Integrating philosophy of science in civil engineering: an integrative course design strategy

Many philosophers of science think scientific practice can benefit from philosophical concepts, and as such philosophy of science should play a direct role in science and engineering education. In this paper we consider a highly integrative course design strategy for integrating philosophy of scienc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal for philosophy of science 2021-12, Vol.11 (4), Article 105
Main Author: MacLeod, Miles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Civil engineering
Colleges & universities
Decision making
Design
Education
Embedding
Engineering education
Paper in Philosophy of Science in Practice
Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Students
Teaching philosophy of science to students from other disciplines
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Many philosophers of science think scientific practice can benefit from philosophical concepts, and as such philosophy of science should play a direct role in science and engineering education. In this paper we consider a highly integrative course design strategy for integrating philosophy of science in specific disciplinary educational programmes through adaptation, operationalization and embedding of philosophy of science material to fit both the scientific and educational structure of a programme. The goal of the strategy is to help encourage students to recognize the value of philosophical concepts to scientific decision making and to apply them in their own scientific practice. We use the example of a 7.5 ECTS civil engineering course which implements this design at a European technical university, to elaborate these concepts, and present some evidence on how students receive the course. We discuss some of challenges and limitations of implementing this kind of strategy for teaching philosophy of science.
ISSN:1879-4912
1879-4920
DOI:10.1007/s13194-021-00422-0