Science tells us about nature;
words and numbers are the symbols it uses to tell us. By representing
nature symbolically, we can understand, predict, and manipulate it.
The symbols give us a picture of the way things are. The only problem is
the most practical one of making the symbols precise, unambiguous,
univocal, to create a clear one-to-one correspondence between object
and symbol. chap11
these formulations
have given us unimagined dominion over the objects and creatures
that surround us. These formulations allow us to conjure great
forces, quicken those at death’s door, and create new forms of life.
When we look to the formulations created by science as reflected in
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How Language Realizes the Work of Science
symposia and published articles, we certainly see a very specialized development
of language, distinct from our everyday conversation and
newspaper reading. Unfamiliar words signify objects and phenomena
from the microscopic and macroscopic limits of the universe, objects
distinguished from each other and classified with a precision and taxonomic
care having little to do with our everyday fuzzy naming of the
objects of domestic life. Moreover, this specialized language of science
seems constantly filled with evidence, numbers, observations, pictures,
to ensure that the formulations correspond to real things.
1. All languages are semiotic systems, incorporating basic assumptions
about the nature of reality (for example, Bloor). These assumptions
color not only representations made within the language, but sensory
perception about the ambient world (see, for example, Hanson). From
this perspective it would seem that the work of science is to maintain
and elaborate the existing semiotic system
2. Scientific formulations embody ideological components from outside
the realm of science. From this point of view the work of science is
to advance or provide foundation, legitimacy for larger social programs
which themselves may simply be the result of class interests (see, for
examples, the various essays in Barnes and Shapin, Natural Order).
3. Scientific language serves to establish and maintain the authority of
science, largely through exclusion and intimidation. By establishing the
special and elevated character of science, scientific communications accrete
power to the scientific community (see Knorr and Knorr, “From
Scenes to Scripts”; Gieryn, “Boundary Work”). Here the work of science
is to advance itself.
4. Within the scientific community, scientific language serves the
competitive interests of separate individuals and research groups. The
language is partisan, argumentative, and manipulated for individual
gain rather than an objective, dispassionate representation of things as
they are (see Latour and Woolgar; Yearley; Pickering). Under this rubric
the work of science is to advance the careers of individuals.
5. Scientific language is often fuzzy, incomplete, undefinitive. In particular
the reference to actual events is obscured if not made fully obscure 1. All languages are semiotic systems, incorporating basic assumptions
about the nature of reality (for example, Bloor). These assumptions
color not only representations made within the language, but sensory
perception about the ambient world (see, for example, Hanson). From
this perspective it would seem that the work of science is to maintain
and elaborate the existing semiotic system
2. Scientific formulations embody ideological components from outside
the realm of science. From this point of view the work of science is
to advance or provide foundation, legitimacy for larger social programs
which themselves may simply be the result of class interests (see, for
examples, the various essays in Barnes and Shapin, Natural Order).
3. Scientific language serves to establish and maintain the authority of
science, largely through exclusion and intimidation. By establishing the
special and elevated character of science, scientific communications accrete
power to the scientific community (see Knorr and Knorr, “From
Scenes to Scripts”; Gieryn, “Boundary Work”). Here the work of science
is to advance itself.
4. Within the scientific community, scientific language serves the
competitive interests of separate individuals and research groups. The
language is partisan, argumentative, and manipulated for individual
gain rather than an objective, dispassionate representation of things as
they are (see Latour and Woolgar; Yearley; Pickering). Under this rubric
the work of science is to advance the careers of individuals.
5. Scientific language is often fuzzy, incomplete, undefinitive. In particular
the reference to actual events is obscured if not made fully obscureby the inadequacy of methodological description, the importance
of inarticulate craft knowledge to produce results, the lack of precise
replication of results, and the selectivity and emphases in the representation
of results (see Knorr, “Tinkering”; Collins, Changing Order). This
fuzziness leaves room for many kinds of social activity, with the apparent
work of scientific discovery being only a screen.
6. In sum, scientific formulations are a human construction and thus
are heir to all the limitations of humanity. Scientific formulations, giving
us no direct access to things in themselves, seem to do all the social work
of being human with no overt means of doing the empirical work which
has been considered the work of science. The appearance of reality projected
in scientific texts is itself a social construction.
Increased attention to detailed developmental data, in part motivated
by Chomsky’s strong claims about the psychological implications of
code structure, has as well revealed that language develops as part of
the child’s increasingly complex interaction with the world and people.
Cognition, experience, and social interaction are all significant variables
in language development, which can no longer be seen as an autonomous
linguistic phenomenon. ch11:9
Michael Halliday, who argues
that linguistic features are only surface realizations of larger social activities
(Language as Social Semiotic). In his study of child development of
language, for example, he sees the developing language system of the
child as part of the child’s growing system of social interaction (Learning
to Mean). Only once that social system is formed is the child ready to
adopt the socially given model of adult language. Accordingly, he interprets
features of the code as realizations of communicative impulses and
social interactions (Functional Grammar). ch 11:10
A Vygotskian Model of Practical Social
Semiosis
The following model of scientific use of language will suggest how the
work of science can be accomplished through the unfolding social and
empirical activity of individuals coordinated (cognitively and behaviorally)
within groups. To start, language is a tool that helps us carry on
cooperative activities (a frequent theme in Vygotsky’s writing; see for
example, Mind in Society, 19-30).
Written directions on
observations to be shared through a microscope require congruence between
the direction writer’s and the direction followers apparatus,
defined by common terms and perhaps aided by standardization in design.
extent spelled out in print. A joint language and organization of the
visual field is necessary for one observer to be able to see what the other
sees, to identify designated patterns and salient features. Much shared
background knowledge and shared experience are necessary to create
the shared perceptual schema. And finally the shared observation is
aided by standard observational routines that organize the activity.
more to the point for scientific
research, research communication requires practical social
understanding of cooperative endeavor, aggressive assertion, and agonistic
competition. As in any competitive activity, one must grasp the
limits of violence and cheating and understand the forces that would
bring the game to the edge of disintegration or transformation to a different
kind of activity.
Given personal investments of all kinds that scientists have in their
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Five: Scientific Writing as a Social Practice
published claims, the maintenance of a cooperative, honest, problemsolving
endeavor may often be threatened. Appeals to the rules of the
game are almost necessarily self-serving resources (Would you complain
to an umpire unless you had some interest at stake?), but mastering
and developing allegiance to the interactional rules are an important
part of socialization into scientific activity. Different individuals have
different understandings of the rules of the game and make different
adjustments to them. Different subcommunities vary or elaborate the
interactive practices differently, with perhaps greater passion, cynicism,
or avoidance of severe struggle. But whatever the interactive pattern
is, the scientist must come to understand it. What fascination
working scientists have for the sociology of science may come from the
need to come to terms with this aspect of the communication system.
The achievement of shared understanding can be examined in two
different kinds of situations, both of relevance for scientific communication.
First is of the neophyte becoming familiar with knowledge already
shared within a community. Through interactions,
the neophyte’s comments are interpreted through a broader and more
charitable interpretation of the communicative system than would be
granted to a speaker recognized as fully socialized.
The symbolic interaction shapes perception and meaning to be taken
from these concrete objects by calling attention to particular features
and placing them in symbolic relations
tells the student to pay attention to color change when placed within
various solutions.
their abilities to formulate symbolic expressions in less teacher-constrained
situations (that is, taking their linguistic constraints from the
materials rather than from sentences fed them in class), and the ranges
of interactive processes they are expected to handle with peers and
mentors.
In the course of these interactions students gradually expand functional
competence in language activity through what Vygotsky calls the
zone of proximal development (Mind in Society, 84-91).
individual can accomplish a broader range of activities with the cooperation
of a more skilled individual, such as associating certain of those
babble sounds with meanings, or boiling the liquid within a distillation
apparatus. The expert intervention provides a scaffolding into which
the neophytes’ behaviors can grow.
As the neophyte gains control of the structured meaning/behavior
system transmitted through the scaffolding, she starts to incorporate
parts of the scaffolding in her own behavior. She starts to repeat the
phrases the adult utters, starts to grab toward the picture the adult
points to in association with an appropriate word, starts to repeat to
herself the instructions provided by the instructor or the lab manual
gradually the neophyte becomes socialized into the semioticbehaviorial-
perceptual system of a community with language taking a
major and multivalent role in the organization of that system, but with
that system also shaped around concrete worldly activities.
The second kind of situation in which shared understanding
needs to be established is when change, growth, or instability
occurs within the system of understandings already shared by fully socialized
members of the community.
Other members of the community would likely have interests
in seeing, thinking, and talking about the phenomenon (or related
phenomena) in other ways. Resistance to new formulations exists for
reasons beyond narrow-mindedness and bull-headedness. Persuasion,
rather than being a single, sudden event, can be a lengthy process of
negotiation, transformation, and growth of the central formulations
and related arguments,
phenomenon that can be reliably reconstituted by members of the
community under appropriate conditions in appropriate relation to
activities and other reliably reconstitutable phenomena as perceived
through the shared perceptual screen of the field.
experiment or observations reported in the article and replication attempts-
have been most criticized as having a loose correlation between
events and formulation,
This Vygotsky-Fleck model of formulating practices seems to me most
fruitful for the issues I have investigated in this study and the data I have
examined. By seating language use in a social/empirical/cognitive activity
this model allows us to see the multivalency of symbolic formulations
and to give a plausible account of the kinds of work we know
through our daily experience that science does.
The evolution of scientific use of language hardly ended with Newton,
nor had it begun with him. But given the contemporary means,
problems, social relationships, and activity of science, he organized
them to create a shared, relatively stable semiotic universe which has
only in this century been displaced by a communal creation. He dominated
the history of science not just because he discovered a few major
laws, but because in finding the way to articulate those laws he found a
powerful, long-lasting (though ultimately and necessarily temporary)
solution to the problem of how one should talk about the subject.
That debate over how to talk about one’s subject continues in all disciplines
today, and cannot be separated from the fundamental practices of
those disciplines. If there is any essential message of this book it is in
precisely this: in those communal endeavors whose goal is symbolic
knowledge, the more we understand the way symbols are used in the
activity, the better we can carry out that activity. In Vygotskian terms,
ability to talk about our language behavior offers us a higher form of self
monitoring and regulation of behavior.
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