'Outfoxing nature’: Matthew Lipman and the Prolegomena to a Pedagogy of Science

This paper explores the role that the idea of science plays within Matthew Lipman‘s ap-proach to inquiry. On the one hand it seems that Lipman shares a typically modern ‗antago-nist-metascientific‘ view of philosophy (in a quasi Arendtian-Kantian way) in opposing the scientific undertaking and philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, he models his idea of community of philosophical inquiry on the Peircean-Deweyan theoretical construct of com-munity of inquiry which refers exactly to the scientific undertaking. And – what is still more significant – it is just by capitalizing on the ―scientific‖ origin of the construct that Lipman can revive the Socratic tradition of philosophy as a dialogic practice. But Lipman‘s relation-ship with science is still more complex: he identifies science as a project of ―outfoxing and outguessing nature.‖ By tracing the origin of such metaphors to the Heraclitean dictum ―na-ture loves to hide‖ (physis kryptesthai philei) and to Francis Bacon‘s interpretation of ancient myths, and by contrasting them with the Kuhnian idea of normal science as puzzle-solving, it becomes clear that Lipman recognizes the ―thoughtful‖—that is, philosophical -- dimen-sion of science, and the need for complex thinking within science itself as a basic dimension of its development. Against the backdrop of such analyses, the paper attempts to point to the possibility of a pedagogy of science in a Lipmanian vein.