The document discusses cognitive resistance to learning science and the difficult acquisition of scientific concepts. It covers how children develop intuitive theories about the world from a young age that sometimes clash with scientific explanations, making conceptual change challenging. While babies observe and experiment with the world like scientists, developing abstract causal systems, their thinking differs from professional science. Science requires skills that must be taught, as scientific reasoning does not come naturally to the human mind due to our evolutionary history in small social groups. Overall, the document examines the origins of scientific thinking in childhood and challenges to learning science posed by natural intuitive theories developed from a young age.

1. Learning science and its difficulties
Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories
The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change
The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as scientists?
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2. Cognitive resistance
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Resistance to the
theory
of evolution

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Resistance to
scientific knowledge
in astronomy

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Resistance to
scientific knowledge
in physics

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McCloskey 1983
Resistance to
scientific knowledge
in physics

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Resistance to
scientific knowledge
in biology

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Resistance to
scientific knowledge
in biology

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Resistance to
scientific knowledge
as implied in
superstition and
pseudo-scientific
claims

10.  Feynman, 1974
 During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such
as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency… Then
a method was discovered for separating the ideas – which was to
try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This
method became organized, of course, into science. And it
developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is
such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in
understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when
nothing that they proposed ever really worked – or very little of it
did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get
me into a conversation about UFOs or astrology, or some form of
mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness,
ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific
world. (Feynman, 1974)

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The “head start” theory
 Intuitions/naïve beliefs, core knowledge/skills
 For forming an early understanding of the natural world and ot
others’ minds
 partly inherited
 the product of natural selection, or exaptations,
spandrels…
 partly acquired through early observation, imitation
 predisposition for observation and a sensitivity to certain
stimuli is required

12.  (Bloom & Weisberg, 2007)
 The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns
what children know prior to their exposure to science.
 The last several decades of developmental psychology
has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off
as "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich
understanding of both the physical world (a "naïve physics")
and the social world (a "naïve psychology"). Babies know that
objects are solid, that they persist over time even when they
are out of sight, that they fall to the ground if unsuorted, and
that they do not move unless acted upon. They also
understand that people move autonomously in response to
social and physical events, that they act and react in accord
with their goals, and that they respond with appropriate
emotions to different situations
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13.  (Bloom & Weisberg, 2007)
 These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to
understanding and learning about objects and people. But
these intuitions also sometimes clash with scientific
discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain
scientific facts difficult to learn. As Susan Carey once put
it, the problem with teaching science to children is "not
what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely
alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the
phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to
teach. (Bloom & Weisberg 2007)
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14. Learning science and its difficulties
Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories
The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change
The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as scientists?
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15. Conceptual change
 (late 1970s) educational research on science education (Clement,
McCloskey)
 (mid-60s) anti-positivistic view of science gains philosophy (Kuhn,
Feyerabend)
 (80s-90s) cognitive approach to scientific thinking and change,
informed by developmental psychology (Piaget + Spelke,
Baillargeon, Carey …)
Give rise to the notions of “misconception” and “conceptual change”
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16.  Uncontroversial:
 Students arrive to instruction with prior ideas
 Prior ideas constrain successive learning
 Controversial:
 In what consists the change?
 What changes?
 How does change occurs?
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17.  Main ingredients of the
« rational » approach to
conceptual change
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18.  misconceptions are blocking or filtering good ones, are coherent and
organized in theory-like structures
 transformation (radical, non-cumulative, change of perspective in
which one concept is given out for another, incommensurability
between conceptual systems)
 conflict between old and new views, and of the experience of conflict
as the necessary and sufficient condition for fueling the transformation.
 2 main influences :
 Thomas Kuhn
 Jean Piaget
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19.  Radical view of what changes =
 theories (e.g. Susan Carey, Alison Gopnik) that contain
concepts
 ontologies have to change too (e.g. Magdalene Chi) because
resistant mistakes derive from miscategorizations not just wrong
concepts
 Less radical view = frameworks (e.g. Stella Vosniadou)
 Theories are structured
 Frameworks are less structured, internal quasi-coherent
explanatory systems, presuppositions
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20.  Soft view of what changes
 Knowledge in pieces or facets or p-prims (John Minstrell, Andrea
DiSessa)
 P-prims are many, loosely structured, sometimes highly contextual
 Children are not scientists
 Soft view of the nature of change
 Reasons for difficulty might be the same in the absence of previous
intuitions: collecting and ordinating pieces is always difficult
 Soft view of how to produce change
 Some facets are consistent with science and can anchor instruction
(John Minstrell)
 Use both conflict and analogy to produce good explanations (John
Clement)
 Not necessarily a rational process of transformation, but accumulation
and coordination (Andrea Di Sessa)
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21.  Other questions:
 Are children really intuitively wrong?
 Or is it an artifact of how their beliefs are evaluated ? (e.g.
Michael Siegal)
 Isn’t it possible that at least certain misconceptions are induced
by instruction? (e.g. pathetic fallacy)
 Do children (and adults) really change their mind?
 There’s evidence that instruction masks previous beliefs
rather thn transforming them (e.g. Andrew Shtulman, Kevin
Dunbar)
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22. Learning science and its difficulties
Cognitive resistance to scientific facts and theories
The difficult acquisition of scientific concepts: Conceptual change
The origins and development of scientific thinking: babies as
scientists?
ECC 2012-13

23. ECC 2012-13
The basic idea is that children develop their everyday knowledge of the world using
the same cognitive devices that adults use in science. In particular, children develop
abstract, coherent, systems of entities and rules, particularly causal entities and
rules.
That is, they develop theories. ..Children actively experiment with and explore the
world, testing the predictions of the theory and gathering relevant
evidence…Eventually, however, when many predictions of the theory are falsified,
the child begins to seek alternative theories (Gopnik 2003)
Babies as scientists

24. So-so scientists
 Pinker 1997 p. 303
 Natural selection, however, did not shape us to earn good grades
in science class or to publish in refereed journals. It shaped us to
master the local environment, and that led to discrepancies
between how we naturally think and what is demanded in the
academy.
 ...
 Good science is pedantic, expensive, and subversive. It was
an unlikely selection pressure within illiterate foraging bands
like our ancestors', and we should expect people's native
“scientific” abilities to differ from the original article.
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25. Unnatural nature of science
 Robert McCauley 2000 (Wolpert 1994; Boyer, 1994)
 Among the huge range of activities scientists undertake, two deserve particular
attention when considering the unnaturalness of science:
 (1) scientists develop explanatory theories that challenge received views
about empirical matters and (2) their critical assessment of those theories
highly values evidence born of empirical tests.
 What distinguishes science is, first, the relative sophistication and systematicity it
brings both to the generation of empirical evidence and to the assessment of that
evidence's import for explanatory theories and, second, the pivotal roles that social
and cultural arrangements--as opposed to our ordinary cognitive predilections--play in
those processes.
 The requisite skills neither automatically come to human beings nor
automatically become habits of the human mind. This is one of the reasons
why science must be taught and why so many have such difficulty both
learning it and learning how to do it.
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26.  R. Dawkins (about mystery in physics)
 Isn't it possible that our evolved brains because we evolved
in what I call "middle world", where we never have to
cope either with the very small or the cosmologically very
large, we may never actually have an intuitive feel for what
is going on in quantum mechanics, we can still test the
predictions, do the mathematics and do the physics to actually
test the predictions because anybody can read the diagrams
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Forbidden intuitions

27. Homo scientificus
 We do science: it is a fact
 Our cognitive apparatus must be somehow prepared for
science
 Research on cognitive precursors of science in the evolutionary
(phylogeny) and developmental (ontogeny) past
 But is not pre-wired for professional science
 Research on tools that make science viable
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28. Naturalization of scientific thinking
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Precursors
of scientific
thinking in
phylogenesi
s
Natural
(cognitive)
enemies of
scientific
thinking
and
knowledge
in
phylogeny
Natural
(cognitive)
enemies of
scientific
thinking
and
knowledge
in ontogeny
Precursors
of scientific
thinking in
ontogeny
Cognitive
skills and
disposition
s displayed
by
scientists
Cognitive
skills and
disposition
s required
for science
Mithen McCauley Gopnik Simon Quine
Liebenberg Boyer Chi Spelke Holyoak DiSessa
Carruthers Atran Carey Carey Dunbar
Povinelli Tooby &
Cosmides
Bloom Bloom
Pinker

29. The natural-cultural hypothesis
 A mixed origin of science
 Nature: core knowledge, curiosity, causal reasoning, sensitivity to
regularities, …
 = capacities that reveal themselves very easily in the
ontogenetic development and probably go far in our
evolutionary past
 Culture: social cooperation and tools for augmenting cognitive
capacities (e.g. writing for transmission, spatial external
representations)
 = capacities that have a natural basis and make our culture
special
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30.  D. Dennett
 But what we can see is that what scientists have
constructed over the centuries is the tools, mind tools,
thinking tools, mathematical tools which enable us to some
degree to overcome the limitations of our evolved brains, our
stone-age, if you like, brains;
 and overcoming those limitations is not always direct
sometimes you have to give up something you get, you just
may never be able as you to think intuitively about this,
but you can know, even if you can't think it intuitively,
there is this laborious process you can make
progress and you can have the seed of a certain authority to
the progress that you can test that and it can carry you from A
to B in the same way you know if you are quadriplegic an
artificial device can carry you from A to B, you can't walk from
A to B but you get from A to B.
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