The Student as Philosopher-Scientist: Dewey’s Conception of Scientific Explanation In Science Education

Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation, which has been neglected by both philosophers of science and philosophers of education, facilitates overcoming the seeming divide between teaching a highly technical and specialized subject matter and encouraging students to successfully engage in the experience of being philosopher-scientists. By analyzing Dewey’s philosophy of science as it pertains to science education, we gain the insight that scientific explanation is a tool that may be used by students and supported by faculty to facilitate scientific investigation that is philosophical. Here I present Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation as it relates to science education by providing an overview of this conception as it relates to the student, followed by Dewey’s ideas with specific regard for science education, as well as an example illustrating how scientific explanation is utilized as a self-empowering, philosophical tool within the context of science education. There is no question that the work of John Dewey has been invaluable with regard to theories of education. What has too often been neglected, however, is Dewey’s work on the philosophy of science as it pertains specifically to science education.1 Although educators might well concede that children should be encouraged to be “philosophical” within the arts or humanities, most neglect or fail to heed Dewey’s insights concerning the child as philosopher-scientist within the science classroom. Dewey recognized that children were too often taught “science” while not learning The Student as Philosopher-Scientist  71 Volume 28 (2)  2012 “the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience” (MW 9: 228). The view of science as a nonphilosophical, highly technical subject that is somehow fundamentally separated from other subjects remains a problem within education. Recently, for example, Victor Pollak criticized science education on this score, indicating the need for reconciliation between the “fundamentally antiauthoritarian spirit of science”—what Dewey considered the scientific, reconstructive manner of thinking—and “education, with its built-in tendency to be authoritarian” (Pollak, 513). In what follows, I argue that Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation, which has often been neglected by both philosophers of science and philosophers of education, can assist us in overcoming the divide between teaching a highly technical and specialized subject matter and encouraging students to successfully engage in “the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience” (MW 9: 228). When students engage in scientific explanation as a tool that facilitates learning how to be scientific, rather than memorizing scientific explanations as a series of facts, they can become philosopher-scientists. Below, I present Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation as it relates to scientific education by first providing an overview of this conception in relation to the individual student. This is followed by more pointed discussion of Dewey’s thinking regarding science education, as well as examples illustrating how scientific explanation, as he sees it, should be utilized as a self-empowering philosophical tool within the context of science education. Accordingly, Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation is connected with scientific education in a way that provides a basis for understanding how Dewey advocated an approach to education that fosters the child as philosopher-scientist, especially within the context of the science classroom. As with so many concepts with which Dewey worked, his writing on this topic is infused with a very particular idea of explanation that is wedded to other concepts in his work and rooted in his theory of inquiry. The functional definition of explanation he supplies refers to “bringing a given set of cases into relation with sets that are of a different kind with respect to qualitative considerations so that free and systematic inference is possible” (LW 14: 24n24). However, this definition does not provide an adequate idea of Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation, especially in the realm of science education. The following, then, is an analysis of Dewey’s conception of scientific explanation that expands upon his very general functional definition. For Dewey, scientific explanation is a particular kind of operation used in solving problems. Explanation in the context of education is, like any process in which students participate, born from transactions with the world of which students are a part. Most of students’ transactions with the world are unproblematic; experiences occur and are undergone and accepted without question. However, when problems—caused by perturbations in the usually calm landscape of experience— do occur, students are led to inquire into those problems in order to solve them so that experience will again be unproblematic and new understandings and abilities