The ontological reversal: a phenomenological critique
of science education
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Edinburgh, 20-23September 2000
Bo Dahlin
Karlstad University
Sweden
e-mail:
Abstract: Husserl critiqued natural science for contributing to an "ontological reversal", meaning that abstract mathematical models of phenomena are taken as more real than phenomena themselves, as they appear in our everyday experience. Thereby science tends to get into a contradiction with itself, since only ordinary sense experience can provide evidence for abstract, theoretical concepts. Nowadays scientists in general have abandoned the correspondence theory of truth concerning their theoretical models. However, the effects of the "ontological reversal" lives on among both teachers and students of science, which is illustrated with some preliminary results from a study of students teachers' conceptions of the nature of science. There is an inherent conflict between the spontaneous, everyday sensebased perception of natural phenomena, and the kind of perception cultivated in science. My thesis is that this conflict is not addressed carefully enough in science education and that a phenomenological approach to science education can make an important contribution to this problem.
Keywords: phenomenology, science education, nature of science.
Introduction
One of the presocratic philosophers, Democritos, is reported as saying:
According to common speech, there are colours, sweets, bitters; in reality however only atoms and emptiness. – The senses speak to the understanding: “Poor understanding, from us you took the pieces of evidence and with them you want to throw us down? This down throwing will be your fall.” (Fragment #125; quoted from Diels, 1992, p 168; my transl. from German)
The first sentence of this quote is often used in textbooks of Physics and Chemistry to illustrate the atomic concept of natural science: what really and truly exists in the world are atoms and emptiness. This view is then ascribed to Democritos (Wagenschein & Buck, 1984).
From an educational point of view, this situation seems to deserve some comments. First of all, Democritos is gravely misrepresented. From the whole quote given above it can be gathered that he is dealing with a much more complex question than what exists “in reality”. The view that everything is composed of atoms and emptiness is considered as a possibility – and a dubious one as well.
Secondly, Democritos’ problem has to do with the relation between the senses and the understanding; it is epistemological as well as ontological. The quote above can be taken as an illustration of how the understanding deceives itself by taking “evidence” from sense experience and then using that to deny the reality of that very experience. Thereby he is pointing towards one of the fundamental difficulties involved in teaching natural science to children and young people today. This difficulty has to do with the “idealising” tendency of modern science; i e, its reduction of our experience of the world to abstract representations and mathematical formulas in which the concreteness and contingencies of everyday life is annihilated, as it were – or at least set aside as belonging to the “not real”. This has lately come to be regarded as a major stumbling block for students’ learning in science (Matthews, 1994).
As can be seen from the Democritos quote, the problem has been considered from a philosophical point of view ever since antiquity. Since philosophy in its true sense, as Dewey remarked, is also educational, science educators may perhaps learn something from philosophy concerning this problem. In this paper I will first present a part of Husserl’s phenomenological critique of natural science, which has been labelled “the ontological reversal” (Harvey, 1989). Secondly, I will illustrate how this tendency to reverse the “ontological priorities” is present in the reasoning of science teacher students. Finally, I will discuss some educational implications of my argument.
Husserl and the ontological reversal
In his phenomenology, Husserl wanted to build a general philosophical basis for all sciences, including natural science. However, phenomenology has been taken up primarily among the human and social sciences. Within these disciplines, phenomenology has been applied both as a theory of science and as an empirical method of research. This is probably because there has been a greater need among the human and social sciences to explicate the philosophical principles upon which they build. The “success” of natural science research has led to a situation where natural science in a way legitimates itself. One does not feel the need to justify one’s research on a philosophical basis. Neither does one feel a need to develop other, “alternative” ways of research.
The phenomenological theory of knowledge is however relevant to all disciplines. Harvey (1989) makes a thorough explication of Husserl’s philosophy in relation to the foundations of natural science.[1]
The problem that Democritos points to in the quote above can be seen as a prefiguration of what Husserl about two thousand years later says about the development of the epistemological and ontological grounds of modern science (Husserl, 1970). This development within the European/Western cultural hemisphere has led to what he calls the “mathematisation of nature”. Galileo was among the first to propagate the view that the true language of nature is mathematics. After that, the view that a scientific understanding of nature, i e, a true knowledge of her, must be founded on mathematics, was gradually accepted by almost all researchers in natural science (as well as by the philosophers reflecting upon this research, notably Hume and Kant).
Among other things, Husserl re-actualised the 17th-century discussion about the primary and secondary properties of things. According to Galileo, Descartes and other leading figures within the “scientific revolution”, properties like colour, smell and taste were “secondary” in the sense that they only existed in the consciousness of the human being, not in things themselves. They were subjective phenomena, conditioned by the mind and the brain. In contrast, primary properties belonged to things in an objective sense. Such properties were measurable; for instance size, mass, durability and power.
In phenomenology however one starts only from what is “positively given” in experience. In immediate experience colours and smells are as “given” as for instance size or mass (perhaps even more so). Therefore, there is no experiential ground for the distinction between primary and secondary properties.[2] The distinction has however played an important role in the development of natural science, and probably also for the popular understanding of the nature of science. According to Husserl’s (1970) analysis, galilean science’s mathematisation of nature started with a “geometrisation”, upon which followed an “algebraisation” (cf Harvey, 1989, pp 58-59). Thereby we have moved two steps away from that foundation of meaning (Sinnesfundament) which is given to us in immediate sense experience. Such mathematical transformations proved however (as we know) to be very successfull. As a consequence, researchers became more and more interested in and occupied with them. Husserl calls this the “technisation” (Technisierung) of science. The progressive technisation involves in its turn a gradual “sedimentation of meaning”: the grounds of the original transformations in concrete, “lived experience” are forgotten and there arises more and more sediments of “self-evidences”:
…this problem of forgetfulness is exacerbated by the fact that with each new generation’s inheritance of the new techniques – an inheritance that presupposes the process of transformation without explicitly recognizing them – another increment in the Selbstverständlichkeit of natural scientific achievement occurs as well. (Husserl, 1970, p 59)
The sedimentation of meaning makes the “higher objects” of science, such as mathematical formulas, take on a life of their own.[3] They become cut off from the fluctuating experiences of everyday life and start to float above it. At the same time they are supposed to explain these experiences. By being taken as explanations they are also ascribed an ontological status of truth and objectivity. Husserl meant that the consequence was
…[a] surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable – our everyday lifeworld. (ibid, pp 48-49)
The abstract mathematical models become more real than the conrete, lived experience in which they have their ultimate ground, and from which they have been abstracted. Harvey (1989) calls this “the ontological reversal”. Since scientific theories and models are often incorporated or re-assimilated into the ordinary lifeworld, this “reversal” becomes more and more a part of the “natural attitude”, i e, of peoples’ general view of life.
Husserl had no principal objections against the geometrisation and algebraisation of nature, as such. His critique was concerned with their unreflected consequences in terms of the ontological reversal, i e, that mathematical formulas and models are supposed to describe a more true and objective reality that that which is available to us in our immediate experience. Thereby science divests itself from the possibility of verifying its theories. All verification must take place in the world of the senses, but it is precisely this world that has been denied as an illusion. As Democritos said: “Poor understanding! From the senses you got your evidence and now you use that evidence to deny those very senses. This will be your undoing.”
The ontological reversal may be summed up in the following logical argument:
Premise 1: Scientific theories and models refer to an invisible world that lies “behind” phenomena.
Premise 2: Scientific theories build upon systematic tests and experiments, they are therefore more true or trustworthy than conceptions based upon everyday experience.
Conclusion: Scientific models of the world “behind” phenomena are more true and real than phenomena themselves.
In the course of time, the first premise of this reasoning seems to have become a self-evident, non-questionable basic assumption of science. As such, it was particularly well expressed by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th-century. Helmholts was arguing against the scientific claims of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Farbenlehre. Towards the end of the 18th-century, Goethe had started to investigate the phenomena of colours and gradually formulated a theory of colours which contradicted that of Newton’s (Goethe, 1971; see also Sepper, 1988). Even though he appreciated Goethe’s efforts, Helmholtz was concerned to prove that the Farbenlehre was not a scientific theory:
For the investigation of physical phenomena he [Goethe] demands such an arrangement of observed facts, that the one always explains the other, so that one comes to an insight about the overall connections without leaving the realm of sense experience. This demand may appear insidious but it is basically false. Because a phenomenon of nature is physically explained only when it has been brought back upon those forces of nature that constitute its ultimate basis. Since we can never observe these forces in themselves we must, at every explanation of natural phenomena, leave the realm of the senses and proceed to those non-sensuous things that are determined only by concepts.
(quoted in Sällström, 1979, p 480; my translation)
It is evident that Helmholtz gives no reason for why a scientific explanation always must build upon natural forces beyond the realms of the senses. He merely says that it is so. How could he know? Apparently, because it had become a “sediment of self-evidence” for him. It could also be said that Helmholtz and his colleagues simply decided to define natural science in this way. Thus expressed the contingent and voluntaristic features of the view of science, which has developed in Western culture, appears clearly. Obviously, there are no unprejudiced arguments proving that science “must” be that which Helmholtz claims – unprejudiced in the sense of starting from no a priori assumptions. Is it not necessary for the science curriculum at higher grades to include reflections upon the consequences that this basically arbitrary decision has had for Western society and culture (cf Abram, 1997)?
The ontological reversal is connected to the reductionist tendency of natural science. The “macroproperties” of phenomena – those properties that are observable by our unaided senses – are reduced to phenomena at the microlevel: molecules, elementary particles, and genes. It is worthwhile noting that even a hard-nosed positivist like Hempel argued against this kind of reasoning (Hempel, 1966, chpt 8). According to Hempel, phenomena at the macrolevel are as real as those on the microlevel, one cannot ontologically reduce the one to the other.
The ontological reversal in teacher students’ reasoning
about science
The reference to Hempel above shows that, as far as modern philosophers of science go, many do not consider the abstract models of science as more real than the phenomena of everyday experience. A pragmatic, not to say instrumentalist, view of the nature of scientific theories is rather common today. An example is the so called Copenhagen school in nuclear physics, according to which mathematical formulas are regarded as mere instruments for prediction and explanation, not as reflecting or representing any essential reality. However, one wonders how much of this view is present among people in general, and among science teachers and students in particular? One would suspect that the “thingifying tendency” of present science teaching and learning (Désautels & Larochelle, 1998) actually contributes towards an “ontological reversal” in the understanding of the nature of scientific models among its teachers and students. (“Thingifying” means looking upon abstract models as representing objectively real things.)
The present section presents some preliminary results from an empirical study, which purports to investigate conceptions of the nature of science among science teacher students. The participants were training to become science teachers at the Lower Secondary level. The project involved a presentation of Goethe’s theory of colours, mentioned above, to six groups of teacher students (mostly women and varying between 3-6 participants in each group). After the presentation each group was given the task of discussing whether Goethe’s theory was a science or not. In this way it was expected that the participants would express their understandings of the nature of science. They were also expected to touch upon the problem of the ontological reversal, because of the view that Goethe has of the role of theory in science, which was part of the presentation of his Farbenlehre (see below). The groups’ discussions were audio- and video recorded, then analysed for thematic contents (cf Eybe & Schmidt, 2000).
The frames of this paper do not permit a thorough presentation of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, nor his general views on the nature of science.[4] However, Table 1 below is an attempt to sum up the main differences between Goethe’s and Newton’s theory of colours and their ways of studying nature in general (this table was presented to the students and elaborated upon):
Table 1. Four essential differences between Newton and Goethe.
Newton / Goethe1. White light “consists of” of all colours in the spectrum. / 1White light is simple in nature and dos not consist of any colours at all.
2. Spectral colours arise because light is refracted by for instance a prism. / 2. Spectral colours arise in the interaction between light and darkness.
3. Theory is an abstract representation of what lies “behind” phenomena. / 3. There is nothing “behind” phenomena. Facts become their own theory, when arranged in an enlightening structure.
4. The researcher’s consciousness is a passive onlooker of observed phenomena. / 4. The researcher’s consciousness is an active participator in phenomena.
As can be seen in point 3 of the table above, Goethe’s view is particularly relevant for the problem of the ontological reversal. Since, according to Goethe, theory does not represent anything invisible beyond phenomena as they appear to us, but is a particular structuration of a number of observed facts, the problem of reversing the ontological priorities in favour of that which is neither seen nor experienced never arises.
Various themes came up in the students’ discussions, not all of them can be reported here. The ontological reversal was however one of these themes, albeit not always expressed to a full 100%. There were often some reservations and caveats. One of these was the common view that not even well established scientific theories are true in an absolute sense. At the same time the participants often looked upon science as a systematic investigation of things, in which “proofs” and “counter proofs” are used in order to verify theories. There was also a strong tendency to emphasise the causal explanatory character of science, i e, its focus upon finding out the causes of things. This was the main reason why Goethe’s Farbenlehre was not considered a science, since it does not go “behind” phenomena in its explanation of them. Such reasoning creates preconditions for the logical argument presented in the previous section as an illustration of the ontological reversal: abstract causal explanations give a truer picture of the world than concrete experience.
In the following extract from one of the group discussions it can be seen how one of the students (S1), in spite of her sympathetic attitude to Goethe’s theory, still longs for a “proved explanation”: