In describing a pedagogy of hope in the title I use the terms ‘irony’ and ‘emergence’ which are not often associated with science education. Take the case of a lump of lead and an oak leaf dropped from a height in the open air. Even on a cool still day the lump of lead will
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always reach the ground first. Or measure the relationship between pressure and volume of a gas at a fixed temperature. Both are violations of Covering Laws. In the first case the Law of Falling Bodies which only holds true in a vacuum and the second in the case of the Ideal Gas Laws which holds for the ideal state. These laws are cases of closed systems; these are important in science experiments because in measuring the acceleration of bodies towards a large mass such as the Earth, it is necessary to remove all conditions except that being tested for, in this case the Earth’s force field, i.e. such experiments take place in carefully controlled closed conditions removed from the vagaries of open systems.
The term ‘irony’ is often used in literature and literary criticism. Take for example the following haiku where the author is trying to express their feelings of awe about cherry blossom on a Japanese mountainside.
O O O
Is all I can say
About the cherry blossom On
Mount Yoshino
The irony here is that language is insufficient to describe this beauty but the only way it can be expressed is using an atrophied form of language. Language, which is the main means for describing the world, is not up to the task in its own terms. Similarly the well-known laws of science inform us about Nature’s regularities yet in our daily experience of the ‘open’ world they do not hold.
Everyone knows that the formula of water is H2O. Yet this is only the case in very particular circumstances, that of totally pure water produced and analysed in a vacuum. In the world of everyday experience, water from natural water courses, drinking water, rain, all dissolve carbon dioxide and oxygen, solid solutes such as salts, and so forth. Any analysis will reveal a much more complex formulation than H2O. So the one fact that almost all schoolchildren know is a false description of the water they are used to.
Pure water is constituted by the atoms oxygen and hydrogen. Molecular water is liquid at room temperature and is used to quench flames. However, both oxygen and hydrogen are gases at room temperature, oxygen is essential in supporting combustion and hydrogen is explosive in the presence of a flame. Clearly the chemical and physical properties of the constituents of pure water are different when single and combined, this is an example of emergence, water emerges with different properties from its constituent elements, a core concept in a Critical Realist approach.
In explaining natural phenomena in open systems, such as the real world we experience daily, we can understand the entities that constitute the world as making things happen, they have causal powers (Chalmers, 1999). Water quenches thirst and flames, large masses like Planet Earth have the power to exert forces on objects but this power is countered by flowing air which in turn has the power to resist the fall of objects.
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When events take place in open systems they can be understood in terms of interacting mechanisms each of which can be isolated and explained through the closed and isolated conditions of carefully controlled experiments. In a critical realist approach events are experienced and described as actual. Take, for example, the decay of a pond. The event, i.e.
the decaying pond, can be experienced through our senses and perceptions, the odour of bacterial decay, the sight of pond life being exhausted, the disappearance of frogs. These perceptions are the domain of the empirical. The domain of the actual consists of the event – the decaying pond – and the empirical, our experiences of that decay. Events do not depend on the empirical – they occur regardless of our perceptions of them – but the empirical depends on events taking place. However, to explain the decay of the pond, a series of interacting mechanisms are taking place which are not necessarily observable or perceptual.
As well as biochemical mechanisms such as the flow of oxygen, the action of bacteria, there are also social and economic mechanisms such as the provision of resources to maintain the upkeep of the pond. These mechanisms are in the domain of the real. Table 1 illustrates the relationship between these domains.
Table 1: Domains within a critical realist approach
Example Real domain Actual domain Empirical
domain
Experience Sight and sadness at
decaying pond / / /
Event Pond decay / /
Mechanism Multiple causes
behind decay of pond
/
The reality of these mechanisms is distinctive to critical realism. Critical realism is
underpinned by ontological realism and epistemological relativism, the need to distinguish between what is or what exists (the intransitive dimension) and what is known (the transitive dimension). In other words, there is a reality independent of our knowledge of it. Scientific theories aspire to explain natural phenomena as far as possible but are always open to correction and independent validation (judgmental rationality). This holy trinity of critical realism (Bhaskar, 2011) can be represented in figure 1.
Ontological realism (the world as it exists)
Epistemological relativism (what we know about the world)
Judgmental rationality (validation of knowledge about the world, e.g. peer review)
170 Figure 1: The ‘holy trinity’ of critical realism
Stratification and emergence
Different strata of being can be conceptualised in terms of the causal mechanisms that cover both Nature and Society. At the most basic stratum, non-living matter is governed by physico-chemical laws and mechanisms, living things by physico-physico-chemical and biological
mechanisms; social phenomena by physico-chemical laws, biological laws and social and economic laws such as the laws of self-interest or Marxist theory. Although these strata are governed by laws and mechanisms, they are not determined by them. As I type on the
keyboard, I am limited by the constraints afforded by the laptop, by the speed of reaction from brain to hand, blood and sugar supply to my cells but my actions are not determined by them.
These strata are non-reducible and emergent. For example, at the social and economic level a school functions according to certain rules: sequences of lessons, curriculum structure. The school consists of people, buildings, books, computers but it is more than the sum of these entities and quite distinct in character (non-reducible) from them just as the properties of molecular water are quite different from its constituent atoms.