Scientific and Technical Communication: Theory, Practice and Policy

Philosophical Contexts

Many of the categories and concepts we associate with science, confirmation, falsification, logical empiricism, objectivity, pragmatism, realism, follow from philosophical traditions. From analyses of questions involving scientific language and knowledge, philosophers of science have proposed criteria that try to capture the distinguishing features of scientific inquiry.

Philosophers of science, particularly in the 20th century, became interested in determining differences between knowledge in the natural sciences and all other forms of knowledge. Viewed historically, the natural sciences furnish an incomparably successful and progressive source of knowledge. Philosophers became interested in defining the features of scientific practice and knowledge to see if they could be applied to other subjects such as human behavior, economics, or philosophy itself. Scientific knowledge apparently possessed the unique trait of preserving its content in different social and historic contexts. No other form of knowledge can claim such uniform interpretation and agreement. Traditionally, philosophers of science attributed the universality of scientific knowledge to at least two characteristics, the pattern of reasoning employed in science, and the repeatability of scientific experiments.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) demonstrated that the force of gravity is the product of two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. In other words, the larger the mass, the greater the gravitational pull. As the bodies are moved further apart, the force of gravity rapidly diminishes. Among other things, Newton's laws of gravity describe the motion of falling bodies on the Earth's surface as well as weight and ocean tides. As gravity is natural, continuous phenomenon on Earth, its effect on falling bodies can be measured, predicted and demonstrated through repeated experiments conducted at any time and in any location. From the evidence produced through repeated experiments, scientists conclude they have an accurate picture of how nature works, a picture that does not change with the current social and political climate. Newton's laws of gravity are an example of scientific knowledge that has only one, universal interpretation that can be witnessed under different circumstances.

Given the traditional view of scientific knowledge, the goal of scientific and technical writers is presented as upholding uniform interpretation and agreement on information by writing a document that can be read in only one way. Since scientific knowledge is universal texts were written not to "get in the way" of scientists' representations of nature. The concept of scientific knowledge as constant across social and historical contexts meant that scientific and technical writing reflected the practices of science as a series of logical steps unaffected by factors such as funding, relationships among researchers and institutional politics.

Responding to traditional views of scientific knowledge, many sociologists explain its universal acceptance in two ways. First, in order to become a member of a scientific community, scientists' must adhere to uniform theoretical commitments. Second, scientists have only a limited repertoire for responding to information and ideas given disciplinary standards, writing formats and disciplinary jargon.

Let's take another look at Newton's laws of gravity. From repeated observations and experiments, scientists elevated Newton's theory of gravity to a truth about nature. And we can agree that truth about the force of gravity Newton, and others, demonstrated does not change, it is invariant and universal. However, language, even if objective, is not invariant and universal. Language, as demonstrated by all other social interaction, is an unreliable means for transmitting the truth. If we view science as an institution influenced by linguistic, historical and social forces in any way similar to other institutions, then language remains a variable medium of expression. No matter what a writer does to ensure only one reading of an experimental article, inevitably there will be more than one interpretation of the information presented. Nevertheless, even if scientific knowledge was relayed by perfectly reliable linguistic means, scientists, just as ourselves, are imperfect knowers. We all process information differently. If you accept the idea that even if a scientific theory is true its means of expression, language, and reception, cognition, are variable and imperfect, how can the universality of scientific knowledge be explained?

One explanation for the universality of scientific knowledge is that in order to become a member of a scientific community, scientists' must adhere to the same theoretical commitments. In the physics community, for example, you cannot hold Newton's ideas with respect to the relation among space, time and gravitation. Students learning to become practitioners in physics learn that relativity theory is the fundamental theory of nature. As a result, practitioners learn to perceive nature in the same way according to an accepted theory. In other disciplines and professions, even if practitioners hold the same theories and views about the world, they disagree on their interpretations. While critics of the traditional view of scientific knowledge would not deny the truth of relativity theory and its explanation of natural phenomena, they deny the universal acceptance of the theory is due to its unchanging nature.

Another explanation for the universal acceptance of scientific knowledge is the scientists' limited choices in responding to information and ideas. Science is also unique in its reliance on a narrow range of communicative choices to convey information, governed by specialist jargon and defined writing formats. The uniform structure of the experimental article in natural science journals serves as an example. What counts as an appropriate expression of, or response to, an idea in science depends on how well writers follow disciplinary standards. If, for instance, a scientific or technical writer presented their ideas in a narrative form using dialog, the article would not be accepted into a mainstream journal. Authors must also use language and jargon appropriate to the discipline on order to have their views accepted. Critics of the traditional view of scientific knowledge claim that it, like all other forms of knowledge, is variable and contingent on time and circumstance. However, through institutional mechanisms requiring scientists to think and communicate along the same lines, scientific knowledge appears universal.

Realists acknowledge that definitions and terms in science follow from theoretical discoveries and could be revised given new empirical evidence. For example, how an engineer designs a machine that runs on electricity depends directly on how electricity is defined and understood in words and equations. As the definitions of concepts shifts, so do their applications. Your own knowledge and its applications are dependent on how the professional community in which you participate defines it terms, and how you understand that definition. In exploring the purpose and function scientific and technical language in actually shaping peoples' actions, you will develop a more robust sense of the possibilities of scientific and technical communication.

Psychological Contexts

Scientific and technical communication is a cognitive process, you make hundreds of decisions as you write, listen, speak or read. These decisions reflect your own thought processes, behavior, preferences and abilities. The discipline in which you study and profession you pursue will also organize your thoughts and behavior. The degree may be small or may be great: some psychologists hold that what a scientist actually sees in an experiment depends on an accepted theory. In coming to understand the contexts in which scientific and technical communication takes place, researchers have begun to examine how scientists and technologists think and behave.

Studies in the psychology of science have generally focused on personality, creativity and cognition. Thomas Kuhn, for example, claims that the personalities and thinking processes of scientists such as Newton, Darwin and Einstein and inventors such as Edison, Tesla and Gramme are incompatible. Scientists, Kuhn suggests, are puzzle-solvers who concentrate on solving one problem within a theoretical structure by deliberately moving to the next related problem. They think within structures imposed by their discipline. Inventors, on the other hand, work outside those structures. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) serves as a wonderful example of an inventor, a somewhat mad visionary who captured the imagination of supporters as diverse as George Westinghouse and Mark Twain. Although Tesla invented many useful and practical devices, he also believed he could harness wireless electricity to communicate with Mars or develop a "death ray."

In science, changes in world view can be profound and fundamental. The physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) observed that new scientific truths do not win the day because scientists suddenly see the light, but rather because a generation of scientists dies off.

There are a number of examples illustrating how the perception of scientists influences the evidence generated by experiments. Perhaps the most infamous case involves the discovery of "N-Rays" by the prominent French physicist René-Prosper Blondlot. In 1903 Blondlot, a professor at the University of Nancy and award winning member of the Academy of Sciences, claimed to have found a new form of radiation, like X-rays, which he called N-rays. Within the French scientific community between 1903 and 1906, the effects of N-rays were observed and reported by over 40 people and became the subject of approximately 300 papers published by 100 scientists and medical doctors. N-rays, claimed Blondlot, could be produced by generating electrical charges in various gases and heated metals.

Scientists in England and Germany, however, had difficulty replicating Blondlot's results. While attending a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September of 1904, Robert W. Wood, an American physicist, was recruited to investigate Blondlot's claims. Wood enjoyed a flamboyant reputation, credited with fabricating one of the first photographs of an unidentified flying object. Blondlot showed Wood an experiment involving N-rays generated by a lamp, bent through an aluminum prism and detected on a phosphorescent surface. During the experiment, Wood secretly removed the aluminum prism from the apparatus. Nevertheless, Blondlot continued to find spectral lines in a refracted beam of N-rays, without the presence of the prism. A week later, Wood's reported his encounter with Blondlot in the journal Nature. The scientific community agreed that Wood's findings thoroughly discredited Blondlot's experiments, although Blondlot continued to believe in the existence of N-rays until his death in 1930.

In 1949 sociologists Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman exposed subjects to images of playing cards projected in quick succession, each image for a few hundredths of a second. The images alternated between normal playing cards and those in which color and suit were reversed, a red ten of clubs for example. At first, when subjects were presented with a reversed card, they identified it according to traditional colors and suits; to borrow Bruner's term, they regularized the card. Soon, however, the subjects began to hesitate. They would proclaim something "wrong" with the display, noting that although a card was the ten of clubs, it had a red border. Eventually, subjects would identify the reversed card as a reversed card. Once subjects discovered the first reversed card, they would identify others more quickly. Bruner and Postman concluded that when people encounter incomplete or confusing information, they make it conform to their own expectations. In the natural sciences there is perhaps no better illustration of the phenomena Bruner and Postman describe than the wave-particle duality of light. Depending on the experiment to be performed, light can be described as either a wave or a particle. The duality of light initially confused experimenters who expected it act one way or the other. However, as they came to understand that light had both properties, experimenters could offer descriptions accounting for both properties.

The structure of scientific and technical communication, like an accepted scientific theory or the grammar of a language, helps order our thought processes and our behavior. Out of this order, certain ways of thinking and learning become available to us as others remain unexplored. Résumé structure, for example, encourages you to formulate concise, comprehensive lists formally describing your education, experiences and skills. While alternatives exist to present this information, we generally adhere to the standard formula. In a limited sense, the way job recruiters think of us, and the way we think of ourselves depends on the structure and content of our résumé. In as much as the structures of scientific and technical communication direct our thinking and behavior, we need to step back critically assess and, if necessary, revise these structures.

Economic Contexts

In 1983 the Washington lobbying firm of Cassidy and Associates, hired by Catholic University and Columbia University, convinced the United States Congress to direct the Department of Energy to appropriate funds supporting their laboratories. There were no hearings. The scientific community made no recommendations. Quite simply, the lobbying group was hired to get the funds and they delivered. Science entered the arena of direct federal appropriations, porkbarrel politics.

From 1983 to 1985 Congress appropriated approximately $165 million dollars directly to laboratories and research project recipients on the basis of lobbying. Government agencies made no requests to release the funds, and no hearings were held. For the first time, money was appropriated for research without the submission and outside review of proposals from individual scientists. Members of Congress saw the value in getting direct support for projects at universities and research centers in their districts. In 1985, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved nine direct appropriations, but Cornell University's president Frank Rhodes turned down the money in arguing for the necessity of merit-based funding. Accordingly, the National Science Board found direct appropriations to be a threat to a peer review, merit based system. The recipients of the money in 1986, however, did not raise any objections.

Although scientific research and technological development is funded by local agencies, private industry and private foundations, the biggest contributor is the federal government. The role of Congress in directly earmarking funds for projects in representative's particular districts remains a highly contentious issue. As the congressional session of 1990 drew to a close, both Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Congressman Tom Bevill of Alabama secured $10 million for projects in their respective state and district. The 1990 the Clean Air Bill contained a $19 million appropriation, anonymously authored, for the study of methane emissions from cattle. As the bill was modified in committee the provision was dropped, but found its way to the Senate version of a farm bill. When the Senate and House reached a compromise on the farm bill, the provision was again dropped. However, the provision found its way back to the Clean Air Bill, where there was a final, failed attempt to remove it. President Bush signed the bill and the appropriation survived. The anonymous author of the provision remained anonymous.

In 1991, the budget contained at least $270 million in pork for academic research, according to one researcher. The trend toward earmarking funds directly for scientific research is rising. While universities initially resisted the allure of federal pork, university administrators are finding it increasingly difficult to legitimate turning down funds to boards of trustees, especially in this era of budget reduction. In coming to accept these funds, some researchers, recognizing that earmarked projects are funded at the expense of peer reviewed projects, argue that direct funding provides opportunities for institutions that would not normally get funding. Consequently, the non-research universities would get two chances at the federal funding, one through merit review, the other through the "fair" and direct appropriation of federal dollars.

Most of federal dollars go to support "big science" projects. "Big science" refers to large-scale, resource intensive programs such as the failed Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the Hubble Space Telescope, the Human Genome project, the Mars Observer and the planned space station. Invariably "big science" projects come to dominate the direction of particular disciplines at the expense of "basic" or teaching oriented forms of research. Certain areas of research are neglected, or abandoned completely in favor of distributing funds to renowned researchers at prestigious institutions. Scientific talent accumulates where the money and prestige are, and possibly fruitful avenues of research suffer as a result. The interests of the majority of scientists, most of whom perform basic research, are considered only in passing. Consequently, a lack of consensus exists in the scientific community about the ultimate value of these programs. For example, some members of the biology community oppose the human genome project as harmful to the development of the discipline. Still other biologists wonder if the results predicted by those involved with the project could not also be gained by a decentralized research program. The split in the physics over the community over the SSC was drawn essentially along the same lines. Congress, however, prefers "big science" projects because they are concentrated, seemingly easier to manage, and offer individual representatives the opportunity for securing porkbarrel projects.

You will be confronted with the economic contexts of science and technology both as a potential practitioner receiving funds, and as an interested taxpayer concerned with how your money is being spent. In either instance, you will be faced with a weighing decisions regarding your individual and social interests and the funding of science and technology. While the impact of the federal and private finances on science and technology is not completely understood, the shape knowledge takes reflects economic decisions. Perhaps the most profound influence on the direction of scientific and technical communication in the 21st century will be economic.

Rhetorical Contexts

With what do you associate the word "rhetoric"? Synonyms range from "exaggeration," "embellishment," and "overstatement" to "lies," "fraud" and "concealment." In conversation, we use phrases such as "political rhetoric," "empty rhetoric," or "that's just rhetoric" to suggest a lack of genuine meaning.

Opposing Socrates and Plato were the Sophists, who regarded language as a resource that might assist anyone to achieve a variety of ends. Moreover, the Sophists argued, as people have different communicative skills not everyone had access to the same linguistic resources. For a fee the Sophists made these linguistic resources available by offering training in the verbal arts. Socrates and Plato claimed that the Sophists were immoral both because they charged for their services and because they did not instruct their clients on the ethical use of their newly acquired skills. Perhaps ironically, Socrates' prowess in debate won the day. He depicted Sophists as dishonest brokers of techniques that could be used to dupe innocents. And today we call the art of verbal trickery "sophistry."

At first glance, scientific and technical communication appears to emulate the ideals of Socrates and Plato. Following this ideal, scientists depict the goal of scientific description as capturing the natural world truthfully and accurately. Accordingly, scientific language should be objective. Facts appear to speak for themselves. But language, even objective language, gets in the way. All words, all our choices involving communication, carry or denote a certain set of values. Scientists must convince audiences that what they are seeing, hearing or reading is true. The scientific community does not immediately hail new discoveries and theories as undisputed triumphs. Researchers have a personal stake in seeing certain theories succeed and certain theories fail.

The April 25, 1953, issue of the journal Nature included an article entitled "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid." It presented for the first time James Watson and Francis Crick's now famous model for the structure of DNA. The article begins "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.", a straightforward opening to what seems at first a not particularly remarkable scientific paper. The tone is understated: "wish to suggest" rather than the slightly bolder "suggest" or the much bolder "found" implies humility, as does the modest claim that their model has "novel" features of "considerable biological interest." The presentation has a modest tone for two reasons. Scientific writing often presents itself modestly, suggesting that what it describes is not "constructed" by a scientist, but rather reveals itself to her. It is modest too for a more practical reason: the tone guards the authors' reputation in the case that they are mistaken. On the other hand, the use of the first person "we" (unusual in scientific literature) suggests that its authors are concerned with credit for the discovery; it makes the unmistakable claim that they got there first. In short, the rhetorical strategy of the article is so subtle that we may miss it on a first reading; finally though, it is both controlled and amazingly powerful.

Language in all its forms supplies the medium for the exchange of ideas and in determining the truth. The functions of language to persuade, to inform and to represent ideas are interwoven with one another; they cannot be separated. The truth of science depends on its linguistic expression. If scientists, like Watson and Crick, can't convince an audience their research has merit, then scientific truths become a casualty of ineffective language use. Audiences in science and technology require persuading just like audiences anywhere else. But how does this persuasion take place? Is it simply a magical combination of words? To find how science persuades its audience, we must begin to understand how language works.

Scientific and Technical Communication in Context
Chapter 1: Part 2

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 1: Part 2

Scientific and Technical Communication in Context Chapter 1: Part 2

James H. Collier with David M. Toomey

Book Contents

Chapter 1: Part 2

Scientific and Technical Communication in Context
Chapter 1: Part 2