Could someone who understands academic stuff explain this to me please?

[noblegiraffe]

nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2467&context=tqr

The article is 'Are STEM syllabi gendered? A feminist critical discourse analysis'.

It says things like 'However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women'

It talks about a masculine learning climate, where knowledge is imparted by an expert to a student, facts are to be learned and individual work is expected.

Am I missing something or is this just saying similar to 'maths isn't for girls because they prefer group work and essays'? Which hardly seems feminist to me.

I know what you mean
I think in a lot of those explanations it's trying to use a model that logically and consistently works, rather than "the truth". So those models of atoms help explain electron swapping etc.
Once you get to particles and photons etc it is really confusing.
One of the things I loved about maths was how you could prove something that should equal zero didn't if you followed a certain process (I think it was integration, I'm a bit fuzzy after 20+ years though).

Yeah. My experience of school was science teachers could be quite patronising of questions about stuff that didn't fit "the rules" so if you knew a bit more than where the syllabus was it got confusing
I definitely agree there's a tendency to science = holy grail of truth, last word in an argument etc but that's people being idiots. Totally agree with erins quote from Leo Tolpert.

I also think you can say vice versa though, I never "got" about literary analysis of texts and have only done limited social science research. Some of the stuff I saw in social sciences being described as "research" was shocking and fell into many traps of bad research (think we had some examples on the porn thread too!) So I've come to understanding this stuff about language and how it constrains what we understand quite late. It's really fascinating but I also still don't quite get it. Might have to go back to uni

From comments my DD has made, I think teachers do try to convey that different descriptions of atoms or light are 'models' - but the success of that will vary with the teacher and the pupil. I don't remember ever finding it a problem - just that it got progressively more interesting.

I guess my take is that there is objective truth, and science is a methodology for getting increasingly good understanding of that truth. For example light - Newton wasn't wrong when he found that it behaved as a wave in the experiments he did. That's objectively true, but not the whole story. More objective truth was revealed by the observation that light can also behave as a particle. The apparent contradiction revealed more truth ... though that one is still a work in progress!

Yep great post errol.
I think scientists don't always take into account or acknowledge social and cultural impacts on how they perceive that "truth" though. A lot of theory is examined from a very male or even colonial perspective though.
Slightly off topic but reminds me of the search for Erebus and Terror where inuit knowledge was discounted for a very long time but was correct

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/12/hms-terror-wreck-found-arctic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt%3f0p19G=e

Yes it would. It is quite soul destroying to do scientific research that finds nothing of note and it doesn't bring in the money either! Especially citation points in journals such as nature is directly equivalent to funding.

I'm not sure how truth is a useful concept here.

Phenomena really does exist beyond our ability to create social constructions about it. There are more and less objective ways of observing that phenomena.

I have seen on this section very many people confusing phenomena which is real with Science, a socially constructed understanding of it.

If someone is coming away from GCSE Science not understanding that a model is a highly simplified representation of a socially constructed concept, so is neither the concept itself and certainly not the actual phenomenon, they've been very badly taught or simply not understood the meaning of the word model!

I should clarify I've seen people confusing phenomena with Science on other threads, not this one.

Buffy, I don't understand why someone would need to study the philosophy of Science to understand that Science is socially constructed.

If you do GCSE Science, as part of controlled assessment, you conduct an experiment and you then compare your results with other groups. So you just socially constructed something.

If Science is not a social construct, what else can it possibly be? Did it appear as a stone tablet from the hand of God? Do Scientific theories fall from the sky like rain?

I'm perplexed by this.

"I think teachers do try to convey that different descriptions of atoms or light are 'models'."
Depends what you think is the model. Saying light is 'like' water waves, or saying that light is a wave is actually (almost) true (quantum aside). Classically saying that light was an electromagnetic wave (cue Maxwells equations) wasn't a 'model', it was the best current theory. Later it was found to be an approximation to a better theory. But neither was a model in the usual sense.

I'd think more in terms of analogies (electrons and nuclei in atoms are 'like' planets going round the sun), as opposed to mathematical theories.

And then we end up with reality is (just) mathematics, rather than mathematics being unreasonably good at modelling reality...........Platonism is rather popular amongst mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

I think 'science is truth' is often just shorthand for -- well, if not absolute truth (like, say, pure mathematics), then as close to that as we get, and true in the sense of has not yet been falsified despite our best efforts but might be falsified in the future. Although we might have to stick in a caveat as regards string theory, and some aspects of cosmology, and the outer reaches of some quantum stuff...............

Bugger that, science is truth, so give us some more money so we can go discover more of it!....................

Buffy, I think that's a perception you have on what people mean, rather than neccesarily what they're attempting to convey.

Peer review is an academic convention rather than a particularly scientific one.

If science describes reality objectively, it is nonetheless a description. By acknowledging it as a description the person acknowledges it is a construction.

I don't know what you think is between science and reality that mediates our understanding. Sciences itself is a mediated understanding of reality.

Of course in a debate people will refer to scientific evidence as a truth claim, and if someone holds a different perspective they will want to know what evidence they are presenting and what the basis of that evidence is. But that is a truth claim for the purposes of gaining understanding within the parameters of a debate, within the limited understanding we all have and are capable of conveying.

It doesn't imply we have access to an absolute truth. There is no practical point in saying there is no truth. We have to proceed by deciding on a range of beliefs from which to proceed within a particular context.

Yes, SomeDyke, I've heard Mathematicians on TV say that mathematics is the language of the universe and that mathematicians are discovering that language not constructing it.

But I don't know anywhere near enough about Maths to understand.

"I've seen on many occasions someone saying that a study has been peer reviewed, as a way of saying that therefore the conclusions are facts that cannot be disputed, for instance."
Which means they haven't got a clue as regards the actual academic 'how we publish science' route.

So we have a kind of scale:

1. Some other bod says their experiments show X. The scientific equivalent of 'someone down the pub says they've seen a ghost'
2. My experiments show X (I've seen a ghost).
3. My results have been peer-reviewed (I've photographed what I think was a ghost and someone else who wasn't paid by my is willing to say that my photo hasn't been doctored or photoshopped).

3 is the start of arguments in the scientific process, not the end! SO it would not be until we had many independent sightings of ghosts with reliable evidence (like photographs), without any other explanation, that we would finally claim ghosts exist, or UFOs, or yetis, or female (pink) brains. A meta-review lets us know how things are going on that score!

DD has just done her GCSE science controlled assessment, and as part of it she had to evaluate conflicting claims, including taking into account that conflicting claims can all be peer reviewed.

The negative space in the scientific literature is nebulous, for a number of reasons. The "file-draw" effect - the putting of results that do not fit the story that you hope to tell away in a file draw - is well know. Peer review is not as binary as the term "peer reviewed" would imply. There is peer review, and there is peer review, for instance. I believe that acceptance or rejection of a publication can occur for sociopolitical as well as scientific reasons. The quality of review depends on the journal, the findings, the reviewer, the field, and so on.

In the natural sciences, there is a trend among the younger generation of scientists towards subverting the process of peer review entirely and releasing results to pre-publication servers that are publicly accessible on the internet, before data are written up as publications and submitted for peer review. By the time the publication is itself published, the data and results have long been available to the scientific community.

I read, in a book about the PhD as process, of the concept that in the process of defining the questions that you ask, so you define the questions that you do not ask. I find this a useful concept to keep in mind whenever research questions are being asked. Who defined the questions? Why? Why those questions? Why not other questions?

Chemists in particular know that not everything they try works, and that this is useful information. I know of a 'failed reactions database' and theres The All Results Journal

I don't think I'm saying you're wrong Buffy. I'm trying to clarify what we're both attempting to communicate, which may well be the same thing.

I think it is extremely important to make a distinction between material reality and Science because so many people conflate the two and then critique science as a way of removing any reference to material reality from discussion. I see that as a power play by people who have more control over material reality to hide that control.

But none of that is what you are doing. I know you're genuinely interested in how people think, reason and communicate.

almondpudding What is "material reality"?

And as a sort-of follow-up, what do you think that science is? Different people see science differently. For example, some people upthread talk about science = fact, so I am trying to understand where you are coming from, when you want to make the distinction between science and material reality.