Scientific Claims or Traditional Beliefs

1. Scientific Claims or Traditional Beliefs An investigation of what constitutes a scientific knowledge claim and whether such claims can be differentiated from other sorts of claims.

2. Directions • Consider each claim… • Suggest how each claim could have come into existence • What sorts of thinking processes and types of reasoning might have been involved? • Compare your answers for the different claims • Are there aspects of the thinking processes involved which are common to most or all of them. • If so, what are they?

3. During the first seven days after birth, it is dangerous to expose a child to the outdoors or to strangers.

4. When a man and a woman both have sickle cell anemia, it is dangerous for them to have children.

5. Singing while bathing is dangerous.

6. Bringing bundles of firewood from the farm into the village is dangerous.

7. Smoking Cigarettes is Dangerous

8. Cutting a tree in the forest without performing certain rites is dangerous.

9. Fishing on Tuesdays is Dangerous

10. A live, non-insulated electric wire is dangerous to touch.

11. Pounding fufu after dark is dangerous

12. Driving after drinking alcohol is dangerous. Let’s go for a drive…!

13. Scientific Claims or Traditional Beliefs Similarities: • Repeated observation • Generalization • Inspired ideas • Prediction • Explanation

14. Which of the claims do you regard as being scientific? Justify your answer. • Do you have a single criterion for distinguishing the scientific from the non-scientific? • Why do non-scientific beliefs persist in groups of people familiar with scientific explanation? • Explanations for taboos are often given in supernatural terms. Is it possible to reconcile natural and supernatural explanations?

15. “Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense.” TH Huxley