This article considers the six principles that the National Research Council's report Scientific Research in Education claims define an enterprise as scientific. I argue that these principles are relatively vacuous generalities because one cannot determine anything about any of them from outside specific theories of specific domains (and domains are smaller, usually considerably smaller, than disciplines). Such theories can differ greatly on how they would define the meanings of the words in the six principles. In the end, I argue that we ought to compare specific theories and their track records, caring less about what “science” is and more about using theories with good track records.
BloomfieldL. (1935). Language. London: Allen & Unwin.
3.
BraceyG. W. (2003). What you should know about the war against America's public schools. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
4.
ChomskyN. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
5.
ChomskyN. (1965). Aspects of a theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6.
ChomskyN. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
7.
ChomskyN. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
8.
ChomskyN. (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
9.
ChomskyN. (2002). On nature and language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
10.
FoormanB. R., FrancisD. J., FletcherJ. M., and SchatschneiderC. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37—55.
11.
HackingI. (2000). The social construction of what. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
12.
KuhnT. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
13.
National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
14.
National Research Council. (2002). Scientific research in education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
15.
PetersS. (Ed.). (1971). Goals of linguistic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
16.
PostalP. M. (1974). On raising: An inquiry into one rule of English grammar and its theoretical implications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
17.
SagI. A., and WasowT. (1999). Syntactic theory: A formal introduction. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
18.
QuineW. V. O. (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60, 20—43.
