All correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Chair, Applied Cognitive Science and Science Education, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 3N4. E-mail: mroth@uvic.ca.
Abstract
We analyze and explore, in the form of dialogues and metalogues questions about the dialogic nature of beliefs and students belief talk about the nature of science and scientific knowledge. Following recent advances in discursive psychology, this study focuses not on students' claims but on the discursive resources and dialogical practices that support the particular claims they make. We argue that students' discourse is better understood as a textual bricolage that is sensitive to conversational context, common sense, interpretive repertoires, and textual resources available in the conversational situation. Our text is reflexive as it embodies the discursive construction of knowledge and undercuts any claims to authoritative knowledge.
The very conception of 'belief' is itself an expression or construction from within the mundane idiom. . . . We learn to use 'belief' in conditions when the 'objective facts' are unknown or problematic and we want to indicate the tenuous character of our claim. . . . The notion of 'real world' or 'objective reality' is embedded in an extensive, pervasive language game which includes as an intelligible move or possibility the use of the very concept of 'belief' itself. (Pollner, 1987, p. 21)
(Interlocutor and author [AUT] are sitting in a spacious office surrounded by bookshelves filled with videotapes, ring binders, research journals, and books.)
Interlocutor: The introductory quote suggests that there are no beliefs and objective facts. Many of our readers will have a hard time accepting such a statement.
AUT: The author of this quote is ethnomethodologist. He takes a discursive perspective to attitudes and beliefs which shifts the focus from underlying psychological entities that are supposed to produce the talk. Rather than reflecting individual properties, members' talk reflects the community and everyday discourse of their lifeworlds. There are no private languages. What belief talk reflects are the ways statements about belief, truth, and world are accounted for.
Interlocutor: Where do you see the advantage of taking a discursive approach to students' beliefs?
AUT: A discursive approach is consistent with neurocomputational accounts [1] of knowing according to which knowledge is always enacted, always produced in the situation at hand, drawing on available and salient resources, and being shaped by the questions, social context, and purposes of interlocutors.
Interlocutor: Why did you choose the unusual format of a dialogue to present your work on students' belief talk?
AUT: The form of dialogue to approach philosophical and epistemological questions is not new but dates back to the days of ancient Greek. In more recent years, philosophers, anthropologists, and sociologists use dialogue as a means to meet the challenge to make epistemological topic and exposition consistent [2]. This led to the work on reflexivity, in which the claim about the socially constructed nature of knowledge is not only made about scientific knowledge but also about the knowledge claims of those who write about the social construction of knowledge in science [3]. As the present paper takes the theoretical position of discursive psychology [4], the dialogical style of presentation appears especially appropriate for exploring students' talk about the nature of science.
Interlocutor: This explains why you wanted to present students' belief talk in the form of conversations. But I am not familiar with metalogues.
AUT: It was Gregory Bateson who introduced us to metalogues. His daughter explains it thus: A metalogue is a conversation that deals with some aspect of mental process; ideally, the interaction between the interlocutors exemplifies the subject matter [5].
Interlocutor: So this is why we deviate from the traditional format of research exposition, conversations to present the discursive nature of "beliefs."
AUT: In this way, our conversation reflects the nature of the subject matter, that is, students' discursive constitution of beliefs, and the discursive nature of knowledge construction in science education.
Interlocutor: So this study is not only about students' discursive construction of the nature of science and scientific knowledge but also about reflexivity.
AUT: Only implicitly. But the present study is reflexive in a triple sense. First, the dialogic nature of the presentation reflect the theoretical approach taken by the study and its topic of inquiry.
Interlocutor: So it is not just what you learned by interviewing the students, but my own contributions to this conversation that constitutes the construction of knowledge.
AUT: You are right, but it also increases my level of anxiety, for I am no longer in complete control of the narrative.
Interlocutor: This is the price that post-structuralist accounts have to pay. But seriously, continue by telling me about the other two senses of reflexivity.
AUT: So, at a second level, the dialogic nature reflects the nature of inquiry in science study by taking up its very style of argument rather than referring to it from a different discursive form (traditional authoritative text). Finally, the presentation reflects the research method of generating the data (interviews with pairs of students) which is fundamentally dialogic in nature.
Interlocutor: Why don't we listen in on your students' conversations?
AUT: Yes, OK. Let me give you some background first. Andy, Jeff, Karin, and Rhonda, are high school students enrolled in a senior year advanced physics course who sit around a table on the grounds of their suburban Australian school. They are talking about the nature of science, a topic brought up by the science education professors who had come to their campus to videotape and interview them in the context of a unit on rotational motion. The conversations are about four statements taken from a questionnaire for eliciting Views on science-technology-society [6].
AUT: One of the questions we wanted you to discuss is, 'Do scientists classify nature as it really is?'
Andy: Do you mean if scientists are classifying nature according to the way nature really is, but any other way would simply be wrong?
AUT: Yes, like that.
Karin: Nobody really knows, but the laws are sort of just one way of understanding it.
Rhonda: I think it is more like they are classifying according to what they see as nature; and they think, 'Oh yeah that's a tree and that's a tree,' and they are probably completely different things.
Jeff: They could probably do more than one classification, but there would be one or two ways that would be best.
Andy: Scientist have chosen one way to avoid confusion like standard international units. That way isn't always the only way. Like you pick a card out of a deck the four of spades, you can classify it as a black card, you can classify it as a spade or you could classify it as a four, there's different ways and all of them are correct.
Karin: I agree with Andy, there still could be a set of circumstances for which some law does not apply. So we have to be careful before we say that these one or two ways work for everything.
Rhonda: But when you take some formula, like distance equals v times t, you know that the formula would work for everyone. That shows how perfect nature is and it sort of shows that maybe everything is predetermined in life.
Karin: I don't think that scientists agree at all. Like you often hear, in newspapers and stuff, this scientist saying this but that person has got a whole series of data and statistics that say the opposite thing.
Jeff: That would depend on the person who got the wrong answer. If all scientists found that the one who got the wrong answer did it the wrong way or something like that, then I suppose you have to accept it. But if they didn't see a flaw in the way this person has done it, they would have to go back and rethink it objectively.
Andy: We can only get close to reality, we can't actually pinpoint it.
Jeff: Yeah, it's a technology thing. For example, you could try to classify different atoms and the way they are set up. Then you get a new microscope and find ways of getting inside the atom and find out new and different things. So it's technology that makes the difference.
Karin: That sort of fits with the different circumstances that I talked about.
Rhonda: But I don't think that the technology gets us any closer. I don't think we know the way nature really is. It is more like the average, well most people have said that we classify it this way, and it works, so that's what we'll say.
Jeff: Because one universal system is much easier
Rhonda: For the moment, basically, that is what everyone believes, so go with the flow, I guess. I just figure that there are heaps of different ways that nature might work but to make life a lot easier everyone sort of decides well this is what we'll say happens because it is all going to be basically the same so they just sort of pick the thing and say this is the formula for this.
Andy: But we have no certainties in life. To me, there is no real answer, no real classification. All we know is that things are physically there, but the theories we use for classification are not really there.
Jeff: But that is only because, like our experiments are only as good as current technology allows us, so there is some doubt in any experiment.
Karin: Nobody really knows.
Jeff: I disagree, I think there may be a true way. It depends on funding. If the experiment was relatively cheap it wouldn't give an accurate result. But there might be a better way and it took a bit longer, then that would depend on the funding as to which way it would be done, even if it was more expensive it would be the way to get a better perception of the way.
Andy: How can you say that when it is pretty certain that nobody knows what nature really is? Classifications are chosen because they are useful and easy to use, to get a better idea for reasoning about things, but we never know if they are the truth.
Rhonda: The only problem with this position is that even if you know that it may be different, on the test you have to do it what the textbook tells you. So I just study it and when the test is over, I forget it. If I don't really believe in what it is, then I just forget it.
Andy: This, I find hard too. Especially when Sparks is telling us sometimes that there is more than one correct way in physics, and then, on the test, he bongs you if you don't get it his way.
Jeff: I don't think you really decide to, like get down and do hard work and all that. I just automatically go ahead and do it.
Interlocutor: Let me interrupt the students here, I get the picture. Looks to me as if there are clearly two different beliefs. Brenda, Karin, and Andy hold the social constructivist belief according to which all scientific knowledge is negotiated. Jeff holds that we approximate the truth about nature as our empirical work becomes increasingly refined with new technology.
AUT: You just stated what some sociologists said about scientists' discursive strategies. Because the scientists interviewed had to admit that there are both scientific controversies and radical changes from one established theory to another, they use the 'truth-will-come-out' strategy. They admit that there are outside influences on individual scientists influencing their work, but they claim that truth will eventually come out.
Interlocutor: I don't see anything wrong with this last part. Classifications are imposed by the very structure of nature so that it is easy to evaluate whether some scientific classification is a valid truth candidate or not.
AUT: Admittedly, classifications have to be viable, but I question whether traditional notions of truth as the isomorphism of world and mathematical structure is useful. But permit me to come back to the issue of the beliefs which you seem to discern from the students' conversation. We take a discourse perspective, and in this perspective it is more interesting to look at intraindividual variations in discourse. Take Brenda, for example, based on her first statement, an analyst may classify her as a relativist; based on her utterance relative to mathematical equations and the perfectness of nature, one might be tempted to classify her as an objectivist.
Interlocutor: This, surely, is inconsistent.
AUT: Exactly. In the past, social science researchers have attributed irrationality to their respondents and used methods such as triangulation to get at the 'real' beliefs of a person.
Interlocutor: So how do discursive approaches deal with data such as these?
AUT: Discourse analytic approaches take their respondents as rational human beings which they try to understand by asking, What aspects of context allow respondents to make seemingly contradictory statements? and What are the discursive strategies used by respondents to deal with their statements from different contexts which appear to contradict each other. Here, Brenda showed that there are situations in which a Newtonian motion equation works under normal circumstances pretty well everywhere on earth. On the other hand, she recognized that there may be other ways how nature could be described.
Interlocutor: It is interesting that there seems to be a relationship between belief and knowledge in the way described by some science educators. We know that Brenda, Karin, and Andy are medium to low achieving students, so they do not understand the issues on a deeper level. Jeff, on the other hand, is an honors student and is likely to have the reflective reasoning ability to make necessary distinctions.
AUT: But correlations, much like triangulation, wash out much of the interesting variations using correlations simplifies the complex issues related to the construction of Self, Other, and reality.
AUT: One of the things we wanted you to talk about was the origin of scientific laws. Where scientific laws discovered or invented?
Andy: Yeah, facts. Like laws are actually out there they are actually happening. If you let go of a pencil in the air it will drop. So 'theory of gravity' is just a word, you could have called it anything and it would still have the same kind of result.
Rhonda: I agree, and because more than one scientist will sort of think about it, and put it in their own words, a lot of the theories are invented. Because more than one person has contributed to it.
Karin: I don't agree with what you are saying. I don't think that laws are there to be found because I think that scientists have to invent something to explain something. Nature works in more complex patterns than that, nature doesn't need a law to make an event happen. Scientists invent some way to describe what happens.
Rhonda: But knowledge is just facts, it is more really stuff that is true, that is what knowledge is. Otherwise you would just have all people running around saying stuff that isn't true.
Jeff: What you are saying makes no sense to me. Scientists may invent new methods to find those laws, but the laws are out there to be discovered. I mean, when the world was created there were laws just put up everywhere and we just have to find them all.
Karin: But the way I understand it, an explanation is sort of an interpretation. And a law is probably when you think about the way that nature works, so it is an interpretation.
Andy: When you first set out to discover something, you do set a series of steps that you have to follow which would be a logical order.
Jeff: Yeah, you have to go through a logical process.
Andy: But along the way usually things go wrong and that's how you discover things. Like electromagnetic radiation was discovered by the guy flicking on a switch. He just happened to notice the compass that was nearby, it turned. So it was an accident that he noticed it.
Jeff: I only agree in part with you. It is true, in science you pretty much have to make a few guesses and hypotheses. In order to find these laws you have to go out to an extreme. But usually one things leads after another. Without logic, you can only go so far to the next stage.
Rhonda: I disagree. I don't think that science itself is orderly, I think that people writing it down are. The scientists when they have written it down and showing everybody it looks very orderly and you sort of go oh yes how perfect.
Andy: Yeah, a lot of things in science are not really logical, they happen by accident.
Rhonda: Sometimes scientists work backwards. They have sort of invented the law themselves and then work from there to see if they are right.
Jeff: But when you look at all the equations of physics.
Rhonda: To me, inventing means that it was something that was there. But the scientists have made an equation for it. The scientists invent the law by taking the stuff that they already know&emdash;like the force exists and this exists&emdash;and put it together in an equation to show how everything relates.
AUT: Stop, stop, stop.
Interlocutor: In this conversation, students' discourse seem colored by different and uncertain use of discovery.
AUT: I agree. We have come to understand only recently that students' ontologies and meanings are often radically different from our own.
Interlocutor: Here, one of the coincident meanings of "discovery" in students' discourse is that it is accidental whereas "invention" appears to be associated with purposeful search.
AUT: Yes, admittedly I did not attend enough to these coincident meanings as I interviewed the students in this class. So I failed to bring out the different ways students constitute ontology in their talk. Andy, for example, suggests that the laws are out there, it is simply the name of the law that is constructed. In a modified way, Rhonda uses the word "invent" for the process by means of which scientists link "forces" and other things they know to exist into formulas. Karin, finally, suggests that natural phenomena occur independently of scientists' laws, which are used as frames for understanding what happens.
Interlocutor: Jeff discursively separates invention and discovery by associating the former with the method, and the latter with the topic, of inquiry.
AUT: What happens is that as soon as students associate "discover" with accidental, they also associate science with scientific process as having disorderly aspect. Andy and Jeff are involved in discursively separating their statements about the orderliness of science and the apparent lack of order associated with accidental discoveries. But to me, more important here is that the students do not separate map and territory, representations of world and world itself. They talk about events and explanations of events at the same level though they are of a different logical type.
Interlocutor: You mean, like we see objects fall on the surface of the earth, but we do not see forces.
AUT: Yes, in the same way, Oersted saw the compass needle move when he ran current through the wire, but the electromagnetic fields are at the level of explanations.
Interlocutor: But this problem of mixing logical types also happens in professional circles.
AUT: I concur. Some of the critics of von Glasersfeld's radical constructivism confused maps and territories by assuming that knowledge (as explanatory framework) is the same as our experience of the world. But let's listen some more to the students.
Interlocutor: (Turns to students) What can you say about why and how scientific knowledge changes over time?
Jeff: I think that scientific knowledge appears to change because new knowledge is added on to old knowledge. The old knowledge doesn't change.
Rhonda: The knowledge still stays the same, it is just they might gain a little bit more knowledge.
Karin: I think it is the science that stays the same.
Andy: I don't agree. Facts can change, because what we choose as fact is based on experiment, the results of how we interpret the outcome of experiments.
Rhonda: I don't think that facts change majorly. I mean they thought the earth was flat, and now it is round. But it is still the earth, it is not suddenly a golf ball, it is still going to be something to live on.
Karin: This is because of the equipment. Before, they thought that the world was flat. But as technology changes, people have access to satellites and things so they can actually see.
Jeff: But that is just what I said earlier. It's the technology thing. There's only going to be that new frontier where the new bit was added on, the old bit you wouldn't expect to change unless it was entirely wrong.
Andy: But that's why I think that experimental data can change radically. The technology they used for experiments in the seventeen, eighteen hundreds was pretty primitive compared to what we have now. So that can change your results considerably.
Karin: This is like with the atomic theory. They used to believe that electrons orbited and once they sort of found more proof, then they changed the theory.
Jeff: They've got a lot better idea of how the structure of the atom is with the technology.
Karin: Yeah, now it's a cloud and it could change again.
Jeff: But they've got their basics of knowledge and they are just expanding on that.
Rhonda: Yeah, I think the knowledge still stays the same. It is just, they might gain a little more knowledge.
Karin: But listen, in maths at the moment, we are doing stats. Our maths teacher has basically said that you can manipulate any data to suit yourself. If this is the case, it shows how flexible some of these things might be.
Interlocutor: Sorry students for interrupting this conversation. (Turns to author) Don't you think that conversations such as this are evidence that students hold certain beliefs? Take Jeff, he brought up technology across different topics.
AUT: Certainly, because many theoretical frameworks will be viable, to a certain degree, in the data sets they seek to explain. For me, the important requirement of any explanation is that it fits with our experiences of rather rational beings. Speakers may utter sentences in different contexts that a theoretician points out to be incompatible. The theoretician then claims that people are inconsistent, or, in the context of fit between utterance and actions, that people do not act according to their beliefs, that is, they do not 'walk their talk.'
Interlocutor: So what does this mean in the present context?
AUT: Take Karin, she claims at one point that science does not change but then also claims that scientific equipment and technology change. So she during this conversation, she uttered two statements at least partially incompatible.
Interlocutor: So?
AUT: To me, it makes more sense to think in terms of textual bricolage during conversations rather than as beliefs to which we have access via students' talk. There appears to be a lot of evidence in our database that students reacted to certain questions the first time. In one case, Andy did not even want to respond because 'he hadn't really thought about it as such.'
Interlocutor: Karin also suggested that students in this class were never stimulated to think about scientific knowledge in different ways and in terms of our questions.
AUT: Yes, this is why students' responses are not evidence of ingrained beliefs or understandings about the nature of science. Thinking in terms of bricolage and studying the resources students used to construct their answers in a situated way has a lot of appeal, particularly that we do not have to throw away seemingly discrepant utterances but find viable explanations what makes it possible (without drawing on irrationality) how one person can identify with the content of such utterances.
Interlocutor: Does this mean you are not so much interested in what students claim?
AUT: Indeed, I find it more interesting to look at the way students support their arguments and what discursive resources they rally. In her last statement, Karin draws on the authority of her maths teacher to support her claim that knowledge is flexible. Importantly, the same repertoire can be used to support opposite claims. Andy suggests that different technology allows the construction of different facts and therefore considerably changed knowledge, whereas Jeff draws on technology to argue for marginal additions to a stock of fixed knowledge. However, most students' utterances do share the argument structure in which claims are supported by other statements that are taken for unassailable at that moment.
Interlocutor: (To students) You earlier talked about how scientific knowledge changes as time goes on. A different kind of change could occur because culture and education might influence science and scientific knowledge. What is your take on that?
Karin: In a country where religion is part of the culture, that is obviously going to affect their discoveries in some way, because they are likely to see the world from a different perspective.
Rhonda: I think religion comes in a lot. Someone might believe in God and they think God created everything and then you look at science, and it says everything collided and everything was formed. I reckon that influences people a lot.
Karin: I also feel that culture does affect different people's objectives and what they are trying to do to change their life or predict things in their life.
Andy: Scientists aren't any different from other people and tend to think along certain lines depending on their life experiences.
Karin: Like if it is written in their holy book that everyone must follow, then the scientists wouldn't want to differ.
Rhonda: Like in the world war, you had German scientists performing experiments on twins, 'Why do they have the same eye color?', 'Why this?', 'Why that?' Whereas most scientists don't sort of cut them up and stuff like that.
Jeff: Well, different countries might be, like third world countries might not have good education or very good morals about things, and their culture and religion might be very restrictive.
Andy: A country maybe a communist country or somewhere like Japan, they may be very unoriginal in their thinking.
Jeff: I've said it many times that technology does help, and in these poverty stricken countries they don't get much help.
Karin: It's like, if you are in a country such as Ethiopia where you have got food shortages, you'd be concentrating on methods to develop more efficient ways of distributing foods.
Andy: Our demands in weapons aren't likely to be as great as somewhere like in Ireland or Bosnia.
Jeff: This is why I think in Japan, they are tremendous in their technology and they find great innovations, but if you look at a country like Papua New Guinea or something like that, I mean they don't have great education.
Andy: In Western society, where scientists have the freedom, culture will promote different kinds of thinking, and radical thinkers are more likely to bring forth new knowledge.
Rhonda: I am not so sure. Ultimately, I don't think it really matters which country you come from. A couple of hundred years ago, people believed heaps of things, but now its more universal, everyone teaches the same stuff, and so I think it doesn't make a difference.
Karin: I think so too. I mean, it is possible that they have different equations, but its more like they look at it from a different angle, the same equation but from a different angle.
Andy: I suppose that the scientists who work with all the people from different nations and cultures, they would be aware of the different ways.
Rhonda: I reckon they'd come to the same thing. They might have different letters or something, but they'd come basically to the same conclusion.
Jeff: The very dedicated scientists are objective, just go straight forward to their purpose, like Einstein.
Andy: and Newton, who first came out with the scientific method.
Karin: Cultures can't really be that important. We never find out where these theories originated, like Sparks never tells us F = ma has come from Iran, so that must be a Muslim sort of thing.
Interlocutor: Thanks, students. (Turns to author) I noticed some instances of the discursive variations you mentioned earlier. Karin, for example, initially argued that religion makes a difference in the discoveries, but in the end suggested that culture and religion does not matter that much.
AUT: I agree. What I found striking were the stereotypical contrasts rallied in support of arguments. Good and flexible cultures and societies (Australia, Western culture) versus bad or rigid cultures (Nazi, communist, Japan, Third World), poor (Ethiopia, New Guinea) versus rich countries (Australia, Japan), and peaceful (Australia) versus war-ridden countries (Bosnia, Ireland). This stereotypical characterization of other cultures is used here as a resource for supporting arguments about the impact of culture and religion on science.
Interlocutor: I notice that these students also draw on the historical and authoritative repertoires that were used by physics students in a different country. Furthermore, as in the previous conversations, the technological repertoire was used repeatedly, especially when linked to the distinction between rich countries (Japan) and poverty-stricken Third World countries (Ethiopia).
AUT: And, the authoritative references to Einstein and Newton (and earlier Oersted) display a stereotypical dimension, too. In these personalities, students repeat the heroic myths of science with which they are indoctrinated. Some science educators argue that it is just these heroic myths that some students may use in support of a decision to turn away from science.
Interlocutor: Maybe you one can link stereotypes to popular culture and TV?
AUT: Actually, I just thought that the use of stereotypes would make sense in the context of the bricolage argument that I tried to make earlier. Popular culture and TV sound bites are the sources of the texts which students assemble in the context of our question. So their answers are more characteristic of popular culture and commonsense forms of making and supporting arguments rather than individual characteristics.
AUT: In the context of our conversation, "Discussion" or "Conclusion" does not seem to be an appropriate heading for the pen-ultimate section of an article.
Interlocutor: I still want to ask you to compare your experiences of doing research on students' discourse about science (and religion) in different countries.
AUT: I am not certain that the country makes a difference. It is a mere coincidence that the Larochelle/Désautels and Roth/Lucas studies, which reported considerable changes in students epistemological discourses, were conducted in Canada. In both situations, students of the approximately the same (about 17 years) as our four protagonists attended classes in which readings and discussions about epistemology were central to instruction. The students from both Canadian studies were much more articulate and commanded much richer discursive repertoires for talking about the ontological and epistemological issues that they faced than we could observe in the Australian study. But this is certainly a reflection of students' experiences rather than one of intellectual prowess.
Interlocutor: So do you mean to imply that science teachers should not only teach science content but also engage students in discussions of epistemological issues
AUT: Well, addressing epistemological issues in the context of science, and thereby relativizing the science portrayed in textbooks is not a matter of indoctrination to relativism. Rather, it is a matter of making students reflect on the indoctrination they usually experience with traditional science textbooks. Some of the Canadian students compared the presentation style of their textbooks with that of the bible.
Interlocutor: But then you are easily subject to a criticism that you indoctrinate students to relativism.
AUT: It is a fundamental nature of knowledge that it is situated. As an instructor, I am always already positioned and any claim that any instructor can offer impartial instruction makes little sense. This argument has been made for a long time by feminist authors But what I can offer is a form of instruction that relativizes my own authority. This forces students to choose their own positions, whatever these may be. What is most important to me that the students I teach go beyond simplistic treatments epistemological issues and that they begin to question the stereotypical treatments important subjects receive in the media.
This work was made possible in part by grant 410-93-1127 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Centre for Mathematics and Science Education, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. We thank Sylvie Boutonné for managing data collection and transcriptions during this project. We extent our thanks to Marie Larochelle and Jacques Désautels for their extensive feedback to an earlier version of this article, and for their discussions on the topic of metalogues.
[1] Among these, see for example P. M. Churchland (1989) and P. S. Churchland and Sejnowski (1992).
[2] See, e.g., Feyerabend (1991) in philosophy, Bateson and Bateson (1987) in anthropology, and sociologists Ashmore (1989) and Pinch and Pinch (1988) in sociology.
[3] In an edited volume, Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge (Woolgar, 1988), all chapters explore reflexivity and new literary forms to overcome the charge that the sociology of scientific knowledge does not apply its findings to its own claims.
[4] An accessible entry to discursive psychology is provided by Edwards and Potter (1992); Roth and Lucas (1997) show how the precepts of discursive psychology pan out in the analysis of students' talk about the nature of science and how this talk changes as students read relativist accounts of knowledge construction besides their traditional high school textbooks.
[5] The notion of metalogue was introduced by Gregory Bateson (Bateson & Bateson, 1987). We thank Marie Larochelle and Jacques Désautels who reminded us of Bateson's metalogues just as we thought about how to write up this study.
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