Apparently we practitioners of science are pretty ignorant of the philosophy of science. I have captured this excerpt because the original is defended by an onerous registration barrier, but the source is longer and has comments and links to related stories:
Graduates [of science teaching programs], from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology.
… Given the numerous news stories that require an understanding of how science operates – global warming, cloning, the possible dangers posed by cell phones or the pros and cons of genetically modified crops – understanding the difference between a fully fledged scientific theory that is backed by evidence and accepted by the scientific community and a speculative guess is essential. If we, as scientists, cannot teach children what these words mean in a scientific context, how can we hope to improve scientific literacy generally? If science graduates are confused to begin with, then it is an uphill battle.
Only a few of the graduates had studied any history and philosophy of science, and therein lies the problem. The majority had high quality degrees and some had doctorates in a science discipline, so it wasn’t that they were not well qualified in science. It was just that their study of science had been utilitarian, a means to an end with the end being a practicing scientist. They had not been given any grounding or instruction on what makes science ‘science.’ It was not their fault: history and philosophy of science was an optional part of their degree programs and many could not see the point of it.
The point is this: you must understand your discipline, know its foundations so you are able to defend it from attack by those who seek to hijack science for their own ends, such as climate change deniers, GM modification scaremongers, or creationists. A basic course in the history and philosophy of science should be a compulsory element of an undergraduate degree in any science discipline.
As a card-carrying physicist (well, not literally, because APS doesn’t actually issue cards), I can’t say I’m particularly surprised, and not everyone is worried about this. I understand how the terms ‘fact’, ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’ are used in normal scientific discourse, but I picked this up without any formal training. We don’t spend any time on philosophy of science in Physics 16 and certainly don’t require it for our physics majors at Amherst.