WRT333

What do we Mean by Science?

Syllabus | Table of Pages

(These notes are extracted from a longer article, "The Nature of Science and its Discourse Communities, and the Cultural Isolation of Science From the Public Sphere," which I wrote for COM455. If you would like to read this, click here and use the back button to return to this page).

This is a course that deals with a subset of written English which I'll call "science speak." By this I mean a set of constructs and words peculiar to those who contribute to science discourse, which, in "Composition and the Rhetoric of Sciences: Engaging the Dominant Discourse," Michael Zerbe represents as

"... discourse that describes empirical research using the familiar IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) organizational scheme. For the most part, this discourse is disseminated in peer-reviewed, scientific research journals that are read chiefly by scientists who work in the specialty area on which the journal focuses. This discourse is used through the physical sciences, life sciences, and social sciences in both experimental (e.g., a pharmacologists' testing of a new diabetes drug) and descriptive (e.g., a botanist's account of the types of plants found on a remote mountaintop in Papua New Guinea) frameworks and in both qualitative and quantitative work. Ideally, the authors describe their research with a degree of thoroughness that allows their research to be replicated and thus confirmed or contested."

In analyzing a few of the particular ways in which scientific discourse is different from—for better or worse—ordinary spoken and written (popular press) English, we'll look at its origin and evolution—following authors like Atkinson (Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context) and Gross, Harmon, and Reidy (Communicating Science)(see Notes on the Evolution of the Scientific Article), who study this development in a sociohistorical context—focusing on style, presentation, and argument. This analysis makes more sense if we start with some familiarity with the state of science, which is addressed in the notes that follow.

To understand the power and influence of science, it may be best to become a student of the early astronomers, for development in this field is usually credited for development of a modern scientific perspective. Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (Chapter VI, "The Rise of Science"), for example, says

"Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. The Italian Renaissance, though not medieval, is not modern; it is more akin to the best age of Greece. The sixteenth century, with its absorption in theology, is more medieval than the world of Machiavelli. The modern world, so far as mental outlook is concerned, begins in the seventeenth century. No Italian of the Renaissance would have been unintelligible to Plato or Aristotle; Luther would have horrified Thomas Aquinas, but would not have been difficult for him to understand. With the seventeenth century it is different: Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas and Occam, could not have made head or tail of Newton.
The new conceptions that science introduced profoundly influenced modern philosophy. Descartes, who was in a sense the founder of modern philosophy, was himself one of the creators of seventeenth-century science. Something must be said about the methods and results of astronomy and physics before the mental atmosphere of the time in which modern philosophy began can be understood.
Four great men—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton—are pre-eminent in the creation of science....

What is it about these four people that can help us understand something about the unique nature of scientific writing? It is not the people themselves (we'll get to them anyway, shortly), but the effort to understand their thinking, in the context of the times in which they lived, that gives us a starting point for understanding scientific writing. Dwight Atkinson, in Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context (1999), puts it this way

"Empirical science is generally considered to represent the dominant knowledge system in the industrialized world today. For many years, the hegemony of the sciences went unquestioned in this world—as a form of knowledge which was self-evident, self-regulating, and beyond the reach of human subjectivity. Only in the last 40 years have these assumptions begun to be critically examined.
Once one begins to probe the epistemological basis of the empirical sciences, their historical foundations and development take on an importance they lacked when the sciences were simply received knowledge. That is, one wants to know how the seamless edifice that the sciences have presented to the public was constructed—how scientists developed their claim to unique understanding of the natural world. In the terms adopted by Latour [(Science in Action, 1987)], we want to know the story of "science in the making" rather than of "all-made [or already-made] science."
One way to study science in the making is to examine the developing symbolic means used by scientists to express themselves scientifically—or, more accurately, to examine the evolution of these forms of meaning as an integral part of the changing scientific form of life. Written language in the service of reporting original research has been a major form of symbolic expression in science, so it stands to reason that a focus on the development of such language across time will tell us much about the dynamics of science in the making."

I would encourage students of science and of scientific writing to do a little reading about the origins of science. The origin of science, as Russell indicates, has a lot to do with the early days of astronomy. Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959) develops a history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton with special emphasis on the schism between science and religion; his portraits of key characters (including the Greeks and Tycho de Brahe) emphasize the development of a religious world view in which certain truths had been revealed (by God to man) and were held to be unchallengeable truths by religious authorities, up to and even for many years after the famous trial of Galileo by the Catholic church (1633) in which Galileo was forced to recant (after which he did not, despite legend, utter the famous "eppur si muove"—nevertheless it moves—ascribed to him). Another account of the same grounds and similar approach occurs in Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield's The Fabric of the Heavens: The Development of Astronomy and Dynamics. (1961). The same events are analyzed from the perspective of the role of rhetoric in Galileo's attempts to persuade patrons (the Medici's), fellow astronomers, and the church of his conclusions, in Jean Dietz Moss's Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy (1993).

An epicycle and retrograde motion
from The Universe of Aristotle and Ptolemy

Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957) preceded his more famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Of the books listed here, Kuhn's does the most complete job of explaining the underlying science in understandable terms, with abundant illustrations and an appendix. Kuhn explains the underlying cosmology, then the perceptions and understandings as they evolved over time. Critical to Kuhn's later understanding of the way in which science evolves (outlined in Revolutions), he presents a very careful case analyzing not only what each of the critical scientists saw and how they interpreted their observations, but also what each contributed to the ability of successors to see and think about things in different ways.

Compressing already brief accounts of the history of astronomy from a sociohistorical perspective, the story that we need to understand for our immediate purposes has two dominant features, I submit. One is the relative amount of time for science to develop statements of what is known (or believed, if we can separate conclusions based on observation and reason (whether or not the conclusions are consistent with modern understanding) from conclusions based on religious revelation (divine word)). Here are critical actors and a sketch of their contributions in time:

Note that Aristotle and Ptolemy thought that the earth was stationary (not moving) and at the center of the universe. Motions around the earth were on perfectly round spheres, because... (well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, which lasted for at least a full millennium).

What is outstanding in Thomas Kuhn's account of the copernican revolution is the clarity with which Kuhn establishes the relatively slow transition of each scientist, from an ancient view to an increaasingly modern view. Kepler, for example, attempted to hold on to notions of celestial divine design, going so far as to propose in 1595 that use of epicycles might actually support a design for planetary orbits that conformed to a series of nested regular polygons, evidence of a notion that Aristotle would have been very comfortable with. Kepler, by the way, was probably best appreciated in his day for his skill in casting horoscopes. Copernicus was a highly pious Catholic, and worked hard to tie his work to scripture. What prevented Copernicus and Kepler from the kinds of direct confrontation later experienced by Galileo was the relative obscurity of their highly mathematical writing; people didn't understand it for years (note, too, that Copernicus didn't publish until the year he died).

Jean Dietz Moss gives a more interesting picture of Galileo, revealing through rhetorical analysis of his many letters and publications Galileo's perhaps irascible nature, but certainly his distain for many of his contemporary astronomers and authorities.

What is important for our current understanding is that although these great men may not have actually individually experienced (within their own awareness or during their own lifetimes) the revolutionary changes in understanding implied by "Copernican Revolution" (or, elsewhere, "Copernican Crisis"), each made it possible for successors to view the world from a slightly different perspective. By allowing their followers a degree of freedom from nearly universal (and to a large extent enforced by the church) dogmatic views of "the truth" (as held to be revealed in scripture), each contributed to an eventually inalterable world view. It may be fair to credit Galileo with being mostly responsbile for the final break between old religion and modern science, but that is in some degree because Galileo was able to move forward only because of Copernicus, Kepler, and others.

With Issac Newton's (1643-1727) publication of Philosophić Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687—including the three laws of motion and the concept of gravity—that astronomers had adequate tools to explain the motions (including quirks) of the planets in what would be recognized (and by then relatively unchallenged) as modern science. We'll ignore for the moment that Einstein unhinged all of this at the beginning of the 20th century.

Stirred by the importance of the early astronmers, and disturbed by the implications for religion, philosophers Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes (1596-1650) contributed perspectives from which we can recognize the modern scientific method. Bacon's Novum Organum (The New Instrument) (1620) set the stage for improvements in logic and inductive reasoning. Descartes Discourse on the Method (1637) allowed the divide between faith based and observation based reasoning to widen. It is Bacon and Descarte to whom we should also pay homage for the scientific method and the underpinnings of the enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

References