Four dialogues and metalogues about the nature of science

We analyse and explore, in the form of dialogues and metalogues questions about the dialogic nature of beliefs and students belief talk about the nature of science and scientific knowledge. Following recent advances in discursive psychology, this study focuses not on students' claims but on the discursive resources and dialogical practices that support the particular claims they make. We argue that students' discourse is better understood as a textual bricolage that is sensitive to conversational context, common sense, interpretive repertoires, and textual resources available in the conversational situation. Our text is reflexive as it embodies the discursive construction of knowledge and undercuts any claims to authoritative knowledge. The very conception of “belief” is itself an expression or construction from within the mundane idiom.... We learn to use “belief” in conditions when the “objective facts” are unknown or problematic and we want to indicate the tenuous character of our claim.... The notion of “real world” or “objective reality” is embedded in an extensive, pervasive language game which includes as an intelligible move or possibility the use of the very concept of “belief” itself. (Pollner, 1987, p. 21)