Understanding Epistemological Anarchism (Feyerabend) in Research Reported in Reference Work

Abstract

This chapter evaluates research reported in the International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching (HPST). HPST is the first handbook (www.springer.com 978-94-007-7653-1) devoted to the field of historical and philosophical research in science and mathematics education. The handbook has 76 chapters written by 125 authors from 30 countries, which makes it truly an international endeavor. More than 300 reviewers from the disciplines of history, philosophy, education, psychology, mathematics, and natural science contributed with their expertise to its elaboration. In order to understand the rationale of the handbook it is important to consider the following invitation that was sent to the prospective authors of the different chapters:This clearly shows the wide ranging and multiple objectives of the Handbook that can provide guidance for future research as well as curricular and pedagogical feedback to those working in the educational field. Based on the subject index of the handbook, I found 10 chapters that referred to “Feyerabend” or “epistemological anarchism.” However, 4 chapters made only a simple mention with no elaboration and thus were not included. Six chapters discussed some aspect of epistemological anarchism or Feyerabend. Following the guidelines based on Charmaz (2005), presented in Chap. 3, and in order to facilitate credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability (cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 2005), of the results I adopted the following procedure: (a) All the 6 chapters from the International Handbook of Research in History, Philosophy and Science Teaching (HPST) were evaluated and classified in one of the five levels (I to V, see Chap. 3 for levels); and (b) After a period of approximately 3 months all the articles were evaluated again and there was an agreement of 95% between the first and the second evaluation. It is important to note that the authors of these chapters were not necessarily writing about epistemological anarchism, but rather referred to it in the context of their selected topic. Appendix 7 provides a complete reference to each of these 6 chapters that can provide readers with an overview of the topic of interest. Distribution of all the articles according to author’s area of research, context of the study and level (classification) is presented in Appendix 8.