Abstract
The emergence of cultural studies as a scholarly programme and its adoption in science education are outlined; problems flowing from its commitment to Thomas Kuhn's epistemological relativism and ontological idealism are detailed; the gulf between the citing and the reading of Kuhn is noted; the malaise of obscurantist writing is documented; finally, problems of pursuing cultural studies research without philosophical input are indicated.
Introduction
The research programme of ‘cultural studies of science’ emerged in the 1980s. 1 The programme had been forming for some decades by gradually delineating itself from the long-established, institutionalized disciplines of philosophy of science and history of science, as well as from the less long-established discipline of sociology of science as exemplified in the work of Ludwig Fleck (1935/1979), Robert Merton (1942/1973) and Karl Mannheim (1952). Additionally, the programme gradually differentiated itself from the political economy of science (Rose and Rose, 1976) and the anthropology of science (Geertz, 1973; Latour and Woolgar, 1979/1986). In the end, and crucially, cultural studies differentiated itself from the Edinburgh-based ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge. 2
Understandably, the programme of cultural studies has some features of each of its parent disciplines. There is some philosophy, history, sociology, economics, politics and assorted inputs, such as feminism, queerism, post-colonialism and other epistemologies. Also understandably, from the outset, the new ‘hybrid’ programme faced the challenge of falling between disciplinary stools—a challenge not always well met.
There is a recurrent problem in any philosophical appraisal of cultural studies: the programme is, by its own admission, inherently ill-defined—not just, at its worst, unclear, ambiguous and confused but lacking both goals and method. John Frow, the founder of the cultural studies programme in Australia, candidly admits: ‘Cultural studies’, on the one hand, designates less a formed disciplinary space than a relatively formless potential which is taken up in different and often quite contradictory ways. (Frow, 2005: 1) As we have thought about constructivism, we have come to realize that it is not a unitary construct. Every day we learn something new about constructivism. Like the bird in flight, it has an elusive elegance that remains just beyond our grasp. (Tobin and Tippins, 1993: 20)
Just how ‘a formless potential’ or anything that remains permanently ‘beyond our grasp’ can be the foundation of a research programme, the aim of which is knowledge of the theory and practice of science (either universal or local), is not explained. ‘Formless potentials’ and metaphoric ‘birds in flight’ present a challenge to philosophical appraisal; they do not auger well for the coherence of the cultural studies programme.
Beginnings of the cultural studies programme
The founding of the journal Science as Culture in 1987 can, for convenience, be taken as the birth year of the cultural studies programme. 3 The Times Higher Education Supplement opined in 1989 that ‘the journal could become a major new publication of the intellectual left—the first one truly to engage with the politics of science and technology’. The journal commenced publication to provide, among other things, ‘research space’ for anthropological studies of science of the kind that had been made famous, or, for many, infamous (Slezak, 1994), by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's study of laboratory life (Latour and Woolgar, 1979).
Just as the anthropology of religion is not concerned with the truth or falsity of religious claims, or even the strength or weakness of specific religious arguments, so too this approach to the study of science was consciously ‘truth neutral’. Truth or good warrant could not be appealed to as the explanation of the formation, and maintenance, of scientific consensus. Claims were not believed because they were true, and positions were not adopted because they were rational or there were epistemically good reasons for so doing. It was external pressures, social circumstances, or personal interests that shaped, powered, or caused scientific belief and change of belief.
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), a French philosopher and sociologist of education, was a standard-bearer for this naturalistic methodology in science studies. The opening statement in his influential 1999 (originally 1975) paper on ‘The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason’ unfolded its banner: The sociology of science rests on the postulate that the objective truth of the product—even in the case of that very particular product, scientific truth—lies in a particular type of social condition of production, or, more precisely, in a determinate state of the structure and functioning of the scientific field. The ‘pure’ universe of even the ‘purest’ science is a social field like any other, with its distribution of power and its monopolies, its struggles and strategies, interests and profits, but it is a field in which all these invariants take on specific forms. (Bourdieu, 1999: 31)
Many adopted Bourdieu's position. David Bloor titled one article ‘The sociology of reasons: Or why “epistemic factors” are really “social factors”’ (Bloor, 1984). Steven Shapin proposed a thoroughgoing sociological, and hence naturalistic, account of the history of science (Shapin, 1982). This was a 50-year echo of the Marxist Boris Hessen's arresting 1931 article ‘The social and economic roots of Newton's Principia’ (Hessen, 1931).
The research avenues and questions in the new cultural studies field were signposted in the 15-chapter anthology Science as Practice and Culture edited by Andrew Pickering (1992). The writing style, or communicative tone, of the programme was, unfortunately, set from the top. Pickering crafted the following 80-word sentence: The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end, thus takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance, which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations that surround it. (Pickering, 1995: 22)
The cognoscenti of the programme might understand what is written, but to outsiders, even sophisticated outsiders, it is, to put it mildly, a difficult passage. Disturbingly, it set the tone for writing in the new field. If this sentence, written by an acknowledged leader, gets through review, copyediting, and into print, what can be kept out? Basically nothing. Notwithstanding this, or maybe because of it, the book was a trailblazer; one commentator affirmed that: It stands as an encouraging sign of the continuing value of the relationship between history of science and constructivist sociology. (Golinski, 1998: 45)
The Sokal hoax demonstrated how easily incomprehensibility can be passed off as profundity. In Sokal's (1996) paper, hundreds of impenetrable sentences, such as the above, were strung together and published in Social Text, a leading cultural studies journal (Sokal, 1996, 2009; Sokal and Bricmont, 1998). The great pity is that it is from such sources that many educators drink.
Cultural studies of science education
Cultural studies soon found a home in science education, where its proponents have high hopes that its methodologies, questions and ‘orientations’ will become the disciplinary norm. The programme has been institutionalized, with doctoral degrees awarded, conference strands established, a journal founded, dedicated professorships created, and so on. The American Educational Research Association conference has a ‘cultural and historical’ research special interest group; the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) conference has a comparable strand.
As with all new ‘guiding lights’ in educational research—such as had been the case with behaviourism, positivism, progressivism and constructivism—the cultural studies programme in education warrants philosophical attention. It is noteworthy that, by the time the programme was taken up in science education, there were few disciplinary stools for its adherents to fall between. Notoriously, science educators have little training in any of the programme's parent disciplines (Matthews, 2021b).
This state of affairs is depressingly well documented in Peter Fensham's book Defining an Identity: The Evolution of Science Education as a Field of Research, in which he interviews 79 of the world's leading science education researchers (Fensham, 2004). He documents how the bulk of science educators have no formal training in philosophy, psychology, sociology or history, yet have to teach courses related to those fields and supervise graduate students. He finds that ‘science educators borrow psychological theories of learning … for example Bruner, Gagne and Piaget’, and that ‘The influence of these borrowings is better described as the lifting of slogan-like ideas’ (Fensham, 2004: 105). Jay Lemke, an educator interviewed by Fensham, well recognized this problem: Science education researchers are not often enough formally trained in the disciplines from which socio-cultural perspectives and research methods derive. Most of us are self-taught or have learned these matters second-hand from others who are also not fully trained. (Lemke, 2001: 303).
The programme's first dedicated research journal commenced publication in 2006 when Kenneth Tobin and Wolff-Michael Roth founded Cultural Studies of Science Education (CSSE). The first editorial announced: The journal encourages empirical and non-empirical research that explores science and science education as forms of culture … It was anticipated that the forms of dissemination will make visible the non-linearity of doing research and the recursive nature of delineating problems. (Tobin and Roth, 2006: 1)
The editors were dissatisfied with extant journals where: … the required format of manuscripts in standard journals assumes a linearity of method and incorporates many characteristics of positivism despite declared allegiances to (social) constructivism and postmodern, post-colonial and post structuralist theories. (Tobin and Roth, 2006: 2)
It is noteworthy that the editorial continues: A requisite for all published articles is, however, an explicit and appropriate connection with and immersion in cultural studies. (Tobin and Roth, 2006: 2)
It is left unsaid whether ‘connection and immersion’ means ‘agreement with’. If so, this certainly insulates its contents from outside critique, but it is a novel policy position for a research journal. It is the policy associated with sectarian or ‘closed-shop’ enterprises; it promotes an insular ‘silo’ research community. Even the scholastic journals—Modern Schoolmen, New Scholasticism and The Thomist—do not require ‘appropriate connection and immersion’ in either Thomism or Catholicism as a requisite for publication, just competence in the subject being addressed.
The foundation editorial of CSSE further announced that the journal encourages submissions that present ideas radically departing from oppressive, hegemonic norms. But the oppressive hegemonic research norms authors are encouraged to depart from are not spelt out. Are they: Measurement? Realism? Rationality? Universalism? Control groups? Literature reviews? Evidence? Objectivity? Clarity? Consistency? Statistics? Coherence? Or some other hegemonic failing not yet announced?
The impact of Thomas Kuhn
Kuhn's epistemological relativism and ontological idealism have had an immense impact throughout the academy; cultural studies and science education are no exception. This is reflected in the opening sentence of a 2022 article by David Treagust, one of Australia's foremost science educators:
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Perhaps one of the major influences on our understanding of how scientific research and scientific knowledge evolves and develops was the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This small book really changed the way we look at the enterprise that is science. (Treagust, 2022: 16)
More is the pity, as many educators were ‘blinded’ by Kuhn's supposed new shining philosophical light. Among other things, Kuhn provided a philosophical blessing to the whole constructivist programme in education. His imprint on nature of science (NOS), conceptual change, multicultural and indigenous science research is palpable (Matthews, 2023).
The founders of the cultural studies programme appealed to Thomas Kuhn's texts, principally The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR) (Kuhn, 1970), to anchor their relativism and idealism. Jan Golinski notes that Kuhn's book ‘has come to be seen as the harbinger of the constructivist movement’ (Golinski, 1998: 13). Relativism has been the most-known public face of Kuhnianism in cultural studies, but Kuhn's anti-realist idealism has had a more profound and insidious impact. Kuhn acknowledged this: Despite my critics, I do not think that the position developed here leads to relativism, but the threats to realism are real and require much discussion, which I expect to provide in another place. (Kuhn, 1990: 317)
Unfortunately, Kuhn never provided the promised defence of his anti-realist, idealist ontology. He died in 1996 aged 74 years. For some years he had worked on a manuscript, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, that was published six years after his death (Mladenovic, 2022). Many reviewers saw that this decade-old manuscript amounted to a ‘walking back’ of his original revolutionary relativist and idealist claims. It was not ‘business as usual’ in philosophy, but it was far from the ‘anything goes’ reception that greeted SSR's original publication. Kuhn had been ‘walking back’ for some many years and he had long been at pains to distance himself from his more enthusiastic followers. Hence there is a need to distinguish Kuhn from Kuhnianism.
Kuhnianism has been a significant factor in the rise of relativism (all views are equally good) and scepticism (we cannot know anything) concerning knowledge of the natural, social, cultural and moral worlds. Such relativism and scepticism are depressingly common in science education.
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To be a sensible fallibilist, and to believe there is no perfect, cannot-be-improved knowledge, is not to be a relativist—a point often not appreciated. In Kuhn's words: What occurred [when paradigms changed] was neither a decline nor a raising of standards, but simply a change demanded by the adoption of a new paradigm and it could be reversed. (Kuhn, 1970: 108). We may have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth. (Kuhn, 1970: 170).
Kuhn's ontological idealism is written into what Rob Hagendijk labelled ‘the first principle’ of constructivism: Statements of fact in science are not so much descriptions of natural phenomena as notions fabricated by the scientists. (Hagendijk, 1990: 46)
That statements of fact—‘the Earth orbits the Sun’, ‘photosynthesis produces oxygen’—are fabricated by scientists is a tautology. All statements are fabricated: that is what being a statement means. The move to idealism occurs when this tautology is taken as evidence that the statement cannot be related to the world; that it has no independent reference; that it cannot, in principle, be compared to any independent state of affairs because there are no such states of affairs. Consequently, for constructivists and cultural studies theorists: This circumstance leads to a preoccupation with colloquial talk and behaviour in the laboratories and the determination of what is to be considered evidence or fact as a consequence of such exchanges and activities. (Hagendijk, 1990: 47)
Their neutrality principle, coupled with idealism, rules out the selection among all the everyday, commonplace laboratory talk and activity—about lunch, football, the weather, a coming social event—of that talk and activity which specifically advances scientific knowledge. So, laboratory ethnography simply amounts to writing down everything said; principled selection is impossible. Without norms, the sociology of science amounts to describing everything scientists do; no lessons can be drawn.
Kuhn well exemplified the ‘falling-between-disciplinary-stools’ problem mentioned above. His PhD was in physics (from Harvard University in 1947), but he had no training in history, philosophy or sociology. Regarding philosophy, he admits to being ‘an amateur’ and reading very little of the philosophical literature (Kuhn, 1991/2000: 106). For sociology, he admits: I proceeded to make up the sociology of such communities as I went along … That is an abominable way to do sociology, and it did not occur to me that its outcome would, qua sociology, have a claim on the attention of members of that profession. (Kuhn, 1983: 28)
Little wonder his work was greeted with dismay by disciplinary specialists. Mario Bunge (1919–2020), a physicist and philosopher who published significant work in both fields (Matthews, 2019b), recounts in his autobiography that in 1966 he attended an influential colloquium on causality convened in Geneva by Jean Piaget. Kuhn, an admirer of Piaget, was a participant. Bunge observed: Kuhn's presentation impressed no one at the meeting, and it confirmed my impression that his history of science was second-hand, his philosophy confused and backward, and his sociology of science non-existent. (Bunge, 2016: 181)
This harsh judgement was made in 1966 after the first edition of SSR was published (1962) but before the second edition (1970). At the time of the symposium, Kuhn's most widely known historical work was The Copernican Revolution (Kuhn, 1957), which Kuhn acknowledged was entirely derivative and put together from secondary sources for the benefit of his Harvard General Education class. Bunge's judgement was harsh but shared by many contemporaries and, outside of education, is still endorsed.
And equal little wonder that Kuhn's work was so widely and enthusiastically embraced: seemingly, disciplinary knowledge was not needed to have strong opinions about historical and philosophical (HPS) questions. 6 This unfortunate state of affairs is manifest in many areas but especially in NOS research in education. Here, too commonly, researchers make assertions about NOS, and give direction to graduate students, without the benefit of any training in the field.
This is an institutional failing, not a personal one: HPS is rarely part of any programme for science teachers, and even less rarely part of graduate programmes for future professors of science education. Once appointed, new faculty are so overwhelmed with the teaching, supervision, service and administrative requirements for obtaining tenure that they have no time for serious HPS reading, let alone completing HPS courses. The latter ticks no tenure box. HPS is done, if at all, ‘on the run’. More is the pity for the quality of science teacher education.
Subsequently, Kuhn did contribute to the history of science. In 1978, he published his acclaimed historical study of the development of black-body theory (Kuhn, 1978). But two considerations mean that this book gives no support to popular ‘Kuhnianism’. First, Black-body did not utilize any of the famed conceptual apparatus of his revolutionary SSR; indeed the latter book, which hundreds of thousands were buying, reading and citing around the world, is never mentioned. Second, for example, Abner Shimony, the philosopher-physicist, in reviewing the book opined: On the whole, the intellectual processes of the few physicists immersed in black-body research seems to me to have been wonderfully rational. (Shimony, 1979: 436)
Many shared Shimony's estimation of the documentary evidence that was so well unearthed by Kuhn during his six months in the archives. This is a challenge to the lazy ‘scientific change is irrational’ thesis that so many expected to see in Kuhn's writing.
As evidence of Kuhn's impact, consider how in 2011 two CSSE researchers asserted the now cultural studies commonplace [sentences numbered for reference]: [1] Recent scholarship in science studies [STS] has opened the way for more thoughtful science education discourses that consider critical, historical, political, and sociocultural views of scientific knowledge and practice … [2] Increased attention to the problematic nature of western science's claims to objectivity and universal truth has created an educational space where taken-for-granted meanings are increasingly challenged, enriched, and rejected … [3] Thus, science's long accepted claim to epistemological superiority has now become bound to the consideration of cultural codes, social interests, and economic imperatives. (Bazzul and Sykes, 2011: 268)
Sentence [1] completely ignores the 150+ years of HPS scholarship that has richly documented the ‘historical, political and sociocultural views of science’. And this scholarship has, for the same length of time, been utilized in European, UK and US science education programmes (Matthews, 1994, chapters 4, 5). Consider merely the Harvard Project Physics programme and its extensive support material (Holton, 1978). Sentence [2] is just hand-waving. Being challenged and enriched is not tantamount to being rejected; that is an additional step that may or may not be warranted for a particular concept and meaning. Sentence [3] is a hand-clapping conclusion that has not been entailed individually or collectively by [1] and [2].
Kuhn's idealism
Ontological idealism is the default position for cultural studies and constructivism. Rosalind Driver reminded readers that: science as public knowledge is not so much a ‘discovery’ as a carefully checked ‘construction’ … and that scientists construct theoretical entities (magnetic fields, genes, electron orbitals …) which in turn take on a ‘reality’ (Driver, 1988: 137). For constructivists, observations, objects, events, data, laws, and theory do not exist independently of observers. The lawful and certain nature of natural phenomena are properties of us, those who describe, not of nature, that is described. (Staver, 1998: 503)
This indiscriminate running together of ‘observations’ and ‘theory’ that are, by definition, observer dependent with events and objects is indicative of generic philosophical indifference. And of casual, inattentive, writing. Both Driver and Staver were former presidents of the US National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST). Such ill-informed, casual writing ‘from the top’, supports denial of climate change, global warming, viral causation of COVID-19, and so on. For the ill-informed, these ‘threats’ are all just creations of the scientific mind and do not really exist. As so often, bad philosophy has bad social and personal consequences.
Michael Roth, the prominent constructivist, recipient of the NARST ‘Outstanding Researcher’ award and founder of the programme of CSSE, laid out the Kuhnian multi-world, idealist ontology: According to radical constructivism, we live forever in our own, self-constructed worlds; the world cannot ever be described apart from our frames of experience. This understanding is consistent with the view that there are as many worlds as there are knowers. (Roth, 1995: 13)
He continues: Radical constructivism forces us to abandon the traditional distinction between knowledge and beliefs. This distinction only makes sense within an objective-realist view of the world. (Roth, 1995: 14)
And concludes, for those who might not themselves draw the lesson: Through this research [sociology of science], we have come to realize that scientific rationality and special problem-solving skills are parts of a myth. (Roth, 1995: 31)
Then, later, he writes: Critiques of an observer-independent world also have been constructed in European phenomenology and existential and hermeneutic philosophy from Søren Kierkegaard through Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and Pierre Bourdieu … The observer and the observed cannot be separated. (Roth, 2005: 8)
It is noteworthy that the string of philosophers listed as refuting the realist claim of an observer-independent world does not include any with marked scientific or HPS competence.
Does quantum theory support idealism?
When philosophy fails to deliver the idealist, observer-dependent world, cultural theorists commonly ‘reach out’ to quantum theory to support their position. So, for instance, Wolff-Michael Roth writes: More serious is the critique that is associated with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. Here, the knowing observer is implicated in every observation without recourse; observer and observed are coupled and need to be accounted for in the mathematics which contains both a pan for the developing, but inaccessible system, and a part that accounts for the act of observation; observation is not passive but an active operation which determines both observational categories and the range of possible observables. (Roth, 2005: 8)
Characteristically, the meaning of ‘a pan for the developing, but inaccessible system’ is less than clear. Perhaps, as with much cultural studies writing, it has no meaning; it is just noise or hand-waving. Further, that ‘observation is not passive’ has been known at least since Plato, who recognized that ‘we see through the eye, not with the eye’. These considerations aside, the quantum argument, or variants of it, recur throughout the philosophical and educational literature. But it is not convincing; it does not bear scrutiny, much less warrant repeating.
Since Planck's 1900 announcement of quantum theory, it has been seen by subjectivists and idealists as ‘manna from the laboratory’. Niels Bohr gave the first and most influential idealist interpretation—something that earned him a strong realist rebuke from Albert Einstein. This philosophical ‘clash of the titans’ has been well documented and copiously commented upon (Kumar, 2008).
Mario Bunge has long advanced, and defended, a version of Einstein's realist arguments. This began with his 1967 edited book Quantum Theory and Reality (Bunge, 1967a) and his contribution to the collection, ‘A ghost-free axiomatization of quantum mechanics’ (Bunge, 1967b). In that paper, he axiomatized quantum mechanics and found no ghosts; everything was physical. In quantum mechanics, there were: no psychological concepts such as ‘observer’, ‘mind’, ‘subjective probability’, ‘expectation’, ‘uncertainty’, or ‘finding’; and no fictions such as ‘ideal measurement’ and extra ‘hidden variables’ with no effects. (Bunge, 1967b: 274)
Forty-five years later, Bunge restated the argument in his Science & Education article ‘Does quantum physics refute realism, materialism and determinism?’ (Bunge, 2012). He points out that, no matter what Bohr, Born, Planck and other quantum physicists wrote, there is no subjective, observer, experiential, or even measuring-instrument term in their equations. Consciousness cannot cause a wave function, a mathematical operator, to collapse. Born's wave function gives the probability that the system is in this or that state when the equation is solved for this or that set of boundary conditions. Quantum mechanics proceeds without subjective, personal or observer terms, as they are not needed. Bunge writes: A semantic analysis of the basic concepts of the quantum theory, such as the energy operator (Hamiltonian) and the state vector or wave function, shows that they do not contain any variables referring to an observer. (Bunge, 2012: 1604)
Bunge celebrates the success and vindication of quantum theory, recognizing that, like all major advances in science, it does enlarge and transform our view of the world: it gives a deeper understanding of the world, its constituents and its processes. Accordingly, philosophical realism needs to be refined. Philosophical realism need not be tied to physicalism and the view that all objects have sharp properties; it should not be tied to classical mechanics. For Bunge, this was Einstein's big mistake in his famous co-authored 1935 paper (Einstein et al., 1935). The proper realist lesson is that quantum objects are not classical objects; the improper idealist lesson is that they are dependent upon us.
The quantum physicist Art Hobson (2017) and contributors to the French and Saatsi (2020) collection Scientific Realism and the Quantum have defended the realist interpretation of quantum mechanics. Hobson concludes his paper on ‘A realist analysis of six controversial quantum issues’ with the unambiguous assertion: The issues of quantization, field-particle duality, superposition, entanglement, nonlocality, and measurement present no barrier to a consistent and realistic interpretation based on standard quantum physics. At least to this extent, quantum physics is consistent with the scientific view as it has been known since Copernicus: nature exists on its own and science's goal is to understand its operating principles, which are independent of humans. (Hobson, 2019: 346)
The realist tradition in quantum theory is seldom mentioned in constructivist and cultural studies writing. Students are told that, after Bohr, realism is so yesterday. Supposedly, the philosophical world has swung over to observer-dependent idealism—the world announced in 1710 by Bishop Berkeley, Newton's trenchant critic: Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceived or known (Berkeley, 1710/1962: 67)
Critics of Berkeley, and of the idealist tradition, are ignored in cultural studies. Ernst von Glasersfeld, the doyen of educational constructivism and for whom Bishop Berkeley was the first philosopher he read, declared 1710 the greatest year in the history of philosophy.
The need for clarity about realism in science is well illustrated in a recent book, Lightspeed, by John Spence, the Australian physicist now at Arizona State University. The book traces the history, philosophy, sociology and physics of the determination of c, the foundational speed of light constant. In the introduction, Spence writes: The speed of light is one of a very small number of fundamental constants in physics which truly determines the nature of our universe and the form of matter within it. (Spence, 2020: 3)
Idealists and educational constructivists may agree, but realists can only shake their heads in disbelief when reading such a claim in an otherwise excellent book. Spence's assertion is the reverse of the truth. Our physical constants do not determine the nature of the universe and the form of matter within it; it is the latter that determine, or at least allow, the former. Dismay upon reading the above should be the reaction of anyone who has had a decent, HPS-informed, education—something not promoted in cultural studies nor, sadly, in much of science education. 7
Educationally, the important thing is not that students become idealists or realists (this can simply be the outcome of effective indoctrination in which students have to believe what the teacher believes), but that they recognize that philosophy, especially epistemology and ontology, has been central to science (Matthews, 2022) and they develop an interest in appraising the strengths and weaknesses of philosophical positions (Matthews, 1997, 1998).
Reading versus citing Kuhn
It needs to be recognized that Kuhn is more cited than read in both cultural studies and science education. For many, the mere mention of Kuhn is considered to constitute an argument, or to provide evidence, for some philosophical view. Marilyn Fleer, a senior Australian science educator, writes: In recent years, the rational foundations of Western science and the self-perpetuating belief in the scientific method have come into question … The notion of finding a truth for reality is highly questionable. (Fleer, 1999: 119)
No evidence is adduced for these sweeping claims; no argument is provided for why ‘finding a truth for reality is highly questionable’. The one piece of supposed evidence is an unpaginated reference to Kuhn.
The practice of having an unpaginated Kuhn reference substitute for evidence, or argument, is widespread in science education. It is almost the disciplinary norm. Merely putting the name ‘Kuhn’ in brackets after some claim is widely regarded as sufficient warrant for making the claim, no matter how outrageous, self-contradictory or ill-supported it might be.
Cathleen Loving and William Cobern, in a study of science education citations of Kuhn's SSR, found that, to the disgrace of the discipline, only 1.5% (144 out of 9715) provided a page reference. The rest were ‘generic’ references; merely using Kuhn's name was good enough for whatever claim was being advanced (Loving and Cobern, 2000: 194). Needless to say, those citing Kuhn paid no attention to the published arguments that challenge or refute the claim made on his behalf, even when the claims were refuted by Kuhn himself. 8
Sal Restivo, a sociologist and former president of the Social Studies of Science Society (4S), identified this malaise: By the early1980s ‘T.S. Kuhn’ had become a cultural resource more or less detached from T.S. Kuhn, his writings, and the social contexts of his arguments. ‘Kuhn’ has served the interests of left, right, and center across the entire spectrum of intellectual discourse. (Restivo, 1994: 99)
Obscurantism
Obscure, difficult-to-understand writing is
From the foundational 2006 editorial, the CSSE journal has provided a steady diet of difficult-to-read or, less kindly, obscure writing. There are technical terms in both natural and social science. They have specific meanings that serious readers can, with some effort, ascertain. But often enough in education, the supposed technical term is no more than a dressed-up everyday term. In which case, Eduspeak has replaced Plainspeak. Consider the examples in Table 1.
Eduspeak vs Plainspeak.
Eduspeak vs Plainspeak.
Have the plain-speaking translations missed anything worth having? Is whatever might be missing worth the time and effort to work out?
Eduspeak, to put it mildly, is common in cultural studies. Roth and Tobin (2007) conjointly edited the programme's ‘flagship’ anthology: Science, Learning, Identity: Sociocultural and Cultural-Historical Perspectives. In their contribution, they crafted the following two sentences: If, on the other hand, we begin with the ontological assumption of difference that exists in and for itself, that is, with the recognition that A↓A (e.g., because different ink drops attached to different paper particles at a different moment in time), then all sameness and identity is the result of work that not only sets two things, concepts, or processes equal but also deletes the inherent and unavoidable differences that do in fact exist. This assumption is an insidious part of the phallogocentric epistemology undergirding science as the method of decomposing unitary systems into sets of variables, which never can be more than external, one-sided expressions of a superordinate unit. (Roth and Tobin, 2007: 99–100) Such alternative ways of ‘w/ri(gh)ting’ classroom research generally and science education research specifically allows us to institute much more substantive ruptures with the current homo-hegemony of the phallogocentric genres of science education and better come to grips with the multiplicity and plurality of experiences that exist in science classrooms. (Roth and Tobin, 2007: 102)
Does assimilating, or ‘getting on top of’, such text constitute good teacher education? These paragraphs were not written by a beginning student but by the two most published and most awarded researchers in international science education. Both are recipients of the coveted NARST ‘Distinguished Contribution to Science Education Research’ award: Tobin in 2007 and Roth in 2009. Combined, they have a Google citation count of 80,000+. What do these awards and citation counts say about the profession? The above texts suggest a clinical problem with the discipline; the paragraphs certainly say something about how much the discipline needs competent philosophy, alertness to nonsense, and commitment to clear writing. 9 And that just for starters.
Whereas natural science uses theoretical terms to simplify complex matters (many disparate movements can be unified as magnetic phenomena, many infections can be unified as bacterial, and so on), education commonly uses supposed theoretical terms to make simple matters more complex and less understandable. Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) lamented: Pretentious rhetoric, deliberate or compulsive obscurity or vagueness, metaphysical patter studded with irrelevant or misleading allusions to (at best) half-understood scientific or philosophical theories or to famous names, is an old, but at present particularly prevalent, device for concealing poverty of thought or muddle, and sometimes perilously near a confidence trick. (Berlin, 2000: 221)
And Stephen Shapin warned: But the problem to which it is worth drawing attention is the particular species of bad writing that is, so to speak, institutionally intentional. Initiates learn to write badly as a badge of professionalism; they resist using the vernacular because it doesn’t sound smart enough; they infer from obscurity to profundity. Some things are indeed hard to say in ordinary English, but not nearly so many as academics pretend. (Shapin, 2005: 239)
Cultural studies’ break from philosophy is institutionalized: there are no philosophers among the 40 or so members of the Editorial Committee of CSSE. This absence is apparent in published material. For instance, a recent article takes up the important topic of teaching non-epistemic values in science (Gandolfi, 2019). Much illuminating material has been written by philosophers on this subject,
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but none is cited in the article—indeed, no philosophers at all are cited. Nevertheless, the author states that his research is: closely connected with the field of Post/Decolonial Science and grounded on the argument that modern Western Science is in fact a product of exchanges and collaborations between different cultures, and of the circulation of diverse types of knowledge around the world, all promoted by historical and geographical contexts (such as the trade in the Silk Road, and the European colonising and imperialist projects). (Gandolfi, 2019: 560)
Just how the achievements of Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Torricelli, Galileo, Huygens, Boyle, Newton and the other founders of early modern science (Wootton, 2015) are fitted into this picture readers are left to imagine—they certainly are not told. Galileo famously praised Archimedes, whose name, he said, ‘should never be mentioned except in awe’. Galileo thoroughly utilized Euclidean geometry in his mathematization of physics, saying that the ‘book of nature was written in geometric language’. Perhaps this is what is meant by cultural ‘exchange and collaboration’. It is worth saying, but it is hardly novel. As with so much of cultural studies, problems emerge when one looks below the rhetorical, hand-clapping surface.
A fundamental problem with such philosophy-free ‘externalist’ programmes is well exhibited in the Gandolfi quotation. We know that for millennia there have been ‘exchanges and collaborations between different cultures, and of the circulation of diverse types of knowledge around the world’. This throws no light upon, and indeed avoids, the question of why the scientific revolution occurred when and where it did. Of all the cultural exchanges that were going on around Tuscany in the seventeenth century, what did Galileo do that made his contribution to the exchange so dramatic and so epistemologically progressive (Matthews, 2023, chapter 3)? This is a question that all science students should be encouraged to answer. In cultural studies, the question is passed over: a case of ‘nothing to be seen here’, so to speak.
For all the millennia of trade on the Silk Road, it was not until the sixteenth-century Jesuit mission of Fr Matteo Ricci to Peking that modern astronomy and science began appearing in China, and this against the strident opposition of local mandarins. Education is enhanced if students learn the details of this debate. Dismissing it as an ‘imperialist project’ advances nothing, least of all good education (Matthews, 2019a, chapter 6). In the past 50 years, feng shui ‘knowledge’ has migrated out of China and settled, with significant local impact, throughout the world. If teachers have some philosophical acumen, this social reality can serve a deep educational purpose (Matthews, 2019a).
Cultural relativism is the foundation of the cultural studies programme; it is the ticket price for entry and for publication. The miserable consequences of cultural relativism are well known in areas such as modern slavery, the genital mutilation of women, the practice of sati, witch burning in New Guinea and many regions of Africa, continuing caste-based discrimination and violence in India, the promotion of voodoo medicine to deal with AIDS, COVID-19, and destructive environmental practices.
Meera Nanda, in many writings, has railed against the impact of ‘progressive’ philosophy and misplaced ‘culturally sensitive’ education in modernizing ‘third world’ countries. She fears ‘the growth of local tyrannies, each justifying itself by culturally authentic standards’ and warns that ‘the postmodern elements of the constructivist science critique strengthen the premodern elements of postcolonial societies’ (Nanda, 1998: 289).
Twenty years later, Christine McCarthy, a philosopher, elaborated on this: Respect for persons does not entail respect for the belief-systems of those persons. Respect for persons entails respect for the capacity of those persons to engage in the fundamentally human activities, among which is the search for true belief. Respect for persons thus entails commitment to the support of each person in their quest for true belief; this means, in general, a commitment to the equal distribution of the social good of education. It means respectful, and mutual, critiques of one another's belief-systems, leading to mutual thought and the self-critique that is essential to the individual's growth in cognition and in all other capacities. It is also the sine qua non for social/cultural improvement, ethical, doxastic, and material. (McCarthy, 2018: 132)
Conclusion
The cultural studies programme acknowledges and deals with many of the serious curricular, pedagogical and policy questions that confront science education. Think of social justice concerns, indigenous education, justification of inquiry teaching, disciplinary versus integrated curricula, liberal versus technical objectives, value commitments and indoctrination, the legitimate boundaries of religion, politics, gender and culture in science curricula and classrooms, and much else. Informed considerations from both the philosophy of education and the history and philosophy of science are required when dealing with these issues. But cultural studies as a programme has largely ignored these disciplines. At best, such knowledge is made up ‘on the run’. 11 Philosophy-free analysis does not advance solutions; it does not enlighten. Rather, it confuses and misdirects educational efforts.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Michael R Matthews is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. He was Foundation Professor of Science Education at the University of Auckland. He has degrees in geology, psychology, philosophy, education and HPS. He has published extensively in HPS and science education, and in the philosophy of education.