Mariano Torras’ letter (March 7) surprised me, because it appears the professor may harbour misconceptions about how Stem practitioners — those teaching science, technology, engineering and maths — solve real problems.
In the university, Stem students learn to solve known problems by known methods, and learn to think through classes of problems. In professional practice, the “logic” of rote process deduction can be applied to common, known problems. However, new and unique problems are mostly solved by inference — scientists, mathematicians and engineers applying “critical thinking” to facts and evidence. Sometimes, similar to “the dog that didn’t bark” — to quote the Sherlock Holmes story — this leads to eliminating all possible explanations except one, inferring this must be the correct one.
According to the physicist Richard Feynman: “In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learnt only to be unlearnt again or, more likely, to be corrected.” Carl Sagan too argued: “Science is more than a body of knowledge, it is a way of thinking. The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined.”
Social science courses lean to memorisation, debating ideas or not, with limited exposure to problem solving, which is unhelpful. Richard Nisbett, the American social psychologist, explains the weaknesses in case studies from social psychology. The source of weaknesses in thinking, common to Stem and social science, are lack of open-mindedness and the reliance on assumptions/inferences, without evidence.
Christopher Clark
Houston, TX, US