The Inference to the Best Explanation as heuristic to address historical episodes in Science Education through explanatory controversies

Abstract

This paper presents the Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to approach aspects of Nature of Science through historical explanatory controversies. The Inference to the Best Explanation is a topic of discussion in epistemology that addresses the justification and rationality of knowledge. Its focus is the study of the conditions that led an explanation to be considered superior than its competitors in a specific context. In this paper, this perspective is adapted to analyze the conflict between scientific explanations at specific times of history of science. The focus is to problematize the epistemic and cultural foundations that supported the defense of explanations proposed throughout the course of the historical episode under discussion. One of the goals is that this discussion can be made in contexts such as secondary education and teachers training, in order to avoid extreme positions in the opposition between structuralist and relativist conceptions of science. For this, some key concepts of the IBE are presented, followed by a proposal of how to adapt them to educational context. As an illustration, this perspective is employed in the historical episode of the photoelectric effect explanation, during the early decades of the 20th century. On the episode are addressed issues such as: the role of the scientific community in the evaluation of scientific knowledge, the indeterminacy of scientific theories by the available evidence, and the influence of personal interests in the evaluation of scientific theories.

Keywords

• inferência à melhor explicação
• natureza da ciência
• história da ciência
• filosofia da ciência