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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

If physics was taught the same way philosophy is, we'd learn about the four elements before getting to Newtonian mechanics.

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Generally I agree with your critique of this approach to a subject, but I think philosophy is an exceptional case, more like a hybrid of mathematics and literature than something like physics.

If philosophy was taught the same way physics is, it would be utterly intractable.

Unlike physics, philosophy has little in the way of settled canon. There are precious few bits of established gained ground when it comes to the truly fundamental questions of a given area of philosophy.

At an entry level, the point of a proper philosophy education is to foster an appreciation for the big questions and for critical thinking.

From there, it is convenient to work historically as it provides both a natural progression of thinking on the topics as well as perfect training for how to find holes in arguments.

By begining with Socrates, the student is exposed to robust and relatively accessible arguments on most of the major topics in philosophy.

This helps students approach the questions earnestly.

Trying to begin with an examination of the current thinking on most philosophical topics would be almost impossibly divorced from that which a new entrant to philosophical thinking could grasp in a deep and rewarding way.

Instead, a good philosophy teacher can walk a student through a rewarding exploration of the major topics in philosophy across history, showing how the implausibilities of the past are far more robust than most think and how much of our present intuition is on far shakier ground than most think.

I don't quite see how you could practice critical thinking while not gaining any solid ground. Are philosophical truths to unattainable, so eternally receding? How do you know that your way of arguing has any benefits if you can't get closer to truth with it?

Solid ground was gained rapidly up until philosophy had sired all the major disciplines. What remains are the most ethereal and intractable problems, and while certain possibilities have been ruled out and others have gained popularity, they are not the sort of thing that regularly admits to being outright solidified.

Every high school chemistry textbook I've seen actually works this way! It's horrible. The chapter starts with Dalton, works up through Rutherford and Bohr, and the last two or three I've seen ended there. Each section is presented as fact, and the kids are quizzed to make sure they know the material, before tearing it all down and teaching them a new bogus theory in the next section. Ugh.

My university somehow managed to teach TCP/IP using this methodology. I stopped going to that guy's sessions pretty quickly.

Unlike say, physics, there is a big shortage of over-arching theories in chemistry. The field (in my experience of it, at least; about 5 semesters' worth) is mostly a collection of ad-hoc rules, with many exceptions and special cases. So I think the historical approach is more or less necessary for teaching these fields.

It works the same way as when bootstrapping a computer, where you have to load a bunch of fake "operating systems" (e.g. BIOS, Grub, early stages of init daemon) before you can run the latest version of the "real" OS. And after that, you will still progress mostly by patches.

Am I the only one who enjoyed this approach?

I was taught atomic theory chronologically starting with the plum pudding model, then rutherford's model, then Bohr's model and finally the quantum models.

At each stage, the focus was on:

* What observations led the scientists in question to propose the model? e.g. in Rutherford's case, there was an extensive discussion on the gold-foil experiment, the observations he saw, and the conclusions he drew from it (e.g. that a lot of mass must be packed into a tiny space).

* What properties follow from adopting them model? e.g. with Rutherford's model, the notion of an accelerating charged particle (electron) would mean that the electron would continuously lose energy until it crashes into the nucleus. obviously this isn't happening.

* Repeat the cycle: how did bohr's model attempt to overcome these problems.

We did the same with the theories on acids and bases: how Arrhenius' concept required the notion of liquid to be present, how Bronsted and Lowry formulated it more generally as proton donation and acceptance, and how Lewis formulated it in terms of electrons.

I like that at each step, we learned WHY these models were proposed and how they explained the phenomena seen until then. We learned WHAT the consequences of making a physical model are, and we learned WHAT new observations could not be accounted for. Then we learned about how concepts are generalized to account for more information.

In contrast, if I had just been shown a beautiful but complex model at the beginning, I'm not sure I would have learned as much or held as much interest. The difference is like seeing a very elegant proof to a problem vs seeing the different half-correct approaches culminating into a final solution. I feel that if the goal is to teach people how to think like scientists, show them the process not the final result.

That would have been great. But, like I said, each model was presented as the "end", and I felt like I had to un-learn things after every section.

I last took chemistry in 10th grade, and I too was exposed to the progressive chronology of atomic theory.

While today I would appreciate it for what you point out, at the time, those lessons were lost on me, and I was a thoughtful kid. I think if the pedagogy were more oriented around the progess of the scientific method, it would have been fantastic.

It seemed misguided, though, in the context of a chemistry chapter on the nature of atoms. Let's also not fail to acknowledge that a gifted teacher can make all the difference in how a given approach might be, and I imagine that the more complex, contextual picture that respects that our understanding is still evolving would be superior in the hands of a gifted teacher.

This simply obeys the inner logic of each discipline. Philosophy without regard to its history would be myopic, and hard science would be bogged down by historical details. This is not to say that the history of science is not worth learning, simply that it is not useful for science.

I'd argue that physics is being taught the way philosophy is. It's just that with physics, there's clear evidence that previous approaches fell short and there is no need to dwell on them for a long time. However, in introductory classes, you still go into the reasons that previous approaches were wrong. Why do we need to postulate such things as atoms? Knowing why advances were needed makes it much clearer why the current approach is right.

In philosophy, you need to go through all the motions to understand exactly where and why previous approaches fall short. You need to be able to reproduce the exact lines of reasoning, because you need them over and over again. Old paradigms are revisited over and over again. After thoroughly understanding why duality falls short, you discover that there are actually ways to save it. But you have to be very careful not to fall into one of the traps of reasoning that made you reject it previously. A thing like Platonism isn't dead, but any current Platonist has to be very refined in order to keep his philosophy credible.

I think there's a real difference between teaching wrong-but-very-useful things like Newtonian mechanics and teaching wrong-and-not-at-all-useful things like the four elements.

I found learning about things like caloric theory, and the ways it was dis-proven, in physics rather enlightening since it gives great insight into the evolution of scientific knowledge and the general workings of the scientific method.

Learning about the four elements is useful if one approaches it from the perspective of learning about how such models are built.

Its not always about the outcome, but rather the process of reasoning.

I also think it's unfair to characterize Newtonian mechanics as "wrong." Under the right circumstances - ones that apply to a lot of day-to-day scenarios - it accurately predicts what will happen. Not so much with the four elements. They, in fact, do not have any predictive power.

Instead you learn the latest 'correct' answers, which you can then write on a test and receive a grade for.

I'm not disputing that modern physics is our best understanding of how the physical world works, but you do lose an important aspect of education by this style of pedagogy. When do you learn what made the best scientific minds what they were? Why should you have to reinvent their learning yourself if you want to be as great as them?

The way 'they' teach physics is just one way to learn it, not necessarily the best. Especially if your goals are not simply to get a degree.

I agree with your point, but this seems like a difficult problem to fix.

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/footnotes_plato.ht... is really accurate.

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