Will Thomas: Holden Thorp's Science editorial on science pedagogy, #HPS #histsci, and realistic perceptions of scientific method arrives almost exactly 50 years after Stephen Brush's famous Science article on the same subject, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" doi.org/10.1126/scie...

Holden Thorp's Science editorial on science pedagogy, #HPS #histsci, and realistic perceptions of scientific method arrives almost exactly 50 years after Stephen Brush's famous Science article on the same subject, "Should the History of Science Be Rated X?" doi.org/10.1126/scie...

The scientific enterprise continues to be questioned when ideas are revised in light of new data. To most scientists, this is such a natural part of science that we take it for granted. We (includes me) need to do a better job of saying "this is what we know now." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Teach philosophy of sciencewww.science.org Much is being made about the erosion of public trust in science. Surveys show a modest decline in the United States from a very high level of trust, but that is seen for other institutions as well. Wh...

I know you've talked about this on social media before, but have you written anything more lengthy on the topic? Am working on a paper about amnesiac rhetorics/reinventing the wheel of interdisciplinarity and am wondering if there's connections to be drawn here

I've never formalized it, but I've been attuned for a while to narratives in which history of science plays the role of methodological savior. I get into it a bit in the conclusion of my book Rational Action, and this post pulls directly from this blog post: rational-action.com/etherwave/20...

Thankyou! The bigger question I'm circling around is *why* do these repeated arguments get forgotten?

It's a great question and I'm not sure there are solid answers,. I've found what David Edgerton has said about "cliches" helpful; there's the nebulous idea of "conventional wisdom"; I invoke the concept of narrative "myths" here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Scientists’ Imagined Pasts and Historians’ Appreciation of Scientific Thought | Isis: Vol 108, No 4www.journals.uchicago.edu Abstract Historians should heed Adrian Wilson’s call for deeper study of the “imagined pasts” of science, but they should avoid thinking of those pasts as corrupted versions of professional history. T...

Wow. There's an actual person called Holden Thorp? In an early series of Frasier, Holden Thorp was a progressive mayoral (or something) candidate who turned out to believe he had been abducted by aliens. [TFI Friday comedy skeet alert.]

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