The "freezing" of science: consequences of the dogmatic teaching of ecology

Abstract

In his classic work “The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research,” the historian and philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1991) asserts that natural sciences are taught almost exclusively from textbooks written especially for students at both graduate and postgraduate levels, and, as often as not, these textbooks do not describe the sorts of problems the future professional will very likely have to deal with, nor the variety of techniques available to treat them. Instead, he says, textbooks usually offer a concrete solution—the “paradigmatic” one—as a model for how to solve similar problems. Continuing, he points out that students are not encouraged to read the classical works of their field, and the learning process is a sort of dogmatic initiation in a tradition that students are not prepared to evaluate for themselves. In sum, textbooks and teachers frequently offer versions of science that—as philosophers David Hume and Karl R. Popper have shown—are unssustainable from the logical point of view (Popper 1977).