ABSTRACT
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).
