Science & Education 11: 525–555, 2002.© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Science Education – An Event Staged on TwoStages Simultaneously

PIOTR SZYBEKDepartment of Education, Lund University, Sweden

Abstract. The article discusses the interaction of scientific knowledge and everyday human exper-ience, using a phenomenological framework, which lets a picture of meaning constitution emerge.This leads to conclusions including construction of a model of curriculum work (on the levels ofplanning, implementation and evaluation) involving translation between the setting of everyday ex-perience and the setting of science. The model may provide the emergence of meaningful scienceknowledge.

1. Introduction

An important focus in the research in science education has been the issue ofconceptual change, i.e., the change of student’ conceptual frame toward one whichmight facilitate their appropriating the concepts of science, as taught in schools.The direction of research was primarily finding ways of changing the concep-tual frame by exploring the ‘alternative frameworks’ which students are usingto understand phenomena (cf. the bibliography by Pfundt and Duit (1994)). Thepreponderance of this knowledge interest has been challenged, for instance byHalldén (1991) and Caravita and Halldén (1994), who argued the importance ofeveryday life contexts. This aspect has been powerfully theorized and reconstruc-ted by Östman (1996, 1998), who places science education against the backdropof empowering citizens to reproduce themselves as citizens in a democratic so-ciety. Östman’s work laid the ground for enlarging the agenda and the repertoryof the means for construction, implementation and evaluation of curricula. Thebackground to this development can be provided by a quotation from RosalindDriver:

. . . if a visitor phones you up explaining he has got lost on the way to yourhome, your first reaction would probably be to ask, ‘Where are you now?’.You cannot start to give sensible directions without knowing where yourvisitor is starting from. (Driver 1983, p. 3)

This begs a question. Apparently the students are assumed to have embarked ona quest for understanding science. Once such an assumption is made, the onlyobstacle in their arriving at the destination can be an inability to find the way.

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But is the assumption legitimate – how does it agree with the fact that Science istaught as a compulsory subject, in many countries? Driver wishes to explain andlegitimize the rationale of the research initiated by her introducing the concept of‘alternative frameworks’ (Driver & Easley 1978). That research is legitimate if andwhen an answer is given to the following questions: Is Science meaningful? And ifnot – how can it be made meaningful? The aim of this article is to contribute to theeffort of answering this.

This article is a continuation of the work described elsewhere (Szybek 1995,1996, 1999, 1999a; Sages & Szybek 2000). The perspective used in that worklinks, on the one hand, concrete classroom occurrences to concrete human exist-ence in an inter- subjective aspect, and on the other hand, shows the relation ofthe subject matter of natural science to the world of human everyday existence.The perspective draws on the work of Edmund Husserl (mostly 1969, 1970) andMaurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968, 1969) which shows natural science as ori-ginating in the world of human everyday existence. An account of this existence iselaborated by Emmanuel Lévinas (1969, 1981), who shows it as embedded in thehuman persons’ responsibility. Ethics, in his account of human everyday existencebecomes its primary modality, rather than some accidental characteristic. This isinterplaying with Hannah Arendt’s (1998), theory of human existence based inshared action.

The article analyzes the connection of experience and corporeality, as shown inthe works of Edmund Husserl. This analysis leads to the description of the processof constitution of meaning, and the definition of the life-world as the backgroundof this process. The emergence of natural science, by the replacement of experi-ence with products of idealisation, is described. The process of the constitution ofmeaning in perception and expression is linked to the structure of the relation ofthe human being and the world around her/him. This leads to the elucidation of theconnection between action and the constitution of meaning. The discussion is thenbrought into the curricular context, by referring to a teaching episode. The episodeis analyzed, and the surplus of meaning implied in it is discussed, providing theground for a discussion of curriculum aims.

The objective of the article is limited to the question of the interaction of scienceknowledge and everyday human experience, and to the fundamental questions ofmeaningfulness. The discussion of the many implications of this interaction indifferent settings, such as work-life, the political make-up of society to whichschooling contributes etc. is deferred to further research. The same applies to themany implications, concerning the school setting, which may be visible to thereader.

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2. Human Existence and the Origin of Science

2.1. THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS WORLD

Edmund Husserl, in his Crisis of the European Sciences . . . (Husserl 1954, 1970)grounds the origin of science in the human person’s experience. That experienceis, in its turn, grounded in human bodily existence. The understanding of this (andof Husserl’s phenomenological method) must be based on the acknowledgementof two circumstances. (1) The phenomenological analysis of a proposition puts itsmeaning into the focus, and (2) the expressions ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ areused in a sense different from the conventional one.

Let us explain this by starting with the second point. In a phenomenological ana-lysis the object and the subject are always interrelated, for instance in the relationof ‘looking at’. An object is looked at by a subject, which makes it an existing asobject for the subject. This is foreshadowed by Aristotle in his Categories. Certainentities exist only as terms in a relation, like parents and children, masters andslaves (Barnes 1984). Here, this means that an ‘objective existence’ is the existenceof something as a possible object of someone’s experience. This leads us to thequestion of meaning. The analysis of the content of experience leads to a picture ofhow something appears, the various ways, modalities, of appearing being exposed.This amounts to unveiling the process in which meaning is constituted.

Let us exemplify this, by looking at how the meaning of ‘tree’ is constituted ina possible enunciation about it. If one says ‘This tree is tall’, one includes in thestatement a set of pre-requisites. It is thus necessary that ‘tree’ is assumed to exist.Further, the existence of ‘tall objects’ is assumed. In order for this class of objectsto be a meaningful entity, there has to be ‘size’, and ‘size’ has to be able to vary.Thus, if the tree is tall, there must be objects which are short. Now, let us think ofsomebody saying ‘this tree is tall now’. The statement includes the assumption thatthere is time, ‘now’ being a point on a ‘line of time’. Further, size is assumed tobe distributed in time. In another points of time the tree may have a different size.It maybe was taller, or maybe shorter. It may grow, or it may diminish. Then, theexpression ‘this’ assumes that there are other trees, a whole class of objects called‘tree’. It also assumes that size is distributed among the objects of this class. Thereare trees which are not tall, or maybe taller, and different trees are of different sizein different points of time. The appearing of the object ‘tree’ is in this exampledescribed by “being pointed out as ‘this’ ”, ‘being situated in time’, and ‘having asize’. This way of appearing constitutes the object ‘tree’ as meaningful.

The constitution of meaning thus has a ‘logical prehistory’: the understandingof something is preceded by the understanding of a number of things. In this case,‘this’, and ‘tall’ must be understood, or the whole statement is meaningless. Oncethese things are understood, the statement is meaningful – but that is not all. Wesee in the example, that a number of other statements have become meaningful aswell. This means that the process of constitution of meaning entails a surplus of

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meaning.1 The process of constitution always points back at an origin, and it alsopoints forward, towards logical consequences.

The way Husserl is doing this makes the constitution of meaning of objectsindependent of historical circumstances. Contrary to 19th century ‘life philosophy’he maintains that meaning, logic, and science do have an apodictic, necessaryfoundation. Husserl’s analysis of the way in which objects are appearing led himto the insight that the background of the relation with objects is bodily (Husserl1952, 1985). He thus leads back (re-ducere means to lead back, compare ‘duct’,‘conduit’ etc.) appearing of objects to the bodily existence of the human beingin her/his world. This procedure of phenomenological reduction is quite obviousin the example above. Pointing out something means that one has to be situatedin a portion of space. A being which perceives itself as smeared out everywherecannot understand what ‘this’ means. Further, there is size, which presupposes anunderstanding of spatiality. All this belongs to living as a bodily, corporeal being.

Now, the body has two aspects, Husserl points out. One is of being observable.It can become an object of observation. A subject can say: ‘My finger has beenhurt’, and thus objectify her/his body. On the other hand, as Husserl points out inhis analysis, it is the body which is observing itself, which manifests its secondaspect, that of being the subject of perception. This is entirely different from the‘Cartesian’ view, generated from the division put by Descartes, between the rescogitans, the ‘thinking thing’, and the res extensa, the ‘outstretched thing’ (i.e.,matter). Descartes went wrong, Husserl suggests2 (Husserl 1954, 1970) by over-looking two facts (1) that the subject of the ‘cogito’ thinks of something, and thatthis ‘something’ is appearing in some way, and (2) that the subject is a bodily being.

The first omission leads into objectivism (and this applies to everybody cominginto connection with the practice of contemporary science, in any form or degree)i.e., the obsession with the question whether reality exists or not (one can wonderif this is not rather an obsession with doubt). The second omission is constitutedby arbitrarily leaving out the body of his description of thinking. This leads to thewhole ‘mind-body’ problem, i.e., what the connection between the res cogitansand the res extensa might be, and also to a misrepresentation of the world in whichhumans live.

Husserl sets out to correct Descartes’ mistake, reclaiming the ‘Cartesian cogito’as . . .

Likewise the multiform acts and states of emotion and of willing: liking anddisliking, being glad and being sorry, desiring and shunning, hoping and fear-ing, deciding and acting. All of them – ( . . . ) – are embraced by the oneCartesian expression, cogito.3 (Husserl 1982, p. 54)

This, to be sure, is not the property of the subject ‘as such’ but the characteristicof the mode of appearing of an object, to the subject.4 This is something whichmarks out the subjective aspect of the body (German: Leib, French: le corps vivant).

The difference between the subjective and objective can be made most plain inconsidering what happens if one is putting a finger into the fire. Exclamations like

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‘Ouch!’ and statements like ‘It hurts’ are manifestations of the subjective aspect,whereas statements like ‘My finger got burnt’, ‘There is a blister on my finger’ etc.are manifestations of the objective aspect. The subjective aspect of the body is thuslinked to experiencing objects in concrete situations: like touching a hot object,being hungry (and looking forward to that delicious piece of pie) or satiated (andthinking back to that delicious piece of pie) etc.

The investigation of the subjective aspect of the human body, performed forthe first time in the second book of the Ideas5 (Husserl 1952, 1985), resulted inthe description of the human bodily existence, as an existence in a world. Husserltakes the expression ‘life-world’ (a borrowing from the German 19th century ‘life-philosophy’) to accentuate that this is the background against which a concretehuman life is taking place.

Once the analysis to experiences is focusing them as bodily, a backdrop is con-stituted, automatically. Experiences are taking place. This means that they have aspatial setting. They also take place in time, hence there is a temporality. There isthus a spatio- temporal background in which experiences stand out. It can also beseen as a setting, in which events are taking place. I shall return to this possibility.

The phenomenological study of the life-world proceeds through the study ofthe body’s affectivity, as is stated by Merleau-Ponty, describing it as being the‘presence to the world through the body and to the body through the world’(Merleau-Ponty 1968, p. 239). It is thus affectivity, the affective components ofthe mode of appearing of objects, which will provide the hub of the investigation.Later in the article this will be treated more extensively.

2.2. THE WORLD AND THE ORIGIN OF SCIENCE

The world, being the backdrop of experience, is also the background of the ori-gin of modern science. This is one of the major themes of Husserl’s Crisis. Thatwork attends to the insertion of certain assumptions concerning the nature of theworld and human subjects’ relation to it, and the logical consequences of theseassumptions.

The background is the result of Husserl’s analysis both in the Crisis and other,preceding, works (for instance Husserl 1952). The world, accordingly, is not onesubject’s property, but is shared with other subjects, thus inter-subjective. As thefoundation of inter-subjectivity Husserl points out the human beings’ bodily exist-ence (cf. also Husserl 1950, 1985). It means that the capacity to move in space, towitness occurrences take place in time (and participate in such ones) – and to ex-perience this in concrete situation, is the ground of being able to share objects. Theexperiences of an object, its mode of appearing, may not be identical for any twopersons, but the fact of them being grounded in the bodily existence constitutes thebackdrop of communication about these objects and thus a shared understandingconcerning them, and, finally, shared actions in which these objects are implied.

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Husserl directs our attention to the practice of measuring (Husserl 1954, 1970).Its background seems to be some need of assessing and comparing. Above all it isconstituted by the concrete situation of moving in a space and in time. Assessingand comparing can easily be seen as resulting in questions about size and number,which lead, in turn, to the definition of section, of a number, and finally of an arith-metical operation or a geometrical construction. These latter are performed usingwhat Husserl calls limit-shapes (Limesgestalten) constituted by the variation ofconcrete, actual shapes. This possibility of generating something which obviouslynever is present in any concrete, particular situation, but which appears to us as animplication of these situations, is the primal establishment (Urstiftung) of modernscience, which Husserl places in Greek thought, the Greek geometry.

Husserl, analyzing the process of the constitution of these ideal shapes (thelimit-shapes) shows how they are ‘dissociated’, as it were, from the full content ofexperiences. The full content is by Husserl called plenum (plural: plena)6 Theseexperiences have the life-world as their backdrop and setting, so the ideal shapespresuppose another setting, a ‘world of geometry’. Now, describing the practice ofmeasurement in the new science, initiated in Galileo’s times Husserl states:

. . . empirical measuring [constitutes exactness] . . . . . . under the guidance of aworld of idealities . . . such a world having been objectified in advance throughidealization and construction. And now we can make the contrast clear in aword. We have not two but only one universal form of the world: not twobut only one geometry, i.e., one of shapes, without having a second for plena.(Husserl 1970, p. 34)

The crucial point is that the plena are not possible to be idealized. Since exactnesshas as necessary presupposition the idealities abstracted from experience, there isno possibility to measure the plena.

In terms of concrete experiences this is made plain by the difference of saying ‘Iam hungry’ and ‘the level of glucose in my blood is low’. The first way of speakingof the experience implies a plenum of experiences, experienced by a living body(German: Leib, French: le corps vivant). This is to be distinguished from aspectsof the experience becoming available – in the second example – by mobilizing theobjective aspect of the body (German: Körper, French: le corps propre). Thoseaspects can be expressed with the help of concepts like ‘sugar metabolism’ and‘oxidative phosphorylation’, which are approximations of the ‘limit shapes’ of theidealization of the objectified processes in the objectified mammalian body.7

An implication seems to be there in Husserl: there is a world being the backdropof the bodily experience, and this world can never be measured with exactness, thusit can never become known after the manner prescribed by modern science. Thereis, however, a possibility to build models showing various aspects of experience,making use of the idealizations abstracted from that experience.

There is, now, a second point in Husserl’s analysis of the Galilean position.

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. . . that a universal inductivity [. . . i.e. that all types of occurrence in the worldare such as to be susceptible to induction. (transl. note)] obtains in the intu-itively given world, one which announces itself in everyday experiences butwhose infinity is hidden.

To be sure, this inductivity was not understood by Galileo as a hypothesis.For him a physics was immediately almost as certain as the previous pure andapplied mathematics . . . . . . the task now was to grasp . . . the universal caus-ality . . . of the world of experience which was presupposed in the hypothesis.. . . a universal causality which is not . . . . . . first arrived at by induction throughthe demonstration of individual causalities but which precedes and guides allintroduction of particular causalities . . . (Husserl 1970, p. 39)

Alexandre Koyré characterizes Galileo’s method thus:

. . . the explanation, or rather the reconstruction, of empirical reality on thebasis of ideal reality. . . . it requires a total conversion, a radical substitution,of a mathematical, Platonic world for the world of empirical reality (for it isonly in the former world that the ideal laws of classical physics hold or arerealised) while at the same time it renders this total substitution impossible,since instead of explaining empirical reality it does away with it . . . (Koyré1978, p. 155)

The impossibility to explain will be returned to later on. We can here see how ahistorian of science, writing in the historic mode (rather than in the transcendental-phenomenological mode, as Husserl does), arrives to much the same conclusion asHusserl.8

So, what has been hence introduced into the practice of science is the view thatthe substitution of the plena, the full content of experience, with general, idealizedshapes, leads to the true picture of reality, rather than a model of it. The ‘one worldof geometry’ is surreptitiously substituted for the life-world, which is the backdropof the constitution of the plena of experience.

Husserl succeeds in unveiling the hidden assumption guiding science practice– and unveiling it as arbitrary, since no experience seems to be there to groundit. This can then become a basis for discussions on the legitimacy of claims ofproviding the one true description of the world, as contrasted to providing modelsapproximating aspects of experience in the world.

2.3. ACTION AND WORLD

The practice of measurement implies an urge towards assessing and comparing,which can be conjectured to be abutted in various practices where things are stored(and store space has to be assessed), where supplies are amassed (and there isthe question of them being sufficient or not), where contributions are given andtaken (and their size is to be assessed) and many other such practices. These areconnected to needs of food, clothing etc., or to experiences of hard, exhausting

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work. The analysis leads thus to the conclusion that the practice of measuring mustbe grounded in the concrete human bodily existence (Leiblichkeit) linked to the‘subjective’ aspect of the body (Leib). This in turn permits to ground measuring –and thus the origin of science – in human inter-subjectivity.

Reality is, from the phenomenological point of view, a human reality. Eventshappen with human persons as audience or as actors. This has, hopefully, beenmade clear in the preceding sections, in the description of objectivity as the wayof appearing of objects to subjects. A consequence is uncertainty as to the corres-pondence of what we acknowledge as appearing, what thus is given in the relationbetween the subject and the object, and ‘a reality out there’. Philosophers have beenlinking this to the question about the validity of representation,9 and the primeinterest has been in the world as ‘that which is the case’10 – namely, what areobjects like as they would be given our non-existence.

Phenomenology has arrived to a way of handling this by an analysis of affectiv-ity. The starting point is that we have no access to a view of the objects as theywould be given our non-existence. There does not seem to be any possibility toprovide that kind of knowledge which Descartes and the 17th century empiricistswere looking for. There is certainty, though, as to objects affecting us. There isa possibility here to circumvent the problem, if not to solve it, by describing theway objects affect us, i.e., the process of the constitution of the meaning of theseobjects. Such descriptions can become the starting point of a discussion on theshared situation in the world. It is maybe not unreasonable to surmise that such adiscussion might be at least as fruitful as discussing if we really know the worldfor what it would be given our non-existence.

This kind of analysis has been performed when the phenomenon of being af-fected was focused (by Lévinas 1969 and 1981; and following that, Waldenfels1994). The analysis led to unveiling the character of the subjectivity, which is theprecondition of the capacity to be affected. The foremost trait of this character isa primary responsivity of the subject. This means that the primary motives consti-tuting a subject-object relation, such as curiosity, initiative etc. are components ofa response to a ‘being affected’, and characteristics of that affection.

The exteriority that elicits response is not given to a cognizing gaze. The ‘stimu-lus’ which issues from it, and which in us elicits a response, is by Lévinas describedas an ethical one. The description which Lévinas undertakes (Lévinas 1969, 1981)proceeding by means of phenomenological reduction, leads back11 morality andethics to a ground in a primary responsibility. Lévinas describes the way of ap-pearing of ‘being affected’ as ‘being called’. Expressions like ‘being affected’ and‘being called’ point at the existence of a bi-polar relation. The poles of this relationcan be named ‘the other’, the pole perceived as that from which ‘the call’ issues,and the ‘I’ pole, from which responsibility issues. This makes the ‘I’ the subject ofmoral and responsibility (‘I am responsible for . . . ’) and of moral judgements basedon this (‘I should/should not do this or that . . . ’). Action has thus the character of‘responding to a call’.

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This points out the essence of human subjectivity as a necessity to act out ofresponsibility for the ‘source of the stimulus’ eliciting response. This is a fun-damental trait of human existence, in any possible cultural and historic setting.Perception is a mode of responding, so the character of that source starts emer-ging only after responding has been elicited. This means that cognition is alwayssecondary to responsibility.12

Thus, the response has always already an ethical character, being the startingpoint from which cognition crystallizes, as it were. Bernhard Waldenfels remarks(Waldenfels 1994a) that this makes the world a place where the first question toask must be ‘What is there to do?’, rather than ‘What is the case?’ – constitutingthe world as a stage where actions are enacted for some reasons.

As a consequence the question presents itself of the validity of the prerequisitesof our action, making the question of validity of representation secondary (as asubsidiary of the question of the prerequisites of action).

2.4. UNVEILING THE PRE-REQUISITES OF ACTION

The method of unveiling the process of meaning constitution, mentioned andbriefly sketched in the beginning of this section provides a way of investigatingpre-requisites of action. The method is to look for the logical pre-requisites of pre-ceiving or expressing something in some way, rather than treating our perceptionas a representation of what an object is, as a ‘thing in itself’. This predominantinterest in phenomenology was expressed by Jan Patocka, a disciple of Husserl,when he said that the relevant task is to show not ‘what things are’ (the obsessionof the positivists) but ‘how they work’ (Kohák 1989).

An outcome of such an analysis is, for instance, unveiling of the assumption ofthe possibility to induce a universal causality, mentioned in the preceding subsec-tion. Having unveiled this assumption, and thus having shown its being arbitrary,one has pulled away the ground for using representations of reality as pre-requisitesof action.

Patocka (1998) presents a comprehensive account of the process of meaningconstitution, drawing on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. He links it toAristotle’s concept of kinesis, movement.13 As Aristotle defines the concept it ismade to encompass any change of states. The background of the change can thenbe seen in terms of cause, or motive (whatever makes a thing move, i.e., change itsstate).

The process of meaning constitution is such a change of state, and it is a super-position of active and passive achievements (achievements which need or do notneed agency). There are parallels to it in the everyday world. To sweeten a cupof tea is such an active/passive process: the lump of sugar has to be put in the tea(need of agency) but then it is dissolving ‘by itself’ (no need of agency). There issomething in the essence of the interaction of saccharose and water which makes

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the crystals dissolve. Similarly, there is something in the essence of our relationwith an object which makes it appear in a certain way.

This specific trait of the relation with the object is its ‘intentional history’, i.e.,the meaning which must be pre-given in order that the object may appear to usas something rather than as something else. As an example let us consider twosituations from everyday life. (1) A university professor in a Western Europeancountry is entering the lecture room barefoot. Everybody is staring. (2) The sameprofessor is walking in the beach, barefoot. Nobody bats an eyelid.

The professor is a different object in the different situations. This is so becauseof what is pre-given. In the lecture room, the meaning of the object ‘professor’ isconstituted by a number of things being so obvious, that one does not have to thinkof them. Among them is the sight of shoes on his/her feet. It is expectable thatthey are shod. In the lecture room, that is – because on the beach its is rather notexpectable that somebody walks in elegant pumps or loafers.

Now, can we imagine the professor hovering in the air, or having two additionalpairs of legs, or being spherical? Whether it is expectable or not, depends on if thereis anything to build this expectation on. And there is. Since there is a possibility ofmaking a vehicle hover, there is such a possibility, potentially, concerning a person.Since we have two legs, there is a potentiality of having three of them, or four, ortwenty four. The reader will have noticed that these were two examples of applyinga pattern. This can be enlarged, into the question of extending a style. The style is,for instance, that we move across space. If we do it by pacing, jumping, crawling,there is – by extension – a potentiality to do it by rolling as well. Since the style isof having a spatial form which can be approximated by a combination of spheresand cylinders, there is – by extension – a potentiality of a spherical human being.

Merleau-Ponty illustrates the notion of describing the process of meaning con-stitution as a style in The prose of the world (Merleau-Ponty 1973) by the episodeof Renoir painting the sea, and using the experience of the ‘sea water blue’ to paintwater in a brook. Which Merleau-Ponty explains thus: ‘. . . each fragment . . . evokesall sorts of variations and thus teaches, beyond itself, a general way of speaking’(Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 63).

What is needed is to find the way to actualize the potentials giving themselvesin the variations, something which is the question of human work, and skillsmanifesting themselves and being developed in the course of work. This is theagency-component. No skill and no amount of work would, however, make theachievement possible without the pre-given potentials. The analysis of the processof meaning constitution is uncovering these potentials and thus making a range ofpossibilities extend itself, in which we then can choose, for instance if we shallactualize all the three mentioned things: spherical human beings, extra pairs oflegs, or an ability to hover. This depends on skills and other prerequisites of acting.It might be thus be impossible (and/or undesirable) to achieve a spherical personin corpore, but it may be possible to achieve one as a literary character, or a statue,

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or simply someone who is talked about. The mode of its appearing will thus be toappear as an imaginary entity.14

The discussion of the conditions of actualizing the potentials of a human personbeing spherical has touched upon such an actuality being desirable, thereby passingfrom the description of background to agency. The discussion of the motive ofaction thus passes from what makes it possible to act in a certain way to whatmakes people want to act.

The exposition of subjectivity by Lévinas, and subsequently, Waldenfels, addsto the description of pre-requisites of action. That exposition might be understoodas prompted by the question: ‘what would human life be if we wouldn’t act?’.The obvious answer would then be that there would be no human life, a non-acting human subject being almost an oxymoron. This is developed already bythe American pragmatists (Dewey, James), but here a phenomenological analysishas completed the picture: the human subject is necessarily an ethical one. Themeaning of this is not that we are all of us intrinsically good, but rather that ouractions are always relating to the good, be it by affirming and actualizing it, be itby negating it. The ‘ought’ aspect of human subjects’ acting, i.e., perceiving andexpressing manifests itself as necessarily as the ‘is’ aspect. This means that all ouractions have a moral aspect including science education (cf. here, for instance Öst-man 1996 and Szybek 2000). The phenomenological analysis takes the argumentfurther than the pragmatist one: in Levinas, and subsequently, Waldenfels, humansubjectivity is primarily ethical, cognition being a component of responses givenagainst an ethical background. This would contribute to a changed view on thecharacter of actions. Their cognitive aspects would have to be seen as subsidiary tothe moral ones.

The pre-requisites of action are thus (1) a certain character of human subjectiv-ity (its being responsive to an affecting exteriority, and the responses elicited bythe affection being endowed with an ethical modality) and (2) the process in whichobjects are constituted as meaningful to that subjectivity, in the course of it givingresponses. Further, it is appropriate to point out that both these circumstances aregrounded in human bodily existence, of the living body (the body as subject).Another way of saying this is that nothing is meaningful except to the bodily livinghuman subject and that this is reflected in the way humans express themselves intheir responses, elicited by an affecting exteriority.

3. Actions as Events Enacted on a Stage

To summarise the presentation so far, the situation of the human person in her/hisworld can be shown in terms of events taking place in time. All these events in-volve persons being affected by an exteriority, which elicits responses, rangingfrom perception to deliberate actions on their part. In these responses the affectionis attributed to objects, which are constituted against a backdrop of expectations,which in turn contributes to new expectations being amassed.

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This description can be subsumed in a metaphor: the human person’s world isa stage where actions are enacted for some reasons. As Lakoff and Johnson (1981,1999) show, social practices and, indeed, all thinking, are guided by metaphors.Metaphors have been used throughout this article. Thus, Husserl is reported to‘ground’ the origin of science, and the practice of measurement is said to be ‘abut-ted’. Following Lakoff and Johnson this could be seen as an instance of using themetaphor ‘Science is an Edifice’. Similarly, the metaphor of the world as a stage hasalready been used. It has been, for instance, stated about human reality that ‘eventshappen with human persons as audience or as actors’, and also that experiences aretaking place against a ‘backdrop’ and in a ‘setting’. The use of such a metaphoris, indeed, justified by the very fact of the theatrical practice being an attempt torepresent the world. One could maybe say that the theatre is a laboratory modelof the world, with a spatiality and a temporality designed in order to experimenton problems of everyday life, on different levels. Thus Aristotle ‘mentions that theword drama was chosen because drontes (‘acting people’) are imitated’ as Arendtpoints out (Arendt 1998, p. 187), and as she further claims “. . . it is obvious thatAristotle’s model for ‘imitation’ [mimesis] in the arts is taken from the drama,whose very name (from the Greek verb dran, ‘to act’) indicates that play-actingactually is an imitation of acting” (ibid.). Using the metaphor of a theatrical stagewould thus have the effect of evoking a laboratory situation, indicating that anexperiment is waged to sort out or examine something. Goffman (1986, 1990) orBurke (1969) might serve as examples of representatives of social science whohave been using the metaphor Human Social Practice as a Theatre (to utilize aLakoff-Johnsonian way of speaking) to show the conditions of action in everydaylife.

In this context the rationale of using the metaphor is the need to bring outthe specific modes in which objects appear according to post-Galilean science, ascompared to and distinguished from their mode of appearing in everyday life, andto do this in such a way that a connection to action can become visible. There isthus a need of providing a context in which reasoning is possible about perceptionand expression, and their pre-requisites. Here something should be mentioned onthe term context. Wittgenstein made the term central with respect of his theory oflanguage games, which provides a way of understanding perception and expres-sion. The meaning of a concept is given in its context, according to Wittgenstein(1997). In the perception of some scholars there was a need to elucidate the term,and one way to do it was to present it as background or setting (Scharfstein 1989)– two theatrical terms. Thus, in order to understand meaning, authors of scholarlytexts resort to a metaphor which transports them and their readers into a theatricalsetting.

The metaphor of the theatrical stage permits here to insert the reasoning aboutthe process of meaning constitution, described in the preceding section. The de-scription is using a term introduced by Merleau-Ponty (1973), applied by him forthe modalities of appearing of objects, which characterise the process of meaning

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constitution. This term is style, and it can be used in connection with applying themetaphor of the theatrical stage. Spectators find that the performance enacted onthe stage conforms to a specific style, and actors fall in with the style of the pro-duction in which they participate. The style subsumes on the one hand expectationsas to what may appear and in which way, and on the other hand pre-requisites forenacting events. The first refers to perception, the second to expression.

It is to stress that both perception and expression is action. The activity inher-ent in perception is made manifest by the very word, being an application of themetaphor Seeing is Grasping (here I am acting as an adept to Lakoff and Johnson).Perception is derived from the Latin verb cepere, meaning ‘to grasp, catch etc’.Merleau-Ponty develops this in his Phenomenology of perception (Merleau-Ponty1962) by making the body the subject of perception, and Patocka (1998), is linkingboth perception and action to the Aristotelian concept of kinesis. One can also addthe investigations on the sense of touch by the Gestalt psychologist David Katz(Katz 1989), which establish the primate of the tactile, and its contribution to theconstitution of the subject’s world – and, of course Jean Piaget, who makes the sub-ject’s sensori-motorical experiences15 the foundation of his genetic epistemology(cf. for instance Piaget 1986).

This is further motivating the expediency of the metaphor of the theatrical stage.Its use permits us to reason on understanding, perception and expression in a con-text of providing and utilizing pre-requisites for action. Thus it seems promising ina context of curriculum research, where the focus is on knowledge being distributedin order to enable action.

The presentation will now proceed to give an outline of two different stylescharacterizing the two stages of events relevant in the context of this article: theeveryday stage of events, and the science stage of events. Thus, an analytic distinc-tion will be introduced, permitting the characterization of the instances in whichscience knowledge plays some role in everyday life.

3.1. THE EVERYDAY STAGE OF EVENTS

The style pertaining to events taking place on this stage of events is characterizedby (1) a certain way in which objects relate to one another (causality) and (2) acertain way or mode in which objects appear.

As to the first point, this has been described by Aristotle (cf. Barnes 1984).He distinguishes between three types of causality: effective (a tennis ball is flyingbecause I hit it with the racket), final, or teleological (the ball is flying in order toland on the other side of the net) and material/formal (the ball is flying because itis has the right weight, size, and elasticity, so the racket stroke can make it fly).Human agency is here acquiring different aspects. In the first case it is replaceableby, say, a machine waving the racket, but not in the second case. Even the insertionof a machine does not obliterate the fact that somebody wants the ball to fly over thenet. Furthermore, agency, and thus, causality, is linked to a perception of a whole.

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Hitting the ball ‘in order to’ send it to the other half of the tennis-court implies (andpresupposes) that one is doing this as a part of a game or training.

Now, what permits humans to grasp a whole is meaning constitution. We arenever aware of it,16 but without it we would not be able to perform a single action.Meaning constitution, in turn, is the mode of functioning of the living human body.The everyday stage of events is one where human subjects enact events as bodilyliving human beings.

This in turn means that the objects involved in perception and expressionare perceived and expressed as plena. The non-Cartesian definition of Descartes’cogito applies.

The characteristic of events has to touch upon one more aspect: necessity orcontingency. The effective and material/formal causality is a manifestation of ne-cessity. The ball cannot not fly given both that it is hit (effective cause) and thatit has the proper size, weight and elasticity (material/formal cause). But a humansubject can decide whether to hit it or not. One could say that it is necessary toacquire a skill with the ball, but given that, the player can send the ball wherevers/he wants.

The human bodily existence is thus dominated by finality, and this entails will.In real life, wills have to compromise and so communication is implied. This com-munication of bodily subjects is inter-subjectivity, and it is communication aboutplena and by the use of plena. Inter-subjectivity involves one necessary trait: thenecessity of responding to an affecting exteriority. It is impossible not to respond.One can say that this is a formal causality: the human subject is ‘made that way’.17

We are thus willy-nilly involved in a responsivity, and this, as Lévinas describes,is the background of sociality and of public life. Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1998, p.182) describes ‘the togetherness and intercourse of men’ as ‘ridden with uncer-tainty’. The background of this uncertainty is that our communication is alwaysabout things, while at the same time directed not at these things, but at the partnersof communication. The ground of communication is sharing an interest in things.Inter-est, she points out, indicates that something ‘is there’ between people. Themetaphor used here is of ‘a space constituted by communication’. This space, ‘gen-erated’, as it were, by ‘togetherness’ (which, as Lévinas and Waldenfels show, isconstituted by responsivity) is characterised by ‘intangibility’ of objects.18 HenceArendt proposes to call this space a web. Thus, the stage where everyday actionis enacted is constituted by human communication, emerging out of responsivity.This means that the style characterizing the pre-requisites of action is open tochanges introduced as people act,19 by the transactions made in the course of thecommunication accompanying action. From this follows that the whole course (andthe exact outcome) of everyday action is – a priori – impossible to predict.20

The most important modality characterizing pre-requisites of action is itsprimarily ethical character. All events staged on the everyday stage of events, areresponses elicited by the affection being endowed with an ethical modality.

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To sum up the descriptions of events enacted on the everyday stage of events:(1) events enacted here are linked to actions (they either are actions or elicit them);(2) actions ‘do not have an author’, only actors, and (3) the style which character-izes the pre-requisites of actions is not manifest, and thus not known to us. Thesecircumstances add up to the impossibility to predict the exact course of action orits outcome. (4) The primary character of the style of events on the everyday stageof events is ethical.

3.2. THE SCIENCE STAGE OF EVENTS

At this point one is reminded of Alexandre Koyré’s dictum: science is not experi-ential, it is experimental (Koyré 1992). The science stage of events is, as has beenmentioned in the preceding section, derived from the everyday stage of events,by the introduction of certain assumptions. Among these two stand out: (1) theelimination of certain elements of experience, reducing the plena to approximationsof limit-shapes, and (2) construing interactions between entities as subordinated toa universal causality. This causality, let us add, is exclusively effective – so thatall teleological reasonings such as ‘what is the purpose of the elephant having atrunk?’ are banned from science.

Among the most important modalities characterizing enactment on the stageof science events is temporality. Time is bound to processes, and on the stage ofeveryday events these involve the various aspects of the plena. This is obviouswhen experiences involving waiting, expecting and reminiscing are considered. Itis a more or less strongly marked affective modality, of joy, sadness, fear or long-ing which gives them their character. This possibility of modalizing experiencesinvolving time makes it possible to be endowed with different qualities, like ‘agood time’, ‘a time of sorrow’, ‘a time of joy’ etc.

In science events this aspect is non-existent. The processes comprised in theseevents involve only those aspects of the plena which enable these events to be ex-pressed in categories of a universal effective causality, and which enable them to bean integral part of the idealization process, aiming at mathematically manageablelimit-shapes. We can say that time is made univalent. This applies to space, too. Allpoints of the spatio-temporal coordinate system are thus ‘worth the same’, in termsof the affective modality of appearing. One can say that they are perfectly neutral,being neither good or bad, pleasant or abhorrent, dangerous or proficient.

Consider the proposition ‘alcohol is dangerous’. One could ask how this couldbe operationalized scientifically – as compared to the proposition ‘alcohol isslowing down certain processes and enhancing others, and this can diminish life-expectancy’. The question is which of the two proposition is more suitable as theground for working out of a hypothesis which can be examined with the helpof scientific concepts and laboratory methods, and render results endowed with acertain verissimilitude (Popper 1972, 1979; Hacking 1983). The question becomes

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more poignant if we ask about the results being commensurable with propositionspre-existent in the paradigm at hand.

This leads to the characteristic of the science stage of events as one wheretime spans do not depend on the affective quality of processes. This also meansthat objects appearing on this stage, and places where the enactment of events islocalized must be affectively neutral.

All the characteristics of the science stage of events, as enumerated above,constitute a possibility of enacting events in a way that greatly facilitates handlingthem. Two things stand out as most important in this respect. One is the possibilityto quantify events. Their mode of appearing is described by mathematical functionsexpressing movements in space, their consequences due to diverse properties of po-tential (and other) fields etc. The second is predictability of the course and outcomeof events. These two characteristics permit the activity of planning, performing, andevaluating experiments, which is central in science.

As related in the preceding section, action – the dominant mode of eventsenacted on the everyday stage – precludes predictability. It is the reverse of thecharacter of the science stage of events. Another modality of appearing missingin the science stage of events is value. Action is characterized by a final causality,purposefulness, and to this valuing is linked. It is in order to do ‘good’ or makesomething ‘better’ (to take the value ‘good’ as example) that actions are waged.The background of this is actions being responses to ‘stimuli’ which constitute arelation with an exteriority the modality of which is primarily ethical. This is amodality of appearing distinctly missing in events staged on the science stage. Forinstance, on the everyday stage the event ‘a person is falling out from the window’would be valued as ‘terrible’ – or ‘lucky’, depending on who would value, andagainst what background. On the science stage the same event would appear as amoving object (the human) reaching certain coordinates at a certain time, and someother object (the planet) happening to be there and at the same time. This wouldmean only that a certain amount of energy would be transferred between objects,and that this might affect their cohesion.

4. The Interaction of the Two Stages of Events

A conclusion which seems apparent, to be drawn from the preceding section, isthat we are dealing with two separate worlds, that of everyday life, the life-world,and the world of science. This picture is, however, marred by problems. If scienceis meaningful, that meaning must be constituted, and any meaning constitution isgrounded in the life-world – since meaning is constituted by actual, living men andwomen, who are bodily human beings. The necessary background of meaning isthe corporeality which makes them real persons, the ‘subjective’ aspect of the body‘the living body’ (der Leib, corps vivant).

So, in order to be understood at all, scientific reasoning must be translated backinto the life-world.21 This means that its meaning constitution (or ‘development

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of meaning’ as Husserl calls it in the §9l of the Crisis) must be exposed. Husserl’smethod, described there, as proceeding ‘back and forth in a zigzag pattern’ (Husserl1970, p. 58), making ‘historical leaps’ between Galileo and the 20th century isprecisely that – an exposition of the process of meaning constitution (as Ströker(1978) points out).22

Taking Husserl as model, I am here trying to effect an exposition of the processof meaning constitution in the practice of science education, which I am trying tosee as the interaction of two stages of events.

4.1. FROM EXPERIENCE TO A CONCEPT: A LESSON ABOUT PLASTICS

At this point I am going to introduce an event, in which I participated. The notion ofthe two stages of events will here be used as an analytic tool. The event took placeduring a lesson about plastics conducted by a pre-service teacher whose supervisorI was. The aim of the lesson was to introduce a distinction between plastics whichcan be melted and those which cannot. The rationale of the distinction was thatplastics are recycled, and that this is done in two ways: some plastics are throwninto special containers, to be processed and reshaped into new objects, while some(soft drinks bottles) are collected to be washed and re-used. The preparation ofthe lesson was animated by the ideology of ‘building science knowledge uponeveryday reality’, dominating the Swedish educational discourse at that time.

The teacher distributed pieces of plastics and instructed the students to in-vestigate them with help of the implements displayed on the teacher’s desk. Thestudents started to heat the pieces of plastic with the help of Bunsen burners. Aftera while, the teacher reviewed the results. I was sitting at the back of the classroom,observing and taking notes. This is what I wrote down:

Teacher: Arash, can you describe what happened with the red piece of plasticArash: It burned. It started to smell. It got black. We couldn’t bend it.Teacher: You couldn’t bend it. It was not formable.

In this short dialogue the interaction of the stages of everyday events and scienceevents is manifested. The stage of everyday life is situated in Sweden in the lastdecade of the twentieth century, and the setting includes persons appearing as ‘stu-dents’ and ‘teachers’, one of which is identified as ‘Arash’. On this stage, as seenhere, the student ‘Arash’ makes the object ‘red piece of plastic’ appear in such away, that ‘it smells’ and ‘is red’. The set of modalities of appearing pertaining tothis can be expected to comprise such modalities of appearing as ‘weird’ (‘thissmells weird’), ‘nice’ (‘nice colours’) etc. The other stage is the stage of chemistry,whose setting can be expected to include ‘molecules’, ‘substances’ etc. and whichis endowed with a set of modalities excluding such modalities as ‘weird’ and ‘nice’.

The stage of chemistry was here introduced by the pre-service teacher (in col-laboration with his supervisor, i.e., the author of this article). It was introduced inthe way described by the dialogue cited initially. The way of introducing it is partly

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Table I.

Arash: Teacher:

We couldn’t bend it. You couldn’t bend it. It was not formable

Table II.

Arash Teacher

It burned No counterpart

It started to smell No counterpart

It got black No counterpart

We couldn’t bend it You couldn’t bend it

No counterpart It was not formable

related here. It included (1) setting the stage for activities known as ‘chemistryexperiments’, by putting material on the table, and (2) verbal interactions like theone analyzed here.

Let us examine the operation which the pre-service teacher is performing. TableI shows the juxtaposition of the description given by Arash and the one providedby the teacher:This can be made more explicit:

The first statement uttered by the teacher, as a response to Arash’s description,is a repetition – putting an accent on the action/experience ‘to be able to bend’.The second statement is a move toward transforming the experience of a particularpiece of plastic into a general property of a certain class of plastics.

It can be said that the teacher is effecting a translation of ‘being able to bend’into ‘formability’. Thus, the event is of translation from experience into general,abstract concepts. This is an enactment of the origin of science and an illustrationof the mode of it, as a process taking place in human life. As has been stated in theprevious sections, this can be summarized thus:

the full content of experience −→ idealized limit-shapes(the Husserlian plena)

The plain picture of the translation, offering itself, is its being effected by sayingnothing about some aspects of experience, and thus manipulating the picture of theexperience, until it is not any more the experience of heating the piece of plastic,experienced by Arash.

The event of translating between stages constitutes a stage of its own, wherethat event can be enacted. This stage can be termed ‘the stage of the school subject

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Chemistry’. In the said context, the stage of school Chemistry events is constitutedby the interaction of events on the science events’ stage and the everyday events’stage. This interaction is, as demonstrated in the Tables I and II, of ontologicalcharacter.

Translation means literally ‘moving from place to place’ (the Latin participlelato meaning ‘carried, borne’). So, translation is not just finding another word, butalso ‘carrying’ into another context, and thus bestowing a new meaning on theoriginal word or expression.23 Thus ‘we can bend it’ will henceforth mean ‘it isformable’. But what will ‘It burned. It started to smell. It got black’ mean? Theircounterpart, as can be seen in Table II, is an absence of a property. If the responsegiven to the statement ‘we could bend it’ was acknowledgement of ‘bending’, thenthe response to ‘it burned et.’ constitutes a lack of acknowledging the existenceof something. The meaning bestowed on these aspects by the translation of theexperience of handling the piece of plastic can be thus said to be ‘these aspects donot exist’.

In a way, this can be said thus: Arash has presented something on the stageof school chemistry (encouraged by the teacher, as it was) and the teacher’s re-sponse was to dismiss his presentation but for one of its aspects, which has beenre-labelled, losing thereby its character of reflecting the plenum – the ‘fullness’ –of experience.

The interpretation which seems at hand is that this is an invalidation of the stageof everyday life. A message seems to be given to the effect that ‘in this context, wedo not deal with things like that’, the ‘things’ being experiential aspects of theoccurrences presented in Science lessons.24 What consequences are conceivablehere? It can be expected that there might be repercussions for the setting of theway occurrences of daily life are spoken about – and thus setting the stage foreveryday actions.

This amounts to a translation back, from the stage of science events, to the stageof everyday events. This is an example of how science is influencing the world – inthe terminology used by Husserl in the Crisis, the life-world. In Elisabeth Ströker’swords, this amounts to a “scientific ‘constitution’ of the life-world” (Ströker 1987,p. 203), performed by the incorporation of the results of scientific research andtheir conversion into processes of the life-world. Processes, let us be reminded,in which the ‘subjective aspect’ of human corporeality is involved. Thus, froma phenomenological analysis follows that the starting-point and background offunctioning of human existence, of human perception and expression, is changedby the incorporation of the results of science. This can let us draw conclusion onthe meaning constituted in the teaching episode.

The starting-point and background of functioning of human existence is the‘style’ of ‘setting up’ events, the ‘scenery’, ‘set-up’ and other ‘staging conditions’of action. In phenomenological terms, this is the way objects will be constituted.What can be inferred from the way of constituting the piece of plastic manifest inthe interaction of Arash and the pre-service teacher, is that whoever accepts this as

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a way of constituting objects of his/her perception or expression will be influencedto think less of their everyday experience and prefer abstract descriptions as groundfor action. The potentiality of this is a component of the meaning constituted in theteaching episode.

No predictions as to this actually coming to happen can, of course be made– given the constituent unpredictability of human actions, as sketched in the pre-ceding section. The character of the style which forthwith will be present as apotentiality, and which the subjects of action now are empowered to turn intoactual reality can, however, be claimed – and claimed as a valid conclusion. Thevalidity claim is supported by the exposition of meaning constitution, and holds tothe extent that exposition is effected (Sages & Szybek 2000).

4.2. CAN A CONCEPT CHANGE OUR LIFE?

The conclusion reached in the preceding subsection is that a component of themeaning constituted in the event of teaching described here is a certain potentialitymarking out the style which henceforth will characterize actions. In this subsectionI want to examine whether one could venture to say that this is, in fact, the wholemeaning of the episode.

As mentioned before, Husserl did acknowledge as fact that scientific results areincorporated into the life-world (Husserl 1954, 1970). It has also been mentionedthat this makes the life-world become constituted by science. In fact, this is notso surprising. Science is nothing if it is not a human practice. The life-world isthe background of human existence, which is, so to say, ‘acted into existence’ bythe actions of men and women. So, men and women cannot but contribute to theconstitution of the life-world. Ströker points out that this makes the notion of a‘pre-scientific life-world’ nonsense (Ströker 1978). New scientific concepts andexperimental practices are understood against the backdrop of what is already ap-parent, self-evident – just as Galileo’s thinking was grounded in what was apparentand self-evident for him.

Understood and grounded does not mean ‘deduced from’. Husserl makes thisvery explicit. In his words it is not enough to go through the motion of scientificprocedure and produce results. It is necessary to ‘make transcendentally under-standable’ science knowledge in order to understand it at all (Husserl 1970, p.189). Husserl is acknowledging the greatness and the validity of the accomplish-ments of the ‘creative geniuses’ of science, but he also asserts the need that theseaccomplishments be “so to speak, ‘understood back into’ [zurückverstanden] theabsolute sphere of being in which they ultimately and truly are.” (Husserl 1970, p.189).

To do this, the being of science should be reached thematically, as Husserlspeaks (ibid.) This means that science should be studied against its backgroundin the life-world. It is the life-world which is this absolute sphere of being inwhich anything human beings see, think of and express ultimately and truly is.

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An effort in this direction is the ‘Crisis’ (Husserl 1954, 1970), and especially suchparts of it as Appendix III (On the origin of geometry). The accomplishments ofphenomenologists who continued Husserl’s work like Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas andRicoeur let us see that the talk of ‘the absolute sphere of being’ does not definean enterprise of epistemological grounding called on by science allegedly lackingin validity.25 There is no fault in science, the fault is in its not having the place inbeing it should have. Since being is defined as it was in the preceding section, thetask of ‘understanding back’ should be done in those terms.

This means that we should continue the translation of the scientific concept intothe stage of everyday events, and look at what this translation can contribute to theway of staging events in various contexts of everyday life. The context actual inthis case is the level of education. Thus this article examines the interaction of thescience stage of events and the everyday stage of events in the context of scienceeducation, and the result will be how the everyday stage of events is modifiedby the introduction of science concepts etc. One move has been done. Men andwomen who participate in events like that Arash was a part of, can acquire accessto a possibility of handling situations in a mode where the plena of perceptionand expression are dismissed. Are there, however, other possibilities which can bemade accessible by staging the teaching event differently?

4.3. CONSTRUCTING THE EVENT IN A DIFFERENT WAY

It can be proposed that the starting-point of teaching be placed in the needs anddesires manifest in human bodily existence. This is already done, by the STS (Sci-ence, Technology and Society) movement (cf. for instance Solomon and Aikenhead1994) and the present exposition is an attempt to develop the theoretical ground ofthat collective endeavour.

The point of departure of the lesson led by the preservice teacher was theso-called ‘experiment’ performed by the students. As it is, it was not a properscientific experiment. School ‘experimenting’ has a special quality, due to thefact that somebody knows the answers beforehand. As we have seen above, themeaning of the activity appeared to be the invalidation of the everyday experiencewhich purportedly was its ground. This cannot be claimed as something whichwas known beforehand. As a matter of fact, it was not known to myself, whoused to stage similar events many times before, until on looking at the pre-serviceteacher performing the action I guided him into. There is thus something in thestyle of staging events at the segment of the ‘interface’ of science and everyday lifeactualized in school Science, which made both me and the pre-service teacher actin the way described here.

To examine this let us look at the process of constitution of meaning of theexperiment. This may be done in a context which is informed by my own know-ledge of the goals I wanted to reach. The ‘experiment’ was to lead to a discussionon the recycling of plastics, namely which sort of plastics should be processed by

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Table III.

Bodily grounded experience Moral judgements, grounded in responsibility

It is ugly Others should not be exposed to ugly surroundings

Resources are scarce Resources should be available for all

It smells awful Others should not be exposed to ugly smells

It is a health-hazard Others should not be exposed to health hazards

heat, and which should not. Thus: which plastic objects could be recycled into rawmaterial for the production of other plastic objects, and which should be restoredto the original condition. In the case of soft drink bottles it means that some arewashed and reused, and some may be melted down and used to manufacture plasticcarrier bags. It can be interesting to analyze what might happen, if one was toreverse the order of the lesson and start with a discussion on that issue.

A conceivable starting point would be to discuss why there is a need to recyclethings at all. What alternatives can be envisaged? Such an alternative, used widely,even globally, is to dump the bottles. This would be likely to lead to making thecountryside disagreeable and to put a strain on a scarce resource, namely land,which can be used better than for dumping soft-drinks bottles. Another alternat-ive, equally widely used, is burning plastics. This is known to generate gaseousproducts of combustion, some of which are noxious, and even harmful. Both altern-atives leave open the question of the raw material from which plastics are produced,being petroleum, which is likely to be used up one day.

This can readily be shown to be grounded in a bodily experience of the situ-ation (Table III). Consider the statements generated by the presentation of thealternatives to recycling plastics. These are: ‘It is ugly’, ‘Resources are scarce’,‘It smells awful’, ‘It is a health-hazard’. All the four statements point to experienceoriginating in subjects being affected by their surroundings. This ‘being affected’has, as can be recapitulated (the subsection ‘Action and world’), necessarily anethical aspect.

The response to ‘being affected’ is given against the background of a respons-ibility. As shown in the following table, each of the statements expressing thecognitive aspect of experience has a counterpart expressing a moral one:

Table III reflects the constitution of a sense of deficiency. The ‘oughts’/‘oughtnots’ counterpointed by the indicative statements let us experience a need of remedyin the situation. Upon this, the question arises how that remedy could be provided.This can lead to the interaction shown in Figure 1.

The crucial component of the process shown in the figure is the translationbetween the two different stages of events, the two different modes of stagingevents. In order to be able to comply with the need of remedy the decision is madeto resort to problem solving. To perform this activity the mode characteristic of the

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Figure 1. Making a science content meaningful.

science stage of events is needed. This mode of staging events makes them takeplace in such a clear-cut, quantifiable way which permits exact predictions (forexposition of the stage of science events, cf. the subsection of this article treatingon this).

Upon translation the difficulty calling for the remedy is transformed into a prob-lem. Ideally, the solution of the problem is already implied by the way the problemis formulated. This is the case with problems which are wholly mathematized. Theprocedure then amounts to following certain moves leading to the reduction of theproblem to a problem already known. Another case is an experiment design whichpermits a hypothesis to be corroborated or falsified.

There is thus a first crucial point, that of transforming the need of remedy intoproblem solving. What is of concern here is formulating a problem so that it canlead to a solution – be it by calculation, be it by experiment. Having reached asolution for the problem amounts to the next critical point. In what relation doesthe solution stand to the need of remedy?

The two translations constitute the validity of the whole process. This is thevalidity of the problem solving procedure as a means of providing remedies forissues relevant in everyday life contexts. This implies two themes: (1) the themeof the relevance of the issue calling for a remedy, and the theme of the relevanceof the solution for the issue at stake, having started the whole process. These twothemes imply two different discussions, in different social contexts, with differentparticipants. It goes without saying that – unless we settle for the Platonian modelof a state run by experts on pure knowledge – issues concerning everyday life ofmen and women should be discussed by the men and women concerned. So, therehas to be a discussion which precedes setting off the whole cycle.

Here we come to the difference of styles. How does the style of the event asstaged by the pre-service teacher (supervised by myself) compare to the style ofthe proposal sketched in Figure 1? This marks our entering into the context ofcurriculum.

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5. Conclusions in the Context of Science Curriculum

The event sketched in Figure 1 can be seen as an example of curricular thinkingcharacteristic for the STS movement (cf., for instance, Solomon & Aikenhead(1994), and Roberts & Östman (1998)). Thus, the process is set off by somethingstanding out as an everyday life event. Science is here incorporated into a process,which ultimately changes the premises of everyday life. It has to be noted that thisincludes that ‘melting down plastics’, i.e., the result of an experiment, becomesan element of daily life. The life-world, the backdrop of everyday life action,incorporates a result of scientific thinking.26

Note that there is a double ‘transport’ from the stage of science events, to thestage of everyday events. This concerns the subsidiary result, concerning classi-fication of plastics. In other situations one could envisage a lesson where thisclassification is developed, the ground for classifying a plastic being explored –how plastics are manufactured, how they are made up on the molecular level etc.This too will be incorporated into the life-world, as a component of the process ofmaking known the conditions for recycling plastics.

This opens a possibility of incorporating into the life-world the results of funda-mental research on a new basis. At the same time the question is raised, whether theSTS framework is not a suitable one for the teaching of ‘pure’ science. Answeringit one must consider (1) how the ‘pure science knowledge’ is related to the problemsolving, called for by the need of remedy, and (2) if the problem being solved needsabutment in ‘pure science knowledge’, and how that abutment should be done.

It goes without saying that there is a plethora of conceivable problems arisingfrom the discussion on recycling plastics. This may include problems connectedwith the availability of resources (oil), the extraction and processing of raw ma-terials, the sources of ‘ugly smells’ and the conceivable health-hazards connectedwith the production of ‘smelly’ substances. All these problems can be expected tohave an ‘infrastructure’ of subsidiary problems, which leads to the question of theirabutment in what might be called ‘pure science knowledge’. Note that all this canbe made visible in the course of asking and discussing the statements describingand guiding the emergence of the need of remedy. There is thus a possibility of en-gaging the students in the process of constitution of science knowledge – and, let itbe stressed, this is the process where the meaning of that knowledge is constituted.By participating in a discourse which makes apparent the emergence of scienceproblems from everyday issues the students may see those problems becomingmeaningful for them.

The interaction of the two stages constitutes a stage of school Science. At thispoint two kinds of such stages can be recognized. One is the stage constituted bythe cycle of translation from one stage to another, which can be named the stage ofknowledge in use, knowledge put to use. The other is the stage constituted in theteaching episode staged by the pre-service teacher (and myself, as his supervisor).What is the character of this stage of events?

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As stated in the preceding section, the meaning of the event included the consti-tution of a certain style of acting. One aspect of this style transpires from Tables Iand II. There is a certain distribution of the parts played by the teacher and the stu-dent. The student is providing the description of the experiment, requested by theteacher, and the teacher confirms certain aspects of this description, disconfirmingothers.

There is another aspect of the style, which is visible first if one knows how thelesson was planned and what its aims and goals were. The intention was here tointroduce a concept, which then could be applied to solve the problem of recyclingplastics. This intention was the motive for the pre-service teacher to act in the wayhe did, as described (as well as, earlier, for myself). In the terms used in this articlethe backdrop of action was set by the style (mode of perception and expression)being its pre-requisite. That style can be pointed out here. It is characterized by thepattern of application.

Thus we have two different styles, providing pre-requisites for two differentways of acting. The difference is in the position of concepts relative to problemsolving, and to remedying flaws in existence. These two styles can be said to char-acterize two different approaches to Science curriculum. One approach, used bymyself (for many years) and by the pre-service teacher (on the occasion describedhere) is that of pure science being applied. The other is that of science knowledgeput to use. The first approach entails science knowledge to be developed andlearned separately from its possible use. It also includes the act of ‘application’.This act involves, as a pre-requisite, somebody having made an arbitrary decisionas to the particular knowledge to be applied in a particular situation. The connectionbetween science knowledge and the everyday issue to which this knowledge is tobe applied is not visible until after the application is performed. Compare this to thepotentiality, made obvious above, of the process of constituting science knowledgein the second mode, and the possibility of involving the students in that process.That latter possibility is very problematic in the first mode, the one which entails‘application’ of the results of ‘pure science’.

The discussion as far has shown a connection between curriculum work, layingdown goals and aims for education, and the potentialities to be made actual in theclassroom, in the course of teaching. Those potentialities are quite different forthe two ways of staging Science education. Developing science knowledge in thecourse of responding to needs of remedy in concrete, everyday situations, generatespotentials of student involvement and lets the emerging knowledge be firmly andvisibly abutted in life-world experience – thus making it meaningful. If scienceknowledge is developed as part of an enterprise independent of any everydaysituations, and applied in a ready-made form, in contexts widely differing fromthe one where that knowledge did emerge, a number of questions are left open.These questions pertain to the relation between science knowledge and everydaylife, and to the degree of involvement of the actual learners, the students, in their

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Figure 2. The emergence of meaningful knowledge in the course of putting science to use.

formulation. The meaningfulness of science knowledge manifested in this type ofcurriculum becomes problematic.

The conclusion reached by the article is the proposal of a model of a cur-riculum construction which can be followed on various levels, from planning toimplementing, in science education.

The model can be captioned ‘science-put-to-use’. It shows the emergence ofmeaningful knowledge in the course of putting science to use. A circular processis envisaged, which is set off by the experience of something as a difficulty (this‘setting off’ makes the experience originary) . The logical implication of such aperception is that a need of a remedy is constituted. The model envisages puttingscience knowledge to use in order to find this remedy, which implies a translationinto the setting characteristic to science. Instead of perceiving the difficulty, we arenow solving a scientific problem. The activity of problem solving having providedthe solution of the problem, we have to translate it back into the setting of theoriginary difficulty. Upon this translation it becomes apparent whether the solutiondoes constitute a relevant remedy or not.

There are thus four essential steps in the model.1. The delimitation of something as an experience of difficulty.2. The construction of a well-formulated problem.3. Solving the problem.4. Evaluating the relevance of the solution as a remedy for the difficulty pointed

out in the first step.Having reached this conclusion, it is expedient to mention other threads

emerging as consequences of the meaning constitution process.The reader will have noticed that there are potentialities emerging in the article,

which permit the development of research problems. The first, and most obvious

SCIENCE EDUCATION – AN EVENT STAGED ON TWO STAGES SIMULTANEOUSLY 551

is the matter of the contextualisation of the model in concrete curriculum work, onvarious levels. Other possible problems might touch upon the role of the teacher inthe Science classroom, the teacher-student relation in a science-education setting(including the power relations, accessibility of discourse for students, creation ofan open space, or closure of space), the character of teacher professionality in con-nection with teaching Science, and the part played by the teaching profession (andthe school as institution) in making science knowledge accessible to the portion ofthe public not involved in using science knowledge directly in their work-life.

The validation of results of a meaning constitution analysis is provided by thepossibility to continue this analysis (Sages & Szybek 2000). Such continuationcan be performed within the framework of different practices. Among them are notonly research, but also evaluation and planning of activities. The reader is thereforewelcome to take on this task, by extending the analysis to the practice in which s/heparticipates.

Notes

1 Here the constitution of meaning is explained using the concept of passive genesis of meaning(Husserl 1950, 1973). For a comprehensive account of this cf. especially Ströker (1987) and Patocka(1998). Elisabeth Ströker gives, in her book, an exceptionally well-informed revue of the meaningconstitution process. She has been director of the Husserl Archive at Köln University, and one of theeditors of the Husserliana series. In that capacity she had made contact with Husserl’s manuscriptsand, especially, hand-written working notes – which enabled her to develop the capacity of not justquoting Husserl, but being able to watch the process of the constitution of meaning of what he wrote.As she then writes, her aim is to let ‘. . . at least something of the perspective of the emergence ofHusserl’s phenomenology come through distinctly, as it was performed at the time’ (Ströker 1987, p.10; my transl.). The exposition of Husserl in this article is much indebted to Ströker’s account.2 The purpose of the whole exposition of Descartes (based on Husserl 1954, 1970) is not to criticizeDescartes, but rather to show the contrast between the unreflected ‘everyday Cartesianism’ of ourtimes, and the new position stemming from Husserl. It is the unreflected ‘everyday Cartesianism’which creates problems like ‘mentalism or behaviorism’, and both the scientistic fundamentalismand its non-scientific (not to say anti-scientific) counterpart. Descartes himself saw the dilemmas hegot in and tried to provide means to escape it. He is acknowledging it in his correspondence withthe princess Elisabeth: Descartes 1971, pp. 660–668, and 683–697 (cf. also ‘Treaty on passions’,Descartes 1965).3 Ebenso die vielgestaltigen Akte und Zustände des Gemüts und des Wollens: Gefallen und Mißfal-len, Sichfreuen und Betrübtsein, Begehren und Fliehen, Hoffen und Fürchten, Sichentschließen undHandeln. Sie alle ( . . . ) umspannt der eine Cartesianische Ausdruck cogito, Husserl 1976, p. 50.4 The understanding of Husserl is in this article informed by the further development of his thought,in which the concept of ‘act’ (which here is a relic of the first attempt to handle the problem) hasbeen dropped altogether – cf. for instance Ströker (1987).5 The work on this started in 1912 when the first book (from which the quotation above is taken)was being published (it appeared in 1913). The second book of the Ideas never appeared in Husserl’slifetime.6 This is how the German expression die Fülle is translated in Husserl 1970.7 That idealization can be historically traced to Jan van Helmont (1580–1644), who first proved theassimilation (incorporation into body mass) of a component of air (now known as carbon dioxide).

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From the crude notions expressed by him (in fact he was still using the conceptual frame of medievalalchemy, while performing experiments leading to results valid according to the standards of modernchemistry), to the more refined concepts of modern molecular biology, the process of idealizing theprocesses of the objectified plant and animal bodies were, and are progressing, and one can envisage alimit, which is approached asymptotically, that limit being the absolute idealization toward which thedevelopment of molecular biology is progressing. All this given that the present paradigm progressuninterrupted by the operation of diverse factors.8 And at about the same time: the French original of the above quoted book by Koyré was publishedabout a year after the first two parts of Crisis.9 cf. The discussion of the debate on this in Rorty (1980).10 Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus.11 Let us be reminded that phenomenological reduction is leading back to an origin, re-duceremeaning just this, compare ‘duct’, ‘conduit’ etc.12 This is the aspect of Lévinas’ description which is relevant to the purpose of the article.13 This is another way of saying that meaning constitution is the mode of functioning of the livinghuman body.14 At this point one could mention Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of airplanes and Jules Verne’sfantasies of journeys to the moon.15 On the relation of Piaget and phenomenology cf. Meyer-Drawe (1994).16 Note that phenomenology is struggling with the task of making that style known. As to howaction is feasible without knowledge about it: The character of human existence (given its groundingin responsivity) is such that subjects may enter into the style of action simply by responding to oneanother. This possibility is elucidated by Bourdieu, in terms of paying attention to gestures, whichare constituted (by convention, i.e., previous actions) as signs in a process disengaged from the needof knowledge about those gestures (Bourdieu 1990, where he follows Mead 1962).17 Moving to the science state of events, this could be explained by the neural constitution of thehuman being.18 Note the reference to the sense of touch, cf. Katz (1989).19 Note the description of emergence of the ideal guiding an action in Ilyenkov (also transcripted asIl’enkov) (1977).20 Arendt’s analysis of action is especially interesting because of its concordance with the gist of thepicture of meaning constitution process (for a comprehensive and well-informed revue, cf. Ströker1987).21 This must not be understood in terms of ‘transfer’. Knowledge is not a ‘package’ which can bemoved with its meaning intact. Meaning is always constituted, against a background, and changingbackground changes meaning. This will become clearer in the course of the article.22 Husserl is thus not writing a history of science.23 cf. Scharfstein (1989), who reviews and discusses this from the point of view of the analyticphilosophy of language.24 cf. Geddis (1998) and Newton et al. (1999) on access to the agenda of discourse in a classroom.Teachers are, in both articles, reported to wield a monopoly on discussions. That finding is acorroboration of earlier findings, as quoted in both articles.25 Let it be stressed once more: science does not describe the world deficiently. Its results are notwrong. The lacunae are not to be filled by the introduction of entities (as is done in less sophisticatedspiritual practices, like New Age). That would be Cartesianism, trying to add imaginary spheres ofbeing to the ones found deficient. An example was Descartes introducing a wholly non-physical soulto patch up a flawed description of human existence in terms of a body which, being a machine, can-not want, desire, abhor etc. In this text, the exposition started with the qualification of the truly whole

SCIENCE EDUCATION – AN EVENT STAGED ON TWO STAGES SIMULTANEOUSLY 553

perception and expression (the Cartesian cogito) in terms of the plena of perception and expression,performed by a corporeality which incorporates those very aspects which Descartes denied to it.26 In this case, it must be admitted, the thinking is quite limited in scope, but the scheme may applyto more sophisticated issues. The limit is put by the abilities of the student group at hand, and thetechnicalities, including available resources.

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