ABSTRACT
The idea of “experiment” plays a central role in both popular and philosophical views of scientific practice. Perhaps as a consequence, it also occupies center stage in framing expectations about student activity and reasoning in science classes. In this chapter we argue that researchers and educators should reconsider the implications of focusing too narrowly on experiment as the canonical form of scientific reasoning. For one thing, experimentation is by no means the only form of argument on which science rests. Rudolph and Stewart (1998), for example, point out that evolutionary biology relies primarily on historical reconstruction, which has a very different structure than experimentation. For another, studies in the philosophy and sociology of science suggest that experiment is a complex form of argument deeply embedded within domain-specific practices of modeling, representation, and material manipulation of the world (e.g., Pickering, 1995). Yet psychological studies often focus on experiment as a form of hypothetical deductive reasoning, ignoring the very practices that set the foundations for such reasoning.
