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Adapting practice-based philosophy of science to teaching of science students

  • Paper in Philosophy of Science in Practice
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Abstract

The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandatory philosophy of science courses to science students from a range of programs at University of Copenhagen. We highlight some of the lessons we have learned in making philosophy of science “fit for teaching” outside of philosophy circles by taking selected cases from the students’ own field as the starting point. We argue for adapting philosophy of science teaching to particular audiences of science students, and discuss the benefits of drawing on research within science education to inform curriculum and course design. This involves reconsidering teaching resources, assumptions about students, intended learning outcomes, and teaching formats. We also argue that to make philosophy of science relevant and engaging to science students, it is important to consider their potential career trajectories. By anticipating future contexts and situations in which methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions could be relevant, philosophy of science can demonstrate its value in the education of science students.

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Notes

  1. European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) was designed to increase the comparability of courses and study programs across European higher education. A year of study in European higher education corresponds to 60 ECTS. A 7,5 ECTS corresponds to 206 hours of work.

  2. For examples of course descriptions, see: https://kurser.ku.dk/course/nndb12002u/; https://kurser.ku.dk/course/nndb19000u; https://kurser.ku.dk/course/NNDB19006U; https://kurser.ku.dk/course/NNDB19002U; https://kurser.ku.dk/course/nndb19005u.

  3. The point is not that philosophy of the social sciences or arts are not relevant to (some) science students, but rather that the relevance should be evaluated on the basis of the specific educational context. For example, our course for sports science students also includes philosophy of social science and humanities, because many students specialize in sociology, history, or other areas that require the use of qualitative methods.

  4. The concept of adidactic teaching is used within the theory of didactic situations (TDS), where “activation” presents a central element of the teaching model illustrated here: https://obl.ku.dk/theme/tds-model/.

  5. Readers may be familiar with debates on whether and how one can move from individual cases to more general theory in psychoanalysis and in medicine (Forrester, 2017), or whether inferences can be made in HPS from single cases to (normative) philosophical claims (cf. Burian, 2001; Pitt, 2001).

  6. A useful resource for teaching sociology, history, and philosophy of science is the SHiPS resource center: http://shipseducation.net, which contains teaching modules and exercises searchable by topic and level.

  7. Recent graduate surveys show that about 23% of the science students are enrolled as PhD students within the first three years at the University of Copenhagen, while about 56% report work in the private sector and about 10% teach in secondary school and adult education. The latter number varies greatly between different science programs, ranging from 3–50%, which underscores the importance of considering student diversity at different levels. The graduate surveys are available at: https://kunet.ku.dk/arbejdsomraader/uddannelsesadm/quality-of-assurance/graduate-surveys/Sider/default.aspx.

  8. We use texts by recognized authors within the discipline, such as Peter Naur on ‘The Science of Datalogy’, Peter Denning on ‘The profession of IT: Who are we?’ and ‘The science in computer science’, and Ivar Jacobson and Ed Seidewitz ‘A new software engineering’. These all originate from the Communications of the ACM, the discipline’s main professional journal, which can be a fruitful source of short texts with a combination of disciplinary and philosophical ramifications.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our students and co-teachers for helping us improve our teaching practices. We are grateful to Kristine Harper for helpful comments to and assistance with copy-editing of a previous version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section for History and Philosophy of Science, Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Sara Green, Hanne Andersen, Kristian Danielsen, Claus Emmeche, Christian Joas, Mikkel Willum Johansen, Joeri Witteveen & Henrik Kragh Sørensen

  2. Center for Science Studies, Department of Mathematics, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Kristian Danielsen

  3. Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Christian Joas

  4. Escola Vera Cruz and Colégio São Luís, São Paulo, Brazil

    Caio Nagayoshi

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  1. Sara Green
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  2. Hanne Andersen
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Green, S., Andersen, H., Danielsen, K. et al. Adapting practice-based philosophy of science to teaching of science students. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 75 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00393-2

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