Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Enquiry
MARSHALL D. HERRON
Portland State University
The study is divided into three major parts. The first deals with
the problems of the development of a conceptual framework for
analyzing accounts of scientific enquiry (referred to as the "com-
monplaces" of accounts of scientific enquiry) and the use of this
framework as a guide, or tool, in the description of several viable
accounts. The "commonplaces" constitute, in effect, a checklist of
aspects or topics at issue which any reasonably complete account of
scientific enquiry should be expected to treat. The "viable ac-
counts" are constructed to serve three purposes. They are in-
tended, first, to exhibit a more concrete treatment of enquiry than
the formally logical or "five step" treatment commonly found in
science textbooks. This more concrete treatment raises for debate
curricular possibilities not visible in more abstract treatments.
Second, these accounts are intended to exemplify some of the
pluralism characteristic of accounts of enquiry-that different de-
fensible treatments of the subject are possible and fruitful. Third,
these accounts are used to test the usefulness of the framework of
"commonplaces" and to demonstrate one way in which such a
framework can be used.
The second part of the study is concerned with three of the so-
called new science courses, all of which claim to confer on students
some knowledge or mastery of enquiry. The attempt is made to
determine the clarity and coherence with which the doctrine is
set forth and to determine the extent to which the doctrine is
incorporated in the actual structure of the textual materials.
The third part of the study concerns the degree to which teach-
ers of science have a grasp of notions of scientific enquiry. Tran-
scripts of interviews with fifty teachers of the "new" materials were
examined in an attempt to determine the extent of their familiar-
ity with notions of this sort, their knowledge of the doctrines
espoused by the materials they use, and the adequacy of their un-
derstanding for effective teaching.
Conceptual Framework
A major decision faced in developing an analytic framework for
accounts of scientific enquiry is to determine what views of en-
quiry the analyses should encompass, since notions concerning the
nature of scientific enquiry are both numerous and varied and
since some of the diversities are of questionable value for curricu-
lum purposes.2 Some differences among accounts of enquiry origi-
nate in differences within science itself, and accounts differing for
this reason are, of course, ones which must be included in our
analyses. Other diversities arise from differences in philosophic
principles and methods which dictate different ways of describing
the scientific enterprise. Many of these diverse accounts also must
be included in our scheme. On the other hand, there are diversities
which arise from the differing intentions of those who have con-
structed the accounts. Some accounts of scientific enquiry, for ex-
ample, are constructed in order to clarify or solve technical prob-
lems of logic. It is highly questionable whether these diversities are
appropriate to our purposes. Still others are intended to bring sci-
ence, as one human activity, into connection with other kinds of
human activity. These, again, are unlikely to be useful to us.
Finally, there are the accounts which are intended to give a pecu-
liarly "literary" account of science, that is, those which throw little
or no new light or additional understanding on specific scientific
researches but which are intended instead to constitute an abstract,
self-contained, and usually exceedingly "neat" story. The range of
these variations must be narrowed drastically if the task is to be at
all manageable. We shall first indicate those to be eliminated and
then go on to develop the range of diversities which the framework
must encompass.
One indication of the diversity which is observed among ac-
counts of enquiry stems from differences in the level of specificity
of the accounts. On one end of this spectrum of generality we find,
for example, the "five step" description of scientific method com-
mon to most science textbooks a few years ago. This view of
scientific activity, based in all probability upon an oversimplifica-
tion of John Dewey's How We Think, is demonstrated by Schwab
to be not so much wrong as simply too general to be useful." That
is, if a large number of scientific enquiries are described in highly
some basis, one chemical (or organism) from another. The im-
portant question here is, on what basis was this more primitive
discrimination made and to what extent did this predilection bias
the validity of the eventual selection of a "proper" basis for clas-
sification?
The problem we face is that of choosing a starting point for the
development of our scheme of commonplaces which is as nearly
neutral as the commonplaces themselves must be. We shall adopt,
for the purposes of this study, an approach similar to that which
has proven to be useful in the development of other classificatory
systems. That is, we shall begin by positing a few of the most
general and widely acknowledged commonplace categories. These
categories will be used to illustrate, at an elementary level, how
such categories may function in describing and differentiating a
few very simple conceptions of scientific enquiry. As we examine
more sophisticated and complex accounts of enquiry, it will be-
come necessary to define subcategories of commonplaces at in-
creasingly detailed levels in order to cope with the increased com-
plexity of these views.
We take as our starting point the following simple description
of scientific enquiry. By scientific enquiry we mean that disci-
plined form of satisfaction of human curiosity which involves
scientists in "ongoing, self-correcting and revisionary processes"
which result in "bodies of currently warranted fact and theory."'7
The bodies of fact and theory accruing from such activities are
contingent on the investigator, the "operations he performs," and
"the conceptions which organize and control his operations."8 In
brief, then, we have a set of questions posed by an agent, to a pre-
selected subject matter, couched in terms which determine a par-
ticular set of operations and which yield certain terminal and
reflexive outcomes. Thus are implied the following five general
categories of commonplaces: subject matter, agent (either singular
or plural), method, phenomena (data, fact, and/or what passes
for fact), and scientific knowledge. Let us examine briefly a few
conceptions of enquiry which could conceivably be generated by
such an abbreviated set of categories.
We might begin by considering a system which takes as its start-
ing point the agent, who is assumed to have certain capacities,
habits, predilections, and epistemological biases. Aristotle, for
3. Specified to particular
problems; experimental
methods devised; data
sought and interpreted
FIG. I
Knowledge of
subject matter
Solutions to these
problems
FIG.2
Subject matter
(obvious problems of the field)
Agent
(singular-a scientist)
Choice of a problem
(formulationof a hypothesis)
Selection of a method
(strictly operational-no mention
of intellectual components)
Application of method
(experimental procedure)
Knowledge
(conclusions-i.e., static
and terminal outcomes)
FIG.3
Commonplaces of Enquiry
1. Agent (A reasonably complete account of scientific enquiry should
include some specification of the character and competences of the
investigator demanded by the account of method.)
a) Faculties assumed and capacities of thought demanded
b) The problem of prejudice -(cognitive bias), predilection, and
cultural limits
c) Communication, consensus, and disagreement
John Dewey
For Dewey, the starting point of all enquiry is an existentially
indeterminate situation. In scientific enquiry, however, the en-
quirer does not wait for the usual train of his habitual actions to
be interrupted by the disquieting occurrence of the indeterminate
situation-the not-quite-definable "something amiss" feeling.
Rather, the problematic situation is deliberately set up for the
express purpose of gaining and testing knowledge.
The intentional institution of a problem and purposeful varia-
tion of existential conditions, as Dewey defines experimentation,
emphasize the vital role played by conceptual structures (common-
place 4d), or logical forms (see second paragraph below), in guid-
ing the premeditated manipulation of environmental factors.
One of the distinctive features of Dewey's doctrine is the inter-
relation of the commonplaces: "sense or sensed," "concepts," and
"movement" or "mode of thought" (commonplaces 2b, 4d, and
2d). He denies the traditional dichotomy of induction and deduc-
tion and asserts, rather, that the difference between them is merely
one of direction, since a to-and-fro oscillation between the two
modes occurs all the while enquiry progresses." The formulation
of a problem implies a possible solution. As a problematic situa-
tion is purposefully defined, the environmental matrix is inspected
and a set of particulars, or "facts of the case," is selectively dis-
criminated (commonplace 3a) so as to feed into the definition of
the problem and to indicate possible modes of solution. Opera-
tions are then deliberately instituted in order to modify the "ante-
cedent objects of perception" in such a way as to produce new data
concerning a newly ordered arrangement within the total field.
The "feedback" data resulting from the deliberate operations are
now consulted for evidential and testing value relative to the
original formulation of the problem. In the light of this compari-
son, the original formulation is revised and the revisions suggest
the possible relevance of other data, suggesting in turn an ad-
ditional set of operations. The data elicited by the new operations
are used to refine and revise the guiding conceptual structures.
Hence, a complete and "accurate" formulation of the problem
actually does not occur until a solution is-reached.
The process continues, with the revised logical forms guiding the
selection of material relevant to the definition of new problems
A lbert Einstein
Einstein begins by assuming the existence of an objective, ex-
terrial world independent of the existence of any observer. The
accumulation of knowledge of this external world, however, is
dependent upon the intuition and experience of the enquirer.
"Experience" in this new context means something widely dif-
ferent from its meaning in Dewey. The word stands, for Einstein,
not for the whole foundation and basis of enquiry but for the.
Charles S. Peirce
The distinctiveness of Peirce's conception of enquiry resides in
four major points: (1) the importance given to the idea of the
public nature of enquiry and to community consensus as the ulti-
mate "long run" test of the accuracy of its results (commonplace
Ic), (2) the treatment of method, including a special type of infer-
ence which he calls "abduction" (commonplace 2d), (3) a cos-
mological doctrine in which continuity and evolution are essential
features of the nature of the universe and in which "brute" facts
"force" themselves upon a mind peculiarly adapted to compre-
hend their purport (commonplace 3a), and (4) a particularly strong
emphasis on the role of chance in natural phenomena and of
probability in its comprehension.
According to Peirce, the object of enquiry is the settlement of
opinion, or the production of "belief," rather than proof of an
"absolute truth." The process begins with the onset of doubt and
ends with the establishment of a "habit of action," meaning by this
a propensity for acting in certain ways which demonstrate opera-
tional confidence in the belief so established. "Doubt" is used to
designate the starting of any question, small or great, existential
rather, "it's the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of the more facile
and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be preferred:
for the reason that unless man have a natural bent in accordance
with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.'"15
Peirce's "abduction" bears a marked resemblance to the familiar
"intuitive leap" from particulars to a universal in the Aristotelian
inductive process. However, unlike Aristotle, who takes this ca-
pacity in man as an "innate," that is, unaccountable, starting point
(and unlike Einstein, who remarks that the one incomprehensible
fact about nature is its comprehensibility), Peirce offers an expla-
nation for the uncanny accuracy of man's synthetic inferences. He
argues that it is the result of the process of natural selection. The
process of evolution, he says, has resulted in a virtual match be-
tween the mind and the regularities to be found in natural phe-
nomena among which that mind evolved. Our "educated guesses"
are genuinely "educated"; the time required for the "educative
process" is of an order of magnitude of billions of years!
The comprehensibility of natural phenomena (commonplace
4e) is accounted for as the result of the evolution of man in con-
junction with, or as an integral part of, an evolving universe. It is
apparently this emphasis on the role of evolution in shaping our
intuitive capabilities which brings Peirce to stress repeatedly that
"continuity is an indispensable element of reality,"16 and con-
sequently an indispensable element of scientific enquiry.
The enquirer, who in singularity counts for little, proceeds to
tentative beliefs upon which he may base habits of action by means
of various synthetic inferences. Such efforts, when added to those
of a multitude of others proceeding in like manner, will result in
knowledge of the "true" order of things in the long run, so that
nothing at all may be said to be ultimately unknowable.
As with Dewey, the degree of confidence in a belief is dependent
upon both the quality and the quantity of enquiry in the long run.
The validity of a synthetic inference becomes established if the
deductive "syllogism of which the induction or hypothesis is the
apagogical modification (in the traditional language of logic, the
reduction)" is valid in the light of the "multiplication of in-
stances." Quality control is dependent upon the honesty and co-
operative consensus of a community of scholars (commonplace Ic).
In addition to operational probabilistic limitations, there are
William Whewell
A major strength of Whewell's conception is his treatment of
method (commonplace 2). His preoccupation with method, how-
ever, results in major weaknesses as far as the totality of the system
is concerned. Internally, the system exhibits considerable impre-
cision in the coherence of terms with one another, and many de-
scriptive statements are at a level of generality which contrasts
sharply with the detailed treatment of method. Many of the com-
monplaces are not specifically treated at all. Whewell's views of
some of the commonplaces may be inferred from his discourse on
method, but the vagueness and careless usage of some terms make
this difficult. An example of this carelessness is his use of the term
"idea"-a word that has a very specialized meaning in Whewell's
system. "Ideas" for him are innate Kantian-like fundamental cate-
gories such as space and time, with reference to which the mind
examines phenomena. Yet in numerous instances, the word is used
by him in the usual vernacular sense, as for example when he
speaks of old and familiar ideas possibly being inadequate founda-
tions for certain kinds of knowledge. The word as used in the first
sense is usually capitalized, but not consistently. Hence, the reader
can get an erroneous impression of what Whewell may mean by
the term.
In Whewell, as in other accounts, the entire course of scientific
knowledge may be accounted for as deriving from the interplay of
an ideational or conceptual factor with a factual-observational one.
However, Whewell's treatment of the interplay and specification
of these factors leaves much to be desired. Two important aspects
of this account are his distinction between "ideas" and "concep-
tions" and the inferred character of "facts." With respect to this
distinction, it might seem at first glance that account is being taken
of predilections to certain modes of thinking which inevitably
enter into the process of observation of phenomena (e.g., holistic,
atomistic). Closer examination reveals, however, that the "con-
\1 2
? ?
FIG. 4
from premise 1: if 1, then p. But p also acts as the premise for other
propositions the conclusions of which are P, Q, and R. One im-
portant point that Whewell is careful to make here is that "induc-
tive truth is never the mere sum of the facts" but "is made into
something more by the introduction of a new mental element."
The mind of the enquirer, of course, "in order to be able to supply
this element," must have those "peculiar endowments and disci-
pline" described by Whewell as undefinable.
PSSC Physics
The CHEM Study materials incorporate both an explicit and an
implicit account of scientific enquiry. The PSSC materials, on the
other hand, rely almost exclusively upon an implicit presentation
of scientific enquiry. The fact that the account is only implicit
makes the task of its analysis more difficult, since it opens the
possibility of a variety of interpretations of what is said. More im-
portant, what is understood by students is determined to an even
greater extent by the classroom teacher and his ability to deal with
and interpret instances of scientific enquiry.
As far as the rhetoric of the textbook is concerned, little atten-
tion is given to the problems which are the focal points of scientific
enquiry. For the most part, the text expounds the logic of con-
clusions, albeit in the format of the "structure" (major unifying
conceptions-what Schwab refers to as substantive structures) of
physics. Major parts of the book are organized around various
questions, such as: What are the inherent problems which limit
the scope and precision of our measurements and observations?
What is the nature of the phenomenon we call light? How are the
motions of the various heavenly bodies to be accounted for? Ques-
tions of such generality, however, are hardly representative of spe-
cific scientific problems as posed for purposes of enquiry.
The first section of the textbook deals at length with observa-
tion and measurement (commonplace 2b) as applied in particular
to the fundamental quantities, that is, mass, length, and time. It
also deals with attempts to refine and extend observational capaci-
ties through complex measuring devices. Near the end of the first
section, the textbook gives an example of the use of such observa-
Despite the play on a phrase of Dewey's and the quote from Ein-
stein, a major factor treated by each of these men is ignored-the
ideational factors operative in the selection of "facts of the case"
(Dewey) or in deciding which sense impressions will be taken as
representative (Einstein). This omission renders the view es-
poused by these materials much more like that of Whewell than
like either Dewey's or Einstein's views, but without the added
sophistication of counterparts to Whewell's "colligation of facts"
and "consilience of inductions."
Lack of emphasis on an ideational factor leaves the origin of
scientific problems shrouded in mystery. The agent merely begins
with problems which are assumed as prior formulations of obvious
anomalies in observable phenomena, "seen" or "recognized"
through accurate "scientific" observation (commonplace 2a). The
textbook gives an analogy in which the activities of science are
compared to a detective story, the most obvious feature of which
is that the crime, or "problem," is given. This misleading analogy
is followed by the historical exposition of an illustrative problem.
The problem selected is: "How are coral islands formed?" The
text proceeds to develop several hypotheses (including Darwin's)
concerning this phenomenon. Since in the selected example the
problem is treated as given to the enquiry, no light is shed on the
process through which problems are formulated. This, of course,
is in complete contrast to any of the three representative philo-
sophical points of view examined earlier in this study.
Due, perhaps, to the repeated reference to the interplay of facts
and ideas, one comes away from the first two chapters of these
materials with a strong feeling (the text is too vague to permit a
rigorous interpretation) of the similarity between this point of
view and that of Whewell. Here we have an "objective" agent who
recognizes a problem in the natural environment and proceeds
to make precise observations of the facts through controlled ex-
perimentation. The facts help to suggest a hypothesis. The hy-
pothesis now "explains the initial facts and shows how they relate
to one another." In addition, it "predicts new facts which can be
related to the initial facts of the problem." The hypotheses which
"stand repeated testing" and are "of general significance" may
then be called theories.
Neither the teacher's guide nor the laboratory materials do very
TABLE 1
Responsesin Each Class accordingto Subject Taught
1 4 3 7 14
2 2 7 6 15
3 8 4 1 13
4 ... 3 3 6
5 2 ... ... 2
Total 16 17 17 50
Mean response 2.6 2.4 2.0
TABLE 2
Responsesin Each Class accordingto Participation
in Special Programs Designed to Acquaint Teachers
with New Materials
1 6 8 14
2 7 8 15
3 6 7 13
4 3 3 6
5 ... 2 2
Total 22 28 50
Mean response 2.3 2.4
teachers were impressed by the fact that the impetus for these new
materials originated with subject-matter specialists. The logic is
simple enough: if the BSCS, CHEM Study, and PSSC materials
originated with these eminent biologists, chemists, and physicists,
they must truly be representative of the fields of biology, chem-
istry, and physics. If the "experts" were concerned enough to take
the time to help out the high school teachers by writing curricular
materials for them, who is to doubt their validity? This respect for
the professional scientist is apparently a very powerful factor and
results in a kind of "missionary zeal" toward the materials and an
esprit de corps among those who use them. The teachers evidenced
an exceptional commitment to "the course" even though they
apparently did not grasp a great deal of the significance of one
widely emphasized aspect of it. Most of the teachers interviewed
expressed extreme reluctance to change or skip any part of the
course. The pressure to finish the entire course (an almost impos-
sible task) was so keenly felt that some of the teachers indicated
that they had students doing laboratory activities before and after
school and during lunch periods and study halls in order that more
class time could be devoted to lectures on the text material.
Many of the respondents seemed to think of themselves as being
associated with scientists and with the content-specialist problems
of the college professor rather than with their teaching colleagues
and the problems of teaching adolescent students. They seemed to
view themselves as members of a team of specialists, utilizing the
materials primarily to prepare their students for successful per-
formance in college science courses. Many made frequent reference
to their own college work, including their current summer insti-
tutes, and, consequently, to what their students could expect in
college science courses. Several of the physics teachers described
their courses as "rigorous" or "tough." One remarked that though
he felt the PSSC course was difficult for most high school students,
this was all right because "physics is hard."
This "identification" phenomenon also appears to carry over
with respect to teaching method. Despite the fact that the "lecture
method" is considered by most curriculum planners to be orthog-
onal to the purposes and intents of enquiry-oriented courses, many
of the teachers in this study referred to the number of days per
week devoted to laboratory exercises versus the number devoted to