Uma análise sobre a realidade das entidades científicas em um livro de física do ensino superior

Abstract

In this paper, we present an investigation on the approach to scientific entities in a higher education physics textbook. We seek to analyze the justification displayed in the textbook Fundamentals of Physics (Halliday, Resnick & Walker, 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; 2009d) for the perception of the photon, the quark, and the electron as real entities, and furthermore if the descriptions and discussions relating the reality of these entities are significant in comparison to the content related to them displayed elsewhere in the textbook. The research took into consideration that teaching/learning physics involves not only treating conceptual aspects and the operationalization of its theories, but also reflections on questions related to the nature of scientific knowledge, including the reality of scientific entities. As a result, it was possible to identify that abductive inferences were used by the textbook as reasoning for the entities to be considered real, but neither in an explicit nor frequent way. Moreover, the entities are treated mainly in an operational way. We understand that Halliday’s approach has “routine” features (Giddens, 2009), considering the regular use of the entities in activities that involve application and resolution of algebraic problems, which do not demand reflections on their reality, but only present questions regarding “how to do it”. Activities with routine features restrict the ways of thinking to what Giddens calls practical conscience, so the reality comprehension concerning these entities of those who study physics through this textbook remains therefore tacit and utilitarian, not offering sufficient elements for the elucidation of the problem relating the way science describes reality and, what is more, in which sense the scientific entities can really be taken for real.