Are chemists naive about philosophy of science?
JOSÉ A. CHAMIZO AND IRYS A. PACHECO
Facultad de Química, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
México 04510 D.F. México
A decade ago Good (1999) raised the question: why are chemist ‘turned
off’ by philosophy of science? His claim consists in that most of the people with
a chemistry degree pretend to be realistic. He also considers that there is a lack
of interest in philosophy because of the way that all the chemistry knowledge
has been raised through history. To obtain an answer to this question we
identified the variety of philosophical visions that the academic coordinators of
the different courses of chemistry and the students from the oldest, largest and
by far more influential School of Chemistry in the spanish speaking countries
(Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) have, between the dualities of
relativism-positivism and realism-instrumentalism. This was taken on through an
interview and the application of a previous validated questionnaire (Nott and
Wellington, 1998) plus a sample of diverse ad hoc questions from different
sources (for example from Liang et al, 2006) to each of the five academic
coordinators and the request of the same questionnaire to a student population
representative of the School of Chemistry.
The results showed that neither the coordinators nor the students have a
good basis about the meaning of the philosophy of science but with the
investigation it is possible to have an idea about which branch of the philosophy
of science seem to belong. This will lead us to realize the importance of
teaching philosophy in chemistry careers to work out the place that chemistry
plays in science philosophy (Chamizo, 2007).
References
Chamizo J.A., 2007, La esencia de la Química. Reflexiones sobre filosofía y
educación, FQ-UNAM, México.
Nott M. and Wellington J.: 1998 ‘A Program for developing understanding of
the nature of science in teacher education’ in W.F. McComas (ed.), The
Nature of Science in Science Education, Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 331-350.
Good R.F.: 1999, ’ Why are chemists “turned off” by philosophy of science?’
Foundations of chemistry 1, 185-125.
Liang L.L, Chen X., Kaya O.N., Adams A.D., Macklin M., Ebenezer J.: 2006,
‘Student Understanding of Science and Scientific Inquiry (SUSSI):
Revision and further validation of an assessment instrument’, Annual
Conference of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching
(NARST), San Francisco, USA.