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324 Conversion

on the part of the student with his or her view of the matter. once intellectual
dissatisfaction – cognitive dissonance – has set in, the student is presumably
ready to absorb the scientific theory.
There is no extensive body of empirical proof that the pedagogical
technique of deliberately creating dissatisfaction by confronting students
with anomalies is effective in helping students overcome their resistance to
change and improve their understanding of counterintuitive scientific subject
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matters. There have been multiple attempts to implement the strategy, but the
outcomes have been mixed. in a 2001 review, Margarita Limón concluded that
“the most outstanding result of the studies using the cognitive conflict strategy
is the lack of efficacy for students to achieve a strong restructuring and, con-
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sequently, a deep understanding of the new information.” Consistent with
Limón’s review, within a decade of the original formulation of the anomaly
accumulation pedagogy, researchers began publishing papers that recorded
reservations or promoted “revisionist” views. There was a general feeling that
conceptual change needed to be “reconceived,” “reconceptualized” or “recon-
sidered”; others disagreed, suggesting instead that conceptual change should
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be “recast” or even “reframed.” in my view, the issue needs to be reconstituted
or perhaps restructured.

A Child is only a Child
scientific theory change always was an unpromising source of inspiration for
a psychological theory of belief revision. The basic assumption of the science-
inspired approach was that “the most central parts of the scientific enterprise,
the basic apparatus of explanation, prediction, causal attribution, theory for-
mation and testing, and so forth, is not a relatively late cultural invention but is
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instead a basic part of our evolutionary endowment.” Why should we believe
this? if evolution provided the relevant cognitive processes some 200,000 years
ago when anatomically modern humans emerged, why did modern science
not appear until 300 years ago? Historically, science is indeed “a late cultural
invention” that had to wait some 10,000 years after the emergence of urban
life before it became an established and recognizable practice. if the relevant
cognitive processes constitute “a basic part of our evolutionary endowment,”
then why did not all societies develop scientific institutions? it is more plau-
sible that science emerged only after millennia and only in a single culture
precisely because the processes of explanation, prediction, experimentation
and theory formation are not among our basic cognitive processes and had to
be invented.