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Friedel Weinert: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud: Revolutions in the History and
Philosophy of Science

Article  in  Science & Education · September 2011

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Paul Thagard
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Review of Friedel Weinert, Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud: Revolutions in the History

and Philosophy of Science, Chichester, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

There are various reasons why people concerned with science education should be

interested in the history and philosophy of science. First, the history of science provides

valuable background about the origins of the concepts and theories that science educators

aim to convey to new generations of students. Second, the philosophy of science can

contribute insights about the structure and growth of scientific knowledge through

penetrating discussions of methodology and norms of inference. Third, history and

philosophy of science can potentially help to address questions about why scientific ideas

are often so hard to communicate to the general population.

The topic of scientific revolutions is especially relevant to all three of these

reasons. The major breakthroughs associated with Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier,

Darwin, and Einstein are historically fascinating, philosophically rich, and potentially

relevant to identifying impediments to science education. Insights about educational

difficulties can arise from the fact that scientific revolutions require major kinds of

conceptual change, and it is possible that similar kinds of conceptual change are required

in the transition from the naïve beliefs of beginning students to the sophisticated

understanding that science education is supposed to produce.

Friedel Weinert provides a historical and philosophical analysis of the work of

three scientists often considered to be revolutionary: Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. I

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will assess his book with respect to the three kinds of relevance to science education

mentioned above: historical background, philosophical insight, and application to

understanding conceptual impediments.

The major strength of this book is its detailed historical accounts of the ideas of

the three enormously influential thinkers it considers. Weinert delivers clear, well

written, comprehensive and accurate descriptions of the theories of all three scientists,

setting key ideas in their historical contexts. For example, the discussion of Copernicus

includes a lucid and rich description of both his heliocentric worldview and the

geocentric worldview that it replaced. The Darwin chapters include a fine description of

other evolutionary theorists such as Lamarck. The Freud chapters include not only a

good summary of Freud’s basic ideas, but also a highly informative discussion of

naturalistic versus hermeneutic approaches to the social sciences.

Weinert’s book, however, has a serious historical weakness. He asserts (p. 263):

“There is neither convergence of evidence in favor of Freud’s model nor convergence on

at least some alternative models in the scientific community.” However, at least in the

English-speaking world, there is substantial agreement in psychology and neuroscience

that Freud was wrong in many of his central ideas about unconscious mechanisms,

infantile sexuality, and the causes and treatment of mental illness. Weinert’s only

discussion of contemporary cognitive science concerns evolutionary psychology, which

gets a lot of popular press but is viewed with much skepticism in mainstream cognitive

neuroscience. Philosophers such as Karl Popper worried that Freudian theory was

unfalsifiable, but much contemporary research in cognitive and clinical psychology

suggests that we can reject many of Freud’s central hypotheses as false on the grounds

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that they contradict alternative hypotheses that are well supported by behaviorial and

neurological research.

Weinert also does not recognize that since the 1980s an alternative has developed

to traditional ideas in the philosophy of science about the structure and growth of

scientific knowledge. He takes for granted logical empiricist accounts of laws and

explanations. In contrast, philosophers such as Hanne Andersen, William Bechtel,

Lindley Darden, Ronald Giere, Nancy Nersessian and I have drawn on the cognitive

sciences to provide alternative accounts of theories, explanations, and conceptual change.

Psychology and artificial intelligence provide resources not considered by Weinert for

considering the nature of scientific developments in both revolutionary and non-

revolutionary science.

Weinert’s unfamiliarity with the cognitive sciences also allows him to take a

strong stand in favor of the autonomy of the social sciences from the natural sciences.

He denies that social events can be explained along the lines of a causal-mechanical

model of physical events, on the grounds that explaining human activity requires

attention to reasons and meaning. But cognitive psychology and neuroscience have

made major strides in generating mechanistic (computational and neural) models that

explain behavior in terms of mental structures that constitute meaningful reasons. The

social sciences are currently in the grip of simplistic individualism (rational choice theory

in economics and politics) and obscurantist holism (postmodernism in sociology and

anthropology). Integrating the cognitive sciences with the social sciences (in a way that

can be informative in both directions) provides a potential middle ground between

reductionist and anti-reductionist approaches.

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 Cognitive approaches to the history and philosophy of science also hold promise

for contributing to the third main reason why these fields are relevant to science

education. The jury is still out concerning the extent to which the cognitive processes of

students learning science approximate the cognitive processes of scientists making

discoveries. But one of goals of science education is surely to help students move

toward a mature understanding of science, which requires them to have some of the

cognitive structures found in mature scientists. These structures go well beyond sets of

propositions such as laws that traditional philosophy of science assumes constitute a

scientific theory. In contrast, cognitive philosophy of science can draw on a broader

account of scientific knowledge that includes concepts, visual images, experimental

procedures as functioning in inquiring minds. Cognitive science is to education what

biology is to medicine, so the approach to philosophy and history of science most

relevant to science education is one that acknowledges the relevance of empirical and

theoretical investigations of the mind. Attention to the cognitive structures of scientific

knowledge can help to illuminate why transferring such knowledge to students is often so

difficult.

Nevertheless, those seeking a more conventional approach to the history and

philosophy of science may well find Weinert’s book informative. There are a few minor

problems. Weinert cavils that Copernicus himself was not a scientific revolutionary, but

generating the heliocentric system that led to overturning the Ptolemaic orthodoxy strikes

me as a major conceptual shift. A recurring error is use of the term “eliminative

induction” to mean selecting the best explanatory account (more commonly known as

“inference to the best explanation”), whereas the term usually means starting with a

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 bunch of hypotheses and selectively limiting those that are refuted by evidence.

Inference to the best explanation does a parallel comparison, whereas eliminative

induction assumes that serial rejections can be carried out until only one hypothesis

survives; such eliminations are historically rare. Despite these problems and the neglect

of cognitive science, there is much to be learned from Weinert’s comparison of

Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.

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