shapere the structure of scientific revolutions pdf

It is important to distinguish Kuhn’s understanding of NOS from the many versions of Kuhn-inspired NOS. Many educators who, after the publication of the second edition of Structure in 1970, did look for history and philosophy of science, saw just Kuhnianism, more particularly Kuhn-inspired constructivism. The seldom faced question is: How is it possible to learn about NOS without knowledge of HPS? This is a truism, but its implication, namely, that science students and teachers need to learn the history and philosophy of science (HPS), has been less recognised and followed through. In brief, they should learn the nature of science.

It is widely agreed that students learning science should learn what science is, how it works, and what it accomplished. 3 An explicit or implicit view of NOS informs curricular decisions, pedagogical practices, and wider national policies about the extent, duration, and funding of science in schools and beyond. The immediate educational impact of Structure was on educators’ understanding of the nature of science (NOS) which is, increasingly, a stand-alone inclusion in worldwide national and provincial science curricula. Richard Duschl, in 1990, described Structure as ‘the most acclaimed book in history of science’ (Duschl, 1990, p.36). In Peter Fensham’s landmark study of the discipline of science education, leading science educators repeatedly identify Kuhn’s Structure as the main influence on their understanding of science (Fensham, 2004). Treagust spoke for the science education research community. This small book really changed the way we look at the enterprise that is science. Perhaps one of the major influences on our understanding of how scientific research and scientific knowledge evolves and develops was the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s ( 1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This is reflected in the opening sentence of a 2022 article by David Treagust, one of Australia’s foremost science educators: 1 Thomas Kuhn’s impact on science education has been immense. This needs to be addressed by raising the level of philosophical competence in the discipline, beginning with the inclusion of HPS in teacher education and graduate programmes.

There was a systematic, disciplinary deficiency. The most important lesson to be learnt from science education’s uncritical embrace of Kuhn and Kuhnianism is that the problems arose not from personal inadequacies individuals are not to blame. But his retreat went largely unnoticed in education, and so the original, deeply flawed Structure affected the four above-mentioned central research fields. Kuhn did modify and ‘walk back’ many of the head-turning, but erroneous, claims of Structure. While educators were rushing to adopt Kuhn, many philosophers, historians, and sociologists were rejecting him. In particular, the education horse had well and truly bolted. Something that he subsequently did, but this amounted to closing the gate after the horse had bolted. This matters, because before publication he could have abandoned, modified, or refined much of his ‘revolutionary’ text. Kuhn was not trained in philosophy, he was not part of the HPS tradition, and to the detriment of all, he did not engage with it. Although the book had many positive features, this paper will document how most of these ideas and insights were well established in HPS literature at the time of its 1962 publication. This paper will document the book’s two fundamental errors: namely, its Kantian-influenced ontological idealism and its claims of incommensurability between competing paradigms. Good, that he brought HPS to so many bad, that, on key points, his account of science was flawed. The discipline of science education needs to learn from its past so that comparable mistakes might be averted in the future. This paper looks back to the Kuhnian years in science education and to the long shadow they cast. More particularly, Kuhn’s book directly influenced four burgeoning research fields in science education: Children’s Conceptual Change, Constructivism, Science-Technology-Society studies, and Cultural Studies of Science Education. For the majority of educators, the second edition (1970) of his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1970a) articulated the very nature of the science, the discipline they were teaching. And he had a great impact on science education research, theorising, and pedagogy. Beginning 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn has had a significant impact across the academy and on culture more widely.

Shapere the structure of scientific revolutions pdf