Today PEWS releases a new series of videos on our YouTube Channel! These short videos focus on topics about scientific methods, like how experiments control variables, reasoning about causation on the basis of correlations, public participation in scientific research, and much more. The videos are aligned with the 2nd edition of Recipes for Science: An Introduction to Scientific Methods and Reasoning, available next week.
What is Recipes for Science?
Recipes for Science is a textbook written for general education undergraduate courses. This textbook is written by Dr. Angela Potochnik, Director of PEWS and Professor of Philosophy at University of Cincinnati, Dr. Matteo Colombo, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Dr. Cory Wright, Professor of Philosophy at California State University Long Beach.
The book’s topics include the nature of science, aims and values; experiments, non-experimental studies, and modeling; deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning; probabilistic, statistical, and causal reasoning; scientific explanations, theories, and knowledge; and science in society. Here at University of Cincinnati, the book is used in a long-running course, PHIL 1032 How Science Works, that satisfies the natural sciences and quantitative reasoning breadth-of-knowledge requirements. The UC Philosophy Department offers this course every semester.
In the new second edition of the book, these topics are addressed in 13 short chapters with numerous examples from both natural and social sciences, with learning goals and aligned exercises (with exercise solutions available to instructors). This new edition expands on topics including how values influence science, diversity in science, participatory research, science and indigenous knowledge, trust and mistrust of science, big data and machine learning methods.
Video series
Timed with the release of the second edition of the textbook, a team of philosophers at UC and the book authors have collaborated to produce a series of short videos to supplement the content of the book. PEWS Video and Media Producer, Dr. Lucas Dunlap, led this initiative–including writing the video scripts and designing, filming, and editing the videos. Dr. Dunlap regularly teaches UC’s course How Science Works, and he selected topics for the video series based on his experiences teaching the course.
Each video highlights a key topic about scientific methods, from how to distinguish science from pseudoscience, to key features of scientific experiments, studies, and models, the use of big data and machine learning in science, Bayesian and Classical statistics, and much more.
See the full list and sample some videos on the PEWS YouTube channel:
The video series features book authors Dr. Angela Potochnik and Dr. Matteo Colombo, along with three UC philosophers who teach How Science works: Dr. Lucas Dunlap, as well as Dr. Melissa Jacquart and Dr. Zvi Biener.
These videos are designed for students enrolled classes that use the Recipes for Science textbook, science teachers looking to expand their curriculum, and simply anyone interested to know more about aspects of how science works. The video project is supported by Routledge, the publisher of Recipes for Science, and the videos will be featured on the book website as well as the PEWS YouTube channel.
