Private science is inevitably phenomenological, but the prevailing insistence on the ‘logic’ of science, when formulated in public language of ‘final form science’ as found in textbooks, does not give students the picture of science as a human activity, or even a historical activity, as pointed out by several previous researchers (e.g. Bauer, 1992; Matthews, 1994). Indeed, the intermediary nature of constructed scientific language, being posed between the phenomenon and cognition, can itself become alienating (e.g. Sutton, 1996).