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Le scienze, come altri campi dell’attività umana, sono spesso vittime di pregiudizi. Tradizionalmente, il discorso stereotipato di certi mass media e generatori d’opinione ha sviluppato e diffuso un’immagine banalizzata e poco realista della ricerca scientifica, contribuendo ad accrescere il divario che separa le scienze umane e sociali (come l’antropologia) dalle scienze esatte e naturali (come le neuroscienze). Eppure, tale divario si è costruito artificialmente e poco ha a che vedere con la realtà oggettiva e con la quotidianità dei ricercatori: si ha spesso la tendenza ad associare gli scienziati sociali ai flâneurs, passeggiatori che attraversano le culture, osservando e sistematizzando -più o meno soggettivamente- strutture e logiche sociali quando invece i “veri” scienziati, quelli in camice bianco, sono tendenzialmente associati ad un immaginario asettico fatto di macchinari, tecnologia e strumenti di precisione atti a garantire l’oggettività del loro lavoro. Una menzogna ben orchestrata, questa, che non rende merito al processo dialogico che ha permesso ad entrambi i versanti della scienza (quella “molle”, delle scienze umane e sociali, e quella “dura”, delle scienze esatte e naturali) di costruire quel sapere polifonico che costituisce la nostra modernità. Quest'intervento vuole dunque contribuire a mostrare come l’antropologia e le neuroscienze, andrebbero considerate come due discipline “amiche” che, sin dalle origini, si son stimolate a vicenda, dato che condividono temi e metodi di ricerca.

Éduquer les futurs citoyens à la science requiert de former les enseignants à la didactique et à l’épistémologie des sciences, de manière à faire évoluer leurs conceptions sur la science, l’enseignement et l’apprentissage des sciences (conceptions épistémiques en lien avec les sciences). Ces conceptions sont objet du champ de recherche de l’épistémologie personnelle, d’origine nord-américaine, où les publications sont majoritairement en langue anglaise. En France, le besoin d’outils d’évaluation des conceptions épistémiques en lien avec les sciences est croissant, et pourtant il n’existe pas d’instrument psychométrique proprement validé en français. Ici nous rapportons la mise au point d’un tel outil, le Questionnaire mesurant les Conceptions Épistémique en lien avec les Sciences (QCES). Une analyse factorielle nous a permis d’identifier des sous-échelles de Likert, de consistance interne satisfaisante. Nous évaluons leur capacité à discriminer les conceptions épistémiques de différentes populations d’étudiants, et à mesurer leur évolution après une formation à l’épistémologie et/ou la didactique des sciences. Nos résultats, conformes à nos hypothèses de départ, montrent une efficacité psychométrique du QCES. Science education for a better citizenship requires training teachers to science epistemology and didactics of science education, in order to favor the evolution of their conceptions about science, science teaching and science learning (epistemic conceptions). These conceptions are studied in the mainly North American research field about personal epistemology. In France, tools are needed to evaluate the impact of teachers’ trainings in science epistemology and didactics of science education. However, there does not exist so far any French psychometric instrument that evaluate epistemic conceptions in science and that is properly validated. Here, we present the outcome of several years of endeavor to develop and set up the Questionnaire that measures Epistemic Conceptions in Science (QCES in French) that are adapted to the epistemological context that is encountered in French science syllabi. We explored the structure and properties the QCES. Results indicated robust internal consistencies of the subscales and their ability to discriminate between different student populations and measure changes in students’ epistemic conceptions.

The question of the metaphysical status of the laws of physics has received increased attention in recent years. Perhaps most well-known among this work are David Lewis’s Humean supervenience and Nancy Cartwright’s dispositionalism, both of which reject the classical conception of the laws of physics as necessary and real independent of the objects they govern, arguing instead that what we call laws are shorthand for the regularities of local states of affairs (on Lewis’s account) or the dispositions of objects (on Cartwright’s). The properties of necessity and reality are generally taken to go hand-in-hand when physical laws are concerned; however, this leaves aside the possibility that the laws of physics are independently real (i.e. not just a description of regularities of objects) yet contingent. This paper will explore this third option which is found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. We will ask: if laws both exist independent of their objects and are contingent, what happens when laws change? Specifically, the possibility of metaphysical retro-causation becomes a live option. This raises both questions of the ontological status of the past as well as our epistemic access to the past after a change in physical laws. Meillassoux’s ontology of hyper-chaos weathers this challenge with its consistency intact; however, it is an open question of whether or not saving the reality of physical laws by sacrificing their necessity is worth the epistemic limits and metaphysical strangeness that it implies.

We introduce a novel point of view on the “models as mediators” framework in order to emphasize certain important epistemological questions about models in science which have so far been little investigated. To illustrate how this perspective can help answer these kinds of questions, we explore the use of simplified models in high energy physics research beyond the Standard Model. We show in detail how the construction of simplified models is grounded in the need to mitigate pressing epistemic problems concerning the uncertainty inherent in the present theoretical and experimental contexts.

This study applies a new quantitative methodological approach to diagnose epistemology conceptions in a large sample. The analyses use seven multiple-rating items on the epistemology of science drawn from the item pool Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS). The bases of the new methodological diagnostic approach are the empirical psychometric scaling of the item sentences in accordance with experts’ criteria, the implementation of a multiple-rating model of answering (the respondent appraises each item sentence), and a scoring procedure that computes standardized indices from the multiple-rating responses and the sentence’s scaling. These standardized indices represent the extent to which the respondent's conceptions about the epistemology of science are informed (the higher the index, the more informed the conception). The approach is applied to evaluate the conceptions of a large and diverse national sample through its standardized indices, which provide statistical hypothesis-testing across individual sentences, items, groups, or studies, computation of reliability indices, the correlations between items, and an exploratory factor analysis that may complement qualitative analysis. Finally, the most relevant features of the new approach, its potential for applications to teacher training and curricular development in the science classroom and the method's power to make easy, quick, and economic evaluations of conceptions about the nature of science, are discussed.

En los últimos años se ha llegado entre los expertos de Didáctica de las Ciencias a notables consensos en epistemología de la ciencia, que con el paso del tiempo ha derivado, en primer lugar, en la formulación de algunas debilidades de la epistemología tradicional y, en segundo lugar, en una importante lista de consensos. El trabajo propone un marco epistemológico formulado desde un entramado conceptual novedoso tal que, recogiendo la diversidad de aportaciones actuales, se ensamblen en un todo ordenado y coherente, lo cual conllevaría también a una redescripción epistemológica del conocimiento de ciencia. Se finaliza reflexionando sobre los valores añadidos que aporta la nueva redescripción epistemológica en relación a los tradicionales y a la lista de consensos actuales.

International audience; This book addresses some of the key questions that scientists have been asking themselves for centuries: what is knowledge? What is information? How do we know that we know something? How do we construct meaning from the perceptions of things? And how do we communicate this meaning to others--that is to say, inform them? Although no consensus exists on a common definition of the concepts of information and communication, few can reject the hypothesis that information - whether perceived as an " object " or as a " process " - is a precondition for knowledge. Epistemology can be defined as the study of how we know things in general--this is its primary signification in the anglophone world--or, more specifically, as the study of how scientific knowledge is attained and validated--this is how it is conceived in the francophone world. To adopt an epistemological stance is to commit oneself to render an account of what constitutes knowledge or, in procedural terms, to render an account of when one can claim to know something. An epistemological theory imposes constraints on the interpretation of human cognitive interaction with the world. It goes without saying that different epistemological theories will have more or less restrictive criteria for distinguishing what constitutes knowledge from what is not. If information is a precondition for knowledge acquisition, giving an account of how knowledge is acquired should affect our understanding of information and communication as concepts.