ABSTRACT
In this paper, I advance an argument that what to teach about scientific reasoning has been bedeviled by a lack of clarity about the construct. Drawing on the insights emerging from a cognitive history of science, which looks at the products, rather than the processes, of scientific reasoning, it will be argued that a conception of scientific reasoning based on six styles offers better insights into what should be taught about science and scientific reasoning. Each ‘style’ requires its own specific ontological and procedural entities, and invokes its own epistemic values and constructs. Previous attempts to develop a coherent account of scientific reasoning have neglected the significance of either procedural knowledge, epistemic knowledge, or both, and over-emphasized the role of experiment and hypothetico-deduction. In contrast, styles of reasoning recognize the need for all three elements of domain-specific knowledge, their role in scientific thought, the complexity and situated nature of scientific practice, and its diversity. In addition, styles of reasoning offer science education a means of recognizing the intellectual and cultural contribution that the sciences have made to contemporary thought, an argument missing from existing accounts of scientific reasoning and a way of giving meaning to the scientific experience for students. Thus, the construct of styles of reasoning provides a more coherent conceptual schema for the contruct of scientific reasoning – one of the major goals of any education in the sciences – and something that both domain-specific and domain-general accounts have notably failed to do.
