Brian Woodcock (University of Minnesota), Arthur Cunningham (St. Olaf College)
Both popular culture and introductory science pedagogy abound with statements about the nature of science and the so-called “scientific method.” This means that college students stepping into a philosophy of science course often come with deep-seated (though perhaps implicit) preconceptions about science, like the idea that there is a single, universally-recognized method that distinguishes science from other domains of inquiry. We believe that directly confronting such popular accounts of how science works is an important task in an introductory philosophy of science course.
Philosophy of science textbooks typically present the ideas of leading philosophers of science, past and present, together with critical evaluation of those ideas. The content contained in such textbooks (for example, about inductivism, hypothetico-deductivism, falsificationism, and contexts of discovery and justification) can be applied to critically evaluate “pop” accounts of how science works, including statements of the so-called “scientific method.” If we want students to understand and appreciate those applications, we need to make it an explicit goal of our courses that students learn to relate philosophical concepts and criticisms to popular accounts of science, and we need to support that goal with examples and exercises. Our experience shows that it is all too easy for students to compartmentalize the academic debates they encounter in a philosophy of science course so that they later fall back into routine ways of describing how science works—for example, by continuing to invoke the idea of a single process called “the scientific method” even after studying debates that cast doubt on the idea that science is characterized by a single, agreed-upon method.
We present a few ways to incorporate popular and introductory pedagogical statements about the nature of science and “the scientific method” in the philosophy of science classroom:
• lecture illustrations
• classroom discussion starters
• conceptual application exercises
• critical analysis and evaluation exercises.
We offer specific suggestions for assignments, including techniques for having students collect “pop” accounts of science to be used in the classroom. In addition, we consider the learning objectives embodied by each kind of exercise and, based on our own experience, some pitfalls to avoid.
