Williams’ calls for a core course in the history and philosophy of science to be taught to all science undergraduates strikes a chord. I’d add that a further course on the philosophy of biology should be required of students in the life and medical sciences.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And calls scientists to “get back to our guiding philosophy”. <\/p>\n
\nThe point is this: you must understand your discipline, know its foundations so you are able to defend it from attack by those who seek to hijack science for their own ends, such as climate change deniers, GM modification scaremongers, or creationists<\/u>. [emphasis mine]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nGallagher: <\/p>\n
\nOne young innocent, for instance, defined scientific theory as “an idea about something, not necessarily true.” If that isn’t playing into the hands of creationists<\/u>, then I don’t know what is! [emphasis mine]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThere you have it! The real reason for their concern… if these students aren’t taught the philosophy of science … scratch that … the right<\/strong> philosophy of science, then (Horrors!!) those ignorant creationists might gain some ground! <\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A pair of interesting articles showed up recently in the Scientist magazine web-site (free registration required). The two articles speak to the need for education in the history and philosophy of science. The arguments presented (and the biases revealed) make for interesting reading. The first article is What makes science “science”? By James Williams, subtitled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[72,65],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-fe","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}