Revealing Injustice in Technoscience: The Case for Critical Realism

• In Event: Toward Critical Public Consciousness in STEM Education: Inter/Transnational Perspectives

Abstract

This paper is about ‘absence’. It addresses the question as to why certain narratives and characters are omitted from the source end of technoscientific production, while political and public debate focuses on high-end production values and consumption through science education. Science education has been associated with moves towards social transformation in the latter part of the 19th century and in the 20th century (Layton, 1973; Haldane, 1945). Movements such as ‘science for the people’ in the U.S. and U.K. were underpinned by autonomy, self-knowledge, empowerment against class hierarchy, as well as curiosity for self and social development (Solomon, 2013). However, links between science and society in school education have become bogged down by epistemological problems dominated by positivist and empiricist justifications and ‘forms of knowledge’ discourse (Hirst & Peters, 2012 ), in which the Humean is-ought dichotomy — the naturalistic fallacy — epistemically separates descriptions and explanations of the Natural World (science) from moral justifications (how the world ought to be).
Teaching and learning of Science, Technology and Society in contemporary science curricula are therefore hampered by this epistemological barrier. Positivism requires that knowledge of Nature takes the form of empirically verifiable laws and relationships — Covering Laws — which exclude personal and existential meanings from practise. Teaching from a basis of facts, principles and laws through a Vision I construct of scientific literacy (Roberts, 2007) makes it problematic to integrate normative statements into school science discourse. Critical Realism addresses this problem by positing a realist ontology (a mind-independent reality) with epistemological relativism. Hence what we know about the world is always fallible through socio-cultural processes of constructing knowledge — and indeed through interconnections between the actor and objects of action (Zembylas, 2006) - but that knowledge is always constrained by the real world. Through a Critical Realist approach, there is no distinction between the realities of the social and natural world. Schools, class hierarchy, oppression are as real as the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. But, their operations are explained through ‘causal powers’ in open as opposed to closed systems. While an empiricist science describes the world and retains an axiological neutrality a critical realist approach can go beyond this: they can ask what are the causal mechanisms that prevent many people in the world from obtaining an adequate and balanced diet when knowledge of science makes transparent what is needed for a healthy diet.
At the core of a critical realist approach, is justice and examination of false beliefs. Such a discourse allows its proponents to question, for example, sources of raw materials extracted under oppressive conditions and eco-destruction that sustain digital technologies (Smith, 2011), uses of toxic substances such as gallium arsenide in processing of solar cells (SVTC, 2009) and toxification of Jamaican soil in the manufacture of aluminium for aircraft (Author3, 2014). It is an approach through pedagogy and curriculum construction that attempts through critical reflexivity and knowledge of science to expose, and explain, hidden injustice and remediate its causes.

Author

• Ralph Levinson, University College London