Opening the Black Box of NOS: Or Knowing How to Go On With Science Education, Wittgenstein, and STS in a Precarious World

Abstract

In this response essay we offer some critical comments on the nature of science (NOS) and thereby hopefully extend Hodson and Wong’s (2017, this issue) argument concerning understanding scientific practice. Drawing on selected theorising in science and technology studies (STS), we argue that NOS needs to take much more seriously sociopolitical contexts of its own formations and embrace wider contemporary social and ecological imbalances, precarities, and injustices. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s later work, in particular notions of “family resemblances,” we are encouraged by Hodson and Wong’s desires to focus on scientific practice. However, we suggest that their analysis is incomplete because it remains undulywedded to lists of representative features prescinded from scientific practices. We conclude with three suggestions for opening up the NOS black box and extending the scope of NOS debate, by (a) more fully embracing science and education as dynamic, performative, grammatical investigations; (b) exploring ways of reconnecting scientific content (representations of nature) with NOS (scientific cultures); and (c) better understanding NOS as a successful situated curriculum movement. As such, we suggest, it might be distinctively positioned to help challenge increasingly widespread neoliberal, positivistic dreams of futurity.