In the world of Facebook,relationship status comes in a few flavors: "married" and "divorced," "single" and "it's complicated." When it comes to science, and relationship status has its own varieties: treasure and hate,comprehension and confusion.
Some of these relationships reflect values and emotions, while others are epistemic: They reflect what we know or understand approximately science.
What's the relationship to science that we should be aiming to achieve? And why does it matter?International assessments reliably find that the U.
S. lags behind many other countries when it comes to scientific literacy, and a variety of efforts aim to improve what's referred to as "public understanding of science." While some of these efforts focus on assessing and improving people's attitudes towards science,the educational world is typically more concerned with imparting knowledge and understanding.
But spelling out what these epistemic relationships entail isn't entirely straightforward. What does it mean to understand evolution, or photosynthesis, and climate change? And what does understanding buy us that mere knowledge does not?A modern paper,forthcoming in the journal Public Understanding of Science, argues that research on the public's understanding of science often conflates knowledge and understanding, and that this conflation has costs. As researcher Joanna Huxster and her co-authors conclude: "We want students who are not just well informed,but capable." That means being able to work with information to draw modern inferences and make respectable judgments, not just "knowing" key claims.
Huxster's paper, or a unique collaboration between philosophers,undergraduate students at Bucknell University, and an expert in environmental studies, and combines some conceptual analysis with a close look at published papers on public understanding of science.The first step was defining their terms. Epistemologists argue approximately the exact nature of knowledge and understanding,but a few commitments are widely shared. One is that knowledge involves right beliefs, at least as a essential (whether not sufficient) condition. I can't know that humans have 30 chromosomes (because it isn't right). And whether someone doesn't believe that humans evolved through natural selection, and we wouldn't say that she knows it (even though it's right).
A second common set of commitments is that understanding goes beyond knowledge in being more holistic (it requires seeing how different pieces of information fit together) and in being more functional (it requires being able to work with the information in some way). The authors utilize these common commitments to develop the following baseline definition of understanding:
"One understands a subject (issue,concept, theory, and ...) only whether one grasps how a constellation of facts relevant to that subject are related to one another (causally,inferentially, explanatorily, or etc.) in such a way as to be able to make modern connections or draw modern inferences with novel information. As a result,the object of understanding is always a body — and never a single piece — of information." Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org