Thinker's Guide to Scientific Thinking

The Thinker's Guide to Scientific Thinking by Richard Paul and Linda Elder is an interesting but flawed little booklet that combines elements of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good

Parts of the discussion are focused and to the point:

• The explanation in the section "Scientific Thinking Requires Precision" (p. 13) of the distinctions among necessary, sufficient, and contributory causes is clear and helpful.
• "Experimental Thinking Requires Experimental Controls" (p. 17) offers an excellent example of confounded variables and how to separate multiple factors in an experiment.
• "A Critical Approach to Scientific Thinking" (p. 60) talks nicely about hypothesis, model, and experiment.

The Bad

Many sections are disorganized, misleading, or wrong:

• Bizarre lists appear to have been built without logic or understanding. In "Asking One System and Conflicting System Questions" (p. 22), the "Examples of one-system (monological) scientific questions" include the philosophical "What is science?", "What are some methods scientists use in making discoveries and developing theories?", etc. along with social "What significant positive implications have resulted from scientific research?" and "What are some important uses of plant life, in medicine, in lumber production, in food production?", etc.—but then, in the midst of all that, the single incongruous quantitative question: "What is the boiling point of lead?"
• In "The Logic of Physics" (p. 43) there are oddly hodge-podge lists:
  • "Key Concepts" read as though they were the result of Internet searches digested down by someone who didn't recognize the difference between properties, universal laws, speculative theories, and practical applications. The list includes "matter, energy, mass, space, time, ..." followed by "..., chaos theory, quantum, and relativity."
  • "Key Assumptions" is a similar mess. And there's a technical mistake in the statement that "... the forces of inertia, gravitation, and electromagnetism are different manifestations of a single force"—presumably the authors are confused about general relativity and the unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force?
  • The funniest section is "Implications". It lists quality-of-life improvements from physics, among which are, "It enables us to build power plants, trucks, airplanes, trains, televisions, and telephones." Other good things from physics they mention include "irrigation and sewer systems".
• The authors don't discuss any mathematics or other quantitative aspects of science. Instead, they hand-wave and speculate, as though they've met a scientist at a party but found the subject too technical to understand. Where are the comments on statistics, correlations, and significance?

As William Thompson (Lord Kelvin) famously said:

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science."

The Ugly

Many areas could be improved:

• The pamphlet is highly repetitive, both internally and in the context of the series of publications by the authors. The pie chart of "Elements of Scientific Thought" on page 4, for instance, is simply a replica of the "Elements of Thought" wheel on the web site and in other booklets, but with the word "Scientific" inserted into the title of every wedge ("Scientific Point of View", "Purpose of Scientific Thinking", "Scientific Question at Issue", etc.). The same eight points appear, little modified, on pages 4, 5, 6-7, 14-15, 16, 18, 20, 25, 38, and 39. If these were cross-referenced and motivated, they might be useful, especially to new students.
• The style of writing is heavy on exhortation without explanation. There's nary a glimpse of the thrill of scientific discovery, the excitement when one suddenly understands something subtle, or the pleasure of bringing order out of chaos.
• The fallacies discussed in the section "The Problem of Pseudo-Scientific and Unscientific Thinking" (p. 55) are good to recognize and avoid, though they're quite generic and not specifically"scientific".
• The section "A Pseudo-Science: Why Astrology Is Not a Science" (p. 56) does a good job of knocking down a straw man. Why not apply the same critical analysis to such areas as Lysenkoism, alternative medicine, cults and religions, economics, political science, psychology/psychiatry, global climate change, string theory, etc.? (No, not all of these are pseudo-sciences; I'm happy to have my personal cherished beliefs challenged!)
• Useful would be brief discussions of epistemological issues such as the importance and risks of inductive reasoning, the nature of "evidence", and the issues surrounding "scientific revolutions".

(cf. BadArithmetic (2004-02-24), ...) - ^z - 2010-09-01