Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present

280 Pages·2002·1.37 MB·English

by  Alan G. Gross

Communicating Science:
The Scientific Article from the
17th Century to the Present
ALAN G. GROSS
JOSEPH E. HARMON
MICHAEL REIDY
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Communicating Science
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C S
OMMUNICATING CIENCE
The Scientific Article from the
17th Century to the Present
ALAN G. GROSS
JOSEPH E. HARMON
MICHAEL REIDY
1
2002
1
Oxford New York
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and an associated company in Berlin
Copyright © 2002 by Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, and Michael Reidy
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gross, Alan G.
Communicating science : the scientific article from the 17th century to the present/
Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, Michael Reidy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-19-513454-0 (cloth)
1. Scientific literature—History. 2. Science—Language—History. 3. Technical writing—History.
I. Gross, Alan G. II. Harmon, Joseph (Joseph E.) III. Reidy, Michael (Michael S.) IV. Title
Q225.5 .G79 2001
808(cid:1).0665—dc21 2001039089
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Rona E. Harmon (1955–2001)
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PREFACE
In January 1665, Denis de Sallo published the first issue of the French Journal des
Sçavans(Journal of the Learned), one of whose stated purposes was “to make known
experiments that might serve to explain natural phenomena.” Two months later in
England, Henry Oldenburg decided to expand his role as unofficial letter box for
scientific correspondence in England and Europe and inaugurated the monthly pub-
lication of technical letters in Philosophical Transactions—“Giving some accompt of
the ... ingenious in many considerable parts of the world.” Thus the scientific jour-
nal article was born. This birth was key in the then-fledgling enterprise of science.
It permitted the relatively rapid and accurate transmittal of new discoveries and ideas
from one researcher to a community of researchers—who could then propagate, re-
fute, accept, ignore, or extend the original claims. Emerging from letters and essays
and competing with books, this new medium developed a style and format that,
eventually, would make it the preferred mode of presentation and debate for new
claims of scientific knowledge.
Despite the obvious importance of the scientific article, there exists as yet no
comprehensive survey of its development as a representation of science and as a
medium for its communication. There are many studies of rhetorical and linguistic
elements of the scientific article based on small samples selected from a single jour-
nal covering a limited historical period, as well as samples selected for the reputa-
tion of their authors as scientists rather than their typicality as examples of scien-
tific prose. In addition, while numerous European countries actively participated in
the origin and development of modern science, most studies are of English science
exclusively or of existing translations. Few trustworthy generalizations can be drawn
from these limited studies. And to neglect telling the rhetorical history of the scien-
tific article is to leave an important gap in our understanding of the history of sci-
ence. This book is meant to fill that gap.
By examining the scientific article from its debut in the 17th century to the pres-
ent, we will track the progress of an evolving genre of discourse continuously en-
gaged in three acts: the creation of arguments for and against knowledge claims about
the natural world, the artful deployment of these arguments in a text, and their rep-
resentation in the syntax and semantics of natural languages. Not coincidentally,
these three acts parallel the central categories of classical rhetoric: the invention of
arguments, their presentation, and the style in which they are embodied. (We have
viii PREFACE
changed Aristotle’s “arrangement” to “presentation” to include tables, graphics, and
features of format.)
Our goal is not to reduce science to mere rhetoric, only to acknowledge that
communicative and argumentative theory forms a legitimate intellectual basis for
viewing the practice of science. It is, after all, only through publication that new
knowledge claims become fully engaged in a struggle for existence. And only in this
public context do scientists take full responsibility for the veracity of their claims,
or lack thereof.
Any contemporary reader of the scientific literature knows intuitively that 20th-
century scientific prose is a very specialized use of language distant from the general
register of contemporary intellectual prose and from its 17th-century counterpart.
What is not known, however, is when or how this change came about. This book
seeks to explore and map this change as it occurred in English, French, and
German—three very different languages, all of which were adapted to the same in-
tellectual purpose. In particular, we address the following questions: (1) In the sci-
entific article viewed over time, what are the trends in style, presentation, and ar-
gument—the traditional components of rhetoric? (2) Can the trends, or patterns of
development, that our analysis uncovers be explained? In answering these questions,
we tried to take into consideration both national differences, such as those between
France and England in the 17th century, and disciplinary differences, such as those
between a well-established discipline (e.g., astronomy in the 18th century) and an
emerging discipline (e.g., geology in the 18th century).
The introduction will set forth our method for gathering a representative sam-
ple of scientific texts spanning four centuries and three languages and for analyzing
the selected texts. It reports not only how we performed these tasks, but also why.
Then chapter 1 presents an example of our method by applying it to two articles in
the life sciences, one from the 17th century, the other from the 20th. Our purpose
here is twofold: to serve as a trial run for our analysis method and to dramatize the
many changes in style, presentation, and argument that have occurred by compar-
ing two articles published nearly 300 years apart. Next come four pairs of chapters
devoted to the implementation of our method on a century-by-century basis: each
pair consists of one chapter on style and presentation and one on argument. Within
these eight chapters, we discuss our results from an analysis of 1,804 short passages
for style and 430 whole articles for presentation and argument. By analyzing this
large sample in a systematic manner, we hoped to arrive at plausible generalizations
about communicative and argumentative practices as they changed over time.
In each pair of century chapters, we deliberately omitted any overarching the-
oretical explanation for the trends and patterns detected. Although we left this task,
on purpose, to the final chapter, we need to establish up front that any explanation
of the developing patterns of communicative and argumentative behavior must avoid
intentional language.
In “Three Ways of Spilling Ink” (1966), John L. Austin differentiates carefully
among three expressions: “on purpose,” “intentionally,” and “deliberately.” While
in many contexts these words can be used interchangeably without confusion, Austin
insists that they have meanings that are importantly different from each other. If I
shoplift a candy bar, I certainly acted intentionally. But did I steal the candy bar on
purpose? Deliberately?
PREFACE ix
Our interest is not in how these words differ, but in the fact that all of them,
and all of their siblings—“he meant it,” “it’s his doing,” “he’s to blame,” and so
forth—assign some degree of responsibility to the actors involved. But of the changes
we have chronicled—changes in titles and sentence length, in headings and the use
of verbs—we cannot say that they were done on purpose, or intentionally, or
deliberately.
Of course, in the latter part of the 20th century especially, some of these have
been codified in style manuals, in the stylistic requirements of specific journals, and
in academic textbooks on technical writing. At least as far as these codified factors
are concerned, scientists do now act intentionally, deliberately, and on purpose. But
we must not confuse this codification with the fact of the changes as they originally
appeared. And we must also acknowledge that there are simply too many changes
ever to codify them all. What individual or institution could possibly document,
much less intentionally orchestrate, the large suite of changes we are chronicling?
“No one” is the obvious answer.
Any explanation of these changes must be causal in some sense of that difficult
word. Our last chapter, therefore, explains the trends and patterns of development
described in the preceding chapters as an instance of evolutionary change. To make
this claim, we adapted a version of selection theory, an offshoot of the evolutionary
epistemology championed by philosophers Stephen Toulmin, David Hull, and James
Griesemer and William Wimsatt. In our evolutionary model, the population of sci-
entific articles constitutes the species; each individual article, an organism, the locus
for change. Over time, the style, presentation, and argument in scientific articles con-
tinually vary, and these variants selectively reproduce as a consequence of the chang-
ing needs of the diverse scientific disciplines. This process of selection creates the
communicative and argumentative lineage whose origin and progress our model is
meant to explain.
We divided the time span covered in this book into centuries for convenience
only: this approach greatly facilitates our comparisons among style, presentation,
and argument over time. It might be argued that nothing has been more productive
of historical bias than the tendency to regard calendar demarcations as freighted with
significance. Despite the recent ballyhoo, for example, the “21st century” and the
“new millennium” mean only another year. But in the end, we decided this arbi-
trary division of time worked best for expository purposes.
Our primary audience for the book is students and scholars interested in sci-
entific communication from a combined historical, rhetorical, social, and linguistic
perspective. This is now a robust and eclectic group housed in many disciplines—
in sharp contrast to the anemic condition a mere 15 years ago. We also hope that
at least some working scientists will be interested in our book since our arguments
and conclusions have some bearing on the soundness of their process of writing, an
act that occupies much of their workday.
Against widespread opinion to the contrary, we contend that the current sci-
entific article is, on the whole, an accurate reflection of the world as science con-
ceives it, an effective means of securing the claims of science, and an efficient medium
for communicating the knowledge it creates. Our conclusions thus challenge the cri-
tiques of stylistic “purists” who insist that modern scientific prose is a communica-
tive scandal.