Scholars Award: What Ought the Public Understand about Science?

该奖项支持解决如何构建科学素养目标等深层次相关问题的研究。一方面，科学界对许多问题的共识（如人类造成的全球变暖和普通儿童疫苗的安全性）与美国公众对这些问题的看法之间存在着巨大的差距。PI将综合最近在科学哲学和社会认识论方面的工作，在许多关于科学教育和传播的社会科学研究的背景下，以制定一个思考科学素养的框架。他将提出一个框架，在这个框架中，科学素养被解释为对科学作为一项集体事业的某种理解，它的优点是强调科学素养在使公众成员认识到科学共识的重要性方面可以发挥的作用。该项目的结果将得到传播，以吸引科学传播者（包括科学家、教育工作者和记者）的兴趣，并指导关于基于科学的政策和科学教育的讨论，特别是在民主审议的背景下。该项目的主要贡献之一将是把最近关于理解的科学哲学工作与最近关于证言的社会认识论工作联系起来。由于社会认识论主要关注知识的转移，很少有人考虑在社会背景下的理解或将这些说法应用于科学素养的概念。与此同时，许多关于科学素养的社会科学工作已经脱离了对理解及其独特的认识论作用的相关哲学讨论。在这些理论问题上取得重大进展的同时，该项目将促进其他几个研究领域（包括科学传播、科学教育和科学政策）相关研究项目之间的协同互动。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award supports research to address deeply relevant questions about how to structure goals for scientific literacy. There are yawning gaps between the scientific consensus on a variety of issues (such as human-caused global warming and the safety of common childhood vaccines) on the one hand, and what the American public believes about such issues on the other. The PI will synthesize recent work in philosophy of science and social epistemology in the context of much social scientific research on science education and communication in order to formulate a framework for thinking about scientific literacy. He will propose a framework in which scientific literacy is construed as a certain kind of understanding of science as a collective enterprise, which has the advantage of emphasizing the role that scientific literacy can play in enabling members of the public to recognize the significance of consensus in science. The results of this project will disseminated so as to capture the interest of science communicators (including scientists, educators and journalists), and to guide discussions about science-based policy and science education, especially in the context of democratic deliberation.One of the main contributions of the project will be to connect recent work in the philosophy of science on understanding with recent work in social epistemology concerning testimony. Since social epistemology has primarily concerned the transfer of knowledge, little has been done to consider understanding in a social context or apply these accounts to the concept of scientific literacy. At the same time, much of the social scientific work on scientific literacy has been at a remove from relevant philosophical discussions of understanding and its distinctive epistemological role. In making intellectually significant progress on these theoretical issues, this project is poised to promote synergistic interactions between pertinent research projects in several other fields of research including science communication, science education, and science policy.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.