Abstract

Abstract Scientific knowledge, as a deeply human activity, has been constructed through the centuries in a transcultural way, on foundations that have been determined (and many times conditioned) by the coexistence and simultaneousness of multiple beliefs about the structure of matter, conflicts of power derived from the need of “controlling the knowledge”, mythological traces, religious influences, political crises and value disputes generating the most incredible controversies and, in many cases, complex controversies. So, in the last decades the idea of historicity and philosophy of chemistry admits polar opposite interpretations in the meta scientific analyses: some of them try to explain the evolution of knowledge of our discipline from a reductionist view, valuing the objectivity of the datum itself. This is known as anachronistic view. Other interpretations would like to generate explanatory models of science theories, rising from the valuation of the period and context in which such knowledge was “socialized” and influencing the cultural development of a certain scientific community. This is known as diachronic view. This last way of understanding the history of chemistry, valuable in our opinion for natural science teachers, generates approaches distinguished in a substantial way among the so called facts of the past and historical facts, as they have been approached by several researchers. Collecting objective data and interpreting it without understanding the social expectations, the political conflicts and the economic controversies of a period contribute to a restrictive interpretation of the development of knowledge and the scientific activity. This is even more so if one ignores the values in dispute conditioning the discoveries and scientific inventions, all elements that are also part of the so called “historical datum”. Such restrictive interpretation would not be adequate, according to many authors, for scientific education in general and the teaching of chemistry in particular. In the same way one cannot ignore the difference sources of information, the scientific instruments, the characteristic languages and strategies of communication that influence scientific work and science teaching.These elements have been very diverse in causes, attributes and consequences at moments and periods also very different in the human history. What sense does incorporating the history of chemistry as a relevant meta theoretical component in the professional development have? That is the question we would like to invite you to reflect upon in this chapter.