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Designing Intelligent Knowledge: Epistemological Faith and the Democratization of Science

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 June 2007, 03:00 CDT

By Pierce, Clayton

ABSTRACT.

In this essay, Clayton Pierce examines the epistemological standpoints of Intelligent Design (ID) and evolutionary science education, focusing specifically on the pedagogical question of how ID and modern science-based education fail to promote democratic relations in how students learn, think, and associate with science and technology in society. Pierce explores the debate in education between ID and traditional science education that centers on the epistemological assumptions embodied in the modern scientific model. Turning to Bruno Latour's recent work in the field of science studies, Pierce develops his argument that both expressions of knowledge fail to deliver an adequate theoretical and practical democratic framework for teaching and learning about knowledge systems and technologies in their social, political, and cultural environments.

BRADY, I'll tell you what he's trying to do! He wants to destroy everybody's belief in the Bible, and in God.

DRUMMOND: You know that's not true. I'm trying to stop you bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States! And you know it!

BRADY: How dare you attack the Bible?

DRUMMOND: The Bible is a book. A good book. But it's not the only book.1

In Inherit the Wind, their theatrical rendition of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee brilliantly capture the drama behind an old and controversial pedagogical debate: whether schools should teach creationism versus evolution as the explanation for life's origins. The drama of Inherit the Wind unfolds through two bold protagonists who square off in a titanic clash of faith versus reason. Mr. Brady, a lifelong politician and religious zealot, enacts the role of expert interpreter of the Bible, someone from America's heartland who speaks on behalf of God and the good folk of the fictitious southern town Hillsboro. Mr. Drummond, Brady's counterpart, is a famous trial lawyer from Chicago summoned to defend a beleaguered school teacher who has been imprisoned for teaching Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in his classroom. Brady, who shares the fundamentalist values of the townspeople, is emboldened by their widespread admiration in his effort to protect the right to teach God instead of the genealogy of apes. Drummond's character, on the other hand, is a champion of rational thought who sees his mission as one imbued with the spirit of reason; his character's struggle is one to uphold the Enlightenment ideals that have shaped the United State's proud progress from colony to industrial giant. Indeed, the philosophical underpinning of the debate in Inherit the Wind is whether scientific or religious explanations should be the ultimate source for knowledge claims pertaining to life's beginnings. Put another way, the question at stake is which epistemological standpoint is best suited to answer such a weighty pedagogical question regarding the origins of life? Although the curtain has fallen on the last act of Inherit the Wind, in the contemporary educational system new actors have entered the stage to perform the roles of Brady and Drummond. While the script is new, much of the content remains the same.

As we enter the twenty-first century, this debate has surfaced once again with a reinvigorated political and historical concreteness. As is clear from the intelligent design (DD) movement's most recent victory in Kansas, where the state school board successfully lobbied for legislation that allows the teaching of DD in public school curricula, the debate over whether to teach creationism or evolutionary science is alive and well.2 Indeed, ID currently enjoys political support from the author of the most sweeping educational policy (the No Child Left Behind Act) in this country's history, George W. Bush, who has asserted that "Both sides ought to be properly taught...so people can understand what the debate is about," and further that "part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought.... You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."3 More recently, the ruling of Judge John E. Jones who, following a 1987 Supreme Court decision against teaching creationism as science, legally struck down an attempt to add ID to Dover, Pennsylvania's public school science curriculum. This setback for the ID movement no doubt will be met with more legal and political battles in the near future.

Yet, the debate embodied in the characters of Inherit the Wind, as well as the debate today between ID and evolutionary education (although the current discourse obfuscates this point), perpetuates nondemocratic models of knowledge production through the institution of schooling. The following examination of these competing epistemological standpoints flushes out what I believe is the most salient pedagogical question lying beneath the surface of this educational issue: How does ID- and evolutionary science-based education fail to promote democratic relations in how students learn and live with science and technology in society? My analysis takes this question as a point of departure for exploring the debate over DD and evolutionary education that centers around the epistemological assumptions embedded in the modern scientific model. Through a dialectical analysis, I argue that both expressions of knowledge fail to deliver what is desperately needed in educational theory and practice today: ways in which to teach and learn about knowledge systems and technologies in their social and cultural contexts - in other words, an approach that links the practice of democracy to our scientific and technological imprints on the world. At the level of epistemology, democratic practices in education can be understood as the recognition of science and technology as context-driven expressions of culture and society. Broadening democratic practices in education, as I argue subsequently, means that democracy should no longer be thought of and taught in traditional terms. Instead, the construction of a democratic education should include the social agency of both natural objects and those produced by science, technologies that shape social life, and the agency of scientists, policy makers, social actors within industry, and the media.

In essence, my goal is to accentuate that the obvious focus in the ID and evolutionary science debate, while important in some respects, misses the pedagogical mark. While each knowledge position does indeed produce important understandings that elucidate the social and cultural Ufe of science, both advance epistemic models that deny the building of new relations between students and science and technology in society. Thus, in the critique ID levels at traditional science-based education, a valid point of contention exists - but it is not the one that ED theorists articulate, nor is it one that they would like to advance. Advocates of evolutionary education, on the other hand, also have many valid critiques of ID, yet their model of knowledge production promotes an undemocratic manifestation of science and technology along with less-than- optimal epistemological positions that seemingly separate both from the political sphere.4

These contradictions embedded within each position illuminate another important dimension of ID and evolutionary epistemological models: their veiled political content. Both ID and evolutionary science frameworks, as modes of knowledge production, deny their political character and, in fact, view the ostensible apolitical aspect of their respective models as virtuous. Traditional science education inherits this legacy from the positivist tradition, while the ID movement is imbued with a religious fundamentalism that is seeking to reaffirm a theism: society through appropriating the positivist model of science. But if nothing else is true of either's position, it is certainly an observable and verifiable fact that ID and evolutionary science education both draw their truth claims from a particular epistemological model and are both complicit in political projects that define and shape the contemporary historical moment in the United States.

On the one hand, contemporary expressions of science and technology are political in the sense that they are articulated through a context of convergence with scientific and political frames. The highly technological mode of production of the contemporary moment is manifested, for example, through biomedical, information and communication, pharmaceutical, and defense industries that constantly require new science and technology for their advancement. To put it another way, science and technology occur in a historical context that shapes their expression before science and technology even take place. Indeed, as Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons argue,

Pre-existing contexts, and deep social substructures, influence science-before-the-event, just as its future impacts anticipate science-after-the-event. The setting of priorities and the patterns of funding are not self-evident or self-referential; rather they are the r\esult of complex negotiations in a variety of contexts, where expectations and vested interests, unproven promises and mere potentials play a role.5

I will identify how the sociopolitical milieu shapes and influences science and technology by locating in both ID and traditional science-based education the epistemological norm that facilitates both an antidemocratic ideal and the false illusion of a value-free objectivity. The educational challenge elucidated in my analysis will be to begin to move toward teaching and learning democratic agency within knowledge frameworks and technologies that increasingly shape the way we live and relate in a society that relies more and more not only on scientific and technological products but also on explanations and knowledge of their uses and consequences. Both ID and science education have faith in their respective modes of knowledge production, yet neither displays a strong faith in the democratization of knowledge production through schooling.

From the perspective of ID, science in general and specifically the way it is taught are rightly accused of having a strong sociopolitical character. Though ID proponents want to impose a narrow vision of human ontology onto knowledge production, they nevertheless draw science into the political fray - something science, left to its own accord, resists. This is a significant feat given the fact that, because of all the gains modern science and technology have made for human civilization, the oppressive and damaging effects of these very same gains are not put to a democratic choice.6

By examining the epistemological standpoints of ID and evolutionary science, I will uncover the camouflaged antidemocratic content that determines the form of both. In contrast to these paradigms, I will begin in my conclusion to articulate an epistemological model that starts with the social and political dimensions of science and technology and then moves to suggest a new form of science education that promotes the democratization of science and technology. Developing such a model, I maintain, will require broadening the current definition of critical thinking to include a new normative component that recognizes science and technology as having social and political agency.

LOCATING THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Underpinning ID's educational project is an effort to produce an alternative account of modern Western science's foremost ontological explanation for human variation. In order to unearth the components of ID's alternative science, I will examine ID's philosophy of science from both an epistemological and ontological standpoint. In this section, I first delineate ID's epistemological framework - in other words, how knowledge claims are generated from LD's theory of science. From this epistemological standpoint, the assumed ontological substratum of ID's position reflects a feature that requires knowledge to depend on what we hold to be the ultimate structure of being. For educational theory, an examination of ID's philosophy of science demonstrates how any theory of science finds its expression in culture and society, ultimately illuminating the sociopolitical quality that, though veiled, defines science and technology and, most importantly, how it is mediated through education.

Leading proponents of ID want, from the beginning, to be clear that their project is not the development of a theologically based science. Indeed, ID theorists argue that ID is "a scientific research program that investigates the effects of intelligent causes"; more precisely, they claim that "intelligent design studies the effects of intelligent causes and not intelligent causes per se. Intelligent design does not try to get into the head of a designing intelligence; rather, it looks at what a designing intelligence does and draws inferences from there."7 Here, ID theorists attempt to lay the groundwork for establishing ID's epistemological claim as an alternative to modern Western science. They begin with a bold challenge to what they perceive as the "orthodox" stranglehold Darwinist evolution theorists have on pedagogical explanations of the life processes of the universe. A large part of ID's philosophy of science, then, takes as its starting point a critique and reinterpretation of modern Western science's position that privileges secular reason as the ultimate tribunal for truth. The dominant Enlightenment tenet that channels understanding of the natural world through the human faculty of reason as opposed to traditional or religious explanations, therefore, does not, from the perspective of ID theorists, emancipate individuals from their "inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another."8 On the contrary, for LD theorists, it is from this central Enlightenment principle that the tyranny of evolutionary theory as the only ontological explanation for life has sprung. Yet, ID theoreticians, as indicated previously, are careful not to break from the mold of the modern scientific processes of inquiry. Instead, ID theorists maintain that modern science is given a stronger expression through their framework, which turns the principles of modern Western science against its own reified claims:

Exposing Darwinism to possible falsification would not imply support for any other theory, certainly not any pseudoscientific theory based upon religious dogma. Accepting Popper's challenge is simply to take the first step towards understanding: the recognition of ignorance. Falsification is not a defeat of science, but a liberation. It removes the dead weight of prejudice, and thereby frees us to look for the truth.'

By evoking the specter of Karl Popper, ID theorists are, in effect, arguing that their version of scientific inquiry actually adheres more rigorously to the postulates set out in the positivist framework of the famed Vienna Circle.10 In building their case ID theorists have constructed and rely on a method of knowledge inquiry termed "design inference" that strictly follows the standards of modern science. Strong notions of objectivity, value-free inquiry, and subjection to rigorous refutation are indeed present in the concept of design inference as ID theorists have framed it. As an epistemological category, design inference serves as the spearhead of ID's alternative philosophy of science and, as such, must be examined as ID's central concept for knowledge-generating claims.

In general terms, design inference translates into a search for a pattern of design at the ontological level of phenomena. In order to build a theory of science that aims to bring to the foreground how phenomena come to be, ID theorists such as Bruce Gordon have developed an epistemological framework that focuses on challenging evolutionary explanations by offering a rigorous mathematical theory of intelligent pattern recognition that is set within natural phenomena:

design theory can generate a robust research program capable of supplementing the techniques of neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and self-organizational complexity theory in a rigorous and significant way. By so doing, it offers the possibility of solutions to various difficulties that so far have proven intractable to these other approaches."

ID's simultaneous challenge to evolutionary models of science and edification of an epistemological category that embodies the tenets of positivist methodology is an important and revealing point on which to meditate. That is, design inference as an epistemological notion has programmed within its expression an inherent opposition to evolutionary or any other open-ended exploration of the life processes in the universe. Thus, design inference, as an epistemology, retains a builtin normative claim that guides the process of knowledge discovery for ID theorists and their science. By holding the express intent of detecting a design pattern within phenomena, design inference reveals that its epistemological model contains within it the hidden attribute of ontological certainty - that is, the mark of a designer. This epistemological feature causes the philosophical walls to cave in on ID's claim to open and value- free knowledge inquiry.

An examination of ID's central epistemological notion makes the pedagogical stakes in this debate clear. ID's indictment of neo- Darwinist models of science supposedly being taught with an iron fist, in this analysis, is replaced by an old form of dogma that has built into its epistemological framework a pedagogical component that promotes certainty as opposed to openness and democratic sensibilities. In other words ID's epistemology focuses on searching for the fingerprints of a designer as opposed to searching for a democratic science and technology. The political interest behind the drive to develop an alternative science that takes its methodological cue from design inference is not invested in a project for the restructuring of science and technology in a democratic way - this much is clear.12 Rather, the intellectual energy of this movement is invested in developing a science that can house God. ID's critique of modern Western science reveals a strong tendency toward a hegemonic method of knowledge inquiry - a tendency that is evident not in their claims but in their mimicking of the positivist attribute in their science. ID's philosophy of science ultimately ends up replacing one deity with another.

Both ID and, as we will see in my subsequent analysis, traditional science education, equally deny any political concreteness to the ways in which dominant science models function in the production of knowledge in education. That is, through the convergence of science with technology, and of high-tech industries with educational institutions, traditional science has failed to reflect critically upon itself in the kind of meaningful and sustained manner that such consequences demand. Th\is conflating of science and technology, corporate interests and educational institutions, produces a dramatic set of consequences for education, putting the achievement of a democratic society through education at risk.13 The dominant pedagogical model of science used in classrooms represents an epistemological framework insensitive to democratic sensibilities, in a time when the projects of science and technology answer only to elites.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL MODELS OF TRADITIONAL SCIENCE

Unearthing the antidemocratic quality of contemporary science can begin with assessing and examining the process of knowledge production that is promoted by the dominant scientific community. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS), as an institutional authority on science and as a body that strongly influences and shapes educational policies for teaching science, is an important place to look for an official position on what science's role should be with respect to education and society. The NAS has been very active in combating the ID movement's position on evolution over the last ten years, producing a series of publications for educators and policy makers to guide the teaching of evolutionary science.14 Therefore, the NAS's framing of an offensive against DD as a science is a clear indication of the model of science they promote.

At the most fundamental level, the NAS's principal critique of ID is that it blurs scientific method with religious and subjective values. In their 1999 publication Science and Cieationism, the NAS displays the deficiency of ID as a scientific vehicle for truth claims while, at the same time, celebrating the triumphs of traditional science as proof that it is a superior way of understanding the natural world:

The detailed knowledge required to sustain our civilization could only have been derived through scientific investigation. The arguments of creationists are not driven by evidence that can be observed in the natural world. Special creation or supernatural intervention is not subjectable to meaningful tests, which require predicting plausible results and the checking of these results through observation and experimentation. Indeed claims of "special creation" reverse the scientific process. The explanation is seen as unalterable, and evidence is sought only to support a particular conclusion by whatever means possible.15

In this critique of ID as a science, the NAS also reveals its definition of what a valid expression of science ought to be. The NAS perspective rests on the epistemological foundation that science education, as a mode of knowledge production, must focus on rendering knowledge of the natural world. Indeed, the stringent separation of fact from value, the emphasis on methodological transparency, the subjection of claims to falsifiability, and the assertion of methodological rigor constitute the positivist position that is embodied in the NAS and that serves as the most formidable critique against ID as a form of science. Yet, while this critique certainly reveals the "emperor's clothes" strategy of the ID movement, it also advances antidemocratic content in science education by teaching that there is a false separation between science, on the one hand, and society and culture, on the other. More specifically, the epistemological framework of modern science perpetuates a gaze and fixation on the asocial, or purely natural, object as a source of knowledge, reestablishing through science education a sharp distinction between what is social - and thus cultural and political - and what is not.

The objectification of nature taught through the epistemological mode of modern science, as Bruno Latour has argued throughout his work on science and technology, perpetuates a relation with the natural world that denies the sociality of objects and their role in the discourse and practice of science:

Yet the human, as we now understand, cannot be grasped and saved unless that other pan of itself, the share of things, is restored to it. So long as humanism is constructed through contrast with the object that has been abandoned to epistemology, neither the human nor the nonhuman can be understood.16

As Latour has deftly pointed out, the object of modern science's gaze has ceased to be a silent feature in the social and political terrain. According to him, "networks" of science and technology create both "human" and "nonhuman" agents in a collective that is mediated through political discourse and practice, on the one hand, and scientific discourse and practice, on the other, with each protected through its exclusion of the other.

Shaping Latour's work is what has come to be known as actor network theory (ANT), a perspective co-developed with fellow sociologists of science John Law and Michel Gallon. They maintain that "the origin of this approach can be found in the need for a new social theory adjusted to science and technology studies."17 One of the central contentions driving ANT for Latour, Law, and Gallon, thus, is the need to develop a social theory that can trace and give more accurate accounts of the associations between objects, humans, and political arrangements:

ANT claims that we should simply not believe the questions of the connections among heterogeneous actors to be closed, that what is usually meant by "social" has probably to do with the reassembling of new types of actors. ANT states that if we wish to be a bit more realistic about social ties than "reasonable" sociologists, then we have to accept that the continuity of any course of action will rarely consist of human-to-human connections {for which the basic social skills would be enough anyway) or of object-object connections, but will probably zigzag from one to the other."

The formulation of a sociology of science and technology, for Latour, requires an epistemological rethinking of how both political philosophy and philosophy of science have traditionally treated the problems of reality, certainty, truth, and political agency. As the nexus of focus for these two modern fields, each discourse has seemingly separately perpetuated modes of inquiry and political organizations that obscure the reality that they actually codetermine each other.

The most important aspect of Latour's work for us here is his examination of the epistemological disconnect that is manifest between two perspectives on knowledge production in society: sociopolitical theory and scientific theory. The sociopolitical concentrates on the affairs of the state and its citizens while science deals exclusively with the objects in its self-designated domain - thus both realms miss the articulation and mutual influence of science, objects, and the natural world. This is another important insight that Latour develops in his critique of modern science: that the dual dichotomies erected between human and nonhuman culture produce a false separation between nature and object and human activity. The first dichotomy is constituted through the work of "purification," which "creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other." The second dichotomy is constructed through "translation" (or mediation), which "creates mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture."19 The concepts of translation and purification are important to draw out here, as they reveal how humans and science coproduce social experiences.

Translation and purification represent for Latour how, epistemologically, modem science simultaneously adopts an ontological distinction between objects and humans while proliferating hybrid network relations made up of culture, nature, technology, and the specialized discourse that is produced from these encounters. Purification is the practice of sharply distinguishing objects in the world, asocial in nature, from the observer who is situated within the social and cultural world. The practice of purification also takes place above the horizontal line that separates it from translation (or mediation). In the zone beneath, the work of translation is exhibited through hybrid networks constituted of both human agents and "nonhuman" actors; these are involved in a process of mutual agency that codetermines social environments and ways of communicating through networks of standardized practices. The laboratory, as a producer of hybrid networks, exemplifies this exchange between humans and nonhumans: "we live in communities whose social bond comes from objects fabricated in laboratories; ideas have been replaced by practices, apodeictic reasoning by controlled doxa, and universal agreement by groups of colleagues."20 The contradictions programmed into this process perpetuate an antidemocratic relation between science and society that stems from the modern epistemological framework of science: we approach science with a lens that was forged through the understanding of the natural world as an other, but we can only do science in society if the other becomes a part of the culture of science. Once nature or the object has become part of science, it gains agency and determinative qualities in culture - that is, objects are not voiceless since they help determine how science explains and interprets the world. So long as this aspect of modern science is misrecognized, science education will continue to utilize an antidemocratic epistemological modality.

From the perspective of our discussion on science education, the process embedded in the modern scientific and political projects elucidates the manner in which epistemic frameworks that shape how we teach and learn about science and society fail to forge democratic relations with science and technology and instead build barriers between the two. Of course, the tension between the development of a democratic society and advances in science and technology has a distinct history that is worth brie\fly visiting at this point. Locating an early peak in the crisis between science and technology and efforts to establish a democratic society requires us to look to the World War II period. In a context where science and technology had helped propel the Nazi project of social domination, a growing anxiety and sense of terror was tangible among contemporary scientists and social theorists due to the utter corruption of what some saw as the inherently "democratic ethos" of science. As historian of science David Hollinger points out, the rapidly changing relation between democracy and science that had accelerated during the 1930s and 1940s initiated a debate over not only the ethical concerns brought about by new industrial and military science and technology, but also over the sharp divergence from what some scientists saw as the internal democratic ethos of science.

Hollinger pinpoints an early and important moment in the debate that emerged from within the scientific community as well as the burgeoning field of the sociology of science during the WWII period. He identifies Robert Merton's essay "A Note on Democracy and Science" as a significant and neglected articulation of the growing concern among some sociologists and scientists who recognized how the intrinsic democratic values that they associated with science were being distorted against the backdrop of fascist and totalitarian states.21 Merton argued that, as opposed to fascistic and totalitarian expressions of science, science's more true democratic form resides in the four norms that comprise what he called the democratic ethos of science: "universalism,""disinterestedness,""communism," and "organized skepticism." For Hollinger, these four norms

depict[ed| science in terms of an interlocking set of specific, institutional imperatives, [that] endowed science with a social weight and concreteness that made it seem all the more formidable an extension of any social order with which it cold be found to bond, and all the more implacable an enemy of any social order with which it could not.22

Indeed, at the crux of Merton's norms for science's democratic ethos was the assertion that the cultural and social grounding in which science is conducted represents the medium through which these norms can either be realized or transfigured.

In concentrating on Merton's pre-Kuhnian articulation of how social and cultural values affect and shape science, Hollinger's analysis identifies what is at the heart of the debate surrounding the role of science in relation to the public. Merton's observations, however, beg the question: If there once was a democratic ethos to science, where has it gone? In what ways have the dominant narratives and practices of science in contemporary society become unreflective of the democratic ethos characterizing modern science's epistemic universe?23 To begin to answer important questions such as these, we must look at how education is dealing with the tension between democratic practices and the needs of an increasingly scientific and technological society. In order to shed more light on this tension, I will now look at how educational policy perpetuates antidemocratic epistemic qualities.

To exemplify how science education establishes as an epistemic virtue the practice of "purification" - the cognitive act of separating out things, objects, and nature from the social world - I want to bring to the fore the normative component present in the epistemological model of the NAS as well as most other contemporary manifestations of science. Foundational to this construction of an epistemological perspective is what I call the "vacuum illusion." The vacuum illusion is a hidden pedagogical and epistemic value that is taught to students through the structure and legacy of positivist epistemology. But more than just maintaining the fact-value distinction through science education and learning with technology, neopositivist science also communicates through its epistemic structure a sharp distinction between the public interest and the project of science. As a result, students are taught through these structures and values embedded in science education an ethic that helps shape the relation of individuals to the natural world and to society from a context-free position. That is, from the epistemological beginning, so to speak, positivist constructions of science resist a democratic potential. Knowledge of the world and society is produced in a space that does not acknowledge or reflect on how society and culture shape the expression of science and on how, as Latour's analysis displays, objects, as products of science, have increasingly gained social agency.24

An example of how science education imbues students with this understanding comes from the National Standards of Science (NSS), a publication of the National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment. One of the unifying concepts of this document - a text central to the NSS's project to promote scientific literacy through education - is the understanding that science is by definition detached from a social and political context:

Scientific explanations incorporate existing scientific knowledge and new evidence from observations, experiments, or models into internally consistent, logical statements. Different terms, such as "hypothesis,""model,""law,""principle,""theory," and "paradigm" are used to describe various types of scientific explanations. As students develop and understand more science concepts and processes, their explanations should become more sophisticated. That is, their scientific explanations should more frequently include a rich scientific knowledge base, evidence of logic, higher levels of analysis, greater tolerance of criticism and uncertainty, and a clearer demonstration of the relationship between logic, evidence, and current knowledge."

Set within NSS's standard definition of science is an epistemological mechanism that channels knowledge production through a very particular discourse and set of practices. In the preceding description of how science should be understood and taught in the classroom, we can detect the logic that produces a dichotomy between nature and culture. This logic is characterized by an insularity that only absorbs or considers new content from its own method of discovery - science, that is, only answers to itself and can thus only produce sets of answers to its own self-produced problems.26 Nowhere in this program are ways of learning about science and technology that set them within a social, cultural, and political framework. The NSS's definition of science education leads to an interesting set of questions: How do we account for phenomena that fall outside of a structure that brackets off the social and political actors, such as corporations, legislators, and the media, for example, who influence the expression of science just as much as scientists themselves? How can objects (such as technologies that shape our experiences, transform the natural world, and generate new knowledge in contemporary society) be rethought through education in a way that does not exclude them from social and political agency? Last, and perhaps most important, how do we hold democratically accountable social agents and actors responsible for the design and application of technology in society?

As both ID and traditional science are rooted in historical and political contexts, so too are their expressions of knowledge. In the case of ID, the politics of religious fundamentalism colors the form of knowledge production that this movement promotes. As I argued previously, ID's epistemological model embeds within it a reactionary component that rejects alternative ontological explanations and, as such, smuggles within its content a highly antidemocratic quality. Traditional science's epistemological mode, which is a legacy of the modern period, perpetuates antidemocratic content by establishing and maintaining a distinction between the natural world (objects) and the cultural and social. Moreover, this mode of knowledge production, through its convergence with a highly technological mode of production, distorts the content of knowledge with the imperatives of corporate logic and a consumer society. This silent appropriation of science deforms its ability to be a cultural source of transformation and instead turns it into an instrument of the dominant mode of production and its counterpart, consumption.27 In the educational context, the epistemological consequence of this contradiction is great. Students learning with the epistemological lens of traditional science are taught a normative value that is denied explicitly on the surface - in other words, while teaching students the distinction between fact and value, traditional science's epistemological mode promotes a value of its own, though it will not acknowledge this offspring.

This said, however, science - as perhaps the highest cultural form of knowledge - also has a promising legacy on which to draw. Within the modern science project there is the potential for the merging of critical reflective thought with science. Indeed, for Hegel the concept of science was philosophy's highest expression, but it could not rely on mere observation or empirical evidence for growth in knowledge; it also needed culture to enrich its content and transcend its particular historical expression.28 Gaining a foothold in contemporary science's expression for the growth of critical and transformative knowledge and its democratic articulation requires educational theory to rethink how science is taught and what epistemological underpinnings are being advanced at the present moment. By examining the epistemological modes of ID and traditional science, we can now see that the pedagogical debate surrounding ID and traditional science education has left unarticulated what is most import\ant. Clearly, ID dangerously advocates a fundamentalism that is antithetical to a democratic education as well as a pseudoscience specifically designed to promote a political and religious agenda. Yet its dialectical function as a challenge to contemporary science remains useful: it draws science into the political sphere and invites reflection on its social and political quality. Thus, the ID movement has created a new space of contestation in which the democratic intent of science can be brought back to the table. It is from this new space that educational theory must focus a new challenge against the way science education cultivates within students an antidemocratic ethos.

DESIGNING INTELLIGENT MODELS FOR LEARNING WITH SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

What has risen to the surface in my analysis of ID and traditional science's epistemological models is that knowledge production in schooling is, despite the epistemological claims of each, a sociopolitical and cultural process. The dominant epistemological mode that is embedded in traditional science education denies this quality while, at the same time, proliferating forms of knowledge and technology that are intimately tied to a social context that shapes scientific expression. The ID movement, acting in bad faith, cloaks its epistemological framework with the rhetoric of traditional science, only to smuggle in an ontological certainty that fulfills ID adherents' fundamentalist position. Indeed, how students learn to think about and interact with science and technology has a significant social and political impact, not only at the practical level where individuals perform techniques they have learned with technologies, but also at the level of ability to understand and reflect upon technological society. Students learn through the epistemological mode of traditional science that particular technologies - such as computers, school facilities, freeways, CAT-scan machines, or textbooks - are objects that both originate and exist as context-free agents as opposed to objects that are programmed for specific purposes and intents.29 With this critique in view, we are now positioned well to ask the question of how educational theory can begin to articulate an epistemological model that promotes a mode of knowledge production conducive to a more democratic way of knowing and learning with science and technology.

The critiques of the epistemological models of ID and traditional science provide a standpoint from which to begin articulating the framework for an epistemological modality that embodies a democratic intent. In an effort to do just this, I will now explore in a preliminary way an epistemological model that takes the concept of critical thinking as a point of departure. My proposal involves rethinking the concept of critical thinking by mediating it through my analysis of the antidemocratic epistemologies represented in ID and traditional science. I want to focus on the normative disposition that, along with reasoning, constitutes the concept of critical thinking.30

As a normative concept, critical thinking is an epistemological faculty that forms and shapes the potential for democratic citizens through the process of education and thus carries with it an ethic that cultivates a sense of civic and social responsibility within the individual. According to Sharon Bailin and Harvey Siegel, "democracy can flourish just to the extent that its citizenry is able to reason well regarding political issues and matters of public policy, scrutinize the media, and generally meet the demands of democratic citizenship, many of which require the abilities and dispositions constitutive of critical thinking."31 Yet, while the notion of critical thinking within educational theory is indeed contested, almost all agree that integral to the concept is the cultivation within students of a disposition infused by values, norms, and habits that work toward a society and culture's idea of the good society.32

Here I want to suggest that constructing the good society requires not only cultivating democratic dispositions through education but also a reconfigured concept of critical thinking. This must begin with an epistemological architecture that produces new "ontological zones" to counter what Latour calls the bifurcated practice of translation and purification and that instead understands each as products of the same epistemological project. In part this will involve the development of an epistemic standpoint in educational philosophy that recognizes the relation between science and technology, on the one hand, and the sociopolitical, on the other. From such a place, the concept of critical thinking will be broadened in order to encompass a new conception of disposition and thus a more robust notion of what a democratic education must include. This broader concept of critical thinking would also have to begin by recognizing how the convergence of technoscience industry and the construction of the social are increasingly conflated within educational settings, the university being just the most concentrated example. How educational theory responds to this convergence and its shaping of the educational terrain depends at least partially on the development of new epistemic structures that can foster a form of critical thinking that rejects the implosion of critical distance in science and technology and instead promotes reflective attitudes on both. In short, educational theory needs to begin to articulate methods by which new forms of consciousness can emerge that can resist the dominant consciousness imputed through the convergence of science, education, and contemporary modes of production in technological society.

The broad set of claims laid out here may prompt one to ask, why is it important for educational theory to begin to develop an epistemological framework that rethinks critical thinking from its conceptual roots? One answer is that science education must begin to produce a space for critical reflection that is built into modes of knowledge production because science and technology have come to play an ever-greater role in creating the experiences of our everyday lives that in turn construct our reality. How we move, think, and communicate in society is intimately tied to either the mode in which we do science and think about the world or its technological products. Developments in information and communication technologies are just one example of how technology increasingly defines how we come to know and relate in the world today. This is precisely why we need an epistemological model that replaces the bifurcated practice of purification and translation with an approach that simultaneously recognizes the concept and practice of both in science education. Here I offer a preliminary set of postulates that suggest what creating such a model might entail:

* Science education, as a mode of knowledge production, must recognize from its conceptual beginnings that it is a context- driven expression of culture and society. As such, it should be taught and learned from a standpoint that acknowledges and engages critically with this defining quality. The questioning of both the means and ends of science and technology must be as important as the potential fruits they may bear.

* We must develop the normative component of critical thinking, disposition, in a way that broadens the traditional notion of the concept. This will mean cultivating through the education system a democratic subjectivity with an understanding that technology and science retain social agency. It will also require a new framework for thinking about a broader notion of democracy and citizenship. Democracy, therefore, can no longer be thought of as simply a human- to-human endeavor. Instead, the construction of a democratic education must include nature; objects both used and produced by science; and, most importantly, technologies that shape social and cultural life.33

* A democratic education, according to this framework, will necessarily require the inclusion of decisions made by scientists, social actors within industry and the state, and sites of knowledge production such as educational institutions. On this model, translation will no longer be falsely absent from the scientific process; the chain of actors that makes up the contemporary expression of science will have to be understood as organically connected to the process of purification. Similarly, purification will need to be resisted in order to avoid at the epistemological level the illusion of neutral objects and value-free technologies.

Whether or not our world is under the gaze and direction of a greater being should not be the point of science, and especially of the way we teach science. We should also avoid any pedagogical approach that denies science and technology as essential components of a democratic education. Whoever the ultimate maker may be, we cannot deny the fact that real scientific and technological actors continue to forge our experience of the human condition largely divorced from the democratic process. This is not an ontological problem; it is an epistemological one. Indeed, this is a historical project that carries with it a massive and widespread epistemological shift from the dominant frameworks that currently guide science education policy, giving critical thinking a larger, yet very tenable job for the future. This project can only begin from the epistemological ground up. If we are serious about building a democratic society through education, we must start by incorporating a new conceptualization of critical thinking into science education in order to begin to build a new vision of our existing technological collective. This will largely depend on developing a new faith in democratic epistemologies.

1. Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind (1955; repr. New York: Bantam Books, 198\1).

2. In February 2007 this measure was struck down by the Kansas state board of education in a six-to-four vote, but proponents and activists who want to add intelligent design to the science education curriculum are petitioning this decision.

3. Peter Bacon and Peter Slevin, "Bush Remarks on 'Intelligent Design' Fuel Debate," Washington Post, sec. A01, August 3, 2005.

4. The misrecognition of how science and society are co- constructed permeates not only the positivist paradigm but also postpositivist models such as constructivism and realism. See, for example, Christine McCarthy and Evelyn Sears, "Science Education: Constructing a True View of the Real World?" Philosophy of Education 2000, ed. Lynda Stone (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2001), 369-377. In this essay they adamantly argue that dominant forms of constructivism valorize belief over truth in a way that ultimately advocates a postmodern position of hyperrelativism. For McCarthy and Sears this forecloses the possibility of any objective truth criterion, jettisoning philosophy from science's roots as a net result. While this critique points out the weakness of a relativist epistemological position, it falters in failing to explain how objective truth is mobilized through political decisions and social actors. That is, they do not address the fact that, despite their objective status, the ends of science are distributed undemocratically just as much as the means are.

5. Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (Maiden, Massachusetts: Polity, 2004), 20.

6. Ulrich Beck characterizes this as a defining quality of a risk society: "Technological innovations increase the individual and collective well-being. The negative effects (deskilling, risks of unemployment or transfer, threats to health and natural destruction) have always found justification in these rises of the standard of living. Even dissent over the 'social consequences' does not hinder the accomplishment of techno-conomie innovation. That process remains in essence removed from political legitimation, particularly by comparison to democratic administrative procedures and the long periods needed for implementation; indeed it possesses a power of enforcement virtually immune to criticism. Progress replaces voting." Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 1992), 184.

7. William A. Dembski, "What Intelligent Design Is Not," in Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design, eds. William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2001 ), 17.

8. Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" in Perpetual Peace and other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 41.

9. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), 154.

10. Karl Popper is perhaps the best known philosopher of science who was associated with a group known as the "Vienna Circle," which included Rudolph Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and Philipp Frank, among others. Popper did a great deal in defining the trajectory of the Vienna Circle through his work critiquing their version of logical positivism. Popper advocated the following general expression of positivism: "the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability." In essence the method is the ultimate determinant as to whether or not a truth claim is more or less valid: it is more valid if the process of discovery is transparent and devoid of value-oriented decisions and less valid if the method is opaque or laden with subjective or cultural interpretations. see Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2000), 37.

11. Bruce L. Gordon, "Is Intelligent Design Science?" in Signs of Intelligence, eds. Dembski and Kushiner, 216.

12. For a rigorous critical examination of the history of the ID movement, see Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Forrest and Gross thoroughly document the resources and political organization that support this religious-political project. For example, in addition to lists of academics active in the ID movement, Forrest and Gross catalog financial resources in the form of grants from various foundations that reveal the support of a strong and highly organized political base: "DI (Discovery Institute] began the 2000 fiscal year with a fund balance of $2,304,275 and ended with a fund balance of $1,375,154, indicating DI's expenditure of almost $1 million that year. With $1.5 million from Fieldstead & Co. and another million from the Stewardship Foundation assured over the next five years (beginning in 1999), along with $400,000 in 1999 (and possibly more later) from the Maclellan Foundation, CRSC [Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture] has acquired a minimum of $2.9 million in guaranteed, direct funding through 2003" (p. 150).

13. See, for instance, Daniel Kleinman and Steven Vallas's essay "Science, Capitalism, and the Rise of the 'Knowledge Worker': The Changing Structure of Knowledge Production in the United States," Theory and Society 30, no. 4 (2001): 451-492. They argue that the convergence of science, high-tech industry, and higher education has resulted in a situation where the values of these entities have coalesced. While their analysis is ambiguous as to what this phenomenon means within the sphere of higher education, it certainly points to a disturbing trend in education that contributes to the implosion of critical reflection, scientific inquiry, and capitalist imperatives.

14. Another front where scientists have been involved in active and heated debate is of course in the socalled "science wars" that began in the late 1990s. Coming to a head with physicist Alan Sokal's infamous submission and subsequent publication of an essay in the journal Social Text (co-edited at the time by Stanley Aronowitz and Bruce Robbins) that was a parody of the field of science studies, the tension between scientists and those that study scientists has caused some to take to the offensive in defending their disciplinary perspectives. Sokal's critique of science studies (and especially of the work of Bruno Latour whom Sokal erroneously categorizes as a postmodern theorist when in fact Latour dislikes and critiques postmodern theory for being a symptomology at best) centers on the distinction between a clear and reproducible scientific methodology and social and individual ethical questions. In Sokal's words "the computer has had applications that are beneficial to society (for example, in allowing the postmodem cultural critic to produce her articles more efficiently) as well as applications that are harmful (for example, in allowing the U.S. military to kill human beings more efficiently). This raises a host of social and individual ethical questions: Ought society to forbid (or discourage) research on computers per se1. Forbid (or discourage) research on quantum electronics? Or solid state physics?...These are all serious questions, which deserve careful investigation adhering to the highest standards of scientific and historical evidence. But they have no effect whatsoever on the underlying scientific questions: whether atoms (and silicon crystals, transistors, and computers) really do behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics (and solid-state physics, quantum electronics, and computer science)." Sokal, though recognizing ethical and political questions associated with science and technology, goes to great lengths here to keep separate these questions and values from "real" scientific questions. see Alan Sokal, "What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove," in After the Science Wars, eds. Keith M. Ashman and Philip S. Baringer (New York: Routledge, 2001 ), 21-22.

15. National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1999), 8.

16. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modem, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), 136.

17. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10.

18. Ibid., 75.

19. Latour, We Have Never Been Modem, 10.

20. Ibid., 21.

21. In contrast to Merton's analysis, social theorists of the so- called Frankfurt School, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, drew a strong symmetry between the uses of science and technology in fascist countries and in advanced industrialized nations such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. In their analysis, beginning with Adorno and Horkheimer's concept of "administered society," using mass media, technology, and science to serve the instrumental needs of industry and the military was not a characteristic exclusive to Nazi Germany; it was a key feature of all industrialized nations. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002).

22. David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 86. Also see Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. Piotr Sztompka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). I would like to thank Sandra Harding for pointing me in the direction of Hollinger's work, which has been most helpful for illuminating this area of the debate on science and democracy in the context of the United States.

23. Indeed, as Hollinger also points out, John Dewey's perspective on science was similar to Merton's. In Freedom and Cultur\e Dewey identified the ability to develop a moral component within science and practices with technologies as one of the central challenges for democratic society: "Science through its physical technological consequences is now determining the relations which human beings, severally and in groups, sustain to one another. If it is incapable of developing moral techniques which will also determine these relations, the split in modern culture goes so deep that not only democracy but all civilized values are doomed." John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989), 118.

24. Sandra Harding also makes this point from a different angle. In her work on science and postcolonial studies, she argues that Western science has, on the one hand, incorporated different cultures' sciences and technologies from across the globe into its epistemic structure while, on the other hand, denying this determinative relationship. Harding sees this cultural appropriation as a point from which to argue for a new epistemological conception of science that can be achieved by beginning from particular historical and cultural contexts and selectively using aspects of Western science with or without indigenous knowledge systems in order to create a science that serves a community's own ends. In so doing, the relation between the political and knowledge production can be framed in an open and more democratic way. Thus, Harding's standpoint epistemology "sets the relationship between knowledge and politics at the center of its account in the sense that it tries to explain the effects that different kinds of political arrangements have on the production of knowledge." Sandra G. Harding, Is Science Multi-cultural! Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 153.

25. National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment, National Research Council, National Science Education Standards (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 1996), 117.

26. This paradox is part of Ulrich Beck's thesis on risk society, where science - as a major contributor to environmental and social damage as well as the producer of die response to these exigencies - is a selfreferential mode of knowledge that is unable to reconcile the contradiction of its inherent social and political nature. The sociology of science, as conceived by both Beck and Latour, aims to problematize this pervasive symptom of contemporary science. see Beck, Risk Society.

27. This claim has been made by a variety of social theorists in the twentieth century, but it was most powerfully articulated by Herbert Marcuse. In his seminal study of advanced industrial society, OneDimensional Man, Marcuse lucidly presented his analysis of how technological society has advanced the capitalist mode of production to heights never before reached in a one-dimensional society. This is especially marked in Marcuse's argument delineating how technology is subjectified through the worker, which thus brings alienation to a more powerful expression through the internalization (in his conception of mimesis) of technology within individuals. The subjectification of technology in the individual, for Marcuse, valorizes technological society's historical form through the subject-object relation that is established between technology in the factory and technology in consumer society. This flattening of the distance between technology and the individual is a key symptom of one-dimensional society and signals a new historical relation between technology and society. see Herbert Marcuse, One- Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).

28. In many ways, this was one of Hegel's central points in Phenomenology of Spirit: Science could not remain as a distinct and separate form of knowledge; its content needed to be dialectically absorbed into the concept of science, thus giving it a richer philosophical content. For Hegel, therefore, philosophy needed to be approached as seriously as science while retaining its ability to reflect upon culture and history. Only through this path could philosophy achieve recognition as Science: "Philosophy is frequently taken to be a purely formal kind of knowledge, void of content, and the insight is sadly lacking that, whatever the truth there may be in the content of any discipline or science, it can only deserve the name if such truth has been engendered by philosophy. Let the other sciences try to argue as much as they like without philosophy - without it they can have in them neither life, Spirit, nor truth." G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 41.

29. This point can perhaps best be made by illuminating the how gender has shaped the development of technologies. Cynthia Cockbum brilliantly argues that technology is "one of the formative processes of men" and that "industrial, commercial, [and] military technologies are masculine in a very historical and material sense." As one example, Cockburn points to how the typesetting machine's design and use in factories were shaped as much by the masculine concern to ensure that men were hired to perform the labor as they were by science and technological advancement. Cynthia Cockburn, "The Material of Male Power," m The Social Shaping of Technology, eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 177-198.

30. See, for example, Sharon Bailin, "The Virtue of Critical Thinking," Philosophy of Education 2003, ed. Kal Alston (Urbana, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 2004), 327-329, Sharon Bailin and Harvey Siegel, "Critical Thinking" in Philosophy of Education, eds. Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (New York: Blackwell, 2003), 181-193; and Harvey Siegel, Rationality Redeemed! Further Dialogues on an Educational Ideal (New York: Routledge, 1997).

31. Bailin and Siegel, "Critical Thinking," 189.

32. See, for example, William Stanley and Nancy Brickhouse, "Teaching Sciences: The Multicultural Question Revisited," Science Education 85, no. 1 (2001): 35-49. Stanley and Backhouse's account provides a contrast to

Source: Educational Theory

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