Including the perspectives of scientists about the nature and process of science is important for an authentic and nuanced portrayal of science in science education. The small number of studies that have explored scientists’ worldviews about science has thus far generated contradictory findings, with recent studies claiming that scientists simultaneously hold contradictory sophisticated and naïve views. This article reports on an exploratory study that uses the framework of Bhaskar’s critical realism to elicit and separately analyse academic scientists’ ontological and epistemological (...) views about science in semi-structured interviews. When the views of scientists are analysed through the lens of critical realism, it is clear that it is possible to hold a realist ontological commitment about what knowledge is of, simultaneously with a fallibilist epistemological commitment about knowledge itself. The apparent incongruence of scientists’ so-called naïve and sophisticated views about science is resolved when analysed using a critical realist framework. Critical realism offers a simple and coherent framework for science educators that avoids many of the problems of positivism and social constructivism by finding a middle ground between them. The three pillars of critical realism: ontological realism, epistemological fallibilism and judgmental rationality help to make sense of how socially constructed scientific knowledge can be anchored in an independent reality. (shrink)

O pragmatismo, como método formal, nos fornece uma importante arena para discussões a respeito do modo pelo qual conceitos podem ser construídos, independentemente de qualquer posição antropocêntrica ou linguística. O presente trabalho tem por finalidade efetuar uma discussão sobre a máxima pragmática e a tese sobre a indeterminação do significado ( meaning ) que ela traz consigo. Ou seja, busca-se entender o trânsito que há entre o indefinido e o definido, entre o indeterminado e o determinado, bem como algumas fronteiras (...) intermediárias encontradas nos processos de determinação relativa do conceito. (shrink)

This paper proposes to recover the topic of the philosophy of scientific method from its late nineteenth-century roots. The subject matter of scientific method sprouted from key inferential ingredients identified by Charles Peirce. In this paper, the historical path is traversed from the viewpoint of contemporary Cognitive Structural Realism (CSR). Peirce’s semiotic theory of methods and practices of scientific inquiry prefigured CSR’s reliance on embodied informational structures and experimentation upon forms of relations that model generic scientific domains. Three results are (...) shown to follow from this convocation: (i) a naturalization of Peirce’s interconnected abductive, deductive and inductive stages of the logic of science, here characterized de novo in terms of CSR. (ii) a perspective to scientific modeling that incorporates processes of abstraction and generalization as originated from Peirce’s logic of science, and (iii) diagrammatic reasoning as a pivotal method in analyzing scientific reasoning in experimental practices. (shrink)

Peirce's Law of Triviality: The Implementation of the Trivium of Logic, Rhetoric and Grammar. Basic Categories for Linguistics and Literature Studies from a Universal Semiotic Theory This article focuses on the aspects that refer to linguistics in the works of Charles S. Peirce. His pragmatic philosophy implemented many other sciences and among them is the traditional trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, which Peirce divided into different kinds of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. While the impact of the work of Peirce (...) on theses sciences is weak, the integration of the sciences in his philosophy is interesting as a step in the history of science and his work is an example for ecclecticism and historism of science in the 19th century and the universalism of science deducted from a philosophy that uses the sign as an unitarian principle. Triple constructions are a very common feature in the writings of Peirce, and the trivium is an example of an academic construction Peirce implemented. (shrink)