The best books on the cognitive foundations of science

By Andrew Shtulman

Who am I?

I’m a professor of psychology at Occidental College, where I direct the Thinking Lab. I hold degrees in psychology from Princeton and Harvard and have published several dozen scholarly articles on conceptual development and conceptual change. I’m interested in how people acquire new concepts and form new beliefs, especially within the domains of science and religion. My research investigates intuitions that guide our everyday understanding of the natural world and strategies for improving that understanding.

I wrote...

Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories about the World Are So Often Wrong

By Andrew Shtulman

Scienceblind: Why Our Intuitive Theories about the World Are So Often Wrong

What is my book about?

Why do we catch colds? What causes seasons to change? And if you fire a bullet from a gun and drop one from your hand, which bullet hits the ground first? In a pinch we almost always get these questions wrong. Worse, we regularly misconstrue fundamental qualities of the world around us. In Scienceblind, I show that the root of our misconceptions lies in the theories about the world we develop as children. They’re not only wrong; they close our minds to ideas inconsistent with them, making us unable to learn science later in life. So how do we get the world right? We must dismantle our intuitive theories and rebuild our knowledge from its foundations. The reward won't just be a truer picture of the world, but clearer solutions to many controversies—around vaccines, climate change, or evolution—that plague our politics today.

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The Books I Picked & Why

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

By Michael Strevens

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

Why this book?

Science has revolutionized the way we live and the way we understand reality, but what accounts for its success? What method sets science apart from other forms of inquiry and ensures that it yields ever-more accurate theories of the world? Strevens argues that the scientific method is not a special kind of logic, like deriving hypotheses from first principles or narrowing hypotheses through falsification, but a simple commitment to arguing with evidence. Strevens shows, with historical case studies, how this commitment is seemingly irrational, as it provides no constraints on what counts as evidence or how evidence should be interpreted, but also incredibly powerful, fostering ingenuity and discovery.

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The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind

By Alison Gopnik, Patricia K. Kuhl, Andrew N. Meltzoff

The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind

Why this book?

This book provides an accessible overview of the developmental origins of scientific reasoning. The hallmarks of inquiry—constructing hypotheses, conducting experiments, interpreting observations, revising theories—can be observed early in development, and the authors explain how infants and children use these skills to develop a rich understanding of the physical and social world. This book introduces the metaphor of “child as scientist,” which has shaped much recent research on cognitive development. This metaphor is motivated not just by empirical studies but also by historical and philosophical considerations about the origins of science, which the authors intermix with charming anecdotes and personal stories.

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The Origin of Concepts

By Susan Carey

The Origin of Concepts

Why this book?

Scientific concepts, like genes and germs, elude observation and intuition. So where do they come from? Carey charts the development of such concepts, from innate perceptual biases to abstract symbolic representations. She presents research investigating the evolved foundations of human knowledge (core knowledge), as well as methods for revising and reorganizing that knowledge, yielding new concepts and theories (conceptual change). This book integrates insights from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology to address longstanding philosophical questions about humans’ ability to transcend the small repertoire of concepts we are born with and grasp ideas that no other species can.

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Education for Thinking

By Deanna Kuhn

Education for Thinking

Why this book?

Two skills fundamental to scientific reasoning are inquiry and argument. Inquiry is generating new information, and argument is using that information to justify and evaluate knowledge claims. Kuhn presents a framework for understanding these processes, as well as methods for teaching them. Her insights are grounded in science-education research demonstrating not only why inquiry and argument are challenging but also how they can be improved. Kuhn’s book fundamentally changed how I teach science to others. It provided me a way of organizing and motivating the various research methods I cover in my courses, as tools for building a collective body of knowledge.

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Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do about It

By Gale Sinatra, Barbara Hofer

Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do about It

Why this book?

If you value science, then you’ve probably puzzled over why other people don’t. Why won’t other people wear masks during a pandemic? Or buy genetically modified foods? Or vaccinate their children. Sinatra and Hofer provide answers by delving deep into the psychology of science denial. They explain the shortcuts we take when searching for scientific information, the misconceptions we hold about scientific knowledge, and the obstacles we face when changing our beliefs and attitudes about scientific topics. From their synthesis of empirical research to their consideration of real-life dilemmas, Sinatra and Hofer provide a compelling account of the public’s fraught relationship with science, as well as practical advice for improving it.