IHPST Newsletter, February 2004

#1 CD Proceedings of the 6th IHPST Conference, Denver, 2001, 100+ papers, W. McComas (ed.), USD10 (postage included).

#2 CD Proceedings of the 7th IHPST Conference, Winnipeg, 2003, 100+ papers, D. Metz (ed.), USD10 (postage included).

#3 Time for Science Education, M.R. Matthews, Kluwer, 2000, 440pp, USD15 (postage included)

#4 Science Education and Culture, F. Bevilacqua, E. Giannetto & M.R. Matthews (eds.), Kluwer, 2001, 362pp, USD15 (postage included).

#5 Challenging New Zealand Science Education, M.R. Matthews, Dunmore Press, 1995, 256pp, USD5 (postage included).

#6 'Science & Education' journal Volume 12, 2003, 808 pps, USD25 (postage included).

#7 'Science & Education' journal Volume 2, 1993, 382pp, USD10 (postage included).

Professor M.R. Matthews
School of Education
UNSW
Sydney 2052
Australia
Email: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au

Davis, B. & Sumara, D.: 2003, 'Constructivist Discourses and the Field of Education: Problems and Pos sibilities', Eduational Theory 52(4), 409-428.
Glasersfeld, E. von: 2001, 'The Radical Constructivist View of Science', Foundations of Science 6, 31-43.
Justi, R. & Gilbert, J.: 2000, 'History and Philosophy of Science Through Models: Some Challenges in the Case of the Atom', International Journal of Science Education 22(9), 993-1009.
Justi, R. & Gilbert, J.: 2003, 'Teachers' Views on the Nature of Models', International Journal of Science Education 25(11), 1369-1386.
Kournay, J.A.: 2003, 'A Philosophy of Science for the Twenty-First Century', Philosophy of Science 70(1), 1-14.
Lawson, A.E.: 2003, 'The Nature and Development of Hypothetico-Predictive Argumentation with Implications for Science Teaching', International Journal of Science Education 25(11), 1387-1408.
Matthews, M.R.: 2004, 'Thomas Kuhn's Impact on Science Education: What Lessons can be Learnt?', Science Education 88(1), 90-118.
McMullin, E.: 2001, 'The Impact of Newton's Principia on the Philosophy of Science', Philosophy of Science 68(3), 279-310.
Osborne, J., Collins, S., Ratcliffe, M., Millar, R. & Duschl, R.: 2003, 'What ÒIdeas-about-ScienceÓ Should be Taught in School Science? A Delphi Study of the Expert Community', Journal of Research in Science Teaching 40(7), 692-720.
Riegler, A.: 2001, 'Towards a Radical Constructivist Understanding of Scien ce', Foundations of Science 6, 1-30.
Rudolph, J.L.: 2002, 'Portraying Epistemology: School Science in Historical Context', Science Education 87(1), 64-79.
Rudolph, J.L.: 2002, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education, Palgrave, New York.

Hugh G. Gauch, Jr. Scientific Method in Practice ,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 436pp, ISBN: 0 521 01708 4, USD45 (paper).

The book's title does not give very much away, and there are countless books with a similar title on library shelves. But this book is different: it is written by an enthusiast for philosophy of science who is also a research agronomist. Instead of the usual examples from physics the book has examples from agriculture, biological and life sciences. Statistics, probability, Bayesian decision theory, and experimental design are all explicated in a sophisticated manner.

The book also deals in some depth with philosophy of science, the Science Wars, and science education. The book makes a grand sweep over scientific method, practice, culture and education.

Not many books that cite Augustine, Albert Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Francis Bacon and David Hume also make mention of the AAAS's Liberal Art of Science and Benchmarks for Science Literacy, or the NCEE's A Nation at Risk or NSTA's A High Schoo l Framework. And it is unusual for books dealing with scientific method to pay attention to research published in The Journal of College Science Teaching, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, or Science & Education.

The author adopts the position enunciated by many national scientific and educational groups that 'students should have the opportunity to learn the nature of the Òscientific methodÓ' (p.5). The book elaborates and defends the scientific method. Against numerous doubters, Gauch affirms that there are 'general principles of scientific method that pervade all the sciences, as contrasted with specialized techniques that occur only in some sciences' (p.19). These principles depend upon strong claims about science's rationality, truth, objectivity and realism.

Gauch's own training was in agricultural science; use of the 'agricultural model' for research on crop yields was his, so to speak, bread and butter. He uses many examples of how agricultural scientists deal with the endemic problems of sample size, 'noise' effects and 'soft' measuring instruments. World wide, billions of dollars per annum are spent on these yield trials. He claims that philosophy of science is relevant to proper and efficient conduct of such trials.

In physics and chemistry there are well known problems in separating out phenomena from data, and then additional problems i n appraising different theories against the phenomena that has been identified. In the life sciences all of these problems are magnified, and simply cannot be dealt with apart from more and more sophisticated statistical analysis. But this analysis should be driven by methodological commitments. From Mendel's pea studies to contemporary high-expense agriculture research, scientists need to separate treatment effects from noise effects; the data collected is generated from multiple causal chains.

The situation is paralleled in education research (although the latter costs just hundreds of millions of dollars while the former costs billions of dollars). Many educationalists have given up on scientific research: some saying that science itself is defective and cannot give us objective truth even about the natural world; while others are happy enough to give the natural world over to science, but say that the social world is too complex, messy and multi-faceted for the application of scientific procedures.

Gauch is not a defeatist: he says that successful agricultural research has recognised the complexity of biological entities and environments, and individual-environment interactions, but instead of throwing their hands up they have developed more nuanced designs and more sophisticated statistics and methods of analysis. This sophistication allows better separation of treatment and noise effects. With the US government now demanding that education research be scientific, and curtailing funds to non-scientific research, educationalists should find much of benefit in Gauch's elaboration of 'Scientific Method in Practice'.

The final chapter on science education elaborates at length on six benefits for students flowing from explicit teaching of Nature of Science (NOS): better comprehension of concepts, greater adaptability, greater interest, more realistic views, better research ability and ultimately, the ability to be better teachers of science. Readers will find these arguments informed by a good deal of education literature.

MRM

John Losee Theories of Scientific Progress: An Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2004. 182pp, ISBN: 0-415-32067-4, USD17.

John Losee's earlier book A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford University Press, 1972) was deservedly praised, and was translated into 11 languages. His latest book shows the same erudition and the same grasp of the history of science and the history of philosophising about science. All of the significant contributors to the debate over what constitutes 'progress in science' are discussed in the text Ð there are about 150 items in the bibliography.

The book's nineteen chapters are divided into three sections: 'Progress as Incorporation', 'Progress as Revolutionary Overthrow' and 'Descriptive Theories of Scientific Progress'. Most people agree that there has been progress in astronomy from Copernicus to Hubble, progress in physics from Galileo to Einstein, progress in chemistry from Dalton to Pauling, progress in geology from Lyell to Wegener, and so on.

Science is reasonably enough thought to be progressive: if it were not progressive, aeroplanes, moon l andings, modern medicine, the internet, and so on would be inexplicable. We know many, many more things about the world than our parents generation, let along grandparents and beyond. Scientific facts accumulate, scientific laws are known more exactly, and so on. But are the explanations of these facts and laws, the theories of science, also progressive?

Thomas Kuhn gave a decidedly negative answer to this question: 'Only the list of explicable phenomena grows; there is no similar cumulative process for the explanations themselves. As science progresses, its concepts are repeatedly destroyed and replaced' (The Copernican Revolution, 1957, p.264). Losee puts aside Kuhn's theory atheism, or even agnosticism, and discusses the positions held by 'believers' in scientific theory progress.

Such believers first identify the distinguishing feature(s) of theoretical progress, and then set out the necessary and sufficient conditions for it to occur. Losee identifies two types of believers: those who see the pr ogress as cumulative (discussed in the first section of the book); and those who see it as revolutionary overthrow (discussed in the second section of the book). Both accounts are normative. Progress means getting better, and the subsequently the accounts offered of progress are meant to direct theorists in the conduct of theory construction and appraisal.

The third section of the book deals with those philosophers who avoid normative judgements about progress and settle for descriptive accounts of what happens to scientific theory during 'progressive changes' (Dalton to Pauling, etc.). The two principal views examined here are: one, scientific progress means convergent approximation to truth achieved by successive theories; two, scientific progress means increased effectiveness in problem solving achieved by the application of successive theories.

In all sections Losee deals very clearly with the principal figures: In section one, Whewell, Brewster, Mill, Lakatos; in section two, I.B. Cohen, Toulmin, Laudan, Popper; in section three, Peirce, Duhem, Rescher, Kitcher, and others. He has useful explanatory diagrams and charts, and the strengths and weaknesses of most positions are illustrated by reference to specific episodes in the history of science. Each section concludes with a few pages of 'Suggestions for Further Reading', a resource which most readers will find helpful.

MRM