I just finished listening to a podcast lecture about Francis Bacon and his ideas on philosophy of science in the Renaissance. His distinction on the importance of inductive reasoning as the foundation of science as opposed to the concept of deductive reasoning that was so critical to the Scholastic epistemology got me thinking about how we teach physics and what part of physics education might be best for lecture or for lab. In the lecture part of my class, we use a deductive method: students are given facts and then asked to apply those general rules like Newton’s laws to specific situations and use that deductive reasoning to gain insight of specific situations. This is someone analogous to Medieval natural philosophy: in medieval natural philosophy the axioms and conclusions of figures such as Aristotle or taken as being axiomatically true and only deductive reasoning was required to apply those fundamental Universal Concepts to particular situations.
Now, of course, the concepts that I’m teaching in my physics class, such as Newtonian mechanics and the like, are grounded in inductive approaches hypotheses and experimental verification but they’re presented to my students as being true axioms that they have to apply deductively. However, it’s clearly important for students scientific education that they also become familiar and adept at the inductive reasoning that is truly the philosophical underpinning of modern science. Where should students get this understanding, and this experience?
My thought after listening to the series of lectures, was that perhaps this is what the lab is fundamentally for in a physics class: the lab provides an excellent environment for students to engage in these inductive processes of model building making predictions testing predictions falsifying claim these types of skills. Now, we already do a lot of this in the 131 labs that Chris Ertl has been developing. However, I feel that this insight into the contrast between inductive and deductive approaches provides a new lens through which we can look at the different types of instruction that occur in a lecture and lab portions of a Physics course. Moreover, it gives us an opportunity to actually talk about these differences in logical approaches with our students and do some of that, what I consider to be critically important, instruction into the fundamental philosophy of science.
From my collaborations with colleagues in the integrated introductory life science Mutual mentoring group one thing that became quickly apparent, was that throughout introductory biology lab introductory physics lab and introductory chemistry lab no one was explicitly teaching the scientific method. Nor, were they teaching some of the fundamentals of the philosophy of science. In contrast, this framework of thinking about lecture as essentially deductive instruction and lab as inductive instruction provides an excellent basis from which to actually begin talking about these important ideas regarding the philosophy of science. It makes that transition natural. I’m curious, as I begin to develop labs for our first semester majors for fall 2024, to think about this framework. Moreover, I would love to talk about this with somebody at the upcoming American Association of physics teachers meeting in Boston this summer to get additional insights. Particularly, from those folks who have spent careers thinking about effective methods for Laboratory instruction.
In addition to this particular new perspective on what could potentially be the fundamental logical underpinnings differentiating lecture versus lab instruction, this entire experience has also added to my growing appreciation of the importance for all teachers to read widely. Only by reading across disciplines do we get these new ideas and new perspectives of ways to approach and think about are disciplinary based instruction. Moreover, I think that those of us who are teaching faculty are in a unique position to this trans-disciplinary approach. We are not subject to the “publish or perish” pressures that so many of our tenured colleagues are subject to. We often have the freedom to read and think a little more broadly within our official positions. In short, it’s another experience in intellectual humility that other disciplines, in this case the history of philosophy, can provide insights that inform science instruction.