I've been pretty quiet of late. In part this is because I've been travelling with little internet access, but also it's because I'm teaching a subject I haven't studied in years, and because I was asked to write a popular essay for a magazine.
It's COSMOS Magazine, an Australian popular science magazine, and what the editor wanted was something like my posts on philosophy of science as the ornithology of science. It takes effort to write clearly to a word limit (which is why I blog - I'm fundamentally lazy), but with the help of the editor, Tim Dean, I managed to say one thing rather than many. If any of my students are listening, do as I say, not as I do, OK?
So this set me thinking (as even random events tend to). There's an entire discipline entitled "science communication" about the problems and issues of communicating science to the public discourse. But there's none on "philosophy of science communication". A niche? I know Paul Griffiths writes for popular media occasionally (and he has much more to say than I do), but I cannot think of much in the way of philosophers of science writing for the general public (apart from the excellent Janet Stemwedel and John Lynch here at SEED).
What would be at issue? Science communication studies the ways in which ideas are framed in nontechnical discourses about science, such as in the political arena, and whether the communication issues is just about passing information on, or is more complex and interactive than that. Science itself is pretty removed from the ordinary experience of the lay public - how much more distant would philosophy of science be?
But then, everybody knows of Kuhn, or at least the p-word (say it softly: paradigm shift), and most people have heard of Popper, and the book that set me on the path to righteousness enlightenment here was a popular book that was a best seller in its day: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (it's no accident I ride a motorcycle, although I don't do much of my own maintenance these days). So perhaps PoS could be more accessible than science itself?
Thoughts?
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Rats. On first reading I thought you were writing for COSMO, and thought I'd have an excuse to buy it, "just for the article, of course!"
Of course the articles are why we buy these magazines. Especially the ones about male shortcomings...
Kuhn has become the posterboy of the post-modernist movement. Just about every time you try to assert that science has provided one of the most (alright, in reality THE most) useful methodologies by which to explore and understand the world around, Kuhn and paradigm shifts suddenly appear, as if to say that ever generation of scientists starts out as a keen explorer and ends up as grey-haired stooges greedily holding on to yesterday's theories and fending off the next generation of upstarts.
I think communicating the philosophy of science to the general public is probably more important than conveying any particular science. It's the old "give a man a scientific result and he understands for a day; teach a man how to think like a scientist and he can understand for life" ... or somethin' ...
...or on "the communication of the philosophy of science communication" (I feel an infinite regress coming on.)
One of the best little books about science I remember was The Trouble With Science by Robin Dunbar.
Come to think of it, why not start with the best popular science communicators, the likes of Sagan, Bronowski, Attenborough, Burke, and see what, if anytihng, they have in common?
Science itself is pretty removed from the ordinary experience of the lay public - how much more distant would philosophy of science be?
Everybody, from children to adults, has a sense of and an interest in how beliefs are formed and what counts as knowledge. Just oodles of things to talk about around those issues.
*low wave*
Awesome! What kind of bike do you ride?
2002 Suzuki GSF1200S, also known as the Bandit. Dark blue and mean.
I would definitely agree that philosophy of science can seem easier to learn and deal with, but from personal interactions with academics who take on the subject without a (primarily) scientific background tend to warp certain concepts and generally over reach and simplify.
as a side note, i believe philosophy of science communication would just be a subset of epistemology.
Andrew K wrote:
I think epistemology is just a subset of the philosophy of science.
I don't want to sound overly glib, but it seems intuitive to me that PoS would be harder to communicate than science simply because PoS is a meta-perspective on scientific practice (although of course PoS has both empirical and normative dimensions). So something like "for years, this irregularity was biology's precession of the perihelion of Mercury..." is a sentence that we can expect to see in even lay PoS, but it still requires a decent amount of knowledge - more than communicating the result of an experiment, I would think. That's not really surprising since bench science can be performed without anything more than a working knowledge of day-to-day scientific practice (and, given the... er... absolutist self-image of some of my hard-nosed scientific friends, is actually performed without a realistic view of scientific practice all the time).
And yet, everybody uses the phrase "paradigm shift", "falsification", and a slew of other terms from PoS, in ordinary usage or quasi-intellectual discourse. I want some serious popular PoS please!