Obstáculos epistemológicos no pensamento científico de Benjamin Franklin: contribuições para o ensino da eletricidade

Abstract

For decades, research in Science Education has directed part of his interests to discussions involving History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Sciences. In this interface field, the discussions promoted by philosophers of science who sought to build theoretical explanatory models from the understanding of the historical development of science deserve attention. Among them, we can highlight Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a French epistemologist and philosopher of science, who proposes to analyze the history of sciences, their revolutions, as well as the démarches of the scientific spirit, developing work with profound pedagogical implications. One of the central concepts inaugurated by the Bachelardian historical epistemology is that of an epistemological obstacle, which inevitably arises in the process of construction of scientific knowledge that is intended to be objective. Based on this framework, the objective was to investigate the appearance of some epistemological obstacles in the studies on electricity by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), mainly in the ideas contained in the work Experiments and Observations in Electricity, made in Philadelphia in America (1769), that was taken as the basis for the analyzes. From this study, it was possible to recognize the presence of obstacles, among them, the substantial and the verbal, mentioned by Bachelard in his work The Formation of the Scientific Spirit (1938). In this direction, without imposing parallelism, the knowledge of the “historical” epistemological obstacles can be useful for the understanding of the conceptions and difficulties manifested by students in teaching situations, concerning the contents of electricity.