![6 M.R. Matthews
NOS in Contemporary Curricula
Contemporary educational concern with teaching NOS (broadly construed) can
be dated from the 1980s and can be seen in numerous US, UK, Canadian,
Turkish, Greek and other national and provincial government reports and curric-
ula (McComas Olson, 1998). This concern with NOS is perhaps most clearly
seen in affirmations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
especially its landmark 1989 publication Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1989)
and its 1990 The Liberal Art of Science (AAAS, 1990). The latter stated that
The teaching of science must explore the interplay between science and the intellectual and
cultural traditions in which it is firmly embedded. Science has a history that can demon-
strate the relationship between science and the wider world of ideas and can illuminate
contemporary issues. (AAAS, 1990, p. xiv)
This was elaborated in their Benchmarks for Science Literacy document (AAAS,
1993). The AAAS believes that learning about science – its history and method-
ology – will have a positive impact on the thinking of individuals and will
consequently enrich society and culture. That is, NOS learning will have a flow-
on effect outside the science classroom. This was, as we will see, an essential belief
that the Enlightenment philosophers and educators held about instruction in science
or ‘natural philosophy’.
The expectations of the AAAS found their way through to the US National
Science Education Standards which were drawn up by the National Research
Council (whose members were drawn from the councils of the National Academy
of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine). The
Standards have a separate content strand devoted to ‘History and Nature of Science
Standards’ (NRC, 1996).
In the United Kingdom there has been a longer tradition of recognising the impor-
tance of NOS learning, broadly construed, in science teaching. Fredrick Westaway,
an ‘Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools’ in the United Kingdom in the 1920s who
also authored substantial books on history of science and philosophy of science,
wrote that a successful science teacher is one who
knows his own subject. . .is widely read in other branches of science. . .knows how to
teach. . .is able to express himself lucidly. . .is skilful in manipulation. . .is resourceful both
at the demonstration table and in the laboratory. . .is a logician to his finger-tips. . .is some-
thing of a philosopher. . .is so far an historian that he can sit down with a crowd of [students]
and talk to them about the personal equations, the lives, and the work of such geniuses as
Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Darwin. More than this he is an enthusiast, full of faith in his
own particular work. (Westaway, 1929, p. 3)
The most recent concerted UK effort to teach NOS material is the new optional
Upper Level Perspectives on Science course for England and Wales (Swinbank
Taylor, 2007). The course has four parts:
Pt. 1 Researching the history of science
Pt. 2 Discussing ethical issues in science](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1255652-250521092253-75c97f50/85/Advances-In-Nature-Of-Science-Research-Concepts-And-Methodologies-1st-Edition-Michael-R-Matthews-Auth-21-320.jpg)
![1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 11
experiences, and expectations actually influence their work. All these back-
ground factors form a mindset that affects the problems scientists investigate
and how they conduct their investigations’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 501)
5. The social and cultural embeddedness of scientific knowledge, where it is held
that ‘Science as a human enterprise is practiced in the context of a larger culture
and its practitioners are the product of that culture. Science, it follows, affects
and is affected by the various elements and intellectual spheres of the culture in
which it is embedded’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 501)
6. The myth of scientific method, where it is held that ‘There is no single scientific
method that would guarantee the development of infallible knowledge... and no
single sequence of activities ... that will unerringly lead [scientists] to functional
or valid solutions or answers’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 502)
7. The tentative nature of scientific knowledge, where it is maintained that
‘Scientific knowledge, although reliable and durable, is never absolute or cer-
tain. This knowledge, including facts, theories, and laws, is subject to change’.
(Lederman et al., 2002, p. 502)
This list has functioned widely in science education as a NOS checklist; it
appears on classroom walls somewhat like the Seven NOS Commandments; and
it informs the group’s hugely popular series of VNOS (Views of Nature of Science)
tests which are used in scores of published research papers to measure effectiveness
of NOS teaching (Lederman et al., 2002) and degrees of NOS understanding (Flick
Lederman, 2004, Chap. IV, Schwartz Lederman, 2008, Chen, 2006). The posi-
tive side of the list is that it puts NOS into classrooms; it provides researchers with
an instrument for measurement of NOS learning; and it can give teachers and stu-
dents some NOS matters to think through and become more knowledgeable about.
The negative side is that the list can, despite the wishes of its creators, function as
a mantra, as a catechism, as yet another something to be learnt. Instead of teachers
and students reading, analysing, and coming to their own views about NOS matters,
the list often short-circuits all of this. And in as much as it does so, it is directly anti-
thetical to the very goals of thoughtfulness and critical thinking that most consider
the reason for having NOS (or HPS) in the curriculum.
As an example of the hurdles that attend an NOS focus, consider the much-
written on claim made by the philosopher Larry Laudan that it is impossible to even
demarcate science from other intellectual pursuits. Laudan maintains that
From Plato to Popper, philosophers have sought to identify those epistemic features which
mark off science from other sorts of beliefs and activity. Nonetheless, it seems pretty
clear that philosophy has largely failed to deliver the relevant goods. Whatever the specific
strengths and deficiencies of the numerous well-known efforts at demarcation. . .it is proba-
bly fair to say that there is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between
science and pseudo-science, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers.
(Laudan, 1996, p. 210)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1255652-250521092253-75c97f50/85/Advances-In-Nature-Of-Science-Research-Concepts-And-Methodologies-1st-Edition-Michael-R-Matthews-Auth-26-320.jpg)
![1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 21
p. 5). The same points are made in the UK Perspectives on Science course, where it
is repeatedly stated that students will gain appreciation of NOS positions and issues,
and competence in NOS thinking, rather than declarative knowledge of NOS. It is
important to stress these points: First FOS claims should not be presented as dogma,
to do so is to confuse education with indoctrination; and second most, if not all,
statements about FOS are subtle, and recognition of this subtlety simply depends
upon having historical and philosophical (HPS) awareness. Both these points have
implications for the very vexed and much-written up topic of the assessment of FOS
and NOS learning (Rudge Howe, 2010).
It is unrealistic to expect students, or trainee teachers, to become competent his-
torians, sociologists or philosophers of science. We should have limited aims in
introducing FOS questions in the classroom. Teachers should aim for a more com-
plex understanding of science, not a total, or even a very complex, understanding.
Fortunately philosophy does not have to be artificially imported to the science class-
room, is not far below the surface in any lesson or textbook. At a most basic level
any text or scientific discussion will contain terms such as ‘law’, ‘theory’, ‘model’,
‘explanation’, ‘cause’, ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘confirmation’, ‘obser-
vation’, ‘evidence’, ‘idealisation’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘fields’, ‘species’. Philosophy
begins as soon as these common and ubiquitous terms are explained, amplified and
discussed.
There is no need to overwhelm students with ‘cutting-edge’ philosophical ques-
tions. They have to crawl before they can walk, and walk before they can run. This
is no more than commonsensical pedagogical practice. There are numerous low-
level philosophical questions that are legitimate FOS questions: What is a scientific
explanation? What is a controlled experiment? What is a crucial experiment and
are there any? How do models function in science? How much confirmation does a
hypothesis require before it is established? Are there ways of evaluating the worth of
competing research programmes? Did Newton’s religious belief affect his science?
Was Darwin’s ‘damaged book’ analogy a competent rely to critics who pointed to
all the evidence that contradicted his evolutionary theory? Was Planck culpable for
remaining in Nazi Germany and continuing his scientific research during the war?
And so on.
Likewise history is unavoidable. Texts are replete with names such as Galileo,
Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Darwin, Mendel, Faraday, Volta, Lavoisier, Dalton,
Rutherford, Curie, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and others. History ‘lite’ begins
when teachers, as Westaway was quoted earlier, ‘talk to [students] about the per-
sonal equations, the lives, and the work of such’ figures. And encourage students
to do their own research on these scientists. History ‘full strength’ begins when the
experiments and debates of these figures are reproduced in the classroom; when
‘historical-investigative’ teaching is practised (Kipnis, 1996, 1998).
Other features of science are on daily display in newspapers, TVs and the
Internet, where accounts of socio-scientific and techno-value debates about genetics,
agro-business, climate change, GM crops, global warming, and so on are constant
features. If understanding FOS is embraced as a curricular goal, then well-prepared](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1255652-250521092253-75c97f50/85/Advances-In-Nature-Of-Science-Research-Concepts-And-Methodologies-1st-Edition-Michael-R-Matthews-Auth-36-320.jpg)
Advances In Nature Of Science Research Concepts And Methodologies 1st Edition Michael R Matthews Auth
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- 6. Advances in Nature of Science Research
- 8. Myint Swe Khine Editor Advances in Nature of Science Research Concepts and Methodologies Foreword by Richard K. Coll 123
- 9. Editor Myint Swe Khine Bahrain Teachers College University of Bahrain Kingdom of Bahrain mskhine@btc.uob.bh ISBN 978-94-007-2456-3 e-ISBN 978-94-007-2457-0 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2457-0 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938137 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
- 10. Foreword Interest in, and debate about, the Nature of Science (NoS) is so prevalent nowa- days it is easy to forget that education research and scholarly debate about the NoS has persisted for more than 50 years. Despite this NoS is, if anything, increasing in importance, because knowledge of NoS is necessary to become scientifically lit- erate. In my view NoS and scientific literacy are the science education issues of our time because of the impact of science on everyday life. Like it or not, science impacts upon the lives of us all, in sometimes alarming ways. This latter observa- tion offers insights into public unease about science and the use to which it is put. I suggest then that each and every citizen needs to understand NoS at some level, and this should be a key output of science education. This book captures contemporary debate about NoS by world experts. It is highly topical and refreshingly challenging in its approach, yet remarkably readable. It is far more than a critical review of the “state of the art” for NoS. The authors challenge our preconceptions about NoS, and challenge us to address our teaching of NoS. The scope of the book is impressive. More impressive still is the synthesis of these ideas which results in a holistic pic- ture of the NoS. To provide us with a comprehensive picture of NoS is one thing; to understand how we might teach NoS is another matter entirely. Modern science teachers get told this or that issue is so very important. All too frequently there is lit- tle guidance as to how one might incorporate topics of NoS or scientific literacy into an already crowded curriculum. This book provides researchers and teachers with genuine insights as to current issues in teaching NoS, and consolidates contempo- rary thinking about NoS. It thus helps us understand NoS in a highly sophisticated way and gives a sound steer as to how we can use this understanding in our teaching practice. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand Richard K. Coll v
- 12. Contents Part I Conceptual Issues in the Nature of Science Research 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Michael R. Matthews 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of Science to Complicate Public Understanding of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Tina A. Grotzer, Rebecca B. Miller, and Rebecca A. Lincoln 3 The Natures of Scientific Thinking: Creativity as the Handmaiden to Logic in the Development of Public and Personal Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Keith S. Taber 4 The Bounded Nature of Science: An Effective Tool in an Equitable Approach to the Teaching of Science . . . . . . . . 75 Sherry A. Southerland, Barry Golden, and Patrick Enderle 5 Why the Study of Pseudoscience Should Be Included in Nature of Science Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Ronald Good 6 The Status of the Nature of Science in Science Education in Lebanon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Saouma BouJaoude and Garine Santourian Part II Methodological Advances in the Nature of Science Research 7 Teaching and Learning of Nature of Science and Scientific Inquiry: Building Capacity Through Systematic Research-Based Professional Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Judith S. Lederman, Norman G. Lederman, Byoung Sug Kim, and Eun Kyung Ko vii
- 13. viii Contents 8 The Nature of Scientists’ Nature of Science Views . . . . . . . . . . 153 Renee’ Schwartz 9 The Nature of Science or the Nature of Teachers: Beginning Science Teachers’ Understanding of NOS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Jonah B. Firestone, Sissy S. Wong, Julie A. Luft, and Derek Fay 10 Learning About Nature of Science in Undergraduate Biology Laboratories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Elisabeth E. Schussler and Nazan U. Bautista 11 Beyond Understanding: Process Skills as a Context for Nature of Science Instruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Randy L. Bell, Bridget K. Mulvey, and Jennifer L. Maeng 12 Impact of a Nature of Science and Science Education Course on Teachers’ Nature of Science Classroom Practices . . . . 247 Michael P. Clough and Joanne K. Olson Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
- 14. Contributors Nazan U. Bautista Department of Teacher Education, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA, uludagn@muohio.edu Randy L. Bell University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, rlb@virginia.edu Saouma BouJaoude Science and Math Education Center, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, boujaoud@aub.edu.lb Michael P. Clough Center for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA, mclough@iastate.edu Patrick Enderle Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA, patrick.enderleadi@gmail.com Derek Fay Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA, derek.fay@asu.edu Jonah B. Firestone Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ 85069, USA, jonah.firestone@asu.edu Barry Golden University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA, bgolden3@utk.edu Ronal Good Science Education, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA, rgood@lsu.edu Tina A. Grotzer Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, tina_grotzer@harvard.edu Byoung Sug Kim Department of Curriculum Studies, Roosevelt University, Chicago, IL 60603, USA, bkim@roosevelt.edu Eun Kyung Ko Department of Elementary Education, National-Louis University, Chicago, IL 60603, USA, eun.ko@nl.edu Judith S. Lederman Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA, ledermanj@iit.edu ix
- 15. x Contributors Norman G. Lederman Department of Mathematics and Science Education, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA, ledermann@iit.edu Rebecca A. Lincoln Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, rlincoln@hsph.harvard.edu Julie A. Luft School of Life Sciences and Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA, Julie.Luft@asu.edu Jennifer L. Maeng University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, jlc7d@alumni.virginia.edu Michael R. Matthews School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, m.matthews@unsw.edu.au Rebecca B. Miller Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, rebecca_miller@mail.harvard.edu Bridget K. Mulvey University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA, bkm2x@virginia.edu Joanne K. Olson Center for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Education, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA, jkolson@iastate.edu Garine Santourian American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon, garine.santourian@gmail.com Elisabeth E. Schussler Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1610, USA, eschuss@utk.edu Renee’ Schwartz Department of Biological Sciences, Mallinson Institute for Science Education, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA, r.schwartz@wmich.edu Sherry A. Southerland College of Education, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA, southerl@coe.fsu.edu Keith S. Taber Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK, kst24@cam.ac.uk Sissy S. Wong College of Education, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA, sissywong@uh.edu
- 16. Part I Conceptual Issues in the Nature of Science Research
- 18. Chapter 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) Michael R. Matthews There has been a long tradition advocating the cultural, educational, personal and scientific benefits of infusing the history and philosophy of science, into science programmes and curriculum – or in current terms, of teaching about the nature of science (NOS) while teaching science. In the nineteenth century, the central fig- ures were William Whewell (1854), Thomas Huxley (1885/1964) and Ernst Mach (1886/1986). In the early decades of the twentieth century John Dewey (1910, 1916) in the United States and Fredrick Westaway (1919/1937, 1929) in the United Kingdom were central figures. In the Anglo-American world, the tradition was con- tinued by Joseph Schwab in the 1940s and 1950s (Schwab, 1949, 1958); by Leo Klopfer (1969) and James Robinson (1968) in the 1960s; by Jim Rutherford (1972), Gerald Holton (1975, 1978), Robert Cohen (1975) and Michael Martin (1972, 1974) in the 1970s.1 In the past three decades a number of science educators have extended this tra- dition. Perhaps the most prominent have been Derek Hodson (1986, 1988, 2008, 2009), Richard Duschl (1985, 1990, 1994) and Michael Matthews (Matthews, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2009). The International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Group, through its conferences held biennially since 1989 and associated journal Science & Education, have contributed a great deal to this research tradition. As well as advocacy there has been a mushrooming of empirical studies relating to NOS matters – determining NOS views held by scientists, teachers and represen- tative historians and philosophers; determining the optimal teacher and classroom conditions for most effective NOS teaching; ascertaining the connections between learning NOS and learning science content; developing valid, reliable and efficient tests to measure NOS learning; and so on. Here the work of Norman Lederman and his students have had a particular impact.2 1 I have surveyed and commented on this history in Matthews (1994, Chaps. 4, 5). 2 See Lederman (1986, 1992, 2004, 2007) and contributions to Flick and Lederman (2004). M.R. Matthews (B) School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: m.matthews@unsw.edu.au 3 M.S. Khine (ed.), Advances in Nature of Science Research, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2457-0_1, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
- 19. 4 M.R. Matthews Science is a human and thus historically embedded truth-seeking enterprise that has many features: cognitive, social, commercial, cultural, political, structural, ethi- cal, psychological, etc. All of these features are worthy of study by science students as well as by disciplinary specialists; and different of them come into clearer focus when considering different sciences, and when considering different aspects of the history, achievements and practice of the different sciences. Some of the features are shared to a large degree with other knowledge-acquiring enterprises, some are shared to a limited degree, and some are not shared at all. Given these character- istics of science, it is useful to understand NOS not as some list of necessary and sufficient conditions for a practice to be scientific, but rather as something that, fol- lowing Wittgenstein’s terminology, identifies a ‘family resemblance’ of features that warrant different enterprises being called scientific.3 This essay recommends a change of terminology and research focus from the essentialist and epistemologically focussed ‘Nature of Science’ (NOS) to a more relaxed, contextual and heterogeneous ‘Features of Science’ (FOS). Such a change of terminology and focus avoids the following philosophical and educational pitfalls that have been associated with a good deal of recent NOS research: (1) The confused jumbling together of epistemological, sociological, psycho- logical, ethical, commercial and philosophical features into a single NOS list. (2) The privileging of one side of what are contentious and much-debated argu- ments about the methodology or ‘nature’ of science. (3) The assumption of particular solutions of the demarcation dispute. (4) The assumption that NOS learning can be judged and assessed by students’ capacity to identify some number of declarative statements about NOS. William Whewell: A Precursor to Contemporary NOS Debates In 1854 the formidable English scientist, philosopher, historian, theologian and moralist William Whewell gave a lecture in Leeds to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the topic of ‘On the Influence of the History of Science upon Intellectual Education’ (Whewell, 1854). He prepared the ground for his particular argument by saying As the best sciences which the ancient world framed supplied the best elements of intellec- tual education up to modern times; so the grand step by which, in modern times, science has sprung up into a magnitude and majesty far superior to her ancient dimensions, should exercise its influence upon modern education, and contribute its proper result to modern intellectual culture. (Whewell, 1854, p. 242) In the lecture he provided passionate argument for the inclusion of NOS (now called) into all liberal education, saying 3 This point has been persuasively argued by Gürol Irzik and Robert Nola (2011).
- 20. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 5 . . .in the History of Science we see the infinite variety of nature; of mental, no less than bod- ily nature; of the intellectual as well as of the sensible world.. . .the history of science. . .may do, and carefully studied, must do, much to promote that due apprehension and apprecia- tion of inductive discovery; and inductive discovery, now that the process has been going on with immense vigour in the nations of Europe for the last three hundred years, ought, we venture to say, to form a distinct and prominent part of the intellectual education of the youth of those nations. (Whewell, 1854, pp. 248–249) Whewell believed that the history of science was indispensible for understanding ‘intellectual culture’ more generally, by which he meant the processes of knowledge creation or epistemology. One hundred and more years before Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos and Thomas Kuhn made the view popular, Whewell argued that philosophy of science has to be informed by history of science. In Lakatos’s words, Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind. (Lakatos, 1978, p. 102) Whewell’s point is worth drawing attention to, as so much NOS discussion in science education goes on in direct violation of it. NOS is frequently taught without reference to history, and is not informed by history. Unfortunately teachers wishing to convey something of NOS do so by having students ‘reflect on’, ‘brainstorm’ or ‘discuss’ their own classroom activities or investigations as if this was the window onto science. It was from this conviction that Whewell’s monumental three-volume History of the Inductive Sciences (Whewell, 1837) informed his equally monumental Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History (Whewell, 1840).4 A source of some confusion is that, despite the title of his books, Whewell was not an inductivist; he did not think that the history of science displayed an inductive/empiricist methodology as currently understood. On the contrary as he famously said in his History ‘There is a mask of theory over the whole face of Nature’. It was from such a ‘theory first’ or hypothetico-deductive position that in 1849 he criticized John Stuart Mill’s hugely popular and influential A System of Logic (Mill, 1843) that had been published a few years earlier and after his own two treatises (Whewell, 1849).5 Whewell also expressed two concerns that have occupied much contemporary NOS research when he went on to ask How is such a culture to be effected? And also, how are we to judge whether it has been effected? (Whewell, 1854, p. 249) Whewell was, in contemporary terms, asking: How can NOS best be taught? And, how can NOS learning best be assessed? Educators and researchers are still asking and answering these questions. 4 An accessible source for some of Whewell’s historical and philosophical studies is Elkana (1984). This includes selections from his Bridgewater Treatises on natural theology. 5 On this, see Elkana (1984, Chap xxii), Laudan (1981) and Yeo (1993).
- 21. 6 M.R. Matthews NOS in Contemporary Curricula Contemporary educational concern with teaching NOS (broadly construed) can be dated from the 1980s and can be seen in numerous US, UK, Canadian, Turkish, Greek and other national and provincial government reports and curric- ula (McComas Olson, 1998). This concern with NOS is perhaps most clearly seen in affirmations of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, especially its landmark 1989 publication Science for All Americans (AAAS, 1989) and its 1990 The Liberal Art of Science (AAAS, 1990). The latter stated that The teaching of science must explore the interplay between science and the intellectual and cultural traditions in which it is firmly embedded. Science has a history that can demon- strate the relationship between science and the wider world of ideas and can illuminate contemporary issues. (AAAS, 1990, p. xiv) This was elaborated in their Benchmarks for Science Literacy document (AAAS, 1993). The AAAS believes that learning about science – its history and method- ology – will have a positive impact on the thinking of individuals and will consequently enrich society and culture. That is, NOS learning will have a flow- on effect outside the science classroom. This was, as we will see, an essential belief that the Enlightenment philosophers and educators held about instruction in science or ‘natural philosophy’. The expectations of the AAAS found their way through to the US National Science Education Standards which were drawn up by the National Research Council (whose members were drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine). The Standards have a separate content strand devoted to ‘History and Nature of Science Standards’ (NRC, 1996). In the United Kingdom there has been a longer tradition of recognising the impor- tance of NOS learning, broadly construed, in science teaching. Fredrick Westaway, an ‘Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools’ in the United Kingdom in the 1920s who also authored substantial books on history of science and philosophy of science, wrote that a successful science teacher is one who knows his own subject. . .is widely read in other branches of science. . .knows how to teach. . .is able to express himself lucidly. . .is skilful in manipulation. . .is resourceful both at the demonstration table and in the laboratory. . .is a logician to his finger-tips. . .is some- thing of a philosopher. . .is so far an historian that he can sit down with a crowd of [students] and talk to them about the personal equations, the lives, and the work of such geniuses as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Darwin. More than this he is an enthusiast, full of faith in his own particular work. (Westaway, 1929, p. 3) The most recent concerted UK effort to teach NOS material is the new optional Upper Level Perspectives on Science course for England and Wales (Swinbank Taylor, 2007). The course has four parts: Pt. 1 Researching the history of science Pt. 2 Discussing ethical issues in science
- 22. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 7 Pt. 3 Thinking philosophically about science Pt. 4 Carrying out a research project The textbook for this course, on its opening page, says Perspectives on Science is designed to help you address historical, ethical and philosophical questions relating to science. It won’t provide easy answers, but it will help you to develop skills of research and argument, to analyse what other people say and write, to clarify your own thinking and to make a case for your own point of view. (Swinbank Taylor, 2007, p. vii) The Philosophy section begins with about 16 pages outlining fairly standard mat- ters in philosophy of science – nature of science, induction, falsifiability, paradigms, revolutions, truth, realism, relativism, etc. Importantly, the book then introduces the subject of ‘Growing your own philosophy of science’ by saying Having learned something about some of the central ideas and questions within the philoso- phy of science, you are now in a position to evaluate the viewpoints of some scientists who were asked to describe how they viewed science. The aim here is to use these ideas as a springboard to develop and support your own thinking. (Swinbank Taylor, 2007, p. 149) The Enlightenment Tradition To better understand reasons for contemporary advocacy of history and philoso- phy, or NOS, in science teaching, and current concern to have empirical studies of the efficacy of teaching NOS, it is informative to go back to the origins of these concerns in the European Enlightenment.6 The Enlightenment philosophers – Locke, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Condorcet, Hume; and a little later Franklin, Priestley, Jefferson and Kant – were inspired by the dramatic achievements of the New Science of the seventeenth century. The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution was the seed that produced the eighteenth-century Enlightenment plant. The scien- tific accomplishments in mechanics, astronomy, horology, medicine and other fields are well known. These ‘natural philosophy’ endeavours were institutionalised with the establishment of The Royal Society in England (1660) and the Académie Royal des Sciences in France (1666).7 David Hume, in his History of England, wrote that Newton was ‘the greatest and rarest genius that ever rose for the ornament and instruction of the species’ (Hume, 1754–62/1828, Vol. IV, p. 434). This was of course one Englishman writing about another Englishman, but nevertheless Hume well expressed the general view of Newton’s preeminence in seventeenth-century science. Newton famously said in a letter to Robert Hooke (5th February, 1676), ‘If I have seen a little further 6 Some excellent recent books on the Enlightenment include Dupré (2004), Hankins (1985), Himmelfarb (2004), Israel (2001) and Porter (2000). 7 One of numerous guides to the achievements of the Scientific Revolution is Gribbin (2002, Book 2).
- 23. 8 M.R. Matthews it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants’. Although Newton did so stand, and there were many giants to stand on, including Galileo, Kepler and Huygens, clearly his Principia (Newton, 1713/1934) and Optics (Newton, 1730/1979) provided the foundation of modern science and the inspiration for the Enlightenment. Newton’s self-styled ‘under-labourer’, John Locke, wrote five major Enlightenment texts in the decade after the publication of the Principia (Locke, 1689/1924, 1689/1983, 1690/1960, 1693/1996 and 1695/1999). In the appalling, unhealthy, warring, oppressive, autocratic, social, political, reli- gious and cultural circumstances of seventeenth-century Europe – with its witch crazes, religious wars, heretic burnings, divine-right lords, denial of all free speech, and so on – it was not surprising that many thought that it would be truly wonderful if Newton’s scientific achievements might be replicated in fields outside of natural philosophy; if his approach and ‘method’ could be applied more broadly. It was the hope of many that lessons from the New Science might have flow-on effects for culture, society and personal life. Newton certainly had this view. As he stated it, ‘If natural philosophy in all its Parts, by pursuing this Method, shall at length be per- fected, the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be also enlarged’ (Newton, 1730/1979, p. 405). The Enlightenment philosophers held three convictions: (1) They believed that the method of the new science was the only way of finding out truths about Nature; the methods of the Scholastic natural philosophers were obsolete and of no use. (2) They thought that the new method had application well beyond the observatory, laboratory and workbench; the new method was useful in the investigation of many social, cultural and even religious questions. (3) They thought that the method of the new science was not something just to be utilised by the natural philosophers, the scholars or the learned elite. They were committed to education, and the promotion of ‘scientific’ thinking in the population; they believed in, as one might say, ‘Science for All’. John Dewey, 300 years later, well expressed these Enlightenment hopes when he said Scientific method is not just a method which it has been found profitable to pursue in this or that abstruse subject for purely technical reasons. It represents the only method of thinking that has proved fruitful in any subject. (Dewey, 1910, p. 127) And when, in his justly famous Democracy and Education, he wrote Our predilection for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judg- ment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are satisfied with superficial and immediate short-visioned applications. ... Science represents the safe- guard of the race against these natural propensities and the evils which flow from them. ... It is artificial (an acquired art), not spontaneous; learned, not native. To this fact is due the unique, the invaluable place of science in education. (Dewey, 1916, p. 189)
- 24. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 9 Some Problems with Contemporary Empirical NOS Research: The Lederman Programme Many individuals and groups in science education have researched factors imping- ing on the teaching and learning of NOS: What is taught? How it is taught? What is learned? How it is best learnt? What are the different outcomes between explicit or implicit instruction? etc.8 This research has achieved much, but suffers because of ‘soft focus’ and ambiguous writing at critical points where important philo- sophical issues are at play. The field of NOS research in science education is yet another example where more cooperation between science educators, historians and philosophers would considerably improve the usefulness and quality of published work. At the outset it is important to appreciate that science educators have typically taken a broad, and fairly relaxed, view of the nature of science; this ‘relaxed’ posi- tion bears upon the validity of test instruments and of informed assessment of NOS learning.9 In many cases what are labelled ‘NOS factors’ by test designers and edu- cation researchers would be thought of as just ‘features of science’ by philosophers; not necessarily things that especially distinguish science or, in essentialist terms, pertain to the nature or essence of science. This section deals with the work of just one representative group of science edu- cation researchers, the group that formed around Norman Lederman.10 This group is chosen because they have been working for two decades or so, and probably are the most cited and the most influential authors in the field. Their definition of NOS is characteristically catholic: Typically, NOS refers to the epistemology and sociology of science, science as a way of knowing, or the values and beliefs inherent to scientific knowledge and its development. (Lederman, Abd-el-Khalick, Bell, Schwartz, 2002, p. 498) It is noteworthy that in this definition both epistemological and sociological aspects of science are subsumed under the NOS umbrella. This rings philosophical alarm bells; it should alone be sufficient to suggest a change from ‘nature of sci- ence’ to ‘features of science’. There may well be some limits on the epistemology or methodology of science, but clearly there will be no such limits on the sociology 8 See contributions to special issues of Science Education (vol. 6 no. 4 1997, vol. 7 no. 6 1998), McComas (1998), Flick and Lederman (2004). See also the literature reviews in Abd-El-Khalick and Lederman (2000) and Lederman (2007). 9 For a critical account of instruments used for NOS assessment from the 1950s to the present, see Lederman, Wade and Bell (1998). 10 Norman Lederman, now professor of science education at the Chicago Institute of Technology, was formerly at Oregon State University. Among his many publications see especially Lederman (1992, 2004). His original Oregon State students included Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, Renee Schwartz, Valarie Akerson and Randy Bell – all of whom have published widely in this field.
- 25. 10 M.R. Matthews of science; the latter will cover politics, commerce, education, professional struc- tures, advertising, and whatever else those studying science as a historical process might have an interest in. The ‘Lederman Seven’ The Lederman group maintains that ‘no consensus presently exists among philoso- phers of science, historians of science, scientists, and science educators on a specific definition for NOS’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 303). Although recognising no across-the- board consensus on NOS, the group does claim that there is sufficient consensus on central matters for the purposes of NOS instruction in K-12 classes. The group has elaborated and defended seven elements of NOS (the ‘Lederman Seven’ as they might be called) that they believe fulfil the criteria of (i) accessibility to school students; (ii) wide enough agreement among historians and philosophers; and (iii) being useful for citizens to know.11 The seven elements are as follows: 1. The empirical nature of science, where they recognised that although empirical, scientists do not have direct access to most natural phenomena. It is claimed that ‘Students should be able to distinguish between observation and inference . . . An understanding of the crucial distinction between observation and inference is a precursor to making sense of a multitude of inferential and theoretical entities and terms that inhabit the worlds of science’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 500) 2. Scientific theories and laws, where they hold that ‘laws are descriptive state- ments of relationships among observable phenomena. . . Theories by contrast are inferred explanations for observed phenomena or regularities in those phenom- ena. . . . Theories and laws are different kinds of knowledge and one does not become the other’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 500) 3. The creative and imaginative nature of scientific knowledge, where they hold that ‘science is empirical . . . Nonetheless, generating scientific knowledge also involves human imagination and creativity. Science . . . is not a lifeless, entirely rational and orderly activity. . . .scientific entities, such as atoms and species are functional theoretical models rather than copies of reality’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 500) 4. The theory-laden nature of scientific knowledge, where it is held that ‘Scientists’ theoretical and disciplinary commitments, beliefs, prior knowledge, training, 11 The list is articulated and defended in, among other places, Lederman et al. (2002, 499–502), Lederman (2004, 303–308), Schwartz and Lederman (2008, 745–762).
- 26. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 11 experiences, and expectations actually influence their work. All these back- ground factors form a mindset that affects the problems scientists investigate and how they conduct their investigations’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 501) 5. The social and cultural embeddedness of scientific knowledge, where it is held that ‘Science as a human enterprise is practiced in the context of a larger culture and its practitioners are the product of that culture. Science, it follows, affects and is affected by the various elements and intellectual spheres of the culture in which it is embedded’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 501) 6. The myth of scientific method, where it is held that ‘There is no single scientific method that would guarantee the development of infallible knowledge... and no single sequence of activities ... that will unerringly lead [scientists] to functional or valid solutions or answers’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 502) 7. The tentative nature of scientific knowledge, where it is maintained that ‘Scientific knowledge, although reliable and durable, is never absolute or cer- tain. This knowledge, including facts, theories, and laws, is subject to change’. (Lederman et al., 2002, p. 502) This list has functioned widely in science education as a NOS checklist; it appears on classroom walls somewhat like the Seven NOS Commandments; and it informs the group’s hugely popular series of VNOS (Views of Nature of Science) tests which are used in scores of published research papers to measure effectiveness of NOS teaching (Lederman et al., 2002) and degrees of NOS understanding (Flick Lederman, 2004, Chap. IV, Schwartz Lederman, 2008, Chen, 2006). The posi- tive side of the list is that it puts NOS into classrooms; it provides researchers with an instrument for measurement of NOS learning; and it can give teachers and stu- dents some NOS matters to think through and become more knowledgeable about. The negative side is that the list can, despite the wishes of its creators, function as a mantra, as a catechism, as yet another something to be learnt. Instead of teachers and students reading, analysing, and coming to their own views about NOS matters, the list often short-circuits all of this. And in as much as it does so, it is directly anti- thetical to the very goals of thoughtfulness and critical thinking that most consider the reason for having NOS (or HPS) in the curriculum. As an example of the hurdles that attend an NOS focus, consider the much- written on claim made by the philosopher Larry Laudan that it is impossible to even demarcate science from other intellectual pursuits. Laudan maintains that From Plato to Popper, philosophers have sought to identify those epistemic features which mark off science from other sorts of beliefs and activity. Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that philosophy has largely failed to deliver the relevant goods. Whatever the specific strengths and deficiencies of the numerous well-known efforts at demarcation. . .it is proba- bly fair to say that there is no demarcation line between science and non-science, or between science and pseudo-science, which would win assent from a majority of philosophers. (Laudan, 1996, p. 210)
- 27. 12 M.R. Matthews If Laudan is correct, then the whole prospect of identifying, much less, itemising some NOS list is otiose.12 But a focus on FOS avoids this hurdle. The possibility of demarcation is just one of numerous features of science that can engage teachers and students. The demarcation question becomes a subject for inquiry, not a cate- chismal matter. An FOS focus leaves open the demarcation question; a NOS focus presupposes a particular answer to it. The Devil Is in the Detail: The Need for Philosophical Articulation The seven features of science, or NOS elements, clearly need to be much more philo- sophically and historically refined and developed in order to be useful to teachers and students. This is not just the obvious point that when seven matters of consid- erable philosophical subtlety, and with long traditions of debate behind them, are dealt with in a few pages, then they will need to be further elaborated, rather it is the more serious claim that at crucial points there is ambiguity that mitigates the list’s usefulness as curricular objectives, assessment criteria, and as goals of science teacher education courses. For instance consider the first item on the list – the empirical basis of science. There are two large problems that this label glosses over: First, the ontological status of theoretical entities in science; second, the role of abstraction and idealisation in science. First, in discussing the empirical nature of science, it is maintained that there is wide enough agreement on the ‘existence of an objective reality, for example, as compared to phenomenal realities’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 303). This is quite so, but the serious debate among philosophers is not the reality of the world, but the reality of explanatory entities proposed in scientific theories. This debate between realists on the one hand, and empiricists, constructivists and instrumentalists on the other has gone on since Aristotle’s time. Aristotle maintained that the crystalline spheres in which the planets were sup- posedly embedded were a real existing mechanism that kept planets in their regular circular orbits, his empiricist rivals held that the spheres were merely mental con- nivances to give order to experience, they had no ontological reality. The debate was famously replayed when Cardinal Bellarmine urged Galileo to adopt an instrumen- talist view of Copernican heliocentric astronomy – that heliocentrism was useful for astronomical calculations, but it was not actually how the solar system was arranged.13 12 Laudan first made the claim in his ‘Demise of the Demarcation Problem’ (Laudan, 1983). A recent survey of the ensuing debate, and refutation of the claim, is provided by Robert Pennock (2011). 13 The classic treatment of the ancient and medieval debates about ‘saving appearances’ as the goal of natural philosophy is Duhem (1908/1969).
- 28. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 13 The debate replayed when Bishop Berkeley criticised Newton’s realist account of force, saying that ‘Force, gravity, attraction and similar terms are convenient for purposes of reasoning and for computations of motion and of moving bodies, but not for the understanding of the nature of motion itself’ (Berkeley, 1721/1901, p. 506).14 And it played again when the positivist Ernst Mach criticised realist interpretations of atomic theory, saying that those theorists had ‘done more than science, whose aim is facts, requires of him – and this work of superogation is an evil’ (Mach, 1872/1911, p. 57). The debate between realist and empiricist or instrumentalist interpretations of the theoretical entities postulated by scientific theories was central to disputes in quantum mechanics (Bunge, 2003). And has recently surfaced in Chemistry over the reality or otherwise of chemical bonds: Are there really covalent and ionic bonds or is there just macro-bonding behaviours for which postulation of micro unseen bonds is just a convenient shorthand for regularities at the macro level? (Vollmer, 2003).15 Throughout the 2,500 years since Aristotle’s postulation of crystalline spheres, it has not been the existence of the world that has been doubted – Bellarmine, Berkeley, Mach and Bohr did not doubt the existence of objects, just the unseen entities and mechanisms that the science of their time was postulating to explain the visible, macro or phenomenal behaviour of the objects. This whole history is removed from science education discussion when the first element in the Lederman list simply says that ‘science has an empirical base’. Well yes, it does, but the issue is more complex; and as with many things, the devil is in the detail. It might be said that students cannot comprehend the detail, but this is an empirical matter; certainly teachers can and should comprehend the detail. The Lederman group are realists about the world, but it is very unclear whether they are realists about science’s theoretical entities – the very issue on which the realist/instrumentalist (constructivist) debate has hinged. It is not the reality of the world that teachers need guidance about, it is the reality or otherwise of entities postulated in scientific theories. Lederman rhetorically asks, ‘can it be said that a student truly understands the concept of a gene if he/she does not realize that a “gene” is a construct invented to explain experimental results?’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 314) And repeats the question by asking, ‘Does the student who views genes as possessing physical existence analogous to pearls on a necklace possess an in-depth understanding of the concept?’ (ibid.) The point is repeated when it is asked, ‘Does the student who is unaware that the atom (as pictured in books) is a scientific model used to explain the behavior of matter and that it has not been directly observed have an in-depth understanding of the atom?’ (ibid.) These questions mask serious and misleading ambiguity concerning the existence of genes and atoms. At first reading, the questions seem to suggest an instru- mentalist, non-realist view of these central explanatory entities; they appear to ‘in 14 For Berkeley’s positivist critique of Newtonian theory, see Popper (1953/1963). 15 For the outlines of this debate, and a guide to some of the literature, see Matthews (1994, Chap. 8).
- 29. 14 M.R. Matthews principle’ not exist, but be merely a human ‘construct’. What if the student thinks of genes not as pearls on a necklace, but links in a necklace chain: Is this sufficient sophistication to rate as high NOS understanding? Or what if a student thinks of atoms not as pictured in the textbook, but as some sort of micro particle: Is this suf- ficient to rate as high NOS understanding? The crucial NOS issue is whether genes and atoms exist at all, exist in principle, not whether any particular picture of them is correct. Once we grant in-principle existence, we can be reasonably relaxed about any particular picture; this is just a matter for good science education to fill in. But Lederman is silent about whether it is in-principle existence or just some particular existence – pearl-like genes, or red and green atoms – that is being denied. The same ambiguity can be seen when another member of the group, Fouad Abd- El-Khalick, recognises that ‘The world of science is inhabited by a multitude of theoretical entities, such as atoms, photons, magnetic fields, and gravitational forces to name only a few’. All realists recognise that the entities listed are both theoretical and central to science, but Abd-El-Khalick proceeds to say that these are ‘functional theoretical models rather than faithful copies of “reality” ’ (Abd-El-Khalick, 2004, pp. 409, 410). Here again is the crucial ambiguity. One wonders why ‘reality’ was put in scare quotes as this introduces some element of doubt about reality itself, but this doubt can be left aside for the moment as he is a realist about reality. But more importantly, functional theoretical models can either have a reference (denote some- thing existing) or merely link observables in a, usually, mathematical way that has no ontological import. Abd-El-Khalick’s claim is ambiguous at the crucial point of whether the listed theoretical entities are non-existing ‘functional theoretical mod- els’ in virtue of them not being ‘faithful copies of reality’ or in virtue of their very nature. This is a re-phrasing of the long-discussed distinction between hypothetical con- structs (which in principle can have existence, although they may, as a matter of fact not exist; or not exist with the properties attributed to them) and intervening variables (which in principle have no existence, but merely link observables).16 In the nineteenth century, caloric and Neptune were hypothetical constructs; one turned out to have existence, the other did not. The notion of ‘average-family number’ when applied to societies functions as an intervening variable: there is no suggestion that any particular family has 3.7 members; the latter is not meant to copy, faithfully or otherwise, any particular reality. The crucial question is whether atoms, photons, magnetic fields, gravitational forces are like average-family numbers? Bellarmine, Berkeley, Mach and Bohr would say ‘yes’; it is simply unclear if Abd-El-Khalick agrees with them or not. If attention had been paid to spelling out the meaning of ‘functional theoretical model’, this ambiguity would be removed. 16 A classic discussion of the difference between hypothetical constructs (that in principle have existence) and intervening variables (that in principle do not have existence) is Meehl and MacCorquodale (1948). Clarity on this issue is of absolute importance in social science: Is ‘intelli- gence’ to be understood as a hypothetical construct or an intervening variable? Rivers of ink have been spilt because researchers have not clarified the kind of thing they are looking for.
- 30. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 15 At a surface reading, it would seem that the Lederman group are empiricists and constructivists about theoretical entities in science. If so, this is a mistake, and is not the message about NOS that science teachers should convey. The mis- take is not so much the assumption of one philosophical side, constructivism, in this debate but rather giving the impression that there is no debate or no alterna- tive position that can and has been adopted – the realist position. Once again, a concentration on the NOS rather than open discussion and inquiry about FOS leads to this mistake. The second problem with the Lederman Group’s ‘empirical basis’ characteri- sation is that it disguises, if not completely distorts, the non-empirical component of science. The very process of abstraction, and idealisation, is the beginning of modern science. It is an ability to see the forest, and not just the trees. Consider Galileo’s ‘thousands of swings’ of the pendulum. He clearly saw no such thing, it is a claim about what he would see if the impediments to pendulum motion were removed (Matthews, 2000). Similarly Newton did not see inertial bodies continuing to move in a straight line indefinitely. This is what he would have seen if all resis- tance were removed. Fermi and Bernardini, in their biography of Galileo, emphasise this innovation: In formulating the ‘Law of Inertia’ the abstraction consisted of imagining the motion of a body on which no force was acting and which, in particular, would be free of any sort of friction. This abstraction was not easy, because it was friction itself that for thousands of years had kept hidden the simplicity and validity of the laws of motion. In other words, fric- tion is an essential element in all human experience; our intuition is dominated by friction; men can move around because of friction; because of friction they can grasp objects with their hands, they can weave fabrics, build cars, houses, etc. To see the essence of motion beyond the complications of friction indeed required a great insight. (Fermi Bernardini, 1961, p. 116) The point of this drawn-out discussion of the first item on the Lederman list is to indicate that such a claim about the empirical basis, and the role of inference, needs to be elaborated at a much more sophisticated level in order to both be useful and to avoid massive misunderstandings of the scientific endeavour. Further with just the slightest elaboration, the more or less uncontroversial and mundane claim – that science has an empirical base – can be transformed into an engaging inquiry that can link teachers and students with a central philosophical argument in the history of philosophy, namely realist or instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theory, a debate to which the greatest minds can be found on either side. It is not a simple, ‘open and shut’ matter that can be reduced to a declarative list. The same kind of argument can be mounted against each of the other items on the Lederman list. A general point is that such necessary elaboration depends upon teachers having some competence or at least familiarity with the history and phi- losophy of science, and notoriously such training is absent from teacher-education programmes. For instance the fourth claim is that ‘Scientific knowledge is subjective or theory- laden’. Again, the claim is ambiguous: one can say both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. First to
- 31. 16 M.R. Matthews acknowledge that some claim is theory-laden is not equivalent to saying it is subjec- tive in the usual psychological meaning of the term. But the meaning being used by the Lederman group is simply ambiguous. For instance Lederman says that ‘I am not advocating that scientists be subjective’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 306). Here ‘subjective’ must be the everyday psychological sense of the term. But previously we have been dealing with, what one might call, ‘philosophical subjectivity’, as it has been stated that subjectivity is equivalent to theory-ladeness, and that ‘subjectivity is unavoid- able’ (ibid.). Clearly all science is theory-laden, as Lederman rightly points out; but if so, then scientists have to be subjective (as in philosophical subjectivity), whether it is advocated or not advocated. But this is entirely different from psychological subjectivity. The entire history of modern science is an effort to take out, or minimise, the psychological subjectivity in measurement and explanation – beginning with the earliest use of measuring instruments in order to get inter-subjective agreement about weight, length, time, etc. Galileo’s creation of the pulsilogium so as to be able to objectively measure pulse rate for medical diagnosis is one such example. The entirely subjective ‘fast’, ‘medium’, ‘slow’ was replaced by the length of a pen- dulum beating in time with the patient’s pulse.17 The force of the fourth claim trades entirely upon an ambiguity, which is unfortunate in something so widely used as a check-list of NOS understanding. The fifth claim is that science is embedded in culture, that it ‘affects and is affected by the various elements and intellectual spheres of the culture in which it is embedded’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 306). It is important that this be recognised, but again the devil is in the detail, and the detail is not provided. We know that the cultures of Nazism (Beyerchen, 1977), Stalinism (Graham, 1973, Birstein, 2001), Islam (Hoodbhoy, 1991) and Hinduism (Nanda, 2003) to take just some examples, dramatically affected scientific investigation wherever they were powerful enough to do so. And of course the impact, for good and bad, of Christian culture, beliefs and authorities on science is well documented (Lindberg Numbers, 1986). Clearly indigenous sciences are affected by the worldviews and social structures in which they are practised. All commentators on the European scientific revolution recognise that the blos- soming of the New Science of Galileo, Huygens, Newton, Boyle, etc, was dependent on, though not caused by, social and cultural circumstances of seventeenth cen- tury Europe.18 Counterwise, scholars have tried to identify the absence of such circumstances in China at the time to account for why there was no comparable scientific revolution in China (Needham Ling, 1954–65). In a famous and con- tentious study, Paul Forman attempted to provide a causal link between the culture 17 See Matthews (2000, pp. 88–89). 18 The classic statement of this position, but with the causal twist, is Boris Hessen’s 1931 The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s ‘Principia’. For Hessen’s text and commentary see Freudenthal and McLaughlin (2009). One well-known elaboration of the thesis, in the causal direction, is Freudenthal (1986).
- 32. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 17 of Weimar Germany and the creation of indeterminate quantum theory (Forman, 1971). The sociological and historical facts of the matter are not in dispute – science depends upon technology, mathematics, communications, money, education, phi- losophy and culture more broadly – and it is useful for students and teachers to be reminded of all this and to be given examples. But for this fact to be truly useful, and not just a sort of anthropological observation, teachers (and their pupils) need to be engaged in or inquire about issues such as separating benign from adverse effects of culture; distinguishing good from bad science; identifying internal and external factors in scientific development; trying to determine just how analogous are Western and indigenous science; and so on. But the Lederman group is silent on these ultimately normative matters. We are told just that although Western Science dominates North American schools, there ‘exist other analogous sciences (e.g., indigenous science) in other parts of the world’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 307). The ambiguity here over ‘analogous’ means that this item on the list gives no direction to teachers, either in cultures that are resistant to Western Science, or in multicultural situations. It is a too-easy step to move from this anthropological claim to the educational conclusion that where other analogous sciences exist, then they should be taught.19 The group does say that NOS means, among other things, identifying the ‘values and beliefs inherent to scientific knowledge and its development’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 303). The use of the word ‘inherent’ suggests that effort will be made to spell out just what is and is not inherent to science, and this would be the occasion to comment on benign and adverse impacts of culture on science; but the matter is not addressed. This can be a good thing, if teachers and students are meant to work out their own answer, but the list is meant to function as a characterisation of the nature of science, and further is to be used in assessing competence in NOS understanding, for these purposes more elaboration is needed. Item seven on the Lederman NOS list is a claim about the ‘tentativeness’ of sci- entific knowledge. We are told that ‘tentativeness in science does not only arise from the fact that scientific knowledge is inferential, creative, and socially and culturally embedded’ but ‘There are also compelling logical arguments that lend credence to the notion of tentativeness in science’ (Lederman, 2004, p. 307). Again, as with all the other items on the list, one can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on how the claim is interpreted. First, contrary to what is stated, absolutely nothing follows about ten- tativeness from the recognition that knowledge is ‘inferential, creative, and socially and culturally embedded’ unless one adds a premiss to the effect that, by defini- tion, knowledge so characterised is tentative. But, without argument, there is no need to add such a premiss. If we infer a particular cause for some effect, this might be a tentative belief, but to infer that there is a cause, is not tentative in the same way. 19 For a philosophically sophisticated discussion of some of the issues, see Nola and Irzik (2006).
- 33. 18 M.R. Matthews Features of Science (FOS) There are seven items on the Lederman NOS list: (1) Empirical basis (2) Scientific theories and laws (3) Creativity (4) Theory dependence (5) Cultural embeddedness (6) Scientific method (7) Tentativeness I have been arguing that these should better be thought of as different features of science (FOS) to be elaborated, discussed and inquired about, rather than nature of science (NOS) items to somehow be learnt and assessed. Each of these features has been richly written about by philosophers, historians and others – as has been indicated above for some on the list. But if they are features of science, then there is no good reason why just those seven features are picked out, and not others of the numerous features – epistemological, historical, psychological, social, techno- logical, economic, etc. – that can be said to characterise scientific endeavour, and that also meet the three criteria of accessibility, consensus and usefulness that the Lederman group additionally utilise to reduce NOS matters to classroom size. Clearly many other things can be added to the above list. Among philosophers, NOS discussion and debate has traditionally revolved around investigations of the epistemological, methodological, and ontological commitments of science. But there are illuminating, non-philosophical studies of science, such as conducted by historians, cognitive psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and numerous other disciplines. The term ‘Science Studies’ encompasses the complete academic spectrum, and all components have useful things to say about different features of science. Just some of the additional topics, issues or questions that can usefully engage science teachers and students might be (8) Experimentation. The long-standing Aristotelian injunction about not interfer- ing with nature if we want to understand her was rejected first by Galileo, with his famous inclined plane experiments conducted so as to understand the phenomena of free fall, then progressively by the other foundation figures of early modern science, most notably Newton with his pendulum experiments in mechanics and his prism manipulations in optics. It was this newly introduced experimentalism that occasioned Kant to remark that When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously deter- mined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite volume of water . . . a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings. (Kant, 1787/1933, p. 20)
- 34. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 19 Historians and philosophers have written a great deal on this topic, and of course it can connect immediately with a more sophisticated understanding of school laboratory work and student experimentation (Chang, 2010; Hodson, 1993, 1996). (9) Idealisation. What is the role, function and status of idealisation in scien- tific theorising? How are laws about idealised and contrary-to-fact conditions reconciled with claims that laws of nature are about the world? (Nowak, 1980) Galileo was the first to build idealisation into the investigation of nature, and it was this methodological move that enabled his New Science to emerge from its medieval and Renaissance milieu.20 What Galileo recognised was that nature’s laws were not obvious in nature; they were not given in immediate experience; the laws applied only to idealised circumstances. This employ- ment of idealisation was also in flat contradiction to the long empiricist Aristotelian tradition whereby ‘science’ was to be about the world as seen and experienced. As Aristotle maintained, ‘If we cannot believe our eyes what should be believe?’ In contrast, Galileo immediately after proving his famous Law of Parabolic Motion says I grant that these conclusions proved in the abstract will be different when applied in the concrete and will be fallacious to this extent, that neither will the horizontal motion be uniform nor the natural acceleration be in the ratio assumed, nor the path of the projectile a parabola. (Galileo, 1638/1954, p. 251) Of crucial importance was the fact that idealisation, and only idealisation, gave specific direction to experimentation so that students of nature (reason) could mould nature ‘after a plan of its own’, in Kant’s famous words. The decades and centuries of classical mechanics, began by Galileo, were a long process of transforming nature in the image of theory; that is what an experi- ment was: controlling all variables identified by theory as being irrelevant, and varying the one held responsible for the phenomena. (10) Models. The ubiquity of models in the history and current practice of science is widely recognised, indeed it is difficult to think of science without models: the ‘billiard ball’, ‘plum-pudding’ and ‘solar system’ models of the atom, the electron orbit model for the periodic table, the ‘lattice’ model of salt structure, the fluid-flow model of electricity, the double-helix model of the chromosome, the ‘survival of the fittest’ model for population expansion in eco-systems, the particle model of light, the ‘big bang’ model in cosmology, the ‘3-body’ model for sun–earth–moon interaction, full dinosaur models from bone frag- ments in palaeontology, the plate-tectonic model in geophysics, the scores of mathematical models in hereditary and population studies, the thousands of mathematical models in economics, engineering, and so on. Any 10 pages of a science textbook might be expected to contain twice that number of models, many in full glossy colour, with state-of-the-art graphics. 20 I have argued this claim at some length in Matthews (2000, pp. 245–48).
- 35. 20 M.R. Matthews In the past half-century historians and philosophers of science have devoted considerable time to documenting and understanding the role of models in science and social science. These studies have led scholars to examine model-related topics such as the nature of scientific theory, the status of hypothesis, the role of metaphor and analogy in scientific explanation, thought experiments in science, and the centrality of idealisation for the articulation, application and testing of models. Mary Hesse’s (1953, 1961, 1966) and Rom Harré’s (1960) publications were foundational for the contemporary tradition (realist and non-realist) of model-related research, with Hesse’s Models and Analogies in Science (1966) being of particular importance. Philip Johnson- Laird’s book Mental Models (1983) was, and still is, enormously influential. He, and associates, provided an explanation for the ubiquity of models in sci- ence when they detailed how models were ubiquitous not just in science but in all mental life. Once more, if models are seen as an important feature of science, then a competent HPS-informed teacher can provide rich materials and questions for class discussion on the topic: How do models relate to the world they model? Is learning the properties of models the same as learning about the world? As with so many FOS questions, there is no uncontested answer, just better informed and better argued answers. A number of rich studies can be seen in the recent special issue of Science Education devoted to the subject – ‘Models in Science and in Science Education’ (2007, vol. 16 nos. (7–8). And of course this extended FOS list can simply be extended to include any number of other important and engaging features of science: (11) Values and Socio-scientific issues (12) Mathematisation (13) Technology (14) Explanation (15) Worldviews and Religion (16) Theory choice and rationality (17) Feminism (18) Realism and Constructivism All of these subjects have been extensively written upon, as can be seen by a perusal of any introductory HPS textbook. Modest Goals for FOS Teaching We should have modest goals when teaching about FOS. In the opening page of the AAAS Benchmarks document it was stated that ‘Little is gained by presenting these beliefs to students as dogma. For one thing, such beliefs are subtle’ (AAAS, 1993,
- 36. 1 Changing the Focus: From Nature of Science (NOS) to Features of Science (FOS) 21 p. 5). The same points are made in the UK Perspectives on Science course, where it is repeatedly stated that students will gain appreciation of NOS positions and issues, and competence in NOS thinking, rather than declarative knowledge of NOS. It is important to stress these points: First FOS claims should not be presented as dogma, to do so is to confuse education with indoctrination; and second most, if not all, statements about FOS are subtle, and recognition of this subtlety simply depends upon having historical and philosophical (HPS) awareness. Both these points have implications for the very vexed and much-written up topic of the assessment of FOS and NOS learning (Rudge Howe, 2010). It is unrealistic to expect students, or trainee teachers, to become competent his- torians, sociologists or philosophers of science. We should have limited aims in introducing FOS questions in the classroom. Teachers should aim for a more com- plex understanding of science, not a total, or even a very complex, understanding. Fortunately philosophy does not have to be artificially imported to the science class- room, is not far below the surface in any lesson or textbook. At a most basic level any text or scientific discussion will contain terms such as ‘law’, ‘theory’, ‘model’, ‘explanation’, ‘cause’, ‘truth’, ‘knowledge’, ‘hypothesis’, ‘confirmation’, ‘obser- vation’, ‘evidence’, ‘idealisation’, ‘time’, ‘space’, ‘fields’, ‘species’. Philosophy begins as soon as these common and ubiquitous terms are explained, amplified and discussed. There is no need to overwhelm students with ‘cutting-edge’ philosophical ques- tions. They have to crawl before they can walk, and walk before they can run. This is no more than commonsensical pedagogical practice. There are numerous low- level philosophical questions that are legitimate FOS questions: What is a scientific explanation? What is a controlled experiment? What is a crucial experiment and are there any? How do models function in science? How much confirmation does a hypothesis require before it is established? Are there ways of evaluating the worth of competing research programmes? Did Newton’s religious belief affect his science? Was Darwin’s ‘damaged book’ analogy a competent rely to critics who pointed to all the evidence that contradicted his evolutionary theory? Was Planck culpable for remaining in Nazi Germany and continuing his scientific research during the war? And so on. Likewise history is unavoidable. Texts are replete with names such as Galileo, Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Darwin, Mendel, Faraday, Volta, Lavoisier, Dalton, Rutherford, Curie, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, and others. History ‘lite’ begins when teachers, as Westaway was quoted earlier, ‘talk to [students] about the per- sonal equations, the lives, and the work of such’ figures. And encourage students to do their own research on these scientists. History ‘full strength’ begins when the experiments and debates of these figures are reproduced in the classroom; when ‘historical-investigative’ teaching is practised (Kipnis, 1996, 1998). Other features of science are on daily display in newspapers, TVs and the Internet, where accounts of socio-scientific and techno-value debates about genetics, agro-business, climate change, GM crops, global warming, and so on are constant features. If understanding FOS is embraced as a curricular goal, then well-prepared
- 37. 22 M.R. Matthews teachers should be able to elaborate a little on these matters and facilitate useful classroom discussion and learning. Twelve years ago I wrote Science educators should be modest when urging substantive positions in the history and philosophy of science, or in epistemology. . . .Modesty does not entail vapid fence-sitting, but it does entail the recognition that there are usually two, if not more, sides to most seri- ous intellectual questions. And this recognition needs to be intelligently and sensitively translated into classroom practice. (Matthews, 1998, pp. 169–170) The change of focus from NOS to FOS greatly facilitates this orientation. NOS research has concentrated on the nature of scientific knowledge; FOS includes this, but is also concerned with the processes, institutions and cultural and social contexts in which this knowledge is produced. References Abd-El-Khalick, F. (2004). Over and over again: College students’ views of nature of science. In L. B. Flick N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Scientific inquiry and nature of science: Implications for teaching, learning, and teacher education (pp. 389–425). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Abd-El-Khalick, F., Lederman, N. G. (2000). Improving science teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science: A critical review of the literature, International Journal of Science Education, 22(7), 665–701. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (1989). Project 2061: Science for all Americans. Washington, DC: AAAS. Also published by Oxford University Press, 1990. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (1990). The liberal art of science: Agenda for action. Washington, DC: AAAS. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (1993). Benchmarks for science literacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Berkeley, G. (1721/1901). De Motu. In A. C. Fraser (Ed.), The works of George Berkeley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Extracts in D. M. Armstrong (Ed.), Berkeley’s philosophical writings, New York, 1965). Beyerchen, A. D. (1977). Scientists under Hitler: Politics and the physics community in the third Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press. Birstein, V. J. (2001). The perversion of knowledge: The true story of Soviet science. Cambridge, MA: Westview. Bunge, M. (2003). Twenty-five centuries of quantum physics: From pythagoras to us, and from subjectivism to realism, Science Education, 12(5–6), 445–466. Chang, H. (2010). How historical experiments can improve scientific knowledge and science edu- cation: The cases of boiling water and electrochemistry. Science Education. Online first DOI 10.1007/s11191-010-9301-8. Chen, S. (2006). Development of an instrument to assess views on nature of science and attitudes towards teaching science. Science Education, 90(5), 803–819. Cohen, R. S. (1975). Physical science. New York: Holt, Rinehart Winston. Dewey, J. (1910). Science as subject-matter and as method, Science, 31, 121–127. Reproduced in Science Education, 4(4), 391–398, 1995. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York: Macmillan Company. Duhem, P. (1908/1969). To save the phenomena: An essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dupré, L. (2004). The enlightenment and the intellectual foundations of modern culture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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- 39. 24 M.R. Matthews Irzik, G., Nola, R. (2011). A family resemblance approach to the nature of science for science education. Science Education, 20(7–8), 591–607. Israel, J. (2001). Radical enlightenment: Philosophy and the making of modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental models. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, I. (1787/1933). Critique of pure reason (2nd ed.) (N. K. Smith, Trans.). London: Macmillan. (First edition, 1781). Kipnis, N. (1996). The “historical-investigative” approach to teaching science. Science Education, 5(3), 277–292. Kipnis, N. (1998). A history of science approach to the nature of science: Learning science by rediscovering it. In W. F. McComas (Ed.), The nature of science in science education: Rationales and strategies (pp. 177–196). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Klopfer, L. E. (1969). Case histories and science education. San Francisco: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Lakatos, I. (1978). History of science and its rational reconstructions. In J. Worrall G. Currie (Eds.), The methodology of scientific research programmes: Volume I, pp. 102–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Originally 1971) Laudan, L. (1981). William Whewell on the consilience of inductions. In his Science and hypothesis (pp. 163–180). Dordrecht: Reidel. Laudan, L. (1983). The demise of the demarcation problem. In R. S. Cohen L. Laudan (Eds.), Physics, philosophy and psychoanalysis (pp. 111–127). Dordrecht: Reidel. Laudan, L. (1996). Beyond positivism and relativism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Lederman, N. G. (1986). Students’ and teachers’ understanding of the nature of science: A reassessment. School Science and Mathematics, 86(2), 91–99. Lederman, N. G. (1992). Students’ and teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science: A review of the research. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 29(4), 331–359. Lederman, N. G. (2004). Syntax of nature of science within inquiry and science instruction. In L. B. Flick N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Scientific inquiry and nature of science (pp. 301–317). Dordrecht; Kluwer Academic. Lederman, N. G. (2007). Nature of science: Past, present, and future. In S. K. Abell N. G. Lederman (Eds.), Handbook of research on science education (pp. 831–880). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Lederman, N., Abd-el-Khalick, F., Bell, R. L., Schwartz, R. S. (2002). Views of nature of science questionnaire: Towards valid and meaningful assessment of learners’ conceptions of the nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 39, 497–521. Lederman, N. G., Wade, P. D., Bell, R. L. (1998). Assessing the nature of science: A historical perspective. Science Education, 7(6), 595–615. Lindberg, D. C., Numbers, R. L. (Eds.). (1986). God and nature: Historical essays on the encounter between Christianity and science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Locke, J. (1689/1924). An essay concerning human understanding (A. S. Pringle-Pattison, abridged and ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, J. (1689/1983). A letter concerning toleration. In J. Tully (Ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Locke, J. (1690/1960). Two treatises of government. Introduction and Notes by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1693/1996). Some thoughts concerning education of the conduct of the understanding. In R. W. Grant N. Tarcov (Eds.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Locke, J. (1695/1999). The reasonableness of Christianity as delivered in the scriptures (J. C. Higgins-Biddle, ed. and introduction). New York: Oxford University Press. Mach, E. (1872/1911). The history and root of the principle of the conservation of energy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Mach, E. (1886/1986). On instruction in the classics and the sciences. In Popular scientific lectures (pp. 338–374). La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company.
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- 42. Chapter 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of Science to Complicate Public Understanding of Science Tina A. Grotzer, Rebecca B. Miller, and Rebecca A. Lincoln Effective communication of scientific findings is critical to sustaining an informed society that can make the best decisions from the science that it funds and that affects daily life. Yet, despite a scientist’s best intentions, attempts to communicate scientific results are often fraught with difficulty. Here, we draw together disparate strands of scholarship to argue that the patterns of perception, attention, and cog- nition, which guide how humans take in and deal with information, are typically at odds with the demands of processing complex scientific information and with how science produces knowledge. Scientists who hope to impact public understand- ing will benefit from an awareness of these human patterns, how they interact with understanding the nature of science, and what this means for presenting scientific information to the public. Gaining the Public’s Attention Gaining and maintaining the public’s attention is one of the first challenges a scien- tist meets when trying to share research findings. In a sea of messages competing for the public’s attention, what breaks through and what manages to sustain atten- tion? A growing literature informs how people respond to perceptual stimuli, what information holds salience for them, and how they consciously and unconsciously allocate their attention. Findings based on research from visual and auditory percep- tion and the design of our perceptual apparatus offer some useful insights. Relevant key findings are as follows: (1) We do not encode information perfectly; (2) Our attention is spotlight-like—we stitch together broader images from the pieces that we focus on; (3) We are selective in what information we take in; and (4) We priv- ilege certain kinds of information over others. We consider research in support of each of these key findings below. T.A. Grotzer (B) Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: tina_grotzer@harvard.edu 27 M.S. Khine (ed.), Advances in Nature of Science Research, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2457-0_2, C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
- 43. 28 T.A. Grotzer et al. Less-than-Perfect Encoding. Our visual perceptual apparatus is designed such that we carry out less-than-perfect encoding of information. Minor movements of our eyes, microsaccades, are necessary so that we don’t habituate on objects in our visual field. Microsaccades are involuntary and they basically “refresh the picture.” If the image on our computer did not refresh, we would be left with an old image. This is not the case with our eyes. If we were to habituate on the visual stimuli, the image would simply fade away. Therefore, one could argue that our eyes are able to see because at times we cannot see (Martinez-Conde, Macknik, Troncoso, Dyar, 2006). Microsaccades occur very quickly and prevent continuous perception, even if we don’t realize that we do not continuously perceive information from the outside world (e.g. Martinez-Conde, Macknik, Hubel, 2004; Morrone Burr, 2006). Each time we shift our attention from one thing to another, we engage in another form of movement and resulting visual suppression called a saccade. Saccades are quick, simultaneous movements of both eyes in the same direction. They last from about 20 to 200 ms (e.g., Ibbotson, Crowder, Cloherty, Price, Mustari, 2008). The visual image is briefly suppressed to prevent blurring of the image. Saccades are considered voluntary compared to microsaccades because we can attempt to suppress saccades by holding our focus on one thing. The combination of microsac- cades and saccades results in a kind of inherent “blink” in our visual system, even though we have the impression that we are seeing everything that comes our way. Spotlight-like Attention. Further, our visual apparatus is designed to take in small, focused parts of a broader image in a manner often likened to the image that falls in the beam of a flashlight or spotlight. These small yet high-resolution images are stitched together to form the larger image. Rather than look at a scene in a steady way, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental “map” corresponding to the scene (Posner, Snyder, Davidson, 1980). By moving the eye so that small parts of a scene can be sensed with greater resolution, bodily resources can be used more efficiently. (If an entire scene were viewed in high resolution, the diameter of the optic nerve would need to be larger than the diameter of the eyeball itself.) However, this kind of focusing apparatus comes with the cost of potentially missing the bigger picture. Images in the middle of the scene are most likely to be perceived. While still the prevailing model, the spotlight analogy for visual perception has been critiqued for being too simplistic (Cave Bichot, 1999). Recent research elaborates on this claim. It reveals, for instance, that the characteristics of stimuli towards the edges impact perception (Müller Ebeling, 2008) and there may be some variation according to individual preferences (Kastner McMains, 2007) as well as individual differences (Heitz Engle, 2007). There may also be differences in how certain populations, such as those with dyslexia, process visual stimuli (personal communication, T. Rose, 2008). A body of research referred to as “change blindness” examines our inability to detect changes even when they are happening right before our eyes and even when we are aware that something is changing (e.g., Grimes, 1996; McConkie Currie, 1996; Rensink, O’Regan, Clark, 1997; Simons Levin, 1998). Change blindness is a broad term and covers a range of phenomena at different levels, but at the most basic level, it appears to be a consequence of the combination of microsaccades,
- 44. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 29 saccadic suppression, and this “stitching together of smaller, focused images.” In order to detect change, we need to map the scene as it was and we need to compare this to a mapping of the scene after the change. However, stitching together spotlight beams of images to create a bigger picture of a scene, and then doing that again in order to make a comparison, is taxing from a cognitive perspective. Even when we know that something is changing, it can be hard to detect the precise nature or features of the change. “Blink” is built into our visual system due to microsaccades, saccades, and stitching together beams of focus to assemble a larger scene. However, most of the time, we aren’t aware that changes are tak- ing place—we are incidentally encoding information and don’t attend to the details of a scene. This results in change blindness at a much broader level. A series of experiments by Simons and Levin (1998) referred to as “the rude door changer” illustrates this phenomenon. An experimenter approached a stranger on the street to ask directions. While the stranger was giving directions to the experimenter, two “rude” movers walked in between them carrying a large door, blocking the stranger’s view of the experimenter. Amidst the interruption, the experimenter was replaced by a second experimenter, in similar clothes, whose appearance was not dramatically different, though certainly not the same. Fifty percent of the strangers in this exper- iment thought they were talking to the same person before and after the “rude” movers walked through, completely missing the switch! Selective Processing. Another body of research, on a phenomenon called inat- tentional blindness (IB), helps to illustrate that the source of attentional difficulties extends well beyond our visual system. Research shows that people often do not notice stimuli that are right in front of them if they are attending to something else (e.g., Mack Rock, 1998; Most, Scholl, Clifford, Simons, 2005). Haines (1991) gives the unnerving example of airline pilots during a simulated landing who are so focused on the control console that they miss the fact that the runway in front of them is blocked by another plane. Inattentional blindness can be so complete that after finishing their simulated landing, those test pilots said that they never realized that there was anything obstructing their way. Moreover, while much of the inattentional blindness research has focused on visual perception, there is evidence to suggest that without focused attention, other senses are also impacted. Mack and Rock (1998) have reported similar findings from their investigations into auditory stimulation (conducted with their colleague, Jack Hoppenstand) and into tactile stimulation. How can we make sense of these events? Most of us tend to believe that we perceive something as a consequence of attending to it. However, as this research indicates, humans are selective about what information we take in and we priori- tize some forms of information over others. We process only portions of the steady stream of stimulation headed our way because we can’t possibly take in everything going on around us. Indeed, research (e.g. Mack Rock, 1998) suggests that per- ception and attention are distinct but related phenomena, and there are different levels of perception and attention. Perception can be both unconscious and con- scious. Unconscious perception refers to the early processing of perceptual stimuli prior to awareness. Sensory stimulation is being processed, but we aren’t aware of
- 45. 30 T.A. Grotzer et al. it. Conscious perception, in contrast, refers to the processing of perceptual stimuli once attention is engaged. Attention refers to our ability—intentional or unintentional, and with more or less depth—to turn our cognitive powers toward the stimuli we detect in the world. So it serves as a filter between all the stimuli in the world and our limited ability to be conscious of things around us. We direct our attention to more things than we consciously become aware of, but we cannot become aware of anything that doesn’t capture our attention. As Lamme (2003) explains: “It seems that attention guards the gate towards a representation that can be consciously reported or remembered (as in IB). . . Many sensory inputs reach the brain and, via the process of attentive selec- tion, some of these reach a conscious state, which allows us to report about them” (p. 12). A steady stream of information reaches us that we are not consciously aware of and, from the viewpoint of our attention, we simply miss. Yet other information makes it “through the gate.” Research also reveals the surprising reality that sometimes things in front of us do capture our attention—that is, our eyes might briefly move toward a new object in our visual field, for instance, toward the plane blocking the runway—but we never become aware that the object is there. Most and his colleagues (2005) summarize this puzzling interaction between implicit and explicit perception and the fundamen- tal paradox that it creates: “On one hand, people engaging in challenging tasks must often maintain focus, effectively ignoring irrelevant information that might distract them from their goal. . . On the other hand, attention must be distractible; if poten- tially dangerous or behaviorally relevant objects appear, they should divert cognitive resources” (p. 218). What does this research suggest for how the public takes in scientific informa- tion? It reveals that the information that we consciously attend to is more limited than we realize. What scientists, educators, and communicators assume the public takes in may be incongruous with the actual information people are able or inclined to attend to. Indeed, we humans prioritize attending to certain kinds of information over others even before becoming aware that we are taking in information at all. So what makes us more or less likely to notice certain information over other? Influences on What We Take In. Experimental psychologists have conducted a range of studies to find out what makes us more or less likely to notice some- thing that is right before our eyes. Attentional capture is impacted by a number of variables pertaining to stimuli, for instance, size, location, familiarity, loudness, the image or sound of our own names, and certain emotional stimuli including faces (e.g., Eastwood, Smilek, Merikle, 2001; Moray, 1959; Ohman, Flykt, Esteves, 2001; Vuilleumier, 2005; Yamasaki, LaBar, McCarthy, 2002). Very large and very loud stimuli are likely to break through and demand our attention. There is also clear evidence that the meaningfulness and relevance of the stimulus impact whether or not we notice it. Meaningfulness even outweighs how recently we were exposed to a stimulus: we are less likely to notice a person whom we passed by yesterday than we are to notice someone whose face has meaning for us. One of the keys to the door between attention and awareness is expectation. Expectation is so powerful that we often find patterns and representations (and
- 46. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 31 assign them meaning) even when what we see is random (Shermer, 2009). There is some evidence that expecting to see a stimulus impacts how our brains respond to it. According to Treisman (2009), “Neural changes can specify the timing of attention effects. Functional MRI activation and single-unit changes occurring in anticipation of the stimulus have proved that attention can affect the baseline activity in special- ized extrastriate areas even before the stimulus is presented” (p. 196, citing Chawla, Rees, Friston, 1999; see also Hopfinger, Buonocore, Mangun, 2000; Kastner Ungerleider, 2000). Further, the more demanding the task, the more expectation matters (White Davies, 2008). This suggests that when we’re working hard to comprehend com- plex information, like scientific evidence and interpretations, expectation may have a pronounced effect on our ability to focus our attention on the myriad pieces of information before us. This tendency can be helpful and protective—for instance, we are neurologically and cognitively attuned to notice faces of people we recog- nize in the midst of teeming crowds (Buchen, 2008). However, it can also lead us to construe patterns that are not there. Expectation is not always explicit. According to Gagnepain and colleagues, “Implicit memory has been defined as the expression of past experiences occurring beyond the boundaries of consciousness and without any intentional recollection” (Gagnepain, Lebreton, Desgranges, Eustache, 2008, p. 276). They point to prim- ing as one of the most well-known phenomena of implicit memory. Priming refers to “a change in the speed or accuracy with which a stimulus is processed, follow- ing prior experience of the same or related stimulus” (p. 276). Priming can occur through repeated exposure to a stimulus whether we are aware of it or not. For instance, if we pass a certain person on the street everyday, whether or not we attend to the person, we are more likely to select that person than another stranger as familiar. Priming turns out to be a powerful psychological predictor of how we implicitly perceive and subsequently attend to stimuli. Having detected a stimulus once makes us more likely in the future to attend to it; this is a form of priming (Hinojosa, Pozo, Méndez-Bértolo, Luna, 2009). Even our speech is unexpectedly primed—the way we form our sentences tends to mimic the syntactic structure of sentences we’ve just heard before crafting our own (Pickering Branigan, 1999). Experiments have shown that we are primed by visual imagery too: for example, women smokers on a diet tended to associate smoking with weight control if, before being questioned, they viewed pictures of models rather than neutral photos of nature (McKee, Nhean, Hinson, Mase, 2006). According to Mack and Rock (1998), “There is now ample evidence in the literature that sensitive, direct methods of testing often reveal that perceptions not consciously experienced seem to be encoded, and facilitate or inhibit subsequent perception when that same or a related stimulus object is subsequently presented to the observer” (p. 173). Expectation not only shapes what we become aware of, but what meaning we make of that which we consciously consider and also how we behave. For example, researchers suggest that being primed with ideas of hostility can make us more likely to judge someone we don’t know as being hostile (Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz,
- 47. 32 T.A. Grotzer et al. Darley, 2002). Negative terms tend to prime us for negative judgment, and pos- itive to positive. Yet the expectations we develop through association can be quite specific—we distinguish guilt from sadness, for instance, suggesting that we’re sen- sitive to the particular meaning of an idea and not simply its valence (Zemack-Rugar, Bettman, Fitzsimmons, 2007). Priming has also been shown to impact behavior. Unconscious cues that are related to meanings or beliefs we already hold can shape our subsequent action. For instance, people primed with words associated with the elderly (like “old” or “Florida”) left a psychology study by walking more slowly than people who weren’t primed that way (Berger, 2008, referencing Bargh, Chen, Burrows, 1996). Researchers suggest that priming was at work when sales of the Mars candy bar rose unexpectedly and anomalously after the U.S. space program landed an exploratory craft on the red planet (Berger, 2008). In light of this copious research on perception, attention, and awareness, what insights can we glean about how we present scientific information to the public? While there are many, we propose a few salient lessons. Perhaps most importantly, we should recognize that human attention is imperfect. Presentations that require constant focused attention to glean their meaning, such as those that follow a care- fully crafted, linear narrative, may fail to connect. Yet this is the format of most scientific papers: researchers trace the logic of the research project through a par- simonious and lean account that minimizes repetition. This same logical structure, which demands “perfect attention,” often governs class lectures and public presen- tations. Scholars may have developed coping strategies, for instance, by investing effort into monitoring their own attention and rereading passages of text. But we ask too much of the public if we require audiences to revisit scientific information mul- tiple times in order to attend to it. Instead, we might mirror the design of successful educational television programs that account for attentional blink by revisiting the main storyline at multiple points and in varied ways. The process of “stitching together images” given our “beam of focus” to glean the bigger picture has clear implications for the layout of published reports and the visual display of important messages. Attentional capture is unlikely to happen unless information in one of those initial “beams” breaks through. Images in the center of a scene are the most likely to be detected by the most people. In addition, we are more likely to shift our attention between different parts of one object than between different objects (e.g., Egly, Driver, Rafal, 1994; Tipper Behrmann, 1996). Finding ways in scientific presentations to bind together important images may help readers attend to multiple key points. We might also heed the finding that certain emotional stimuli—faces, guns, or our own names—have privileged access to human attention (Blanchette, 2006; Mack Rock, 1998). Further, we have all felt the impact of an emotionally charged image that endures, that continually creeps back into our consciousness. Given their aspiration to objectivity, scientists may feel that it is manipulative to gain the public’s attention by using such stimuli, but in the steady stream of stimuli, familiar and sentimental images do have the advantage of garnering public attention over other stimuli.
- 48. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 33 Finally, being open to new information is not as easy as we think. We can implic- itly take in information that primes what we later notice, how we react to it, and how willing we are to take in subsequent information that does not seem to fit. This suggests the importance of priming readers or viewers for salient points in a pre- sentation. Research by Teige-Mocigemba and Klauer (2008) suggests that it may be possible to control priming and to strategically contradict its effects, for example, by intentionally thinking of something positive in negative priming instances and neg- ative in positive priming instances. So, for instance, if an audience is likely to bring a set of implicit assumptions to their interpretation of scientific research, one might prime them at the outset with examples designed to contradict these assumptions. Patterns of Engagement with Causal Complexity, Salience, and Risk Even in cases where we gain the public’s attention, how can we sustain this attention and encourage the public to view scientific findings as salient and, when prudent, to be willing to change their behaviors and opinions based on those findings? Research on how people attend to risk in situations that involve causal complexity introduces further challenges in sustaining public attention and impacting people’s choices and behavior. Risk perception is a broad-ranging and complex topic that can be studied from a number of academic angles, including the fields of psychology, sociology, cul- tural theory, cognitive psychology, decision theory, economics, medicine, and public health. Research on causal complexity analyzes the biases and mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that people tend to use when considering phenomena or explanations that have complicating features such as non-linearity, distributed causality, or time delays and spatial gaps (e.g., Feltovich, Spiro, Coulson, 1993; Grotzer, 2003, 2004; Perkins Grotzer, 2005; Wilensky Resnick, 1999). Together, these bodies of scholarship suggest some interesting patterns in how people attach salience to research findings. Often making sense of research findings involves the analysis of risk. Consider the factors at play when one decides whether it is safe to eat eggs during a salmonella outbreak, when one weighs the pros and cons of undergoing a new medi- cal treatment, or when one evaluates legislation prompted by warnings about climate change. A person’s analysis of risk perception and behavior is not entirely rational— it entails complex interactions between affect, cognition, and behavior that can result in seemingly puzzling behavior choices (Sunstein, 2002). For instance, peo- ple’s actions suggest that the calculated, mathematical level of risk often differs from a person’s perception of risk, and people are often unwilling to modify their behavior in instances where mathematics suggest that they should, and willing when the mathematics suggests otherwise (e.g., Slovic, Fischhoff, Lichtenstein, 1982a, 1982b). For instance, Sunstein (2002) explains that, amidst the sniper attacks in the Metropolitan Washington D.C. area in the fall of 2002, people made significant
- 49. 34 T.A. Grotzer et al. changes in their behaviors, yet they did not make changes in dietary or driving habits that were, probabilistically, much more likely to cause them harm. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky (1982) and colleagues have carried out extensive research to demonstrate the difficulties people have in reasoning about probability (see also Slovic, Monahan, MacGregor, 2000) as well as how people misjudge samples, make errors of prediction, and confuse correlation with causality, to name a few common difficulties. Analyzing these difficulties reveals heuristics that people tend to engage in and how these can lead to certain risk assessments. These mental shortcuts have been extensively studied (e.g., Kahneman et al., 1982; Slovic, 2000; Tversky Kahneman, 1973) and have been written about widely by scholars who study risk and the public’s reaction to it (Gardner, 2008; Gilovich, 1991; Sunstein, 2002; Thaler Sunstein, 2008). What are some of these heuristics and biases and how might they influence human behavior? We review some of the most well-known heuristics below and refer the interested reader to the many sources that explain these heuristics in detail (e.g. Kahneman et al., 1982; Sunstein, 2002). The availability heuristic (Tversky Kahneman, 1973) refers to people’s ten- dency to make predictions based on the information that is most available to them, rather than on more systematic assessments. According to Slovic, Fischhoff and Lichtenstein (2000), it is defined as “judging the probability or frequency of an event by the ease with which relevant instances are imagined or by the number of such instances that are readily retrieved from memory” (p. 37). It is often the case that something we can recall easily also seems to us to occur frequently. For exam- ple, we might think that crime is a common occurrence in our hometown if crimes are frequently reported on the local news, or if a neighbor was a victim of crime. We tend to turn to narratives about events that have happened to us or to those around us rather than rely on statistical data. The tendency to rely on affect as a shortcut (Slovic, 2000) is another common response pattern. Affect heuristic refers to the tendency to use emotion as a mental shortcut in judging risks and benefits (Slovic, 2000; Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, Johnson, 2000). So, for instance, if a person adores skydiving and loathes scuba diving, that person may underestimate the risk associated with jumping from planes and overestimate the risk of underwater exploration. Likewise, we tend to overesti- mate the benefits of activities we like. Another mental shortcut, the proportionality effect, refers to our tendency to place greater importance on reducing the propor- tion of a risk than the raw number of those affected by risk (Tversky Kahneman, 1982). For example, as Cass Sunstein (2002) explains, people more often favor a hypothetical governmental intervention that would save one in 100 people out of a population of 1000 (10 lives) over an alternative intervention that would save one in a million out of a population of 200 million (200 lives). Though sometimes people consider proportions as well as raw numbers in assessing risk, and though factors such as morals, values, and affect are also at play, we generally prefer the greater proportional impact over the greater numerical one. Such mental shortcuts have benefits when we have little information available to us or if we have to make a quick decision based upon whatever information we have.
- 50. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 35 Yet, they can be costly in those instances when we are tasked with reasoning about research data or other information of significant complexity. Drawing conclusions based on our prior personal experience tends to cause errors because we are basing those conclusions on a biased sample. For instance, dramatic images or events with shock value—like the example of crime above—that we can easily recall can lead us to overestimate the likelihood of certain kinds of events (Morgan et al., 1985). It can also lead us to focus less on everyday, mundane risks that are statistically more prevalent (Slovic, 2000). To continue the above example, when choosing an apartment and considering how safe a certain neighborhood is, we might scan our memory for cases of anything bad that happened there. If we can’t think of any, we might conclude without any systematic data that the neighborhood must be safe. However, one dramatic crime event, even if it is a rare occurrence, might shift our entire sense of the neighborhood. At the same time, our attention to crime rates might cause us to miss or overlook information about higher cancer rates that might otherwise affect our view of the safety of that neighborhood. As Sunstein (2002) has argued, it is likely that the key role of emotion in facil- itating these heuristics is a consequence of the way our brains and bodies process information. LeDoux (1996, 2000, 2007) differentiates between emotional memo- ries (implicit or unconscious memories), in which sensory information takes a direct path to and is processed in the amygdala, and memories of emotion (emplicit or conscious memories), which are processed at the level of the hippocampus and neo- cortex. Emotional memories help prompt our immediate reactions to a situation. Processing at the level of the hippocampus comes into play after this initial reaction, but at this point the body has already begun to respond to the emotional memory and we may already feel the impact of that first response, such as the feeling of a rush of adrenaline. LeDoux’s research suggests that while the amygdala influences the information processing in the hippocampus and neocortex, the hippocampus and neocortex appear to have very little effect on the amygdala. This makes it difficult to consciously override what our bodies tell us or to change our unconscious responses in the future. This distinction between levels of emotional response has important conse- quences for understanding how people normally reason. We tend to think that reasoning should be cool, rational, and emotionless. One might assume that our immediate responses are always problematic and that we need our secondary, rea- soned response to prevail. But neuroscience research suggests that this separation is not necessarily possible except for people with certain brain impairments who reason passionlessly (Damasio, 1994). Further, it’s not clear that such rationality is preferable: those with dispassion-producing brain impairments tend to be ill- equipped for real-world reasoning. The distinction itself may not be meaningful in people without impairments. According to Damasio, “Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological reg- ulation, but also from it and with it” (p. 128). Rather than view mind and body as separate—what Damasio calls “Descartes’ error”—we should view our bodily reac- tions as part of a system prepared to respond to environmental dangers. However, as
- 51. 36 T.A. Grotzer et al. we consider below, it is possible that our immediate emotional responses may not always serve us well in a complex causal world. Our emotions interact with how we handle the complex causality inherent in most risk situations. Our emotional responses can lead us to reactions that help us to face certain kinds of causal features but to ignore others. Immediate and innate fear reac- tions, which evolutionary biologists postulate may persist in humans because they helped protect our ancestors from danger, are generated in the amygdala and bypass the reasoning region of the neocortex (LeDoux, n.d.). For instance, if you are eating lunch and a wasp descends upon you, you are likely to spring into action to escape assault. For most people, wasp stings are not life threatening, but one can readily connect the wasp (cause) with the stings it can inflict (effect) through a simple and spatially proximate chain of causal reasoning. The amygdala mobilizes action and one does not have to engage higher order reasoning to respond. However, you might be willing to sit next to a colleague who is smoking cigarettes and not give it a second thought. Your colleague’s cigarette is unlikely to trigger an immediate emo- tional response and/or concern about the risk posed by it because, in contrast to the wasp, thinking about the risk of cigarette smoke requires grappling with temporally distant causes and effects, non-obvious causes, and compounded probabilities. When reasoning about complex phenomena, people tend to make assumptions about the nature of the causality involved. These assumptions are often at odds with the forms of causality inherent in those phenomena. Feltovich et al. (1993) iden- tified characteristics of concepts or situations that cause difficulty for most people and found that people tend to simplify phenomena, exercising a reductive bias. The authors explain that people often reduce dynamic phenomena to static “snapshots” and continuous processes into discrete steps. For example, one might inappropri- ately interpret the weather on a given day as evidence for or against climate change without reasoning about longer term changes over time. Subsequent research found that people rely on an array of similar tendencies in situations involving complex causality (e.g., Grotzer, 2004; Perkins Grotzer, 2005; Resnick, 1996). According to Grotzer (2009), people in these situations typically assume the following: 1) linearity as opposed to nonlinearity in the relation of cause(s) and effect; 2) direct con- nections between causes and effects without intervening steps or indirect connections; 3) unidirectionality as opposed to bidirectionality; 4) sequentiality as opposed to simultane- ity; 5) obvious and perceptible as opposed to non-obvious and imperceptible causes and effects; 6) active or intentional agents as opposed to non-intentional ones; 7) determinism— wherein effects must consistently follow “causes” or the “cause” is not considered to be the cause—as opposed to probabilistic causation; 8) spatial and temporal contiguity between causes and effects as opposed to spatial gaps or temporal delays; and 9) centralized causes with few agents—missing more complex interactions or emergent effects—as opposed to decentralized causes or distributed agency. (pp. 57–58) There is substantial support for these tendencies in the research literature (e.g., Chi, 2000; Feltovich et al., 1993; Ferrari Chi, 1998; Grotzer, 2000; Grotzer Basca, 2003; Hmelo-Silver, Pfeffer, Malhotra, 2003; Houghton, Record, Bell, Grotzer, 2000; Perkins Grotzer, 2005; Wilensky Resnick, 1999).
- 52. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 37 Complexity of Causal Feature Salience Attached to Risk Perception Low High High Low 1. Time Period Between Causes and Effects: Long Delay or System in Steady State Immediate 2. Reliability of Effects to Causes: Probabilistic Deterministic 3. Obviousness of Causes and Effects: Non-obvious Obvious 4. Spatial Proximity of Causes to Effects: Distant Local 5. Agency—Distribution: Decentralized Centralized 6. Agency—Intentionality: Non-intentional Intentional Fig. 2.1 Complex causal dimensions and perceptions of risk The inherent causal complexity and the particular features of this complexity can interact with how we attend to and attach salience to particular risk situations and to related scientific information (Grotzer Lincoln, 2007). Figure 2.1 illustrates the relationship between causal features and our tendency to attend to and attach salience to risk. Factors on the left side of the table are less likely to garner our perceptual, attentional, and cognitive resources than those on the right. By failing to process these left-side features, which tend to characterize causally complex situa- tions, we may misconstrue the nature of a given phenomenon and thus ignore certain forms of risk. For example, people have difficulty reasoning about time delays. Time delays are a feature of a number of causally complex phenomena (recall the potential risk associated with sitting near your cigarette-smoking colleague). Since we have difficulty reasoning about time delays, we struggle to perceive causal relationships that are temporally distant; ultimately, we are less likely to perceive a particular time-delayed cause as related to later risk.
- 53. 38 T.A. Grotzer et al. While one can roughly think about each of the features in Fig. 2.1 as existing along a continuum, there is more nuance to each than is set out in the diagram. For instance, complex causality along the temporal dimension can take a number of forms: delay between cause and effect, slow accumulation of effects such that the effects are increasingly perceptible, trigger effects, immediate effects, and so on. It is also the case that these dimensions interact with one another. Slowly accumulating effects may be initially non-obvious and become increasingly perceptible as the effects aggregate. Particular risks can be assessed according to these dimensions. The develop- ment of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) is characterized by a long latency period and extreme uncertainty from the point of HIV exposure to the onset of disease (Becker Joseph, 1988; Prohanska, Albrecht, Levy, Sugrue, Kim, 1990). It involves a non-obvious causal mechanism, temporal delays between causes and effects, and patterns of spread that involve decentralized causality. Assessing risk of contracting AIDS involves probabilistic causation about various risk-related behaviors and, indeed, about the behavior of the underlying mechanism itself (since HIV, as we currently understand it, does not lead to disease in all infected individ- uals). Causal features such as these are much harder to hold salient than those that trigger our innate fear mechanisms, such as immediacy, intentionality, and obvi- ous causes and outcomes. The lack of these fear-triggering features means that we also find it difficult to attend to the research on global warming, which involves many forms of complexity: the effect is cumulative, there is a larger temporal and spatial gap between the cause and the effect, and the causes are distributed and non-intentional, to name a few. Research on how people handle particular risks offers support for this interpre- tation of how complex causality and risk interact. For instance, people are more likely to go off of their statin heart medicine than their arthritis medicine because of the difference in the immediacy of the effects (Jackson, 2000; Pepine, 2003). The result of stopping arthritis medication is immediate pain, whereas the result of stop- ping statin medication is a higher risk of heart problems in the long term, but not necessarily any immediate effects. The situation in Picher, Oklahoma, vividly illustrates the interrelationship between these dimensions. For approximately 100 years, Picher was a prosperous mining town where many kinds of metals were extracted, mostly zinc and lead, but also cadmium and other metals (Keheley, 2006). The leftover material from the mining process, called “chat,” was left in mountain-sized piles all around the town. Generations of children from Picher played on the chat piles and even had their birthday parties on them. In the early 1970s, the mining operations shut down, but the piles continued to loom over the town’s playing fields and schoolyard. In 1980, Picher was designated part of one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States (Tar Creek). The legacy of the mining that occurred in previous years became the subject of intense study and concern. Research from the 1980s and 1990s on the health of those living in or near the Superfund Site found ele- vated rates of stroke, kidney disease, high blood pressure, heart disease, skin cancer, and anemia (Neuberger, Mulhall, Pomatto, Sheverbush, Hassanein, 1990). In the
- 54. 2 Perceptual, Attentional, and Cognitive Heuristics That Interact with the Nature of. . . 39 mid-1990s, 31% of children living in the 5 towns within the Superfund site were estimated to have lead poisoning, while 45% of children living in the most con- taminated towns of Picher and neighboring Cardin were estimated to have lead poisoning (Osborn, 2006). These levels were much higher than the average rate of about 2% for both the state of Oklahoma and the entire United States (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 2004)—although they have declined in recent years, a likely result of remediation and education efforts. According to local educators, children in Picher experienced learning difficulties at a much higher rate than children in other towns of similar socio-economic status. Yet families were reluctant to leave. After all, Picher was their home, the center of their lives and a source of great hometown pride. Many of the adults had lived in Picher for years, had themselves played on the chat piles as children, and had grown accustomed to the many scientists taking samples from their homes and yards. One of the authors of this chapter, Rebecca Lincoln, was also one of the researchers working in Picher. Some of her work involved collecting samples of dust, air, and water in people’s homes to test for lead and other metals, but she found that, among the people whose homes she studied, opinions on whether the chat was a risk or not varied greatly. Many people to whom she talked felt that because they had grown up in Picher and had turned out fine, it was probably safe for their kids, too. In terms of complex causal features, the cause of the problem in Picher was non-obvious. While one could see the chat piles, the dangers that they posed were invisible. Quotes from a documentary entitled, “The Creek Runs Red” illustrate the townspeople’s reactions (Beesley, Brannum, Payne, 2006). As one teenager from Picher framed it, “I like Picher, Picher wouldn’t be Picher without the chat piles.” People couldn’t see lead in the air or in the soil around their playgrounds and yards. It wasn’t until the effects became visible that people could more easily attend to what was in the chat. As one town resident put it, “When the red water started to flow into the creek, that’s when the trouble started.” Further, the effects on the children were slow and accumulative. Staying one more day wasn’t likely to result in a noticeable difference in one’s health outcomes. Indeed, slowly developing effects are perhaps the hardest to detect and respond to—they require sustained effort and attention. Those effects also had a probabilistic aspect since not everyone was visibly affected or sick. When a home buy-out plan was offered to families with children under 6 years old, some but not all moved away. As one town resident expressed, “It’s still a good town, and there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.” The tendency to ignore non-obvious, slowly accumulating causes is perhaps most powerful in a case like this, where risks are pitted against a strongly ingrained way of life and a deeply held, emotion-laden conception of home. As one resident put it, “I’m the fourth generation to live here and my kids are the fifth, and that means something” (Beesley, Brannum, Payne, 2006). Further, the economic challenges of leaving were acute because most families had all of their resources invested in their homes. However, even smaller changes in behavior were hard to achieve. One mother talked about coming back to Picher following her divorce so that she would have the support of her family. During the videotaped interview, she watches as her
- 55. Other documents randomly have different content
- 56. hand, with so much passion, that the head of the pipe flew across the road, and was for ever lost among the docks and nettles. One glance he deigned to the stump which remained in his hand, and then, with an air of romantic recklessness which laughs at all sacrifices, he flung it disdainfully from him, clapped his cocked hat upon his head with a vehemence which brought it nearly to the bridge of his nose, and, planting his hands in his breeches pockets, he glanced at the stars with a scowl which, if they take any note of things terrestrial, must have filled them with alarm. Suddenly recollecting himself, Mr. Toole perceived that his intended master, having walked on, had left him considerably behind; he therefore put himself into an easy amble, which speedily brought him up with the chase. Mr. O'Connor, plase your honour, he exclaimed, sure it's not possible it's goin' to lave me behind you are, an' me so proud iv your company; an', moreover, after axin' you for a situation—that is, always supposin' you want the sarvices iv a rale dashin' young fellow, that's up to everything, an' willing to sarve you in any incapacity. An' by gorra, sir, continued he, pathetically, it's next door to a charity to take me, for I've but one crown in the wide world left, an' I must change it to-night; an' once I change money, the shillin's makes off with themselves like a hat full of sparrows into the elements, the Lord knows where. With a desolate recklessness, he chucked the crown-piece into the air, caught it in his palm, and walked silently on. Well, well, said O'Connor, if you choose to make so uncertain an engagement as for the term of my stay in Dublin, you are welcome to be my servant for so long. It's a bargain, shouted Mr. Toole—a bargain, plase your honour, done and done on both sides. I'm your man—hurra!
- 57. They had already entered the suburbs, and before many minutes were involved in the dark and narrow streets, threading their way, as best they might, toward the genial harbourage of the Cock and Anchor.
- 58. CHAPTER VI. THE SOLDIER—THE NIGHT RAMBLE—AND THE WINDOW THAT LET IN MORE THAN THE MOONLIGHT. Short as had been O'Connor's sojourn, it nevertheless had been sufficiently long to satisfy mine host of the Cock and Anchor, an acute observer in such particulars, that whatever his object might have been in avoiding the more fashionably frequented inns of the city, economy at least had no share in his motive. O'Connor, therefore, had hardly entered the public room of the inn, when a servant respectfully informed him that a private chamber was prepared for his reception, if he desired to occupy it. The proposition suited well with his temper at the minute, and with all alacrity he followed the waiter, who bowed him upstairs and through a dingy passage into a room whose claims, if not to elegance, at least to comfort, could hardly have been equalled, certainly not excelled, by the more luxurious pretensions of most modern hotels. It was a large, capacious chamber, nearly square, wainscoted with dark shining wood, and decorated with certain dingy old pictures, which might have been, for anything to the contrary, appearing in so uncertain a light, chefs d'œuvre of the mighty masters of the olden time: at all events, they looked as warm and comfortable as if they were. The hearth was broad, deep, and high enough to stable a Kerry pony, and was surmounted by a massive stone mantelpiece, rudely but richly carved—abundance of old furniture—tables, at which the saintly Cromwell might have smoked and boozed, and chairs old enough to have supported Sir Walter Raleigh himself, were
- 59. disposed about the room with a profuseness which argued no niggard hospitality. A pair of wax-lights burned cheerily upon a table beside the bright crackling fire which blazed in the huge cavity of the hearth; and O'Connor threw himself into one of those cumbrons, tall-backed, and well-stuffed chairs, which are in themselves more potent invitations to the sweet illusive visitings from the world of fancy and of dreams than all the drugs or weeds of eastern climes. Thus suffering all his material nature to rest in absolute repose, he loosed at once the reins of imagination and memory, and yielded up his mind luxuriously to their mingled realities and illusions. He may have been, perhaps, for two or three hours employed thus listlessly in chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, when his meditations were interrupted by a brisk step upon the passage leading to the apartment in which he sate, instantly succeeded by as brisk a knocking at the chamber door itself. Is this Mr. O'Connor's chamber? inquired a voice of peculiar richness, intonated not unpleasingly with a certain melodious modification of the brogue, bespeaking a sort of passionate devil- may-carishness which they say in the good old times wrought grievous havoc among womankind. The summons was promptly answered by an invitation to enter; and forthwith the door opened, and a comely man stepped into the room. The stranger might have seen some fifty or sixty summers, or even more; for his was one of those joyous, good-humoured, rubicund visages, upon which time vainly tries to write a wrinkle. His frame was robust and upright, his stature tall, and there was in his carriage something not exactly a swagger (for with all his oddities, the stranger was evidently a gentleman), but a certain rollicking carelessness, which irresistibly conveyed the character of a reckless, head-long good-humour and daring, to which nothing could come amiss. In the hale and jolly features, which many would have pronounced handsome, were written, in characters which none could mistake, the prevailing qualities of the man—a gay and sparkling eye, in which lived the
- 60. very soul of convivial jollity, harmonized right pleasantly with a smile, no less of archness than bonhomie, and in the brow there was a certain indescribable cock, which looked half pugnacious and half comic. On the whole, the stranger, to judge by his outward man, was precisely the person to take his share in a spree, be the same in joke or earnest—to tell a good story—finish a good bottle—share his last guinea with you—or blow your brains out, as the occasion might require. He was arrayed in a full suit of regimentals, and taken for all in all, one need hardly have desired a better sample of the dashing, light-hearted, daredevil Irish soldier of more than a century since. Ah! Major O'Leary, cried O'Connor, starting from his seat, and grasping the soldier's hand, I am truly glad to see you; you are the very man of all others I most require at this moment. I was just about to have a fit of the blue devils. Blue devils! exclaimed the major; don't talk to a youngster like me of any such infernal beings; but tell me how you are, every inch of you, and what brings you here? I never was better; and as to my business, replied O'Connor, it is too long and too dull a story to tell you just now; but in the meantime, let us have a glass of Burgundy; mine host of the 'Cock and Anchor' boasts a very peculiar cellar. So saying, O'Connor proceeded to issue the requisite order. That does he, by my soul! replied the major, with alacrity; and for that express reason I invariably make it a point to renew my friendly intimacy with its contents whenever I visit the metropolis. But I can't stay more than five minutes, so proceed to operations with all dispatch. And why all this hurry? inquired O'Connor. Where need you go at this hour?
- 61. Faith, I don't precisely know myself, rejoined the soldier; but I've a strong impression that my evil genius has contrived a scheme to inveigle me into a cock-pit not a hundred miles away. I'm sorry for it, with all my heart, Major, replied O'Connor, since it robs me of your company. Nay, you must positively come along with me, resumed the major; I sip my Burgundy on these express conditions. Don't leave me at these years without a mentor. I rely upon your prudence and experience; if you turn me loose upon the town to-night, without a moral guide, upon my conscience, you have a great deal to answer for. I may be fleeced in a hell, or milled in a row; and if I fall in with female society, by the powers of celibacy! I can't answer for the consequences. Sooth to say, Major, rejoined O'Connor, I'm in no mood for mirth. Come, come! never look so glum, insisted his visitor. Remember I have arrived at years of indiscretion, and must be looked after. Man's life, my dear fellow, naturally divides itself into three great stages; the first is that in which the youthful disciple is carefully instructing his mind, and preparing his moral faculties, in silence, for all sorts of villainy—this is the season of youth and innocence; the second is that in which he practises all kinds of rascality—and this is the flower of manhood, or the prime of life; the third and last is that in which he strives to make his soul—and this is the period of dotage. Now, you see, my dear O'Connor, I have unfortunately arrived at the prime of life, while you are still in the enjoyment of youth and innocence; I am practising what you are plotting. You are, unfortunately for yourself, a degree more sober than I; you can therefore take care that I sin with due discretion—permit me to rob or murder, without being robbed or murdered in return. Here the major filled and quaffed another glass, and then continued, —
- 62. In short, I am—to speak in all solemnity and sobriety—so drunk, that it's a miracle how I mounted these rascally stairs without breaking my neck. I have no distinct recollection of the passage, except that I kissed some old hunks instead of the chamber-maid, and pulled his nose in revenge. I solemnly declare I can neither walk nor think without assistance; my heels and head are inclined to change places, and I can't tell the moment the body politic may be capsized. I have no respect in the world for my intellectual or physical endowments at this particular crisis; my sight is so infernally acute that I see all surrounding objects considerably augmented in number; my legs have asserted their independence, and perform 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' altogether unsolicited; and my memory and other small mental faculties have retired for the night. Under those melancholy circumstances, my dear fellow, you surely won't refuse me the consolation of your guidance. Had not you better, my dear Major, said O'Connor, remain with me quietly here for the night, out of the reach of sharks and sharpers, male and female? You shall have claret or Burgundy, which you please—enough to fill a skin! I can't hold more than a bottle additional, replied the major, regretfully, if I can even do that; so you see I'm bereft of domestic resources, and must look abroad for occupation. The fact is, I expect to meet one or two fellows whom I want to see, at the place I've named; so if you can come along with me, and keep me from falling into the gutters, or any other indiscretion by the way, upon my conscience, you will confer a serious obligation on me. O'Connor plainly perceived that although the major's statement had been somewhat overcharged, yet that his admissions were not altogether fanciful; there were in the gallant gentleman's face certain symptoms of recent conviviality which were not to be mistaken—a perceptible roll of the eye, and a slight screwing of the lips, which peculiarities, along with the faintest possible
- 63. approximation to a hiccough, and a gentle see-saw vibration of his stalwart person, were indications highly corroborative of the general veracity of his confessions. Seeing that, in good earnest, the major was not precisely in a condition to be trusted with the management of anything pertaining to himself or others, O'Connor at once resolved to see him, if possible, safely through his excursion, if after the discussion of the wine which was now before them, he should persevere in his fancy for a night ramble. They therefore sate down together in harmonious fellowship, to discuss the flasks which stood upon the board. O'Connor was about to fill his guest's glass for the tenth or twelfth time, when the major suddenly ejaculated,— Halt! ground arms! I can no more. Why, you hardened young reprobate, it's not to make me drunk you're trying? I must keep senses enough to behave like a Christian at the cock-fight; and, upon my soul! I've very little rationality to spare at this minute. Put on your hat, and come without delay, before I'm fairly extinguished. O'Connor accordingly donned his hat and cloak, and yielding the major the double support of his arm on the one side, and of the banisters on the other, he conducted him safely down the stairs, and with wonderful steadiness, all things considered, they entered the street, whence, under the major's direction, they pursued their way. After a silence of a few minutes, that military functionary exclaimed, with much gravity,— I'm a great social philosopher, a great observer, and one who looks quite through the deeds of men. My dear boy, believe me, this country is in the process of a great moral reformation; hospitality— which I take to be the first, and the last, and the only one of all the virtues of a bishop which is fit for the practice of a gentleman— hospitality, my dear O'Connor, is rapidly approaching to a climax in this country. I remember, when I was a little boy, a gentleman might
- 64. pay a visit of a week or so to another in the country, and be all the time nothing more than tipsy—tipsy merely. However, matters gradually improved, and that stage which philosophers technically term simple drunkenness, became the standard of hospitality. This passed away, and the sense of the country, in its silent but irresistible operation, has substituted blind drunkenness; and in the prophetic spirit of sublime philosophy, I foresee the arrival of that time when no man can escape the fangs of hospitality upon any conditions short of brain fever or delirium tremens. As the major delivered this philosophic discourse, he led O'Connor through several obscure streets and narrow lanes, till at length he paused in one of the very narrowest and darkest before a dingy brick house, whose lower windows were secured with heavy bars of iron. The door, which was so incrusted with dirt and dust that the original paint was hardly anywhere discernible, stood ajar, and within burned a feeble and ominous light, so faint and murky, that it seemed fearful of disclosing the deeds and forms which itself was forced to behold. Into this dim and suspicious-looking place the major walked, closely followed by O'Connor. In the hall he was encountered by a huge savage-looking fellow, who raised his squalid form lazily from a bench which rested against the wall at the further end, and in a low, gruff voice, like the incipient growl of a roused watch-dog, inquired what they wanted there. Why, Mr. Creigan, don't you know Major O'Leary? inquired that gentleman. I and a friend have business here. The man muttered something in the way of apology, and opening the dingy lantern in which burned the wretched tallow candle which half lighted the place, he snuffed it with his finger and thumb, and while so doing, desired the major to proceed. Accordingly, with the precision of one who was familiar with every turn of the place, the gallant officer led O'Connor through several rooms, lighted in the same dim and shabby way, into a corridor leading directly to the
- 65. rearward of the house, and connecting it with some other detached building. As they threaded this long passage, the major turned towards O'Connor, who followed him, and whispered,— Did you mark that ill-looking fellow in the hall? Poor Creigan!—a gentleman!—would you think it?—a gentleman by birth, and with a snug property, too—four hundred good pounds a year, and more—all gone, like last year's snow, chiefly here in backing mains of his own! poor dog! I remember him one of the best dressed men on town, and now he's fain to pick up a few shillings by the week in the place where he lost his thousands; this is the state of man! As he spoke thus, they had reached the end of the passage. The major opened the door which terminated the corridor, and thus displayed a scene which, though commonplace enough in its ingredients, was, nevertheless, in its coup d'œil, sufficiently striking. In the centre of a capacious and ill-finished chamber stood a circular platform, with a high ledge running round it. This arena, some fourteen feet in diameter, was surrounded by circular benches, which rose one outside the other, in parallel tiers, to the wall. Upon these seats were crowded some hundreds of men—a strange mixture; gentlemen of birth and honour sate side by side with notorious swindlers; noblemen with coalheavers; simpletons with sharks; the unkempt, greasy locks of squalid destitution mingled in the curls of the patrician periwig; aristocratic lace and embroidery were rubbed by the dusty shoulders of draymen and potboys;—all these gross and glaring contrarieties reconciled and bound together by one hellish sympathy. All sate locked in breathless suspense, every countenance fixed in the hard lines of intense, excited anxiety and vigilance; all leaned forward to gaze upon the combat whose crisis was on the point of being determined. Those who occupied the back seats had started up, and pressing forward, almost crushed those in front of them to death. Every aperture in this living pile was occupied by some eager, haggard, or ruffian face; and, spite of all
- 66. the pushing, and crowding, and bustling, all were silent, as if the powers of voice and utterance were unknown among them. The effect of this scene, so suddenly presented—the crowd of ill- looking and anxious faces, the startling glare of light, and the unexpected rush of hot air from the place—all so confounded him, that O'Connor did not for some moments direct his attention to the object upon which the gaze of the fascinated multitude was concentrated; when he did so he beheld a spectacle, abstractedly, very disproportioned in interest to the passionate anxiety of which it was the subject. Two game cocks, duly trimmed, and having the long and formidable steel weapons with which the humane ingenuity of the fancy supplies the natural spur of the poor biped, occupied the centre of the circular stage which we have described; one of the birds lay upon his back, beneath the other, which had actually sent his spurs through and through his opponent's neck. In this posture the wounded animal lay, with his beak open, and the blood trickling copiously through it upon the board. The victorious bird crowed loud and clear, and a buzz began to spread through the spectators, as if the battle were already determined, and suspense at an end. The law had just expired, and the gentlemen whose business it was to handle the birds were preparing to withdraw them. Twenty to one on the grey cock, exclaimed a large, ill-looking fellow, who sat close to the pit, clutching his arms in his brawny hands, as if actually hugging himself with glee, while he gazed with an exulting grin upon the combat, whose issue seemed now beyond the reach of chance. The challenge was, of course, unaccepted. Fifty to one! exclaimed the same person, still more ecstatically. One hundred to one—two hundred to one! I'll give you one guinea to two hundred, exclaimed perhaps the coolest gambler in that select assembly, young Henry Ashwoode, who sat also near the front.
- 67. Done, Mr. Ashwoode—done with you; it's a bet, sir, said the same ill-looking fellow. Done, sir, replied Ashwoode. Again the conqueror crowed the shrill note of victory. To face page 34. Again the conqueror crowed the shrill note of victory, and all seemed over, when, on a sudden, by one of those strange vicissitudes of which the annals of the cock-pit afford so many examples, the dying bird—it may be roused by the vaunting challenge of his antagonist— with one convulsive spasm, struck both his spurs through and
- 68. through the head of his opponent, who dropped dead upon the table, while the wounded bird, springing to his legs, flapped his wings, as if victory had never hovered, and then as momentarily fell lifeless on the board, by this last heroic feat winning a main on which many thousands of pounds depended. A silence for a moment ensued, and then there followed the loud exulting cheers of some, and the hoarse, bitter blasphemies of others, clamorous expostulation, hoarse laughter, curses, congratulations, and invectives—all mingled with the noise occasioned by those who came in or went out, the shuffling and pounding of feet, in one torrentuous and stunning volume of sound. Young Ashwoode having secured and settled all his bets, shouldered his way through the crowd, and with some difficulty, reached the door at which Major O'Leary and O'Connor were standing. How do you do, uncle? Were you in the room when I took the two hundred to one? inquired the young man. By my conscience, I was, Hal, and wish you joy with all my heart. It was a sporting bet on both sides, and as game a fight as the world ever saw. I must be off, continued the young man. I promised to look in at Lady Stukely's to-night; but before I go, you must know they are all affronted with you at the manor. The girls are positively outrageous, and desired me to command your presence to-morrow on pain of excommunication. Give my tender regards to them both, replied the major, and assure them that I will be proud to obey them. But don't you know my friend O'Connor, he added, in a lower tone, you are old acquaintances, I believe? Unless my memory deceives me, I have had the honour of meeting Mr. O'Connor before, said the young man, with a cold bow, which
- 69. was returned by O'Connor with more than equal hauteur. Recollect, uncle, no excuses, added young Ashwoode, as he retreated from the chamber—you have promised to give to-morrow to the girls. Adieu. There goes as finished a specimen of a mad-cap, rake-helly young devil as ever carried the name of Ashwoode or the blood of the O'Leary's, observed the uncle; but come, we must look to the sport. So saying, the major, exerting his formidable strength, and accompanying his turbulent progress with a large distribution of apologetic and complimentary speeches of the most high-flown kind, shoved and jostled his way to a vacant place near the front of the benches, and, seating himself there, began to give and take bets to a large amount upon the next main. Tired of the noise, and nearly stifled with the heat of the place, O'Connor, seeing that the major was resolved to act independently of him, thought that he might as well consult his own convenience as stay there to be stunned and suffocated without any prospect of expediting the major's retreat; he therefore turned about and retraced his steps through the passage which we have mentioned. The grateful coolness of the air, and the lassitude induced by the scene in which he had taken a part, though no very prominent one, induced him to pause in the first room to which the passage, as we have said, gave access; and happening to espy a bench in one of the recesses of the windows, he threw himself upon it, thoroughly to receive the visitings of the cool, hovering air. As he lay listless and silently upon this rude couch, he was suddenly disturbed by a sound of someone treading the yard beneath. A figure sprang across toward the window; and almost instantaneously Larry Toole—for the moonlight clearly revealed the features of the intruder—was presented at the aperture, and with an energetic spring, accompanied by a no less energetic, devotional ejaculation, that worthy vaulted into the chamber, agitated, excited, and apparently at his wits' end.
- 71. CHAPTER VII. THREE GRIM FIGURES IN A LONELY LANE—TWO QUEER GUESTS RIDING TO TONY BLIGH'S—THE WATCHER IN DANGER—AND THE HIGHWAYMEN. A liberal and unsolicited attention to the affairs of other people, was one among the many amiable peculiarities of Mr. Laurence Toole: he had hardly, therefore, seen the major and O'Connor fairly beyond the threshold of the Cock and Anchor, when he donned his cocked hat and followed their steps, allowing, however, an interval sufficiently long to secure himself against detection. Larry Toole well knew the purposes to which the squalid mansion which we have described was dedicated, and having listened for a few moments at the door, to allow his master and his companion time to reach the inner sanctuary of vice and brutality, whither it was the will of Major O'Leary to lead his reluctant friend, this faithful squire entered at the half-open door, and began to traverse the passage which we have before mentioned. He was not, however, permitted long to do so undisturbed. The grim sentinel of these unhallowed regions on a sudden upreared his towering proportions, heaving his huge shoulders with a very unpleasant appearance of preparation for an effort, and with two or three formidable strides, brought himself up with the presumptuous intruder. What do you want here—eh! you d——d scarecrow? exclaimed the porter, in a tone which made the very walls to vibrate.
- 72. Larry was too much astounded to reply—he therefore remained mute and motionless. See, my good cove, observed the gaunt porter, in the same impressive accents of admonition—make yourself scarce, d'ye mind; and if you want to see the pit, go round—we don't let potboys and pickpockets in at this side—cut and run, or I'll have to give you a lift. Larry was no poltroon; but another glance at the colossal frame of the porter quelled effectually whatever pugnacious movements might have agitated his soul; and the little man, having deigned one look of infinite contempt, which told his antagonist, as plainly as any look could do, that he owed his personal safety solely and exclusively to the sublime and unmerited pity of Mr. Laurence Toole, that dignified individual turned on his heel, and withdrew somewhat precipitately through the door which he had just entered. The porter grinned, rolled his quid luxuriously till it made the grand tour of his mouth, shrugged his square shoulders, and burst into a harsh chuckle. Such triumphs as the one he had just enjoyed, were the only sweet drops which mingled in the bitter cup of his savage existence. Meanwhile, our romantic friend, traversing one or two dark lanes, made his way easily enough to the more public entrance of this temple of fortune. The door which our friend Larry now approached lay at the termination of a long and narrow lane, enclosed on each side with dead walls of brick—at the far end towered the dark outline of the building, and over the arched doorway burned a faint and dingy light, without strength enough to illuminate even the bricks against which it hung, and serving only in nights of extraordinary darkness as a dim, solitary star, by which the adventurous night rambler might shape his course. The moon, however, was now shining broad and clear into the broken lane, revealing every inequality and pile of rubbish upon its surface, and throwing one side of the enclosure into black, impenetrable shadow.
- 73. Without premeditation or choice, it happened that our friend Larry was walking at the dark side of the lane, and shrouded in the deep obscurity he advanced leisurely toward the doorway. As he proceeded, his attention was arrested by a figure which presented itself at the entrance of the building, accompanied by two others, as it appeared, about to pass forth into the lane through which he himself was moving. They were engaged in animated debate as they approached—the conversation was conducted in low and earnest tones—their gestures were passionate and sudden—their progress interrupted by many halts—and the party evinced certain sinister indications of uneasy vigilance and caution, which impressed our friend with a dark suspicion of mischief, which was strengthened by his recognition of two of the persons composing the little group. His curiosity was irresistibly piqued, and he instinctively paused, lest the sound of his advancing steps should disturb the conference, and more than half in the undefined hope that he might catch the substance of their conversation before his presence should be detected. In this object he was perfectly successful. In the form which first offered itself, he instantly detected the well- known proportions and features of young Ashwoode's groom, who had attended his master into town; and in company with this fellow stood a person whom Larry had just as little difficulty in recognizing as a ruffian who had twice escaped the gallows by the critical interposition of fortune—once by a flaw in the indictment, and again through lack of sufficient evidence in law—each time having stood his trial on a charge of murder. It was not very wonderful, then, that this startling companionship between his old fellow-servant and Will Harris (or, as he was popularly termed, Brimstone Bill) should have piqued the curiosity of so inquisitive a person as Larry Toole. In company with these worthies was a third, wrapped in a heavy riding-coat, and who now and then slightly took part in the conversation. They all talked in low, earnest whispers, casting many
- 74. a stealthy glance backward as they advanced through the dim avenue toward our curious friend. As the party approached, Larry ensconced himself in the recess formed by the projection of two dilapidated brick piers, between which hung a crazy door, and in whose front there stood a mound of rubbish some three feet in height. In such a position he not unreasonably thought himself perfectly secure. Why, what the devil ails you now, you cursed cowardly ninny, whispered Brimstone Bill, through his set teeth—what can happen you, win or lose?—turn up black, or turn up red, is it not all one to you, you mouth, you? Your carcase is safe and sound—then what do you funk for now? Rouse yourself, you d——d idiot, or I'll drive a brace of lead pellets through your brains—rouse yourself! Thus speaking, he shook the groom roughly by the collar. Stop, Bill—hands off, muttered the man, sulkily—I'm not funking— you know I'm not; but I don't want to see him finished—I don't want to see him murdered when there's no occasion for it—there's no great harm in that; we want his ribben, not his blood; there's no profit in taking his life. Booby! listen to me, replied the ruffian, in the same tone of intense impatience. What do I want with his life any more than you do? Nothing. Do not I wish to do the thing genteelly as much as you? He shall not lose a drop of blood, nor his skin have a scratch, if he knows how to behave and be a good boy. Bah! we need but show him the lead towels, and the job's done. Look you, I and Jack will sit in the private room of the 'Bleeding Horse.' Old Tony's a trump, and asks no questions; so, as you pass, give the window a skelp of the whip, and we'll be out in the snapping of a flint. Leave the rest to us. You have your instructions, you kedger, so act up to them, and the devil himself can't spoil our sport.
- 75. You may look out for us, then, said the servant, in less than two hours. He never stays late at Lady Stukely's, and he must be home before two o'clock. Do not forget to grease the hammers, suggested the fellow in the heavy coat. He doesn't carry pistols to-night, replied the attendant. So much the better—all my luck, exclaimed Brimstone—I would not swap luck with the chancellor. The devil's children, they say, observed the gentleman in the large coat, have the devil's luck. These were the last words Larry Toole could distinguish as the party moved onward. He ventured, however, although with grievous tremors, to peep out of his berth to ascertain the movements of the party. They all stopped at a distance of some twenty or thirty yards from the spot where he crouched, and for a time appeared again absorbed in earnest debate. On a sudden, however, the fellow in the riding-coat, having frequently looked suspiciously up the lane in which they stood, stooped down, and, picking up a large stone, hurled it with his whole force in the direction of the embrasure in which Larry was lurking. The missile struck the projecting pier within a yard of that gentleman's head, with so much force that the stone burst into fragments and descended in a shower of splinters about his ears. This astounding salute was instantly followed by an occurrence still more formidable—for the ruffian, not satisfied with the test already applied, strode up in person to the doorway in which Larry had placed himself. It was well for that person that he was sheltered in front by the mass of rubbish which we have mentioned: at the foot of this he lay coiled, not daring even to breathe; every moment expecting to feel the cold point of the villain's sword poking against his ribs, and half inclined to start upon his feet and shout for help, although conscious that to do so would scarcely leave him a
- 76. chance for his life. The suspicions of the wretch were, fortunately for Larry, ill-directed. He planted one foot upon the heap of loose materials which, along with the deep shadow, constituted poor Mr. Toole's only safeguard; and while the stones which his weight dislodged rolled over that prostrate person, he pushed open the door and gazed into the yard, lest any inquisitive ear or eye might have witnessed more than was consistent with the safety of the confederates of Brimstone Bill. The fellow was satisfied, and returned whistling, with affected carelessness, towards his comrades. More dead than alive, Larry remained mute and motionless for many minutes, not daring to peep forth from his hiding-place; when at length he mustered courage to do so, he saw the two robbers still together, and again shrunk back into his retreat. Luckily for the poor wight, the fellow who had looked into the yard left the door unclosed, which, after a little time perceiving, Larry glided stealthily in on all fours, and in a twinkling sprang into the window at which his master lay, as we have already recorded.
- 77. CHAPTER VIII. THE WARNING—SHOWING HOW LARRY TOOLE FARED —WHOM HE SAW AND WHAT HE SAID—AND HOW MUCH GOOD AND HOW LITTLE HE DID—AND MOREOVER RELATING HOW SOMEBODY WAS LAID IN THE MIRE—AND HOW HENRY ASHWOODE PUT HIS FOOT IN THE STIRRUP. Flurried and frightened as Larry was, his agitation was not strong enough to overcome in him the national, instinctive abhorrence of the character of an informer. To the close interrogatories of his master, he returned but vague and evasive answers. A few dark hints he threw out as to the cause of his alarm, but preserved an impenetrable silence respecting alike its particular nature and the persons of whose participation in the scheme he was satisfied. In language incoherent and nearly unintelligible from excitement, he implored O'Connor to allow him to absent himself for about one hour, promising the most important results, in case his request was complied with, and vowing upon his return to tell him everything about the matter from beginning to end. Seeing the agonized earnestness of the man, though wholly uninformed of the cause of his uneasiness, which Larry constantly refused to divulge, O'Connor granted him the permission which he desired, and both left the building together. O'Connor pursued his way to the Cock and Anchor, where, restored to his chamber and
- 78. to solitude, he abandoned himself once more to the current of his wayward thoughts. Our friend Larry, however, was no sooner disengaged from his master, than he began, at his utmost speed, to thread the narrow and complicated lanes and streets which lay between the haunt of profligacy which we have just described, and the eastern extremity of the city. After an interrupted run of nearly half an hour through pitchy dark and narrow streets, he emerged into Stephen's Green; at the eastern side of which, among other buildings of lesser note, there then stood, and perhaps (with a new face, and some slight external changes) still stands, a large and handsome mansion. Toward this building, conspicuous in the distance by the red glare of dozens of links and torches which flared and flashed outside, and by the gay light streaming from its many windows, Larry made his way. Too eager and hurried to pass along the sides of the square by the common road, he clambered over the broken wall which surrounded it, plunged through the broad trench, and ran among the deep grass and rank weeds, now heavy with the dews of night; over the broad area he pursued his way, startling the quiet cattle from their midnight slumbers, and hastening rather than abating his speed, as he drew near to the termination of his hurried mission. As he approached, the long dark train of carriages, every here and there lighted by some flaming link still unextinguished, and surrounded by crowds of idle footmen, sufficiently indicated the scene of Lady Stukely's hospitalities. In a moment Larry had again crossed the fences which enclosed the square, and passing the broad road among the carriages, chairs, and lackeys, he sprang up the steps of the house, and thundered lustily at the hall-door. It was opened by a gruff and corpulent porter with a red face and majestic demeanour, who, having learned from Larry that he had an important message for Mr. Henry Ashwoode, desired him, in as few words as possible, to step into the hall. The official then swung the massive door to, rolled himself into his well-cushioned throne, and having scanned Larry's
- 79. proportions for a minute or two with one eye, which he kept half open for such purposes, he ejaculated— Mr. Finley, I say, Mr. Finley, here's one with a message upwards. Having thus delivered himself, he shut down his open eye, screwed his eyebrows, and became absorbed in abstruse meditation. Meanwhile, Mr. Finley, in person arrayed in a rich livery, advanced languidly toward Larry Toole, throwing into his face a dreamy and supercilious expression, while with one hand he faintly fanned himself with a white pocket handkerchief. Your most obedient servant to command, drawled the footman, as he advanced. What can I do, my good soul, to obleege you? I only want to see the young master—that's young Mr. Ashwoode, replied Larry, for one minute, and that's all. The footman gazed upon him for a moment with a languid smile, and observed in the same sleepy tone, Absolutely impossible— amposseeble, as they say at the Pallais Royal. But, blur an' agers, exclaimed Larry, it's a matther iv life an' death, robbery an' murdher. Bloody murder! echoed the man in a sweet, low voice, and with a stare of fashionable abstraction. Well, tear an' 'oun's, cried Larry, almost beside himself with impatience, if you won't bring him down to me, will you even as much as carry him a message? To say the truth, and upon my honour, replied the man, I can't engage to climb up stairs just now, they are so devilish fatiguing. Don't you find them so? The question was thrown out in that vacant, inattentive way which seems to dispense with an answer.
- 80. By my soul! rejoined Larry, almost crying with vexation, it's a hard case. Do you mane to tell me, you'll neither bring him down to me nor carry him up a message? You have, my excellent fellow, replied the footman, placidly, precisely conveyed my meaning. By the hokey! cried Larry, you're fairly breaking my heart. In the divil's name, can you as much as let me stop here till he's comin' down? Absolutely impossible, replied the footman, in the same dulcet and deliberate tone. It is indeed amposseeble, as the Parisians have it. You must be aware, my good old soul, that you're in a positive pickle. You are, pardon me, my excellent friend, very dirty and very disgusting. You must therefore go out in a few moments into the fresh air. At any other moment, such a speech would have infallibly provoked Mr. Toole's righteous and most rigorous vengeance; but he was now too completely absorbed in the mission which he had undertaken to suffer personal considerations to have a place in his bosom. Will you, then, he ejaculated desperately, will you as much as give him a message yourself, when he's comin' down? What message? drawled the lackey. Tell him, for the love of God, to take the old road home, by the seven sallies, replied Larry. Will you give him that message, if it isn't too long? I have a wretched memory for messages, observed the footman, as he leisurely opened the door—a perfect sieve: but should he catch my eye as he passes, I'll endeavour, upon my honour; good night—adieu!
- 81. As he thus spoke, Larry had reached the threshold of the door, which observing, the polished footman, with a nonchalant and easy air, slammed the hall-door, thereby administering upon Larry's back, shoulders, and elbows, such a bang as to cause Mr. Toole to descend the flight of steps at a pace much more marvellous to the spectators than agreeable to himself. Muttering a bitter curse upon his exquisite acquaintance, Larry took his stand among the expectants in the street; there resolved to wait and watch for young Ashwoode, and to give him the warning which so nearly concerned his safety. Meanwhile, Lady Stukely's drawing-rooms were crowded by the gay, the fashionable, and the frivolous, of all ages. Young Ashwoode stood behind his wealthy hostess's chair, while she played quadrille, scarce knowing whether she won or lost, for Henry Ashwoode had never been so fascinating before. Lady Stukely was a delicate, die- away lady, not very far from sixty; the natural blush upon her nose outblazoned the rouge upon her cheeks; several very long teeth —ivory and ebon alternately—peeped roguishly from beneath her upper lip, which her ladyship had a playful trick of screwing down, to conceal them—a trick which made her ladyship's smile rather a surprising than an attractive exhibition. It is but justice, however, to admit that she had a pair of very tolerable eyes, with which she executed the most masterly evolutions. For the rest, there having existed a very considerable disparity in years between herself and her dear deceased, Sir Charles Stukely, who had expired at the mature age of ninety, more than a year before, she conceived herself still a very young, artless, and interesting girl; and under this happy hallucination she was more than half inclined to return in good earnest the disinterested affection of Henry Ashwoode. There, too, was old Lord Aspenly, who had, but two days before, solicited and received Sir Richard Ashwoode's permission to pay his court to his beautiful daughter, Mary. There, jerking and shrugging and grimacing, he hobbled through the rooms, all wrinkles and rappee; bandying compliments and repartees, flirting and fooling,
- 82. and beyond measure enchanted with himself, while every interval in frivolity and noise was filled up with images of his approaching nuptials and intended bride, while she, poor girl, happily unconscious of all their plans, was spared, for that night, the pangs and struggles which were hereafter but too severely to try her heart. 'Twere needless to enumerate noble peers, whose very titles are now unknown—poets, who alas! were mortal—men of promise, who performed nothing—clever young men, who grew into stupid old ones—and millionaires, whose money perished with them; we shall not, therefore, weary the reader by describing Lady Stukely's guests; let it suffice to mention that Henry Ashwoode left the rooms with young Pigwiggynne, of Bolton's regiment of dragoons, and one of Lord Wharton's aides-de-camp. This circumstance is here recorded because it had an effect in producing the occurrences which we have to relate by-and-by; for young Pigwiggynne having partaken somewhat freely of Lady Stukely's wines, and being unusually exhilarated, came forth from the hall-door to assist Ashwoode in procuring a chair, which he did with a good deal more noise and blasphemy than was strictly necessary. Our friend Larry Toole, who had patiently waited the egress of his quondam young master, no sooner beheld him than he hastened to accost him, but Pigwiggynne being, as we have said, in high spirits and unusual good humour, cut short poor Larry's address by jocularly knocking him on the head with a heavy walking-cane—a pleasantry which laid that person senseless upon the pavement. The humorist passed on with an exhilarating crow, after the manner of a cock; and had not a matter- of-fact chairman drawn Mr. Toole from among the coach-wheels where the joke had happened to lay him, we might have been saved the trouble of recording the subsequent history of that very active member of society. Meanwhile, young Ashwoode was conveyed in a chair to a neighbouring fashionable hotel, where, having changed his suit, and again equipped himself for the road, he mounted his horse, and followed by his treacherous groom, set out at a brisk pace upon
- 83. his hazardous, and as it turned out, eventful night-ride toward the manor of Morley Court.
- 84. CHAPTER IX. THE BLEEDING HORSE—HOLLANDS AND PIPES FOR TWO—EVERY BULLET HAS ITS BILLET. At the time in which the events that we have undertaken to record took place, there stood at the southern extremity of the city, near the point at which Camden Street now terminates, a small, old- fashioned building, something between an ale-house and an inn. It occupied the roadside by no means unpicturesquely; one gable jutted into the road, with a projecting window, which stood out from the building like a glass box held together by a massive frame of wood; and commanded by this projecting gable, and a few yards in retreat, but facing the road, was the inn door, over which hung a painted panel, representing a white horse, out of whose neck there spouted a crimson cascade, and underneath, in large letters, the traveller was informed that this was the genuine old Bleeding Horse. Old enough, in all conscience, it appeared to be, for the tiled roof, except where the ivy clustered over it, was crowded with weeds of many kinds, and the boughs of the huge trees which embowered it had cracked and shattered one of the cumbrous chimney-stacks, and in many places it was evident that but for the timely interposition of the saw and the axe, the giant limbs of the old timber would, in the gradual increase of years, have forced their way through the roof and the masonry itself—a tendency sufficiently indicated by sundry indentures and rude repairs in those parts of the building most exposed to such casualties. Upon the night in which the events that are recorded in the immediately preceding chapters occurred, two horsemen rode up to this inn, and leisurely entering
- 85. the stable yard, dismounted, and gave their horses in charge to a ragged boy who acted as hostler, directing him with a few very impressive figures of rhetoric, on no account to loosen girth or bridle, or to suffer the beasts to stir one yard from the spot where they stood. This matter settled, they entered the house. Both were muffled; the one—a large, shambling fellow—wore a capacious riding-coat; the other—a small, wiry man—was wrapped in a cloak; both wore their hats pressed down over their brows, and had drawn their mufflers up, so as to conceal the lower part of the face. The lesser of the two men, leaving his companion in the passage, opened a door, within which were a few fellows drowsily toping, and one or two asleep. In a chair by the fire sat Tony Bligh, the proprietor of the Bleeding Horse, a middle-aged man, rather corpulent, as pale as tallow, and with a sly, ugly squint. The little man in the cloak merely introduced his head and shoulders, and beckoned with his thumb. The signal, though scarcely observed by one other of the occupants of the room, was instantly and in silence obeyed by the landlord, who, casting one uneasy glance round, glided across the floor, and was in the passage almost as soon as the gentleman in the cloak. Here, Tony, boy, whispered the man, as the innkeeper approached, fetch us a pint of Hollands, a couple of pipes, and a glim; but first turn the key in this door here, and come yourself, do ye mind? Tony squeezed the speaker's arm in token of acquiescence, and turning a key gently in the lock, he noiselessly opened the door which Brimstone Bill had indicated, and the two cavaliers strode into the dark and vacant chamber. Brimstone walked to the window, pushed open the casement, and leaned out. The beautiful moon was shining above the old and tufted trees which lined the quiet road; he looked up and down the shaded avenue, but nothing was moving upon it, save the varying shadows as the night wind swung the branches to and fro. He listened, but no sound reached his ears,
- 86. excepting the rustling and moaning of the boughs, through which the breeze was fitfully soughing. Scarcely had he drawn back again into the room, when Tony returned with the refreshments which the gentleman had ordered, and with a dark lantern enclosing a lighted candle. Right, old cove, said Bill. I see you hav'n't forgot the trick of the trade. Who are your pals inside? Three of them sleep here to-night, replied Tony. They're all quiet coves enough, such as doesn't hear nor see any more than they ought. The two fellows filled a pipe each, and lighted them at the lantern. What mischief are you after now, Bill? inquired the host, with a peculiar leer. Why should I be after any mischief, replied Brimstone jocularly, any more than a sucking dove, eh? Do I look like mischief to-night, old tickle-pitcher—do I? He accompanied the question with a peculiar grin, which mine host answered by a prolonged wink of no less peculiar significance. Well, Tony boy, rejoined Bill, maybe I am and maybe I ain't— that's the way: but mind, you did not see a stim of me, nor of him, to-night (glancing at his comrade), nor ever, for that matter. But you did see two ill-looking fellows not a bit like us; and I have a notion that these two chaps will manage to get into a sort of shindy before an hour's over, and then mizzle at once; and if all goes well, your hand shall be crossed with gold to-night. Bill, Bill, said the landlord, with a smile of exquisite relish, and drawing his hand coaxingly over the man's forehead, so as to smooth the curls of his periwig nearly into his eyes, you're just the
- 87. same old dodger—you are the devil's own bird—you have not cast a feather. It is hard to say how long this tender scene might have continued, had not the other ruffian knocked his knuckles sharply on the table, and cried— Hist! brother—chise it—enough fooling—I hear a horse-shoe on the road. All held their breath, and remained motionless for a time. The fellow was, however, mistaken. Bill again advanced to the window, and gazed intently through the long vista of trees. There's not a bat stirring, said he, returning to the table, and filling out successively two glasses of spirits, he emptied them both. Meanwhile, Tony, continued he, get back to your company. Some of the fellows may be poking their noses into this place. If you don't hear from me, at all events you'll hear of me before an hour. Hop the twig, boy, and keep all hard in for a bit—skip. With a roguish grin and a shake of the fist, honest Tony, not caring to dispute the commands of his friend, of whose temper he happened to know something, stealthily withdrew from the room, where we, too, shall for a time leave these worthy gentlemen of the road vigilantly awaiting the approach of their victim. Larry Toole had no sooner recovered his senses—which was in less than a minute—than he at once betook himself to the Cock and Anchor, resolved, as the last resource, to inform O'Connor of the fact that an attack was meditated. Accordingly, he hastened with very little ceremony into the presence of his master, told him that young Ashwoode was to be waylaid upon the road, near the Bleeding Horse, and implored him, without the loss of a moment,
- 88. to ride in that direction, with a view, if indeed it might not already be too late, to intercept his passage, and forewarn him of the danger which awaited him. Without waiting to ask one useless question, O'Connor, before five minutes were passed, was mounted on his trusty horse, and riding at a hard pace through the dark streets towards the point of danger. Meanwhile, young Ashwoode, followed by his mounted attendant, proceeded at a brisk trot in the direction of the manor; his brain filled with a thousand busy thoughts and schemes, among which, not the least important, were sundry floating calculations as to the probable and possible amount of Lady Stukely's jointure, as well as some conjectures respecting the maximum duration of her ladyship's life. Involved in these pleasing ruminations, sometimes crossed by no less agreeable recollections, in which the triumphs of vanity and the successes of the gaming-table had their share, he had now reached that shadowy and silent part of the road at which stood the little inn, embowered in the great old trees, and peeping forth with a sort of humble and friendly aspect, but ill-according with the dangerous designs it served to shelter. Here the servant, falling somewhat further behind, brought his horse close under the projecting window of the inn as he passed, and with a sharp cut of his whip gave the concerted signal. Before sixty seconds had elapsed, two well-mounted cavaliers were riding at a hard gallop in their wake. At this headlong pace, the foremost of the two horsemen had passed Ashwoode by some dozen yards, when, checking his horse so suddenly as to throw him back upon his haunches, he wheeled him round, and plunging the spurs deep into his flanks, with two headlong springs, he dashed him madly upon the young man's steed, hurling the beast and his rider to the earth. Tremendous as was the fall, young Ashwoode, remarkable alike for personal courage and activity, was in a moment upon his feet, with his sword drawn, ready to receive the assault of the ruffian.
- 89. Let go your skiver—drop it, you greenhorn, cried the fellow, hoarsely, as he wheeled round his plunging horse, and drew a pistol from the holster, or, by the eternal ——, I'll blow your head into dust! Young Ashwoode attempted to seize the reins of the fellow's horse, and made a desperate pass at the rider. Take it, then, cried the fellow, thrusting the muzzle of the pistol into Ashwoode's face and drawing the trigger. Fortunately for Ashwoode, the pistol missed fire, and almost at the same moment the rapid clang of a horse's hoofs, accompanied by the loud shout of menace, broke startlingly upon his ear. Happy was this interruption for Henry Ashwoode, for, stunned and dizzy from the shock, he at that moment tottered, and in the next was prostrate upon the ground. Blowed, by ——! cried the villain, furiously, as the unwelcome sounds reached his ears, and dashing the spurs into his horse, he rode at a furious gallop down the road towards the country. This scene occupied scarce six seconds in the acting. Brimstone Bill, who had but a moment before come up to the succour of his comrade, also heard the rapid approach of the galloping hoofs upon the road; he knew that before he could count fifty seconds the new comer would have arrived. A few moments, however, he thought he could spare—important moments they turned out to be to one of the party. Bill kept his eye steadily fixed upon the point some three or four hundred yards distant at which he knew the horseman whose approach was announced must first appear. In that brief moment, the cool-headed villain had rapidly calculated the danger of the groom's committing his accomplices through want of coolness and presence of mind, should he himself, as was not unlikely, become suspected. The groom's pistols were still loaded, and he had taken no part in the conflict. Brimstone Bill fixed a stern
- 90. glance upon his companion while all these and other thoughts flashed like lightning across his brain. Darby, said he, hurriedly, to the man who sat half-stupefied in the saddle close beside him, blaze off the lead towels—crack them off, I say. Bill impatiently leaned forward, and himself drew the pistols from the groom's saddle-bow; he fired one of them in the air—he cocked the other. This dolt will play the devil with us all, thought he, looking with a peculiar expression at the bewildered servant. With one hand he grasped him by the collar to steady his aim, and with the other, suddenly thrusting the pistol to his ear, and drawing the trigger, he blew the wretched man's head into fragments like a potsherd; and wheeling his horse's head about, he followed his comrade pell-mell, beating the sparks in showers from the stony road at every plunge.
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