The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed

The practical application of theory, or praxis, in science education is arguably less straightforward today than it has been in preceding generations. While formal education and learning theories have been promulgated for close to 100 years, the changing disposition and balance of academia, and the consequent dissemination of questionable and unverifiable social theories, have led to a more ambiguous discussion and application of au courant learning theories to science education. Much of what the authors consider the detrimental entanglement in academia of definitions and educational theories about science occurs at the confluence of different professional attitudes and motivation. Scientists are generally complacent in terms of championing and defending their own core philosophy and epistemology, and a scientist’s professional rewards and efforts rarely consist of debunking critics in the so-called other ‘ways of knowing’ (see the Science Wars website and the Sokal Affair for a droll exception at http://members.tripod.com/ScienceWars/). The defense of scientific reasoning is not what scientists focus on by training; thus, this is an area that almost certainly needs more systematic attention and treatment in science curricula. By contrast, science’s detractors in the humanities, social sciences and even education, find professional incentive and marketable topic in assailing the science colossus. Most notably, postmodernism with its socially relativistic and radical constructivist theories, replete with the denial of objective truth, have attempted to undermine science, or as Fishman (1996) noted, are attempting to put science on an “indefinite furlough” (p. 95). Like it or not, the science community is at war with nihilistic ideologies and one of the battle grounds is pedagogy, a deliberation that extends to online science learning environments.

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The Quiet Resolution of the Science Wars

10.1093/oso/9780197518977.003.0003 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 53-79

Author(s):

Matt Grossmann

Keyword(s):

Social Science ◽

Qualitative Methods ◽

Rational Choice ◽

Human Nature ◽

Rational Choice Theory ◽

Choice Theory ◽

Confirmation Bias ◽

Frequentist Statistics ◽

Science Wars ◽

Quantitative And Qualitative Methods

The “science wars” were resolved surprisingly quietly. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, critics of science from humanities disciplines fought with scientists over the extent to which science is a social and biased process or a path to truth. Today, there are few absolute relativists or adherents of scientific purity and far more acknowledgment that science involves biased truth-seeking. Continuing (but less vicious) wars over Bayesian and frequentist statistics likewise ignore some key agreements: tests of scientific claims require clarifying assumptions and some way to account for confirmation bias, either by building it into the model or by establishing more severe tests for the sufficiency of evidence. This sedation was accompanied by shifts within social science disciplines. Debates over both simplistic models of human nature (especially over rational choice theory) and over what constituted proper quantitative and qualitative methods died down as nearly everyone became theoretically and methodologically pluralist in practice. I herald this evolution, pointing to its benefits in the topics we cover, the ideas we consider, the evidence we generate, and how we evaluate and integrate our knowledge.

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