Some researchers are skilled in conducting investigations in such a way that their beliefs and biases maintain separation from the outcome.
This separation is purposely introduced to avoid influencing the outcome. Other researchers blunder through the investigative process in pursuit of the exact answer that they advocated before starting their study. They search and search until they find the answer that parallels their prior beliefs … and once found, then they stop seeking any alternative explanation!
Being human, with all the curiosity and inquisitiveness that drives researchers, we investigate topics that we find to be fascinating and for which we understand that answers are needed. Researchers need to reflect sustained interest and perseverance in pursuing a topic, and this requires that we must have some degree of anticipation as to what an outcome of an investigation might disclose.
This is the established way for crafting hypotheses that anticipate what the data might show. Nonetheless, it is incumbent on honorable researchers to work diligently to ensure that their research protocol and the interpretations they make about data uncovers objective truth. Researchers have an obligation to become acquainted with established scientific procedures developed over centuries that help establish separation between the researcher and their research outcome.
The researcher must allow the data to speak for themselves uninfluenced by characteristics of the researcher. Only researchers who learn and then follow best-practice in research methodology, and who scrub their procedures of conditions that introduce bias, can be said to investigate with objectivity.
In a sense this approximates to the interpretation of science as social knowledge as suggested by Longino Carrier has outlined the role played by values, value-ladenness, and pluralism in understanding objectivity in scientific development based on the following facets of history of science: a The traditional notion of objectivity was strongly shaped by Francis Bacon p.
Longino is widely considered to have undermined or dissolved the distinction between the epistemic and the social; g Pluralism remains as a step in the development of science and eventually gives way to consensus. Classified as Level V.
An important aspect of this presentation is the emphasis on a pluralistic value-laden nature of scientific judgments, within a historical context that facilitates an intersubjective consensus in the scientific community. In the s the Swedish government became concerned of the declining number of students who chose to study science as a career.
Based on this in the s and s, initiatives were taken to make science more attractive and a fun subject to students, referred to as the TEK-NA projektet The TEK-NA project also targeted student counselors in their strategy to achieve a change of attitudes.
This confirmed the belief in career guidance as a way of creating positive propaganda; the Swedish government had stressed the need for such a development during the s …. Consequently student counselors were involved as a direct channel to pupils approaches to science. As a technology of government they were part of every-day school life without interfering with direct class room practice ….
The text also contained sections with advices on how to guide pupils—especially girls—into identities as engineers or scientists … the project lead to protests from student counselors who claimed they were forced to persuade pupils into the high school Science program and that the material lacked a sense of objectivity … pp.
This is an interesting example of how some reform efforts more experiments and less abstract textbooks can be construed to be less rigorous than the traditional science curriculum and thus lack objectivity. Similar relationship between traditional science and objectivity can also be found in other countries.
The charge that such a policy violates academic freedom is not so easily dismissed. One might reasonably dispute about whether academic freedom applies in the public elementary and secondary schools in the same way that it does in higher education, but primafacie there seems to be no good reason to think that this important protection should be afforded to university professors and not to others of the teaching profession who serve in other educational settings.
However, academic freedom is not a license to teach whatever one wants. Along with that professional freedom comes special professional responsibilities, especially of objectivity and intellectual honesty.
Although this may seem to be sound advice, at least some science educators may not agree with it. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum based his curatorial work on the purported use of objectivity as a means to communicate the validity of the evolutionary theory.
However, this was criticized by the Baptist pastor John Roach Straton by establishing a different type of objectivity based on pluralistic approaches to theories of origin that included both evolutionary theory and creationist account. Consequently, established as a common value, objectivity ceased to discriminate between scientists and non-scientists. Next, Homchick considers that both Daston and Galison and Gergen provide useful lenses to look at the Osborn-Straton debate.
With respect to the historical origin of objectivity, Homchick , p. Objectivity, often connected with the rise of Baconian science, came to be associated with a particular matrix of values in the nineteenth century.
They identify atlases as bearers of the concept of objectivity specifically because of the association between the visual and the factual embedded in this type of artifact. Similarly, according to Homchick, Gergen considers objectivity not to be a static characteristic of texts and objects and differentiates objectivity through two general categories that of process and product. Thus, it seems that Osborn relied primarily on the objectivity of the product, namely the artifacts displayed in the museum exhibit.
In contrast, Straton used the objectivity of process to criticize Osborn for not including the creationist account. Finally, Homchick concluded:. In this formulation, objectivity emerges through the product—the artifact of nature p. Such controversies can provide teachers an opportunity to include topics in the classroom that can lead to lively discussions. The use of scientific knowledge for their argumentation was regarded as an appreciation of expert knowledge, and their support for biotechnology relating to the discussed example was interpreted as their appreciation of disembedded practices.
Typically, the use of expert knowledge was seen as a way to create objectivity and distance to the dilemma …. Following is an example of an episode in which expert knowledge was manipulated by a government for its own political agenda. According to Legates et al.
A better approach to determining an appropriate methodology to identify and quantify a consensus can be found in the work of Lefsrud and Meyer Even here, a Classical purist might legitimately argue that appealing to the authority of experts, however well qualified, is the Aristotelian logical fallacy later labeled by the medieval schoolmen as the argumentum ad verecundiam—the argument from reputation.
They were wrong because the regime demanded them to make scientific objectivity subservient to the racial politics of the regime p. In other words the opinion of the experts can be politically motivated and hence the difficulties involved in accepting trained judgment as an alternative to mechanical objectivity. Following traditional accounts of expertise, a scientific expert is a formally trained specialist in a scientific discipline …. The scientific community developed through professionalisation and formal training and established a professional ideology … in which they portray themselves as value-free, neutral and objective experts ….
However, from a sociological point of view, scientists cannot operate outside society; they are as much members of the public as anyone else. The notion that a scientific expert can be entirely neutral, value-free and objective cannot be sustained from a sociological perspective e.
The presentations by Allagaier and Legates et al. As part of society experts also have difficulty in being entirely objective and value-free. Perhaps similar constraints can also be observed in the peer-review process used by most scientific journals.
Keller has suggested a multi-gendered scientific research that leads to the idea of dynamic objectivity. This shows that we need to explore the degree to which a field of inquiry has achieved objectivity.
Blake has analyzed three pioneer programs at three universities in USA that attempt to integrate genetics and ethics in the classroom. A major critique of the study is the lack of continuity between the pedagogical goals and the theoretical framework of these programs. Finally, Blake concluded:. This is not merely a priority of science over ethics in the science classroom but a much more fundamental disparity. This modern view of science and consequent epistemological privilege have been critically examined by philosophers, sociologists and historians of this century cf.
Feyerabend, ; Keller, ; Kuhn, ; Lakatos, ; Midgley, …. The ideals of objectivity, rationality and empirical privilege have been seriously and soundly challenged …. Science has an historical and social context; science is contingent and subjective p.
This presentation was classified as Level III as it clearly shows the problematic nature of objectivity. Furthermore, Blake refers to two major issues that are of considerable importance to science education. First, she refers to the problem of two cultures, introduced by C.
Snow , namely a gulf of mutual incomprehension between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. Polanyi , differentiated between two kinds of knowledge: a explicit, articulated, and formal knowledge; and b tacit, unarticulated, and non-formalized knowledge.
He argued that the first cannot be achieved without the second. The contingent nature of science has been recognized by physicist-philosopher James Cushing However, it was basically ignored, rather than either studied or rebutted.
Just as external factors had played a key role in establishing the Copenhagen hegemony, so they once again contributed to keeping this competitor from the field. In other words the order in which events take place is an important factor in determining which of two observationally equivalent theories is accepted by the scientific community. In other words, it is plausible to suggest that it is perhaps the contingent nature of science among other factors that manifests itself in the evolving nature of objectivity.
Furthermore, it can be argued that the Copenhagen and the Bohm interpretations of quantum mechanics constitute an example of methodological pluralism in the history of science. Kubli has emphasized the need to go beyond the simple regurgitation of experimental details, and provide students with the historical narratives stories which provide the background to understanding progress in science:.
Of course, scientific reasoning and laws can be imparted in a completely objective way: they can be reduced to facts and figures without any human element, and indeed, some scientists and even teachers see such objectivity as the characteristic of true science.
Of course, scientific laws are independent of the specific circumstances of their discovery. This approach has not disappeared, even among teachers, in spite of engaged discussions in science education. It stands in contrast to the view that, in science teaching, stories are not only justified, but necessary Kubli, , p. We know that objectivity in history is, at one level, impossible : history does not just present itself to the eye of the beholder; it has to be manufactured.
Materials and sources have to be selected; questions have to be framed; decisions about the relevant contributions of internal and external factors in scientific change have to be made. All of these matters are going to be influenced by the social, national, psychological, and religious views of the historian. More importantly they are going to be influenced by the theory of science, or the philosophy of science, held by the historian.
At the end of the citation, Matthews provides the well-known quote from Lakatos , to the effect that if philosophy of science without history of science is empty, then history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Rest of the citation constitutes a preamble and even perhaps a guide to future research on the application of history and philosophy of science HPS to science education. It refers to the difficulties involved in recounting any historical episode, and hence the problematic nature of objectivity. Matthews provides another facet of this conflict by referring to the case of Galileo, who was considered by nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists as an inductivist and empiricist.
However, this picture changed in the twentieth century and Galileo came to be considered as a Platonist dedicated to rationalism and thought experiments. Throughout the previous section a few arguments were already put forward to support the idea that the history of science can help students to acquire an adequate image of science. Enabling students to realise that models in science have been altered and modified in order to fit new data and that the same phenomena can be explained by different models, history of science gives students the opportunity to see how scientific knowledge is provisional and uncertain and how, even in science, we cannot find objectivity and truth … p.
Due to the changing nature of scientific models, this presentation emphasizes the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. Leite then goes beyond by associating uncertainty in science with difficulties involved in finding objectivity and truth.
The essence of the idea expressed in this presentation is quite similar to what Matthews had referred to previously with respect to objectivity in history. Lyons has stressed that we need to do a better job of teaching students about the process of science. The practice of science is not quite the straightforward objective process that many scientists suggest:.
More important, a variety of factors contribute to whether a particular idea is readily accepted, from the prestige of the person advocating it to how well it fits in with prevailing social views …. Nevertheless, objectivity is a value that all scientists strive for in their work.
Science is as successful as it is because it has developed a set of standards and a methodology for designing experiments, interpreting results, and constructing effective scientific institutions. This does not prevent scientists from making mistakes, but the various aspects of scientific practice mean that science has enormous capacity to be self-correcting p. This presentation attempts to establish a balance between how scientists strive to be objective and that the practice of science shows how various factors are influential in the acceptance of a theory and this often leads the scientists to make mistakes.
According to Deng, Chai, Tsai, and Lin :. Another possible explanation can be that school science teaching practice pays relatively less attention to the role of society in science. In China, Marxism tends to highlight relatively more the pragmatic values of scientific knowledge than the influence of society on the development of scientific knowledge p. At first sight, this may appear somewhat counter-intuitive, given the strong relationship between Marxism and changes in society.
Mao even considers practice as the sole criterion for testing truth and value of scientific knowledge p. This provides the background for understanding objectivity as a consequence of everyday practice in different endeavors. Since Marxists insist on the necessity to understand phenomena from their surrounding conditions, they also believe that science should be understood in its broad social context.
However, it should be noted that the emphasis on the influence of the social context on scientific activities does not lead Marxism in the anti-rationalism that characterizes various branches in the contemporary philosophy of science. Instead, the social influence on science is just considered as the opposite of and in a unity with rationality or objectivity of science.
It is interesting to note that the two presentations presented above in this section deal with Marxism and still have some subtle differences. Deng et al. On the other hand, Wan et al. Besides pointing out the relevance of objectivity for Marx, this presentation recognizes its importance for Marx due more to the influence of Epicurus rather than Hegel. Furthermore, they provide the following guideline for classroom practice:.
As Skovsmose … indicates by his examples of project work in the classroom, his reformulation of exemplarity may become a link between educational theory and practice, by planning a thematic approach in mathematics education.
Indeed, this helps to question the objectivist trend not only in mathematics but also in science education cf. Instead, they suggested that the electroencephalographer had to cultivate a new kind of scientific self, one that was more intellectual rather than algorithmic.
According to Ernest , objectivity of mathematics can be accounted for as socially accepted knowledge, in other words, it is objective by virtue of its acceptance by the scientific community. For Ernest , this is not objectivity in the sense of logical necessity from which the objectivity can be recognised; rather, subjectivity becomes objectivity through consensus. The rationale for this is the failure of the foundationalist programme to establish certainty in the foundations of mathematics: take away the certainty of mathematics then you can take away logical necessity as having any role in establishing what is to be accepted—objectivity merely becomes part of that which is accepted ….
Rowlands et al. However, in their opinion it is not enough to say that objectivity can be equated with acceptance. Furthermore, in order to support their thesis of how objectivity cannot be equated with acceptance, Rowlands et al.
This theorem was proven first by Alfred Kempe in and later by Peter Tait in This episode led Rowlands et al. Despite the merit of this interpretation one could argue that it was the community that revealed the fallacies in the theorem and hence shows mathematics to be socially accepted knowledge, as suggested by Ernest Fiss has analyzed reform movements in mathematics education based on the documents of the National Education Association, during the last decades of the nineteenth century that emphasized objective methods of teaching and recommended that rules be derived inductively.
Based on this perspective Fiss concluded:. This language of objectivity and objects was a novel nineteenth-century reinvention of the scholastic distinctions between subjectivity and the objectivity. This language, coupled with the argument that students should use the manipulation of physical objects in the world as a substitute for the epistemic authority of a book or teacher, ultimately reframed mathematics as a physical science p.
According to Daston and Galison , p. Drawing on the use of a balance, Machamer and Woody draw implications for the intelligibility of a model:. The model exhibits all and only those properties that are important. This intelligibility and the normative character of the idealized model is what allows for objectivity. If a problem cannot be reduced to these elements, or if a participant in the investigation insists on attending to other aspects, then either the problem falls outside the scope of the model or the participant needs re- training about what is important in the problem or what are the allowable procedures.
Nature of science is a controversial topic of considerable interest to science educators and had the following five presentations: Talanquer , Irzik and Nola , Wong, Kwan, Hodson, and Jung , Gauch , and Galili Based on the work of philosophers, historians and science educators, Talanquer has contested the Universalist characterization of the nature of science NOS and then concluded:.
The central claim is that scientists in different disciplines have distinctive epistemic goals, practices, and norms that influence how they conduct their research and how they perceive, communicate, and evaluate their activities and results. Their work relies on unique experimental approaches, particular deployments of instrumentation, different forms of explanation, as well as on distinct conceptions of rationality, standards of objectivity, and modes of argumentation.
From this perspective, science educators need to better understand what the various practices of the different sciences look like in order to devise more authentic contexts for the teaching and learning of each of these disciplines in schools.
This presentation calls attention for the need to understand diversity in the scientific enterprise. If scientists use unique experimental procedures in order to solve complex problems then their conceptions of rationality, modes of argumentation, and standards of objectivity would also vary accordingly.
Precisely, this also characterizes the evolution of objectivity in the history of science. For instance, scientific knowledge is said to be theory-laden and subjective. Does this make objectivity of science impossible? If not, why not? If science is socially and culturally embedded, how is it that it produces knowledge that is valid across cultures and societies?
Is the influence of society on science good or bad? How do we distinguish between these two kinds of affects? Does science have any means of detecting the bad ones and eliminating them? These are important questions that need to be raised if we want our students to have a sophisticated understanding of NOS p. After critiquing the consensus view of NOS nature of science , Irzik and Nola then go beyond to assert the objectivity of science as experiments are reproducible and the same experiments done under the same conditions do come up with the same results.
This is precisely what Daston and Galison have referred to as mechanical objectivity. Furthermore, this ignores the fact that in the history of science various scientists doing the same experiments and having the same results came up with entirely different theories.
The fact is that scientists do not need to study the history of their discipline to learn the Tradition; it is right there in every science textbook. It is not called history, of course. Furthermore, history of science is replete with controversies among scientists cf. This obviously leads to a dilemma: which history shall we include in the classroom? One laden with experimental details or the one based on theory-laden nature of observations leading to controversies in the history of science.
History of science bears witness to the difficulties involved in interpreting experimental data and that the essence of the scientific endeavor is perhaps characterized by the creativity and imagination of the scientists. Later in the same article, Irzik and Nola state that scientific knowledge, though theory-laden, is nevertheless reliable because it is obtained by subjecting our theories to critical scrutiny, and. Similarly, the fact that science is objective in the sense that scientific findings are correct independently of individual, social and cultural variations is a result of the same intersubjective critical process.
That scientific experiments are reproducible also contribute to the objectivity of scientific knowledge. Whoever does the same experiment under the same conditions should come up with the same result regardless of when and where the experiment is carried out.
Again, it is not clear in the consensus view how reliability and objectivity of science is to be explained without such considerations. An interesting example is the oil drop experiment Klassen, which provides, even at present, very contradictory results in almost all parts of the world even with modern apparatus. Wong et al. In one of the video clips they showed that immediately following the announcement on March 18, , by a group of scientists from Hong Kong and Germany that the virus causing SARS was paramyxovirus, other research groups around the world quickly announced that they had also found evidence that paramyxovirus was the causative agent of SARS.
However, only a few days later, on 22 March , another group of researchers in Hong Kong announced that further evidence showed that coronavirus, rather than paramyxovirus, is the causative agent of SARS. Immediately after this announcement, several laboratories, including Rotterdam, Frankfurt and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention CDC in Atlanta, also confirmed the coronavirus theory.
Acknowledgement of the biased observation of data is in stark contrast to the usual school science curriculum portrayal of scientists as objective and impartial in interpreting data Wong et al. Furthermore, Wong et al. One contributor, influenced by Kuhn, reported that scientists should accept the new picture of science as myth. Brunner, in Brown, , p. Galili has pointed out the predicament often faced by science educators in understanding and explaining the essence of objectivity. Consider the following statements:.
Thus, the resultant knowledge of classical mechanics enabled great technological achievements—a reliable test of objectivity: people walked on the Moon regardless various individual details in the knowledge of the people who created the knowledge required for such enterprise.
Many teachers and textbook authors would subscribe to such statements that facilitate an important aspect of the nature of science, namely its objectivity. However, Galili goes beyond by stating:. Furthermore, in science education, it is important not to confuse various aspects of scientific knowledge with its genus ….
Confusion of objectivity with universal and unconditional correctness of knowledge seemingly leads to misconceptions about the nature of science p. In other words, just as science advances our understanding also changes, and this shows the need for science educators to understand how objectivity evolves. Indeed, the changing or the tentative nature of scientific knowledge has been recognized as an important part of NOS in many reform documents, and can help to understand objectivity in a historical perspective.
According to Chalmers when two similar cameras take a picture of the same thing, they produce two identical images. We can justify our observations in the face of the subjectivist doubts. In so far as people can be trained to be reliable observers, their perceptual knowledge is objective. Felipe Folque, a prominent figure in the development of astronomy as a discipline in Portugal, taught astronomy and geodesy at the Lisbon Polytechnic from to Students received an intensive training in the use of astronomical instruments and mathematical methods that were believed to be important in their future work.
Carolino has summarized this experience in which engineers received training at the Lisbon Polytechnic, in the following terms:. Historians have stressed the importance that the rise of a culture of precision measurement, from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, played in the process of formation of nation-states in Europe and America ….
The same happened in nineteenth century Portugal, where the strengthening of a culture of precision and objectivity was especially visible under the reformist government, from mid-nineteenth century onwards. Classified as Level II, as it refers to objectivity as an academic objective.
At this stage it would be interesting to compare the two presentations: Sievers , classified as Level IV, and Carolino , classified as Level II. Although, both recognize the importance of objectivity, the difference between the two precisely provides an understanding Sievers of the evolving nature of objectivity. In , Herbert Spencer emphasized the importance of science and scientific knowledge. Based on these ideas, Otis W.
Caldwell — , a botanist and science educator designed general science courses by emphasizing the role played by observations. Next, Heffron presents a critique of the inductive methods and observations in the following terms:.
We must first make them more theoretical. For in the realm of science, theories come logically before problems, problems before observations. The latter, in so much as they fail to lead to the falsification of these theories, are actually an aspect of non-science.
From a Popperian perspective, Heffron has emphasized that the real test of scientific truth lies not in its obedience to our observations, but in its falsifiability, the belief that scientific truths are only temporarily valid and subject ultimately to falsification. Lakatos, In other words, Piaget was not studying the average of all human abilities, but rather the ideal conditions under which a psychological subject a particular person could perhaps attain the competence exemplified by the epistemic subject for details see Niaz, , p.
In order to understand this distinction he draws on Galilean methodology, a version of the hypothetico-deductive method to indirectly test a hypothesis, in the following terms:. Hence, by extrapolation, one may assume it is also true of free fall as a limiting case.
Here we have an indirect confirmation of a mathematical law which is true only of ideal objects under ideal conditions, a law to which real objects approximate only to certain degrees. Kitchener, , p. Based on this understanding of Galilean methodology, Kitchener provides the following perspective for understanding objectivity:.
Knowledge is not to be naively equated with mere belief or the brute factual existence of a cognitive structure : knowledge has an inescapable normative dimension, one concerning concepts like evidence, objectivity, rationality, validity, truth, etc …. Kitchener emphasizes that just like validity and truth, objectivity is part of the normative dimension epistemic subject and hence cannot be reduced to an empirical psychological dimension psychological subject.
School science generally endorses a view that comprises of: a Foundationalism, science is built on a foundation of unproblematic true propositions and b Logicalism, science has a logical method to determine which of two competing theories is true McMullin, , p.
History of science, however, shows that actual scientific practice is much more complex in which controversies based on the presuppositions of the protagonists play a crucial role. Indeed, controversies play an important role in the dynamics of science, especially before consensus with respect to facts and theories has been achieved Silverman, , p. Silverman has referred to the difficulties involved in understanding science in cogent terms:. Part of the classical perspective of science is that scientists ideally undertake their work without bias or preconception.
Objectivity and open-mindedness are indeed integral attributes of science, but not in this naive sense. Scientific knowledge is purely objective, and it is an objective description of the real structure of the world.
But the recent philosophical insight into the nature of science gives us a different idea in this regard. When you do something objectively, you do it with an open mind, considering the facts rather than your personal feelings. A spelling bee judge has to make decisions objectively. Objectives give you something to work towards, and help to direct energy and effort.
They stimulate the need to act. Research has found that where staff are involved in setting their own objectives they are more motivated to achieve them Locke, E A and Latham G. P, Goal setting; a motivational technique that works. However, recent studies have found these to be not really exclusive to human beings; many other species are shown to be equally capable in demonstrating them in their own contexts. However, no experiment or observation so far has claimed that anyone else but we are capable of being objective.
They indicate the desirable knowledge, skills, or attitudes to be gained. An instructional objective is the focal point of a lesson plan.
0コメント