The Inquiry of the Cyclops: Dewey’s Scientific Inquiry Revisited

Abstract

The concept of scientific inquiry in education has a long and convoluted history. It is a favoured approach in modern science classrooms and curricula and is attributed with high expectations for science teaching and learning. In this chapter, I unpack the legacy of the writings of John Dewey, especially his late work Logic: The Theory of Inquiry that promoted this concept and practice centrally for science education from the 1950s until today. Dewey’s scientific inquiry is examined through a specific philosophical affirmation comprising three phases. The first phase is a diagnosis of the contemporary conceptualisation of scientific inquiry in science education, examining the connection between Dewey’s writings on scientific inquiry and Joseph Schwab’s work on establishing scientific inquiry centrally in science education curricula. The second phase is an examination of Dewey’s line of thought and how he constructed his specific stance of inquiry, linked to common sense and experience. The third phase is a reframing of Dewey’s notion of inquiry through Benedict de Spinoza's and Gilles Deleuze’s line of thinking, reaffirming Dewey’s thought and notions through a specific Spinozist perspective. In other words, the overall intention is to contribute to an overturning and reconceptualisation of scientific inquiry and to see the concept through a different theoretical frame, freed from a dualistic Cartesian perspective of mind and body or dogmatic image of thought. Not only critiquing and diagnosing, but proposing an outline for moving forward reaffirming Dewey’s original intentions throughDeleuze and Spinoza. Such reaffirmation and reconceptualisation serves as a contribution to potentially reach a more adequate concept of scientific inquiry, here connected to a specific kind of Spinozism.