Science, Culture, and the Reconciliation of Knowledge and Understanding

Science, Culture, and the Reconciliation of Knowledge and Understanding PDF Author: Arthur Pontynen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1036406946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
In daily life we consciously attempt to reconcile what with why, factual knowledge with understanding. Currently, it is commonplace to presume that understanding is limited to the production of facts, which we place into narratives of understanding. We exist in a world of facts with no why to find, living in a culture that vacillates between identity and tolerance, authoritarianism and anarchism. Neglected is the importance of seeking good judgments in daily life, that is, of being wise. This book analyzes the millennial shift from seeking Truth to asserting subjective meanings, so that we can escape that sordid condition. It is necessary to challenge current dominant modes of thought and interpretation in order to live intelligently and peacefully. Western Civilization and the Enlightenment are historically associated with seeking to understand, with the goal of being right with an intelligible and therefore meaningful reality. That goal remains worthy of our efforts.

Research Is Ceremony

Research Is Ceremony PDF Author: Shawn Wilson
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
ISBN: 1773633287
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don’t just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.

Scientific Knowledge as a Culture

Scientific Knowledge as a Culture PDF Author: Igal Galili
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030802019
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 477

Book Description
This book, in its first part, contains units of conceptual history of several topics of physics based on the research in physics education and research based articles with regard to several topics involved in teaching science in general and physics in particular. The second part of the book includes the framework used, the approach considering science knowledge as a special type of culture – discipline-culture. Within this approach, scientific knowledge is considered as comprised of a few inclusive fundamental theories each hierarchically structured in a triadic pattern: nucleus-body-periphery. While nucleus incorporates the basic principles and body comprises their implementations in the variety of laws, models, and experiments, periphery includes concepts at odds to the nucleus. This structure introduces knowledge in its conceptual variation thus converting disciplinary knowledge to cultural-disciplinary one. The approach draws on history and philosophy of science (HPS) necessary for meaningful learning of science. It is exemplified in several aspects regarding teaching physics, presenting history in classes, considering the special nature of science, and using artistic images in regular teaching. The revealed conceptual debate around the chosen topics clarifies the subject matter for school students and teachers encouraging construction of Cultural Content Knowledge. Often missed in teachers' preparation and common curriculum it helps genuine understanding of science thus providing remedy of students' misconceptions reported in educational research.

Science, Creation and the Bible

Science, Creation and the Bible PDF Author: Richard F. Carlson
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830838899
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Physicist Richard Carlson and biblical scholar Tremper Longman address the long-standing problem of how to relate scientific description of the beginnings of the universe with the biblical creation passages found in Genesis. Experts in their respective fields, these two authors provide a way to resolve seeming conflicting descriptions.

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture PDF Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191563919
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

The Wisdom of Science

The Wisdom of Science PDF Author: Robert Hanbury Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521314480
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
An examination of the cultural role of science and technology. Attempts to clear away popular misconceptions and give a wider and deeper understanding of the nature of science and its value to society.

Women, Education, and Science within the Arab-Islamic Socio-Cultural History

Women, Education, and Science within the Arab-Islamic Socio-Cultural History PDF Author: Zakia Belhachmi
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9087905793
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
From a rationale of multiculturalism and a based on systemic approach grounded in the Arab-Islamic tradition, this book integrates history, education, science, and feminism to understand the implications of culture in social change, cultural identity, and cultural exchange.

Social Justice and Cultural Competency

Social Justice and Cultural Competency PDF Author: Marcia A. Mardis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Published in partnership with the International Association of School Librarianship, this work gathers together the latest and most important research on the topics of social justice and cultural competency in school libraries. Education systems today are expected to advance national goals related to fairness, equity, and social cohesion. Comprising articles written and collected in the journal of the International Association of School Librarianship and new articles written especially for this anthology, this book documents both empirical research and promising practices to help school librarians and teachers work together to promote social justice and develop learners' and educators' cultural competence. Both coeditors are experienced in working with authors from around the world and have participated in the development of effective and ethical standards and guidelines for school library practitioners. Brief real-life case studies of school librarians and teachers in action showcase efforts to improve the lives of marginalized or under-served students. School librarians inside and outside of the United States, school library educators and policymakers, and academic librarians building school librarianship collections will find this guide valuable.

Science as Social Knowledge

Science as Social Knowledge PDF Author: Helen E. Longino
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691020518
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Conventional wisdom has it that the sciences, properly pursued, constitute a pure, value-free method of obtaining knowledge about the natural world. In light of the social and normative dimensions of many scientific debates, Helen Longino finds that general accounts of scientific methodology cannot support this common belief. Focusing on the notion of evidence, the author argues that a methodology powerful enough to account for theories of any scope and depth is incapable of ruling out the influence of social and cultural values in the very structuring of knowledge. The objectivity of scientific inquiry can nevertheless be maintained, she proposes, by understanding scientific inquiry as a social rather than an individual process. Seeking to open a dialogue between methodologists and social critics of the sciences, Longino develops this concept of "contextual empiricism" in an analysis of research programs that have drawn criticism from feminists. Examining theories of human evolution and of prenatal hormonal determination of "gender-role" behavior, of sex differences in cognition, and of sexual orientation, the author shows how assumptions laden with social values affect the description, presentation, and interpretation of data. In particular, Longino argues that research on the hormonal basis of "sex-differentiated behavior" involves assumptions not only about gender relations but also about human action and agency. She concludes with a discussion of the relation between science, values, and ideology, based on the work of Habermas, Foucault, Keller, and Haraway.

Science, Democracy, and the American University

Science, Democracy, and the American University PDF Author: Andrew Jewett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139577107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Book Description
This book reinterprets the rise of the natural and social sciences as sources of political authority in modern America. Andrew Jewett demonstrates the remarkable persistence of a belief that the scientific enterprise carried with it a set of ethical values capable of grounding a democratic culture - a political function widely assigned to religion. The book traces the shifting formulations of this belief from the creation of the research universities in the Civil War era to the early Cold War years. It examines hundreds of leading scholars who viewed science not merely as a source of technical knowledge, but also as a resource for fostering cultural change. This vision generated surprisingly nuanced portraits of science in the years before the military-industrial complex and has much to teach us today about the relationship between science and democracy.