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On the Epistemic Value of Students’ Conceptions in Science Education

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Abstract

In this article, I present an analysis of the epistemic value of the students' conceptions, as employed in the current constructivist research. I focus on the conceptions about natural kinds. Since natural kind terms are a crucial part of the discourse of the natural sciences, my conclusions are particularly relevant in science education. To perform my analysis, I use a thought experiment, adapted from Hilary Putnam’s famous Twin-Earth examples. I conclude that, to avoid some strong ontoepistemic implications, an externalist view of the learner’s thought must be adopted. In my approach, students’ conceptions are re-interpreted in terms of Hilary Putnam’s stereotypes, conventional representations of a natural kind that guarantee a semantic competence in a specific linguistic environment. As a conclusion, I argue that the role of students’ conceptions is not epistemic but pragmatic. They should not be understood as a partial or provisional representation of how a natural kind really is but as linguistic tools that permit the learner to engage in classroom discourse. Finally, I present a preliminary application of my ideas to the study of the usage of tautologies in science education.

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Notes

  1. A rather eloquent test of the topicality of Putnam’s ideas is to search “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As of February 2020, the paper is cited in 54 entries, some of them obvious, such as ‘Word Meaning’, or ‘Externalism about Mental Contents’, but others as far apart from Putnam’s starting point as, for example, ‘Social Ontology’ or ‘Memory’. It is not exaggerated to say that The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ is one of the most influential pieces of philosophical research of the whole twentieth century.

  2. Since they were first put forward by Putnam, Twin-Earth experiments have become a genre on their own within the literature on analytic philosophy (see, for example, Pessin & Goldberg, 1996). Anyway, some readers may feel uneasy with them. They may think that they are nothing but extravagant, Star Trek-like stories that teach little, if anything, about the actual world. But, as some authors have shown (see, for example, Section 1 of Parent, 2013), these experiments can be reformulated without resorting to any extraterrestrial counterfactual. Such is, for example, the approach of the other great externalist philosopher, Tyler Burge (Burge, 1979, 1986). Twin-Earth experiments must be understood as rhetorical instruments intended to help us to think about the semantic and epistemic consequences of some metaphysical issues. They are designed to highlight a specific aspect precisely by leaving everything around it untouched. The only requisite for one of these experiments to be acceptable is that the differences between Earth and Twin-Earth must not affect the psychological state of the subject of the experiment. Once this condition is fulfilled, it does not matter how unlikely the situation described in the thought experiment is if it is possible. In Section 3.1 I elaborate on this limit of Twin-Earth experiments.

  3. In The Meaning of ‘Meaning’, Putnam resorts to a much stronger, essentialist view of natural kinds. Anyway, it has been shown that Putnam’s semantic externalism is not necessarily linked to any form of essentialism (Salmon, 1979, 1982). In this paper, I subscribe to a weaker form of realism that consists in taking natural kinds to be the groups resulting from a natural classification. The version of Putnam’s thought experiments that I use in this article is compatible with this weak realist view of natural kinds.

  4. In the jargon of set theory, I take the meaning of a natural kind term to be the intension of the kind, where these kinds are the groups resulting of a natural classification. I think that this position is consistent with my naturalism about natural kinds. As I see it, this naturalism implies that when I say ‘This is an imperial eagle’ what I am actually stating is that this specific bird is the same as any Earthian imperial eagle, in the sense that grouping it together with the rest of the animals I call imperial eagles is a natural way of classifying them. And since imperial eagles are evidently not the same as twin-imperial eagles in this sense, the meaning of the term ‘imperial eagle’ is clearly different in English and in Twin-English.

  5. Chevallard (1985) propounded that the process of didactic transposition is a general educational feature, and thus, from this perspective, the contents included in science education can be, and in general are, different from those resulting from the scientific research. This gap is seen as a natural consequence of the system of formal education, which creates its own epistemological and cultural referents (curricula, syllabuses, textbooks, classroom discourses and interactions, exams, etc.) to which scientific knowledge is reduced as it is transposed into the classrooms. Astolfi & Develay (1989) have elaborated this line of thought, presenting an analysis of the changes experienced by scientific knowledge when translated into the educational context. According to these authors, the passing from a wise knowledge to a taught knowledge is a complex process which implies the decontextualisation, depersonalisation, desyncretisation, programming (i.e. the adaptation into a didactic program), reformulation, dogmatisation, and operationalisation of the scientific discourse. In other words, school (or college) science is a processed product, with its own distinctive features, and with relations with proper science which are far from being obvious. Science education, if a mirror of science, is a distorting one.

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Funding

This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, through the research project PGC2018-099423-B-I00. The author is a member of the research group Methods of Scientific Representation (MSR), based at the Complutense University of Madrid.

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  1. Departamento de Didáctica de Las Ciencias Experimentales, Sociales y Matemáticas, Facultad de Educación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, C/ Rector Royo-Villanova, S/N, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Pedro J. Sánchez Gómez

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Sánchez Gómez, P. On the Epistemic Value of Students’ Conceptions in Science Education. Sci & Educ 30, 827–847 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00211-4

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