Thereafter, please write a short speech (400-500 words in length) addresses why people claim to know things about science or theater or mathematics or history or race or politics
For this chat forum, please reread Kenneth Burke’s lengthy quote on p. 73 of our text. It is entitled “Man is the symbol-using animal.” Thereafter, please watch a short TED Talk by Jonathan Drori from 2007 that is entitled “What We Think We Know.” Here is the link to Drori’s TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_what_we_think_we_know?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
Thereafter, please write a short speech (400-500 words in length) addresses why people claim to know things about science or theater or mathematics or history or race or politics, anything at all, when they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about. Many times, people think they know things, but have no firsthand knowledge of those things. They know only what they’ve been taught. In the process of learning certain things, these people study and memorize data for a test and thereafter, they think they know things. However, it turns out that they don’t know very much about those things at all. Why is this the case?
More details;
Guiding Principles for Scientific Inquiry
In Chapter 2 we present evidence that scientific research in education accumulates just as it does in the physical, life, and social sciences. Consequently, we believe that such research would be worthwhile to pursue to build further knowledge about education, and about education policy and practice. Up to this point, however, we have not addressed the questions “What constitutes scientific research?” and “Is scientific research on education different from scientific research in the social, life, and physical sciences?” We do so in this chapter.
These are daunting questions that philosophers, historians, and scientists have debated for several centuries (see Newton-Smith [2000] for a current assessment). Merton (1973), for example, saw commonality among the sciences. He described science as having four aims: universalism, the quest for general laws; organization, the quest to organize and conceptualize a set of related facts or observations; skepticism, the norm of questioning and looking for counter explanations; and communalism, the quest to develop a community that shares a set of norms or principles for doing science.
In contrast, some early modern philosophers (the logical positivists) attempted to achieve unity across the sciences by reducing them all to physics, a program that ran into insuperable technical difficulties (Trant, 1991).
In short, we hold that there are both commonalities and differences across the sciences. At a general level, the sciences share a great deal in common, a set of what might be called epistemological or fundamental
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2002. Scientific Research in Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/10236.
principles that guide the scientific enterprise. They include seeking conceptual (theoretical) understanding, posing empirically testable and refutable hypotheses, designing studies that test and can rule out competing counterhypotheses, using observational methods linked to theory that enable other scientists to verify their accuracy, and recognizing the importance of both independent replication and generalization.
It is very unlikely that any one study would possess all of these qualities. Nevertheless, what unites scientific inquiry is the primacy of empirical test of conjectures and formal hypotheses using well-codified observation methods and rigorous designs, and subjecting findings to peer review. It is, in John Dewey’s expression, “competent inquiry” that produces what philosophers call “knowledge claims” that are justified or “warranted” by pertinent, empirical evidence (or in mathematics, deductive proof).
Scientific reasoning takes place amid (often quantifiable) uncertainty (Schum, 1994); its assertions are subject to challenge, replication, and revision as knowledge is refined over time. The long-term goal of much of science is to produce theory that can offer a stable encapsulation of “facts” that generalizes beyond the particular. In this chapter, then, we spell out what we see as the commonalities among all scientific endeavors.