This is an editorial report on the outcomes of an international conference sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (REESE-1205273) to the School of Education at Boston University and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University for a conference titled: How Can the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary U.S. Science Teaching? The presentations of the conference speakers and the reports of the working groups are reviewed. Multiple themes emerged for K-16 education from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. Key ones were that: students need to understand that central to science is argumentation, criticism, and analysis; students should be educated to appreciate science as part of our culture; students should be educated to be science literate; what is meant by the nature of science as discussed in much of the science education literature must be broadened to accommodate a science literacy that includes preparation for socioscientific issues; teaching for science literacy requires the development of new assessment tools; and, it is difficult to change what science teachers do in their classrooms.
The objectives of this study are: (a) elaboration of a history and philosophy of science (HPS) framework based on a reconstruction of the development of the periodic table; (b) formulation of seven criteria based on the framework; and (c) evaluation of 57 freshman college-level general chemistry textbooks with respect to the presentation of the periodic table. The historical reconstruction of the periodic table showed that the periodicity of the elements could be construed as an inductive generalization or as a function of the atomic theory. There is considerable controversy with respect to the nature of Mendeleev's contribution, and various alternatives are discussed: ordered domain; empirical law; and a theory with limited explanatory power. Accommodation of the elements according to their physicochemical properties is considered to be the major contribution of the periodic table by all textbooks, followed by contrapredictions of previously unknown elements (30 textbooks), and novel predictions (corrections of atomic mass) of known elements (10 textbooks). The relative importance of accommodation and prediction within an HPS framework is generally ignored. Few textbooks have attempted to explore the possible cause of periodicity in the table and very few textbooks have explored the nature of Mendeleev's contribution. The development of the periodic table as a sequence of heuristic principles in the form of a convincing argument has been ignored. The textbook approach of emphasizing that the development of the periodic table was an inductive generalization, and that Mendeleev had no model or theory, does not facilitate the spirit of critical inquiry that led the scientists to grapple with alternative interpretations, conflicts, and controversies. It is concluded that the development of the periodic table went through a continual critical appraisal (conflict and controversy), in which scientists presented various tentative theoretical ideas to understand the observed phenomena. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 42: 84–111, 2005
It is suggested that the contribution of history and philosophy of science (HPS) to science education can be enhanced through a consideration of scientific models which are relevant to major sectors of the curriculum. The possibilities for so doing are considered through the discussion of six assertions. A way of characterizing such models, based on the work of Lakatos (1970, 1978), is outlined and applied to a typically important sector, that of the nature of the atom. An analysis of the way that the curriculum for 14-16 year olds and typical textbooks in Brazil and the UK treat historical models of the atom is given. The use of 'hybrid' models was identified in those treatments. Hybrid models, by their very nature as composites drawn from several distinct historical models, do not allow the history and philosophy of science to make a full contribution to science education. They do this by denying the role of distinct models in the history of science and of the role of progression between these models in the philosophy of science. The consequences for the teaching of science of an appropriate treatment of historical models are outlined.
This article focuses on two of the principal issues for science curriculum developers who wish to introduce the history and philosophy of science into the teaching of science—the justification for, and the placement of, historical materials within teachers' schemes of work. First, it is argued that the history and philosophy of science must have a rationale that is integral to, and consistent with, teachers' main aims to have any chance of being considered for inclusion in a program of study. Second, the justification must point to places in schemes of work where the inclusion of history of science will directly contribute to students learning of science concepts and satisfy that principal objective. A new model for the inclusion of such material is proposed that directly addresses both children's alternative frameworks and the historical and sociocultural context of the discovery. It is argued that this model offers potential for improved learning of the concepts of science and for learning about science. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sci Ed 81:405-424, 1997.
Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: what constitutes an appropriate science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. Outlining the history of liberal approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education.
One: Medicine and the Life Sciences.- 1. Development of Medical Education among the Arabic-speaking Peoples.- 2. Gentile da Foligno and the Via Medicorum.- 3. Some Assumptions behind Medicine for the Poor during the Reign of Louis XIV.- 4. Buffon's Histoire naturelle as a Work of the Enlightenment.- 5. Adam Gottlob Schirach's Experiments on Bees.- 6. William Swainson: Types, Circles, and Affinities.- 7. A Retrospoct on the Historiography of the Life Sciences.- Two: Astronomy and Natural Philosophy.- 8. Two Astronomical Tractates of Abbo of Fleury.- 9. Pseudo-Euclid on the Position of the Image in Reflection: Interpretations by an Anonymous Commentator, by Pena, and by Kepler.- 10. Thomas Harriot's Papers on the Calendar.- 11. Thomas Harriot's Observations of Halley's Comet in 1607.- 12. Animadversions on the Origins of the Microscope.- 13. Hemsterhuis on Mathematics and Optics.- Three: The Social Framework.- 14. Galileians in Sicily: a Hitherto Unpublished Correspondence of Daniele Spinola with Domenico Catalano in Messina (1650-1652).- 15. A Friend of Hobbes and an Early Translator of Galileo: Robert Payne of Oxford.- 16. Descartes and the English.- 17. From Corfu to Caledonia: the Early Travels of Charles Dupin, 1808-1820.- 18. A Scotswoman Abroad: Mary Somervillc's 1817 Visit to France.- Four: Styles in the History of Ideas.- 19. Rationality and the Generalization of Scientific Style.- 20. The Idea of the Decay of the World in the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha.- 21. Science in Antiquity: the Indian Perspective.- 22. System-building in the Eighteenth Century.- 23. Elements in the Structure of Victorian Science, or Cannon Revisited.- A Bibliography of the Writings of Alistair C. Crombie.- General Index.
This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro
Methodological questions in economics have often been discussed in terms that are too abstract and too exclusively normative. Slim volumes or essays about the ‘scope and method’ or the ‘nature and significance’ of the subject, seem often to have been concerned mainly with ideal epistemological models which are almost as remote from the actuality of what economists do, as economic models of smoothly and ideally selfequilibrating processes are remote from the processes of the real economic world. Intellectual norms are prescribed, and, it seems to be implied, are actually upheld, which are certainly not in fact followed, and perhaps could not practicably be followed, by economists. Moreover, generalisations, normative or positive, are inevitably highly abstract, or stylised, when they relate to ‘science’ and ‘scientific method’ in general, or to ‘the social sciences’ generally, or even to economics as a whole, which comprises theories and arguments of very varying epistemological types and calibres. It could, therefore, constitute a most welcome and significant example, as far as economics is concerned, that in their different ways, in the work of both Kuhn and Lakatos, the history of science, and its analysis or philosophy, have been brought together for mutual illumination. Certainly there is the danger here of normative–positive confusion, insofar as the philosopher of science may be seeking to prescribe what scientists ought to have done or decided (or be doing or deciding) while the historian is attempting rather to set out what they actually did do or decide.
This special issue presents selected contributions to the conference “Integrated History and Philosophy of Science” (&HPS3) held at Indiana University in September 2010. The introduction revisits a previous special issue on History and Philosophy of Science, published in Perspectives on Science (2002), and reflects on the recent development of HPS as a field. Ten years ago, scholars expressed concern about the growing distance between mainstream history of science and mainstream philosophy of science. Today, we have good reason to be optimistic. The papers assembled in this special issue demonstrate that we now have a whole spectrum of combinations of historical, philosophical, and other perspectives to study science, ranging from augmenting historical studies by philosophical perspectives and vice versa to historicist reflection on methodological, epistemological, or scientific concepts and practices. This plurality of approaches to combining the historical and the philosophical perspectives on science is a hopeful sign that integrated HPS is here to stay.
intends his book Worldviews for beginners in history and philosophy of science.His ambitious aim is to provide an accessible and enjoyable introduction to fundamental issues in history, philosophy, and science, as well as to draw out the connections between these fields.The time frame is broad, the three parts of the book spanning the period from around 300 BC until today.The focus is on physics and, more specifically, astronomy.Part 1 introduces in a non-technical way some key philosophical concepts and problems, which include: the notions of worldview, truth, and underdetermination; facts and evidence; the problem of induction; and the attitudes of instrumentalism and realism.Part 2 offers a survey of the main views on the physical structure of the universe.It begins with the Aristotelian conception and outlines the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Newtonian system (via Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo).Part 3 covers important recent developments in the sciences, namely, relativity theory, quantum theory, and evolutionary theory.The book ends with useful bibliographical notes and suggestions for further readings on each chapter.
Professor Howard Stein has made contributions on a wide range of topics in the history and philosophy of science, with an emphasis on physics. Stein has published papers on early physicists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton as well as papers on later science, especially relativity theory, quantum mechanics and the foundations of mathematics. This volume contains 13 essays exploring the work of Howard Stein, and topics include: Plato's conception of exact science; the structure of argumentation in Newton's Principia; imagery in the work of Descartes and Newton; patterns of reasoning in Maxwell; Mach's conception of space, time and motion; Einstein's conception of geometry; conceptual and technical issues in the foundations of relativity theory; general issues in epistemology; and the structralist conception of mathematics. It also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Howard Stein's writings.
This article aims at applying the approaches peculiar to analytic philosophy to the question about representation of the concept of time as a symbol which can reflect the bases of the modern natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. The main methods, which the author of this article uses, are speculative analysis and modeling. The symbolic meaning of the concept of time demonstrates preconditions for the organization of the bases of the natural sciences, and social and humanitarian knowledge as well. Judgments for the meaning of time reveal the essence of the problem in two aspects of discussion on the dissociation of the foundations in the modern philosophy of physics and the philosophical analysis of the humanities as well. 1) The formation of the image of human nature in contemporary philosophy reveals the special role of the concept of time in epistemology and philosophy of science. 2) This research reveals the perspective of understanding natural and cultural processes, which is based on the unification of branches of science. As a result, the research shows the basics of communication of the natural sciences with the social science, and humanitarian knowledge as well.
The integration of the history and philosophy of statistics was initiated at least by Hacking (1975) and advanced by Hacking (1990), Mayo (1996), and Zabell (2005), but it has not received sustained follow-up. Yet such integration is more urgent than ever, as the recent success of artificial intelligence has been driven largely by machine learning -- a field historically developed alongside statistics. Today, the boundary between statistics and machine learning is increasingly blurred. What we now need is integration, twice over: of history and philosophy, and of two fields they engage -- statistics and machine learning. I present a case study of a philosophical idea in machine learning (and in formal epistemology) whose root can be traced back to an often under-appreciated insight in Neyman and Pearson's 1936 work (a follow-up to their 1933 classic). This leads to the articulation of an epistemological principle -- largely implicit in, but shared by, the practices of frequentist statistics and machine learning -- which I call achievabilism: the thesis that the correct standard for assessing non-deductive inference methods should not be fixed, but should instead be sensitive to wha
Data-driven approaches to philosophy have emerged as a valuable tool for studying the history of the discipline. However, most studies in this area have focused on a limited number of journals from specific regions and subfields. We expand the scope of this research by applying dynamic topic modelling techniques to explore the history of philosophy in Colombia and Latin America. Our study examines the Colombian philosophy journal Ideas y Valores, founded in 1951 and currently one of the most influential academic philosophy journals in the region. By analyzing the evolution of topics across the journal's history, we identify various trends and specific dynamics in philosophical discourse within the Colombian and Latin American context. Our findings reveal that the most prominent topics are value theory (including ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics), epistemology, and the philosophy of science. We also trace the evolution of articles focusing on the historical and interpretive aspects of philosophical texts, and we note a notable emphasis on German philosophers such as Kant, Husserl, and Hegel on various topics throughout the journal's lifetime. Additionally, we investigate
The paper defends the thesis that it's possible to maintain some conceptual preconditions of overcoming of relativistic intentions in modern philosophy of science ("there are no any general foundations in philosophy of science"). We found two general foundations in philosophy of science as a minimum. From the first side it's realistic to reveal on the base of special understanding of time the value of time not only in natural thought (especially in theory of gravity) but also in humanitarian knowledge. That's why philosophy of science has independent position in epistemology and ontology corresponding to interpretation of time as a general category of scientific thinking. The nature of time has internally inconsistent (paradoxical) character. Time is phenomenon which existing and not existing at the same time. This phenomenon is identified with imaginary movement and also ideal (formal) process of formation of the nature. The general understanding of time is connected with its "mathematical" meaning as calculable formal regulation of language practice and also the universal organization rules of quantitative parameters of intelligence of natural (physical) processes. From the secon
In this paper I review the problematic relationship between science and philosophy; in particular, I will address the question of whether science needs philosophy, and I will offer some positive perspectives that should be helpful in developing a synergetic relationship between the two. I will review three lines of reasoning often employed in arguing that philosophy is useless for science: a) philosophy's death diagnosis ('philosophy is dead'); b) the historic-agnostic argument/challenge "show me examples where philosophy has been useful for science, for I don't know of any"; c) the division of property argument (or: philosophy and science have different subject matters, therefore philosophy is useless for science). These arguments will be countered with three contentions to the effect that the natural sciences need philosophy. I will: a) point to the fallacy of anti-philosophicalism (or: 'in order to deny the need for philosophy, one must do philosophy') and examine the role of paradigms and presuppositions (or: why science can't live without philosophy); b) point out why the historical argument fails (in an example from quantum mechanics, alive and kicking); c) briefly sketch som
Perhaps more than any other of the physical sciences, cosmology exemplifies the inevitable contact between science and philosophy, including the problem of the demarcation criteria that distinguish science from non-science. Although modern physical cosmology is undoubtedly scientific, it is not obvious why it has this status, and nor is it obvious that all branches of theoretical cosmology satisfy ordinarily assumed criteria for science. While testability is generally admitted as an indispensable criterion for a theory being scientific, there is no agreement among cosmologists what testability means, more precisely. For example, should testability be taken to imply falsifiability in the sense of Popper? I discuss this and related questions by referring to two episodes of controversy in the history of modern cosmology, the debate over the steady state theory in the 1950s and the recent debate concerned with the anthropic multiverse. In addition, I draw attention to the use of historical analogies in cosmological and other scientific arguments, suggesting that such use is often misuse or otherwise based on distortions of the history of science.
The Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), a premier autonomous research institute under the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India has a legacy of about seven decades with contributions made in the field of observational sciences namely atmospheric and astrophysics. The Survey of India used a location at ARIES, determined with an accuracy of better than 10 meters on a world datum through institute participation in a global network of Earth artificial satellites imaging during late 1950. Taking advantage of its high-altitude location, ARIES, for the first time, provided valuable input for climate change studies by long term characterization of physical and chemical properties of aerosols and trace gases in the central Himalayan regions. In astrophysical sciences, the institute has contributed precise and sometime unique observations of the celestial bodies leading to a number of discoveries. With the installation of the 3.6 meter Devasthal optical telescope in the year 2015, India became the only Asian country to join those few nations of the world who are hosting 4 meter class optical telescopes. This telescope, having advantage of geog
This article is a theoretical study on the effectiveness of educational research in the context of Philosophy of science. This topic of discussion, in the area of educational research, has been the subject of intellectual debate and arises again at the beginning of the 21st century. This article outlines the challenges and opportunities for scientific effectiveness facing educational research if it aspires to contribute to the ideal of an education of excellence and quality. Nine strategies to improve scientific effectiveness in educational research are identified and discussed. As a conclusion, it is argued that the foundations of contemporary educational research need to be revisited and reformulated, parallel to the new concepts present in the philosophy of science, to face the new problems present in our society.
This monograph discusses dualities in physics: what dualities are, their main examples--from quantum mechanics and electrodynamics to statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and string theory--and the philosophical questions they raise. Part I first conceptualises dualities and discusses their main roles and themes, including how they are related to familiar notions like symmetry and interpretation. It also discusses the main simple examples of dualities: position-momentum, wave-particle, electric-magnetic, and Kramers-Wannier dualities. Part II discusses advanced examples and their inter-relations: particle-soliton dualities, electric-magnetic dualities in quantum field theories, dualities in string theory, and gauge-gravity duality. This Part ends with discussions of the hole argument, and how string theory counts the microstates of a black hole. Part III is an in-depth discussion of general philosophical issues on which dualities bear: theoretical equivalence (two theories 'saying the same thing, in different words'), scientific realism and the under-determination of theories by data, theory succession and the M-theory programme, explanation, and scientific understanding. It