific theories are inextricably involved in the design and interpretation of experimental methods as well as the instruments and tools used to obtain data. Early in the 20th century, however, philosophers of science sought to establish the objectivity and rationality of scientific claims on the basis of language alone by (1) claiming a distinction between observational and theoretical languages based on grammar, (2) seeing theories as sets of sentences in a formal logical language, (3) using some form of inductive logic to provide formal criteria for theory evaluation, and (4) advocating that there is an important dichotomy between contexts of discovery and contexts of justification. The logical positivists also promoted tenets of science that saw scientists working (5) individually, (6) with criteria that are normative dimensions to scientific inquiry, and (7) with compatible theory choices that contributed to a cumulative and continually progressive process in the growth of scientific knowledge.

Twentieth century philosophy of science can be partitioned into three major developments: an experiment-driven enterprise, a theory-driven enterprise, and a model-driven enterprise. The experiment-driven enterprise gave birth to the movements called logical positivism or logical empiricism, shaped the development of analytic philosophy, and gave rise to the hypothetico-deductive conception of science. The image of scientific inquiry was that experiment led to new knowledge that accrued to established knowledge. How knowledge was discovered and refined was not on the philosophical agenda; only the final justification of knowledge was deemed important. This early 20th century perspective is referred to as the “received view” of philosophy of science.

This “received view” conception of science is closely related to traditional explanations of “the scientific method.” The steps in the method are:

1. Make observations
2. Formulate a hypothesis
3. Deduce consequences from the hypothesis
4. Make observations to test the consequences
5. Accept or reject the hypothesis based on the observations.

The issue is to question the usefulness of scientific method frameworks that do not attend to the theory refinement dialogic practices embedded in science as a way of knowing. One must also question the usefulness of scientific method frameworks that do not attend to the epistemic practices inherent in constructing and evaluating models. Theory-building and model-building practices provide the contexts where epistemic abilities, social skills, and cognitive capacities are forged. Missing from the traditional five step hypothetico-deductive laboratory-based view of scientific method, and creationists’ theories, are the important dialogic and epistemic processes involved in model and theory building.

Consideration for both the insights and limitations of logical positivism and early “Kuhnian” responses to logical positivism have expanded our perspectives about the nature of science, the growth of scientific knowledge, and the goals/ limitations of science (see Godfrey-Smith, 2003; Zammito, 2004, for a comprehensive review). The seven tenets of science proposed by Duschl and Grandy (2008a, 2008b) characterize how the received view of the scientific method, one that is cast in terms of hypothetico-deductive views of the nature of science, has shifted. The revised tenets reflect the philosophical debates that have emerged since the introduction of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolution and, importantly, from the “...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Epistemology
• Part II: Intelligent Design and Evolution
• Part III: Teaching Science
• Conclusion
• Contributors