Investigating the Potential for Unanticipated Consequences of Teaching the Tentative Nature of Science

If you are reading information supportive of climate science, you may well read that climate science is “settled science.” If you are reading something from a climate science skeptic, you may well read that climate science is “just a theory.” Given that the science education community strongly supports teaching the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, one might think that the skeptic has a legitimate argument. Experts will quickly object that such a deduction is quite wrong, and we agree. Nevertheless, we can’t help but wonder to what extent teaching the tentative nature of scientific knowledge might undermine confidence in science, especially for those who have not grasped important epistemological nuances. Our paper reports the findings from an initial exploration of this possibility