Scientific
training often begins with learning content knowledge and techniques. As a student
progresses, they are required to communicate the results of their experiments with
their instructors in a manner that other scientists would understand. This style
of communication is stressed throughout their entire training. As has become obvious
in the Indonesian response to the current global pandemic, scientific training should
include instruction on how to communicate with interested nonscientific audiences.
However, in the experience of one of the authors, it hasn’t. During his training,
he learned that many of his peers felt the best way to interact with non-scientists
was to begin with complex information, slowly becoming less complex until they recognized
that their audience was feigning understanding or losing interest. It seemed that
among his scientific peers, there were two camps: those who were interested in altering
their style of communication to fit their audience and those who hoped the audience
would alter their understanding to meet the speaker. This dichotomy seems to be
shifted heavily toward those who focus on peer-to-peer communication over communication
to others so much so that it has become a major plot point in a number of pop culture
items (see The Big Bang Theory). Within the field of science communication,
this is referred to as information deficit model (Dickson 2005).
Scientific
discourse has typically been considered what philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin,
Holquist and Emerson (1981, p. 343) termed an “authoritative discourse,”—a discourse
that “binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally,”
whose hegemony is traditionally a priori, unquestioned. However, within the public
realm, that authority is in crisis. There is an unsettling rise of anti-scientific
counter-discourses such as the anti-vaccine movement, the growing Flat Earth movement,
climate change denialism, and a host of other “movements” grounded in either pseudo-science
or an outright dismissal of scientific authority. Most recently, we’ve seen this
anti-science backlash during the COVID-19 global pandemic in the rush to reopen
businesses, the refusal to wear masks, and the rise of a variety of conspiracy theories
and fringe treatments that endanger everyone. In response to this crisis, scientists
and educators have called for more attention to improving scientific literacy among
the general public. While this is a necessary endeavor, we want to suggest, as others
have before, that science communication itself could be improved. By examining the
generic conventions of scientific discourse using the theories of Bakhtin, we hope
to point out some of the barriers causing the current crisis in scientific authority.
Bakhtin
et al. (1981, p. 344) characterizes authoritative discourse as “hard-edged, a thing
in its own right” characterized by “semantic finiteness and calcification”—in other
words, as centripetal and monologic as opposed to centrifugal, heteroglossic novelistic
discourse. In fact, the generic convention of monologic scientific discourse presents
itself as authorless; however, any utterance, including a scientific utterance is
geared toward an audience who will imaginatively embody an author. Greater attention
to the inflections and context that potential audiences might bring to scientific
discourse could improve communication. Moreover, the generic conventions of academic
science make it necessarily heteroglossic. Writers of scientific discourse are expected
to enter into a dialogue with their peers and the work that has already been done
upon a given research question. Although scientific discourse, as it seeks to answer
these research questions, moves centripetally toward a monologic authoritative discourse,
the competition and variety inherent in Western academia function as centrifugal
forces that fret the edges of authority. Additionally, Bakhtin’s theory of speech
genres and the socio-ideological nature of professional languages and styles complements
the work of feminist theorists such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling,
and others, which has argued that Western scientific discourse tends to ignore or
silence marginalized voices and contributors (Fox Keller and Longino 1996). By examining
scientific discourse through a Bakhtinian lens, we will demonstrate some of the
factors contributing to this crisis in scientific authority and propose that greater
attention to audience, to imbedded ideology, and the recognition of the heteroglossic
nature of academic scientific discourse point toward avenues for addressing this
crisis.
Scientific
discourse attempts to present knowledge in an objective, neutral, bias-free manner.
However, according to Bakhtin et al. (1981, p. 293), “there are no ‘neutral’ words
and forms–words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely
taken over, shot through with intentions and accents.” If language is never a neutral
medium, then scientific discourse can also never be neutral, never truly be objective.
Nevertheless, scientific discourse attempts to construct an objective stance through
the particular stratification of its language and its generic conventions. In particular,
this occurs through a standard organizational structure (IMRaD), the frequency of
nominalizations, and the use of passive voice.
Most scientific
research articles are organized in a fairly rigid structure: Introduction, Methods,
Results, and Discussion—often shortened to IMRaD (International Committee of Medical
Journal Editors 2019). This structure was adopted during the 1920s and was suggested
as the ideal method of writing papers but didn’t become prevalent until the 1930–1940s
(Wulster-Radcliffe, Hamernik, Reynolds, Lewis, and Zinn 2005). “Development and
changes in the internal organization of the scientific article is simply an answer
to the constant growth of information. The IMRaD structure facilitates modular reading,
because readers usually do not read in a linear way but browse in each section of
the article, looking for specific information, which is normally found in pre-established
areas of the paper” (Meadows 1985).
While
it may have been adopted for the ease of modular reading, for much of scientific
discourse IMRaD has become a “relatively stable type[] of utterance[]”—in other
words, a complex “speech genre” (Bakhtin, Vern, Emerson, and Holquist 1986, p. 60),
with a “stylistic aura” that encompasses both typical “themes” and “meanings” (Bakhtin
1986, p. 87). On the one hand, the ascendancy of IMRaD is an example of the way
that relatively stable utterances coalesce into speech genres. On the other, it
is possible to see this rigid structure is a centripetal attempt of authoritative
discourse to stratify and control language’s inherent heteroglossia: “It is in fact
not the neutral linguistic components of language being stratified and differentiated,
but rather a situation in which the intentional possibilities of language are being
expropriated…they knit together with specific objects and with the belief systems
of certain genres of expression and points of view peculiar to particular professions”
(Bakhtin et al. 1981, p. 289). In Bakhtinian terms, the IMRaD structure encapsulates
the worldview and belief systems of scientific discourse. In other words, generic
style is “a form of politics” (Clark and Holquist 1984, p. 210). It behooves us
to dissect this standard structure to get at the unspoken socio-ideological beliefs
that make the IMRaD structure synonymous with “science.”
In some
ways, the repeatability of the IMRaD structure mimics the repeatability that scientific
experiment attempts to achieve. As Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990, p. 117)
explain, “Bakhtin concedes that monologiziation and transcription have their legitimate
uses. In the hard sciences, for instance, a researcher’s interest may lie precisely
in what is repeatable and stateable as monologic propositions.” Scientific results
are most valid when they are repeatable. Having a genre that also is repeatable
offers rhetorical support for the validity of scientific discourse. Indeed, perhaps
the IMRaD genre itself has become the format of scientific fact—that something seems
more “true” or “valid” when it is presented in this structure than otherwise. This
could, and likely has, led to invalidating other ways of knowing. For instance,
Western science has been criticized for ignoring indigenous knowledge and ways of
knowing, resulting in the “discovery” of flora and fauna long identified and understood
by indigenous peoples (Agrawal 1995). Feminist scholars have also critiqued scientific
discourse for having an androcentric bias that colors and distorts not only the
problems asked, but also how experiments and designed and conducted and how results
are interpreted (Fox Keller and Longino 1996).
Without
delving into the masculinist bias of logocentrism, it seems likely that form influences
matter as much as matter influences form. If IMRaD was developed and perpetuated
for its ease of modular reading, which mimics the controlled and modular steps of
an experiment, then could outliers in information, in insight, in ways of knowing,
in uncertainty be left out of scientific discourse much as they are often left out
of statistical analyses? How might those lacunae impede communication between the
scientific community and the larger population?
Knowledge,
and the communication of knowledge, tends to be messy. It’s not rigidly organized
or modular as a scientific worldview seeks to present it. Rather, knowledge is often
narrative, anecdotal, reasoned from a particulari ad universale, which is in stark
contrast to scientific discourse that uses IMRaD format as the carefully organized
presentation of a deductive experiment. If for scientists, “fact” or “truth” comes
packaged in IMRaD, for a “lay” audience, “fact” or “truth” comes packaged as story
based on individual, empirical evidence. Thus, miscommunication seems almost inevitable
in a situation when both groups of interlocutors lack training in understanding
the communication norms of each other.
But structure
is only the tip of the iceberg of miscommunication. Two grammatical aspects of the
style of scientific discourse—scientific nominalizations and the frequent use of
passive voice—also set the stage for lack of understanding between the scientific
world and the larger population.
One aspect
of scientific language that can feel especially “foreign” for the non-scientist
is the “frequency of grammatical metaphor, from the union of nominalization with
recursive modification of the nominal group” (Haliday and Martin 2003, p. 15). What
in “reality” and in everyday language is both things (nouns) and processes (verbs),
scientific discourse tends to nominalize in order to “holds reality still, to be
kept under observation and experimented with; and in so doing, interprets it not
as changing with time (as the grammar of clauses interprets it) but as persisting—or
rather, persistence—through time, which is the mode of being a noun” (Haliday and
Martin 2003, p. 15). The verb—the action—in scientific discourse tends to be objectified—“that
is, representing actions and events, and also qualities, as if they were objects.
As a corollary to this, the relations between events came to be construed as if
they were the events themselves” (Haliday and Martin 2003, p. 52). In other words,
in order to theorize about phenomena, scientists hold them still in the form of
nouns. At the same time, this results in nominal clause building upon nominal clause,
barnacle-like, upon passive verbs, creating a lexically dense web of things seemingly
observed by a non-grammatically present scientist. For the non-specialist, navigating
this nominalized terrain can be quite daunting for a variety of reasons. Lexically,
just unweaving the dense web of signifiers can be difficult, even for academics.
Moreover, the level of abstract thought that nominalizes actions into things requires
not only training, but also a worldview or epistemology that can be at real odds
with that of an “average” person.
Passive
voice is a necessary consequence of the nominalizing trend in scientific discourse.
Actions are turned into events, into nouns, connected together by polysemous passive
verbs, like “to be,” in an ontological stasis. This might metaphorically pin down
phenomena in order to study and theorize it, but it also creates convoluted writing
that often hides not only the action, but the actor. Ideologically, hiding of the
actor—the scientists—is an attempt to discursively capture the goal of scientific
objectivity—it places the scientists as observers of phenomena and experiments.
However, passive voice hides their roles, not only as interpreters of data, but
as designers and manipulators of the scientific occasion that is being reported.
To a general population, then, passive voice can seem disingenuous, akin to a politician’s
use of passive voice to “pass the buck.”
To illustrate
these points, we will dissect two sentences taken at random from recent scientific
publications, the first from biology and the second from computer science.
"Using video recordings,
response threshold evaluation, sleep disturbance experiments, and detailed behavioral
analyses, | we established | that the sleep-like state of bumble bee (Bombus terrestris)
workers shows the essential behavioral and physiological characteristics of sleep
and is particularly similar to that of the honeybee" (Nagari, Gera, Jonsson
and Bloch 2019)
"In programming language
semantics, | normalization by evaluation (NBE) is a technique | of computing the
output of a program P by appealing only to the denotational semantics of P"
(Chouquet, Guerrieri, Pellissier and Vaux 2017)
In the
first sentence, the independent clause (between |), “we established” is in active
voice; however, “establish” is relatively abstract, polysemous transitive verb.
It is not a clear or concrete action. This main clause is modified by an opening
participle phrase and a restrictive clause that functions as the direct object.
To begin, the opening participle phrase nominalizes the entirety of the scientific
observations and experiments—all of actions that it likely took “we” years to perform
(recording, evaluating, experimenting, analyzing) —in a phrase that is not even
grammatically necessary for the sentence. Moreover, the verb participle, “using,”
on which all these nominalizations hang is also an abstract, polysemous verb. The
restrictive clause functioning as the direct object of “establish” contains all
of the information about the subject of these nominalized scientific actions—the
bumblebee worker. However, grammatically, the bee is the object of a preposition
rather than the subject of the restrictive clause. The bee’s ongoing actions have
been nominalized—objectified as a “sleep-like state”—and the activities that occur
during this “state” are presented as a further abstraction (characteristics) of
an already abstract noun (character). The verbs in this restrictive clause (shows
and is) are likewise abstract and polysemous. The entire restrictive clause is tautological—that
a “sleep-like state” is in fact, like “sleep.” In other words, unpacking this sentence
would take a team of highly trained movers. Each of these nominalizations is in
itself a Pandora’s box of ideas and activities that “we” seem to hope readers possess
the ability to parse.
In the
second sentence, the stripped-down independent clause is “normalization…is a technique.”
Or in other words, a Latinate, nominalized, abstract concept is a Greco-Latin abstract
concept. “Normalization” is a dead metaphor, originating in the Latin “norma” —or
right-angled. The nominalized form used here first came into use in nineteenth-century
science to characterize the attempts to have concepts and phenomena conform to a
rule—to “square” them (Oxford English dictionary 2014). In this case, however, the
sentence modifies “normalization” with a prepositional phrase (“by evaluation”—itself
another nominalization of a Latinate verb, based on the Latin stem -val-, meaning
“worth”). Thus, one might unpack this independent clause (“normalization of evaluation
is a technique”) quite literally as “the act of squaring the state or condition
of determining worth is skill set.” Of course, the acronym (“NBE”) tells us that
“normalization of evaluation” is not just a vague normalization, but is a specific,
concretized process known to those initiated into computer science language—e.g.,
“programming language semantics.” This latter is also an esoteric phrase—what “programming
language semantics” is really only understood by the initiated. Moreover, the “is”
of the main clause tells us that this sentence is definitional—that the object (“technique”
modified by prepositional phrases) will define the subject (“normalization” modified
by prepositional phrases). In other words, it is supposed to initiate the un- or
only partially initiated. To do so, “technique” is modified by a series of prepositional
phrases. The first, “of computing the output,” features a gerund phrase as the object
of the preposition “of.” In this instance, both the verbal (computing) and its direct
object (the output) are abstractions. This gerund phrase is further modified by
two additional prepositional phrases. The first “of a program P” is again an abstract
noun. The second, (“by appealing…”) is another gerund phrase. “Appealing” is the
most concrete verbal in the entire sentence as it does conjure up a particular action.
However, this gerund phrase is itself modified by a sixth prepositional phrase (“to
the denotational semantics”). In this sixth prepositional phrase, “denotational”
is the adjectival form of a nominalized verb (denote). “Semantics,” which begins
and ends this sentence, is a word ripe for miscommunication. In academia, for the
initiated, “semantics” is a field of study that researches how a language or languages
function. But for the lay population, “semantics” usually means straining at gnats—focusing
on unimportant verbal differences rather than big picture similarities.
Perhaps
this careful breakdown of what might be called recursivity run amok is itself straining
at gnats. Both of these examples, after all, are taken from texts written by scientists
for scientists. At the same time, however, their esoteric opacity could seem like
a deliberate dis-invitation to potential lay readers interested in these topics.
Bees, after all, are crucial for the survival of life as we know it on this planet,
and Bombus terrestris’s American cousin was placed on the Endangered Species List
in 2019. It is not unreasonable to assume that there might be lay interest in the
humble bumblebee. Moreover, while programming language is, in fact, another language,
computer programming intimately impacts the lives of pretty much every person on
the planet. Writing in a way that invites the curiosity of the general public would
do much toward bridging the gulf between them and the scientific specialist.
In Bakhtinian
terms, scientific discourse is an example of “a professional stratification of language”
(1981, p. 289), which, on the one hand, in necessary for a field like science because
such stratification allows for particular kinds of thought and inquiry. Creating
a specialized language or means of communication can facilitate communication among
a specialized group. Because language is often a key element to insider–outsider
status and group formation, language stratification and specialization is perhaps
a necessary and natural phenomenon in any socially stratified society. On the other
hand, language stratification also limits what can be communicated about across
groups. “Language is seen as both carrier and creator of a culture's epistemological
codes. The ways we speak and write are held to influence our conceptual boundaries
and to create areas of silence as language organizes meaning in terms of pre-established
categories” (Lather 1991, p. 74). These areas of silence are ripe, not only for
epistemological blind spots, but also as pitfalls for cross-group communication.
As Bakhtin et al. (1981, p. 289) explains, “For such outsiders [to a stratified
language], the intentions permeating these languages become things, limited in their
meaning and expression.”
Jay Lemke
(1990, pp. 129–30) has argued that science teaching has alienated students from
science because “the language of classroom science sets up a pervasive and false
opposition between a world of objective, authoritative, impersonal, humourless scientific
fact and the ordinary, personal world of human uncertainties, judgments, values,
and interests.” We think that this dilemma could easily be extended beyond the classroom
to characterize the alienation so much of the general population seems to feel toward
science and scientific discourse. Michael Halliday and James R. Martin suggest that
part of this reaction is that the lexicogrammar of science can make one’s native
language is made to feel foreign to the uninitiated (2003, p. 4). While a specialized
language is necessary for scientific endeavors, a better understanding of how everyday
language is changed into a technical language could help scientists better communicate
with the general population.
For the
non-scientist, then, scientific language is “foreign,” opaque, alienating, all of
which can foster mistrust toward the scientific community, especially when the complexities
of scientific discourse seem unnecessary or a deliberately erected barrier to communication.
As Lemke (1990, p. 172) describes it “It is a foreign “register” … … within English,
and it sounds foreign and uncomfortable to most.” According to Halliday and Martin
(2003, p. 21), “The language of science, though forward-looking in its origins,
has become increasingly anti-democratic: its arcane grammatical metaphor sets apart
those who understand it and shields them from those who do not.” Charges of elitism,
often aptly, are frequently hurled at the academy as a whole, not just at the scientific
community, and all academics and scholars should consider how to more clearly communicate
their crucial research and knowledge to a general population. For instance, how
accessible is this paper, which is about communication barriers, to those without
some knowledge of and training in language theory or philosophy? This dilemma is
especially salient for the sciences, because of the various crises the world at
large is facing. This has been driven home with the most recent global crisis, the
novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2), that has infected millions of people, caused hundreds
of thousands of deaths in less than half a year, and that has wrought unknown havoc
on local and global economic systems. While misunderstanding this paper might create
ill-will or add to the anti-intellectualism marring too much of US society, misunderstanding
or dismissing science has much more dire consequences. The current anti-science
response to the global pandemic is just the latest anti-science discourse that is
posing an existential threat. It joins previous backlashes such as the anti-vaccine
movement that has resulted in the reemergence of measles as a serious health threat
and climate change denialism that has endangered life as we know it on this planet.
It is easy to blame these crises solely on the lack of scientific literacy among
the general public. Perhaps, however, the scientific community—and academia at large—should
remember the lesson in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex of looking to oneself for the flaw
destroying the kingdom. If scientific discourse is to remain an authoritative one,
it needs to practice some outreach by being less esoteric, less monologic. In other
words, scientific discourse needs to be more willing to recognize the messiness
of the conditions outside the laboratory and more willing to listen to and incorporate
the heteroglossic voices and knowledge of the lay population as it seeks to disseminate
its vital findings to a world in crisis.
References
Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific
knowledge. Development and Change, 26, 413–439.
Bakhtin, M., Vern, W. M., Emerson, C., & Holquist, M. (1986). Speech
genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas.
Bakhtin, M., Holquist, M., & Emerson C. (1981). The dialogic imagination.
four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas.
Dickson, D. (2005). The case for a ‘deficit model’ of science communication.
SciDevNet. https://www.scidev.net/global/communication/editorials/the-case-for-a-deficit-model-of-science-communic.html.
Chouquet, J., Guerrieri, G., Pellissier, L., & Vaux, L. (2017). Normalization
by evaluation in linear logic. In Preproceedings of the international workshop
on trends in linear logic and applications, TLLA. https://www.i2m.univ-amu.fr/perso/lionel.vaux/pub/nbell-tlla.pdf.
Clark, K., & Holquist, M. (1984). Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University.
Halliday, M. A., & Martin, J. R. (2003). Writing science: Literacy and
discursive power. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203209936.
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. (2019, October 26). Recommendations
for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical
journals. Retrieved from: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.
Keller, E. F., & Longino, H. E. (1996). Feminism and science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy within/in
the postmodern. London: Routledge.
Lemke, J. L. (1990). Talking science: Language, learning, and values.
New York: Ablex Publishing Corporation. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203451311.
Meadows, A. J. (1985). The scientific paper as an archaeological artifact. Journal
of Information Science, 11, 27–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/016555158501100104.
Morson, G. S., & Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaics.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Nagari, M., Gera, A., Jonsson, S., & Bloch, G. (2019). Bumble bee workers
give up sleep to care for offspring that are not their own. Current Biology,
29(20), 3488–3493.
Oxford English dictionary. (2014). Normalization. In Oxford English dictionary.
Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/128273?redirectedFrom=Normalization#eid.
Wulster-Radcliffe, M. C., Hamernik, D. L., Reynolds, L., Lewis, G. S., &
Zinn, S. (2015). Scientific publications: From the stone tablet to the electronic
tablet. Animal Frontiers, 5(3), 45–50.