Beliefs about science and beliefs about language

Researchers have recently shown a growing interest in teachers' and pupils' beliefs about the nature of science, and how these differ from the picture offered by historians, philosophers and sociologists. Tacit beliefs about how scientists work are, however, sustained by unexamined assumptions about language, and this paper explores those assumptions and suggests that attention to beliefs about the nature of language would be a productive focus in future research and in efforts at curriculum reform. A key tension is that between the learner's experience of language as an interpretive system, actively used for generating new understanding, and of language as a labelling system for transmitting established information.