Worksheet grades

• Worksheet 1 has been marked.
• Comments and total grade (out of 10) is in the document.

Reminder: Topic submission

• Dont' forget: your poster topic is due Wed, Oct 2 on Teams.

Discussion question assignments

• Everyone should have received an email that looks like this:
  
• These list the date of the class period that your question should relate to and the due date for submitting the question.
• E.g. the question for the class of November 11 (Poudrier 2007) is due on November 5.
• Turn these in on the “Assignments” section on Teams.

1. Prompt

• One (broad) idea, described in a few sentences
• Can contain multiple, related “questions”
• Can contain quotes from text
• Should use in-text (parenthetical) citations
• A single prompt (one of the numbered items on the worksheets)

2. Motivation

• A few sentences describing where the question is coming from and where I hope it may lead
• Counts toward score, but will not be published if your question is chosen for inclusion

Social construction in popular discourse

• “If something is a ‘socially construct’, that means it can be whatever you want it to be.”
• “Socially constructed = fake”
  
  
  

• These interpretations are usually based on a serious mis­under­standing (or deliberate mis­repre­sentation) of social construction.

Scientific realism

• The real world is independent of human experience
• Science describes the real world
• Scientific knowledge is either:
  True (describes accurately) or
  False (describes inaccurately)

Scientific constructivism

• The real world is, at best, accessible only through human experience
• The processes that justify belief as knowledge are social
• Scientific knowledge is contingent

Describing reality

• Scientists’ job is to objectively describe the real world (nature).
• Descriptions may be flawed due to measurement error, undetected phenomena, bias, etc.
• But the object of description—the thing described—is consistent.

Ian Hacking

• Prominent Canadian scientific realist.
• “So far as I’m concerned, if you can spray them then they are real.”
  Hacking (1983) on the reality of positrons

Describing phenomena

• Focus on scientific knowledge as it exist for humans.
• The truth of a scientific claim is based in its accepted meaning and social consequences.
• True scientific claims can change.

Umbrella term

• Constructivism means a lot of different things.
• Sometimes compatible with realism, sometimes not.

• If phenomena are all we have to work with, then everything we know is filtered through our experience of it.
• There is no objective way to select among competing theories if they do not contradict empirical evidence.
• Trying to decide whether a theory is true in some fundamental sense is meaningless.
• Explicitly anti-realist.
• “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method
  of questioning.”
  
  Werner Heisenberg
  Physics and Philosophy (1958)