5.2 Reconceptualizing the Foundations of Knowledge
5.2.1 What is Knowledge
Leplat (1990) claimed that knowledge, in essence, is the justified skill that can be used to solve a problem. Some scholars argue that our knowledge is more a matter of being socially constructed than a fact passively waiting to be unearthed (Pressley, 2005). On this view, the causal, contextual and analytical findings of science are thus socially constructed judgement calls in which knowledge contains an element of subjectivity. The nature of knowledge, particularly empirically-driven scientific knowledge, “represents a progression towards truths about the natural world” (Hewson, 1992, p.5). Many contemporary so-called “social epistemologists” accept that scientific knowledge is socially constructed in terms of knowledge production, discovery, and creation because an “enormous portion of our truth [knowledge] seeking is either directly or indirectly social” (Goldman, 1999, p.4). In this sense, social epistemology is the study of social relations, interests, and the institutional guardianship of all knowledge or information (Driver et al., 2000; Pressley, 2005). It is believed that these perspectives have arisen from a system of ideas critiqued during the postmodern movement which question the ‘objectivity’, ‘authority’, ‘intelligibility’ and ‘neutrality’ of knowledge claimed by traditional empiricist epistemology. Instead, the critiques of postmodern epistemology consider ‘context and power’ to be imperatives to seeing through to the alleged truths which are in turn called knowledge (Pressley, 2005; Hong, 2006). Knowledge, that is to say, “ceases to become an end in itself” (Lankshear et al., 2000, p.22). The word ‘science’ is derived from the Latin ‘scientia’, meaning ‘knowledge’. To discover knowledge empirically, the use of verificatory organizing principles which allow hypotheses about what is the case to be tested sufficiently to make predictions about the world in which we live, thus presumably advancing the body of human knowledge (Wilson, 1998; Buckeridge, 2008). Much of what engineers do is simply to find ways of applying the so-called ‘truths’ of science (Buckeridge, 2008). Bronowski has it summarized adequately,
Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them. Those who think science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not (Bronowski, 1972, p. 63-64).
5.2.2 Is Knowledge Value-Free?
Both knowledge and technology, so the conventional argument goes, are value-free in the sense that neither of them is good nor bad in itself; it is how people use knowledge and technology which determines its moral status. This point is usually put euphemistically when it is said, ‘Guns don’t kill people-people kill people.’ However, the paradox of presuming objectivity and value neutrality via a “view from nowhere”, due to the fact that “objectivity is both underrated and overrated”, as Nagel (1986, p.5) says in his book The View from Nowhere, obscures who decides what knowledge is and by which methodologies (Kasman, 2003). The assertion of the neutrality and autonomy of scientific knowledge from values is expressed as having an independence from the subjective preferences of the investigator, such as personal, socio-cultural and religious values which can influence what we ‘see’, because of what we want to see. Generally scientific practice does not make explicit these normative constraints (Longino, 1983; Kasman, 2003). This being so, thinkers of the contemporary ‘enlightened science’ persist in presenting a significant prejudice of their own. What we find is that science is still largely taught conceptually as if it were objectively proved by test and thus value free. This is why theories are often taught as if they were facts (Cross & Price, 1996). Scientific practice or the applications of science and technique are still limited to the ‘use’ and ‘validation’ of knowledge. Such a limited perspective restricts students from gaining insight into the construction of scientific knowledge and technology, a perspective, by the way, which is of paramount importance (Driver et al., 2000). It is to be conceded that there is a truth in this way of looking at the matter, but its covert dependence on the epistemology of power paradigm betrays the major limiting factor that what is said it is only a part of the epistemic equity narrative, and thus fails to represent the deeper truth we need to hear. Despite much intellectual propaganda designed to instil the pedagogy of power view, there is an epistemological dimension to the problem that contradicts the naïve view presented by the conventional wisdom of empiricism. Such assessments could do justice to either of the equity concerns mentioned above. When a community is displaced and its families lose everything, it is clear, as we observed in the previous chapter, that it is very difficult to rebuild the lives of those who have little or nothing.
The time has come to approach these epistemological issues more determinately. Let me turn directly to this task by enlarging the scope of the argument to include more than the empiricist rubric and rhetoric of a value-neutral/objective science. After all, technology is essentially applied knowledge; so let us endeavor first to get a better sense of the relationship between knowledge and technology before passing a final judgment on the debate about the alleged ‘value-neutrality’ of science.
5.2.3 The Value-Ladenness of Educational Epistemology
Science is a social and evolutionary process of knowledge construction that should involve all stakeholders in the system design of proposals, justifications, evaluations, and epistemic legitimizations (Taylor, 1996; Kelly, 2008). Each of the aforementioned elements has been considered by some philosophers as the primary epistemological processes of science. The study of science is a social activity and scientific knowledge is ultimately the product of a community, in large part, an academic community. An assertion of knowledge does not become public scientific knowledge until it has been tested and justified through the various institutions of science. This social production of scientific knowledge consists of factors beyond those internal to science. These include factors such as the scientists’ social commitments, their personal values, cultural influences and technological capabilities in their society at a particular time (Woolgar, 1988). Discursive practices also play a central role in the social construction of scientific knowledge. It establishes both moral judgments and knowledge claims (Driver et al., 2000). The discursive practices of social knowledge are not just confined in technological and economic aspects, but manifest also in social, cultural, psychological and moral aspects. Therefore, it is important to evolve social/moral policy from a far more comprehensive and holistic social context, thereby truly representing the interests of those most affected by social development projects (Cernea, 1995a)
Not only is knowledge ‘theory-laden’ through observation and discursive practice (Quine & Ullian, 1978; Taylor, 1996; Laura et al., 2008), but it is the value-ladenness of knowledge which exerts the greatest influence on the institution of education and the social structures and disciplines that arise out of and support it. To elaborate this argument, let us first consider that whatever else education may be, it at least involves the transmission of knowledge. Before proceeding further, tt will be convenient to distinguish between the verb ‘to know’ and the verb ‘to understand’. One of the most common uses of the infinitive refers to our capacity to remember what we have been taught, in the sense of ‘knowing the facts’. For example, someone may have been taught and know quantitatively how high Mt. Everest is, and thus even be able to describe this accurately in meters. If, however, knowing this, one then decided to climb this astonishing mountain, but is still wearing his shorts, dress, and shoes and has not packed a lunch, the person clearly does not understand what they know. Thus, the two concepts are not coterminous in extension (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010). This being so, to ‘understand’ science, in the required sense, means that one knows “not only what a phenomenon is, but also how it relates to other events, why it is important, and how this particular view of the world came to be” (Driver et al., 2000, p.297). Such questions are “fundamentally epistemological and would provide an opportunity to redress the imbalance” (Monk & Osborne, 1997, p.414). This imbalance is the result of the over-emphasis within school science on the facts which are inculcated as factual transmissions, rather than upon understanding their deeper meaning and connections with each other and the more comprehensive paradigm within which their logical relationship become alive (Monk & Osborne, 1997). Only knowing any one of these participatory aspects in isolation, therefore, misses the point. There are many things which could be said about the problem of ‘knowing’ in our schools. One of these things is that students — even university students — do not ordinarily know and understand what they know. One of the most important of these things concerns the extent to which knowledge is value-laden (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010).To know the facts is clearly not enough. The question of ‘how we know’ is more important in science learning and part of the justification for our ontological commitments (Monk & Osborne, 1997). There are common grounds for various categories of contemporary knowledge formulated by western institutions of education. One is the value which both motivates and defines knowledge, and another is the value postmodernists place upon discourses of knowledge as a form of power (Monk & Osborne, 1997; Bruguier, 2008). It is the “power/ knowledge nexus”, along with the “processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge” (Bruguier, 2008, p.56). According to the view to be advanced here, knowledge enshrines the values which prompt and motivate its discovery. “To be known is to be created to be known,” as knowledge is motivated by our insatiable appetite for power, the search for knowledge recapitulates the preoccupation with power which holds our culture captive. What we have in western culture come to accept as knowledge, in other words, is determined presuppositionally by whether what is known provides some power advantage to the knower (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010; Bruguier, 2008). In other words, “knowledge is tied both to the institutionalization of particular regimes of truth and to the involvement of these processes with real life issues of dominance and exploitation, with the reproduction of particular structures of inequality, or alternatively the substitution of those structures by other ones” (Narotzky, 2005, p.40). Truths under this context are thus in the sense of being socially constructed merely things we have, most of us, agreed to call true by virtue of the role they play in the overall system of belief (Glenn, 2004). Truths “come from a whole process of human observation, self-evidence, testimony, hypotheses, confirmation and refutation, explanation/interpretation” (Quine & Ullian, 1978). All human experiences which contribute to the conceptualisation of knowledge are in one sense also moral experiences because it is the medium of ordinary practices in everyday life (Kleinman, 1998). Epistemology, is itself a moral undertaking and therefore highly value-laden (Glenn, 2004). Nietzsche claims that the most significant event is the creation of ethical values (ibid) and epistemology is the nexus of ethical concern, as a logical positivist made beloved by Hume’s famous is-ought distinction has surmised (Glaeser, 2003).
The sociology of science has shown repeatedly, that if science and technology are socially constructed knowledge, rather than empirical givens, then it must be conceded that epistemology is in practice always contingent on some system of or grounding in values (Glaeser, 2003; Oliver-Smith, 2010). Research into science, technology and society encourages investigations in the field of both environmental sustainability education and in civics education (Girault & Lhoste, 2010). The processes involved particularly imply “the development of values and skillfulness relative to decision-making concerning the use of science and technology with regards to a certain quality of society” (Sauvé, 1997; quoted in Girault & Lhoste, 2010, p.32). Fuller (1997), for instance, has argued that “most of what non-scientists need to know in order to make informed public judgments about science fall under the rubric of history, philosophy, and sociology of science, rather than the technical content of scientific subjects” (Driver et al., 2000, p.290). This being so, it is clear that rhetoric within contemporary science education courses, including environmental education, should emphasize “the processes of science” as evolving and critically dynamic (Driver et al., 2000). However, in China, science and environmental education still heavily focus on the technical facts and knowledge aspects of science, rather than the “processes of science”. For example, in China 70-80 percent of the science or applied science major courses have no grounding in the moral values process aspects of the enterprise associated with implementation and deployment of scientific technology, compare to the United States’ 30 percent (Martinson, 1993). It is also salutary to remind ourselves that in China the majority of students have to make a decision in high school whether they will study in the field of science or languages and arts. Depending on their decision they will be assigned to different classes, such that those who have chosen the path of science will have no opportunity to consider the relevance of the moral processes which humanize science. The focus for science students is on the science subjects such as physics, biology and chemistry, while philosophical and sociological subjects such as geography, politics and history will be restricted to arts, and social science students. The students who choose science will cease to be provided non-science courses as mentioned above and vice versa. The point of the liberal arts sector of the Committee is its commitment not just to knowing the ideas of science educators, but to developing those ideas as a way of comprehending their value and purpose (Duschl, 2008). On this view, social epistemologists (Fuller, 1997), rhetoricians (Taylor, 1996), and science communicators (Gregory & Miller, 1998), argue for figuring science as a dynamic process with a social dimension, and in which discursive practice is essential to the process of science (Driver et al., 2000).