Thursday, September 13, 2012

Bozerman analyzes Watson and Crick

Charles Bazerman (born 1945) is an American educator and scholar. He was born and raised in New York. He is one of the world's leading experts on writing and has contributed significantly to the establishment of writing as a research field. Best known for his work on genre studies and the rhetoric of science, he is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as Chair of the Program in Education for eight years.

In Shaping Written Knowledge, Charles Bazerman traces the history and character of the experimental article in science, calling attention to the social and rhetorical forces that shaped its development. Truly a landmark in writing studies, this book provides a broadly interdisciplinary exploration of an important genre and offers insights that extend far beyond its immediate focus of study.
Examining the writing in science seemed a particularly
important challenge for several reasons. First, the statements made
through scientific discourse have been socially and culturally important
in ways I hardly need elaborate; we are constantly rebuilding our world
upon the statements of science. Second, scientific methods of formulating
knowledge have been highly successful in gaining almost universal
assent to claims hardly accessible or persuasive to common sense.
Third, as a result of science’s great success, habits of scientific discourse
have influenced almost all other areas of intellectual inquiry. By unpacking
scientific language one can come to understand important influences
in all disciplines. Finally, scientific language is a particularly hard
case for rhetoric, for sciences have the reputation for eschewing rhetoric
and simply reporting natural fact that transcends symbolic trappings.
Scientific writing is often treated apart from other forms of writing, as a
special code privileged through its reliance on mathematics (considered
a purer symbolic system than natural language). If one can show the
workings of formulating practices in sciences on the kinds of statements
science produces, one can begin to mine important depths of rhetoric. (Bazerman, 2000, p 14)
Recent scholarship into the complex private and semiprivate activities
of scientists has enriched our view of how knowledge is created, the
impulses and processes that lead to public statements; these private moments
indeed shed light on the public statement, and I shall often draw
on such evidence (see, for example, Collins, Changing Order; Garfinkel
et al.; Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge; Latour and Woolgar;
and Lynch). p 23
An author, in deciding which words to commit to paper, must weigh
these four contexts and establish a workable balance among them. A
text is, in a sense, a solution to the problem of how to make a statement
that attends through the symbols of language to all essential contexts
appropriately. More explicitly, an article is an answer to the question,
Against the background of accumulated knowledge of the discipline,
how can I present an original claim about a phenomenon to the appropriate
audience convincingly so that thinking and behavior will be modified
accordingly? A successful answer is rewarded by its becoming an
accepted formulation. p 38

Bazerman analyzes Cricks
 
  1. The article “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid”primarily describes a geometric model, elaborated in quantitative and qualitative terms, that is claimed to correspond to thestructure of a substance found in nature.
  2. its structure
    being consistent through repeated observations, for otherwise the
    names will not convey a distinct and stable meaning to all observers.9
  3. All other contexts are subordinated to this primary one so that the
    article may appear to speak univocally about nature.
  4. The audience is assumed to share the
    same criteria of closeness of fit, discreteness, robustness, and reproducibility
    for acceptance of claims (or symbolic formulations) about phenomena;
    therefore, the audience can be relied on to have much the same
    assessment of the literature as the authors do, and persuasion may proceed
    by maintaining apparent focus on the object of study.10
  5. the authors’ apparent presence is minimized
    by the common pursuit of authors, literature, and audience to
    establish a common, codified, symbolic analogue for nature.
  6. The opening sentence of Watson and Crick’s article sets the task: “We
    wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid.”
  7. we can see how the accumulated knowledge of the field
    (represented by the literature) is incorporated into the language.
  8. the name reveals the gradually
    emerging orientation of chemistry to describe most features and processes
    through structure.
  9. the task of
    the molecular biologist is not to create a structure that approximates
    nature, but to discover and express in human terms the actual structure
    resulting from all the forces and accounting for the behavior and appearance
    of the molecule. The claim of representing an actual structure
    rather than creating an approximate model results in a strong requirement
    for correspondence between data and claim. This correspondence,
    as we shall see below, is the main criterion of persuasion
    offered to the audience.
  10. The analysis of the first sentence is not yet finished. The first five
    words, “we wish to suggest a . . . ,” reveal much about the joint persona
    and contribution of the two authors. Despite the folk belief about
    the absence of the first person in scientific papers, the authors do assert
    their presence through the word we, That direct presence, however, is
    immediately subordinated to the object under consideration, the structure
    of DNA.
  11. By
    identifying their subject within the language of scientific disciplines,
    they are implicitly putting their original contribution within the framework
    of existing scientific knowledge.
  12. The placement and titling of the
    paper itself suggest how much the originality of the paper is subsumed
    within a highly structured framework of knowledge
  13. the chemical claim in the context
    of biological knowledge; this added context identifies the great
    importance of the paper. The knowledge of one field is not treated as the
    hermetic creation of that field, liable only to internal consistency within
    that field. Rather, other disciplines are subject to the discoveries about
    nature.
  14. “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we
    have postulated immediately suggests a copying mechanism for the
    genetic material." This brief comment invokes the knowledge of genetics
    and cellular mechanics and tells the biologist where to fit this structure into the open claims of the field. The single added piece ofinformation will allow biology to move forward in directions determined by its own logic.
  15. all the uses of the first person are to indicate
    intellectual activities: statement making (opening words of paragraphs
    1 and 4), making assumptions (later in paragraph 4), criticizing statements
    (paragraph 2), and placing knowledge claims within other intellectual
    frameworks (paragraphs 11 and 12). None of the first-person
    uses imply inconstancy in the object studied, but only changes or development
    of the authors’ beliefs of what the appropriate claims about the
    object should be.
  16. Until a univocal formulation
    that describes the phenomenon in all its features is found, the phenomenon
    is not fully understood.
  17. After mentioning the genetic implications of the structure, the paper
    has finished its primary scientific business. The thirteenth paragraph
    promises greater detail in later publication.
  18. The last paragraph pays its respects to some aspects of the social system
    of science: prepublication criticism, access to unpublished evidence
    and ideas, and funding. To those who know the history of this
    discovery, these few thanks and the earlier criticisms of competitive
    work recall a web of social intricacies and inchoate psychological reaching
    toward discovery. 14 These prepublication facts of life are recognized
    by working scientists as necessary preconditions of publishable work;
    nonetheless, these preconditions of discovery do not enter the actual
    argument of the publication. In the article, competition is dealt with
    only in cognitive terms, discovery is presented as a fait accompli, and the social system is appended only as a courtesy, a polite nod at the
    end.
  19. The article cites only work immediately relevant to the assessment of claims made
    in the article.
To recapitulate the major points of comparison amongthe three texts analvzed is to notice that the three statements of knowledge
are three different things. In mediating reality, literature, audience,
and self, each text seems to be making a different kind of move in a
different kind of game. All three texts appear to show interest in phenomena
which form the topics for the essays (as well as provide the
titles), But the phenomena are not equally fixed prior to the essays. The
substance DNA and the concept genetic carrier were well known
(although not agreed to be synonymous) prior to Watson and Crick’s
essay. The Wordsworth poem was also well known, but Hartman claims
what was known should not count as true knowledge, which can only
come in the subjective recreation of the poetic moment. In the
ambivalence essay Merton must first establish that the phenomenon
exists and is consequential,
The chemical and biological literatures are codified and embedded in
the language, problematics, and accepted modes of argumentation;
consequently, the DNA essay does not need to discuss explicitly most of
the relevant literature except for claims and evidence immediately bearing
on the essay’s claim. The sociological literature on scientific behavior
is more diverse, unsettled, and open to interpretation; therefore, the
essay must reconstruct the literature to establish a framework for discussion.
The author attempts codification because codification is not a
fact going into the essay. The literatures of poetry and its criticism tend
to be particularistic and used in particularistic ways; the Wordsworth
essay invokes both literatures idiosyncratically and only in support of
the critics vision of the particular poetic moment of consciousness being
investigated. Codification, if it can be called that, is entirely personal.
The biological and biochemical audiences share an acceptance of
much knowledge, evidence gathering techniques, and criteria of judgment
against which to measure Watson and Crick’s claims and to suggest
how the claims might be applied; therefore, the authors do not
urge, but rather leave the audience to judge and act according to the
dictates of science. The sociological audience, sharing no uniform
framework of thought or criteria of proof, must be urged, persuaded,
and directed along the lines of the author’s thoughts. The literary audience,
concerned with private aesthetic experience, must find the critic’s
comments plausible, but more important must find the comments
enriching the experience of reading; evocation of the richest experience
is persuasion.

Reference
Bazerman, Charles. 2000. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. WAC Clearinghouse Landmark Publications in Writing Studies: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/ bazerman_shaping/ Originally Published in Print, 1988, by University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin.
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bazerman_shaping/

Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning. London, 1603.
Bazerman, Charles. “Scientific Writing as a Social Act.” In New Essays in Technical
Writing and Communication, ed. Anderson, Brockmann, and Miller.
Farmingdale: Baywood, 1983: 154-84.
Bazerman, Charles. “Studies of Scientific Writing: E Pluribus Unum?” 4S Review
3, 2 (1985): 13-20.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,
1968.
Crick, F. H. C., and J. D. Watson. “The Complementary Structure of Deoxyribonucleic
Acid.” Proceedings of t h e Royal Society. A223 (1954): 80-96.
Day, Robert. How to Write a Scientific Paper. Philadelphia: ISI, 1983.
Holmes, Frederic, “Scientific Writing and Scientific Discovery.” Isis 78 (1987):
220-35.
Lynch, Michael. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and
Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.


Scientific language: invisibility of
rhetorical character, 6, 14, 257, 320,
322; accomplishment of, 6, 13-15,
257; studies of, ‘155-56, 189-90, 315;
and activity of science, 155; as construction,
155, 298; migration to
social sciences, 257-58, 278-79; as
complex persuasive system, 258;
simplified models of in social sciences,
259-61, 279-81; privileging
in common sense view, 292-93; reasons
to distrust, 293-95; lack of adequate
model of, 298, 300-302;
proposed model, 302-7. See also
Genre
Genre: theory and definition of, 6-8,
62-63, 319-20; experimental report
as a, 6-8, 59-60, 62-63, 77-78, 260,
315-17

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