Language as a Scientific Tool: Shaping Scientific Language Across Time and National Traditions

244 Pages·2016·2.34 MB·English

by  Miles MacLeod

Language as a Scientific Tool
Language is the most essential medium of scientifi c activity. Many historians,
sociologists, and science studies scholars have investigated scientifi c language
for this reason, but few have examined those cases where language itself has
become an object of scientifi c discussion. Over the centuries scientists have
sought to control, refi ne, and engineer language for various epistemologi-
cal, communicative, and nationalistic purposes. This book seeks to explore
cases in the history of science in which questions or concerns with language
have bubbled to the surface in scientifi c discourse. This opens a window
into the particular ways in which scientists have conceived of and construed
language as the central medium of their activity across different cultural
contexts and places and the clashes and tensions that have manifested their
many attempts to engineer it to both preserve and enrich its function. The
subject of language draws out many topics that have mostly been neglected
in the history of science, such as the connection between the emergence of
national languages and the development of science within national settings,
and allows us to connect together historical episodes from many understud-
ied cultural and linguistic venues such as Eastern European and medieval
Hebrew science.
Miles MacLeod is Professor for Philosophy of Science at the University
of Twente, The Netherlands.
Rocío G. Sumillera is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and
German, University of Granada, Spain.
Jan Surman is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leibniz Graduate
School at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe
in Marburg.
Ekaterina Smirnova is currently affi liated with Sciences Po (Paris) and the
STS Center in EUSP.
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Language as a Scientific Tool
Shaping Scientifi c Language Across
Time and National Tradition
Edited by Miles MacLeod, Rocío
G. Sumillera, Jan Surman, and
Ekaterina Smirnova
First published 2016
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacLeod, Miles, editor.
Title: Language as a scientific tool : shaping scientific language across
time and national tradition / edited by Miles MacLeod [and three others].
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies in
cultural history ; 43 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015041763 | ISBN 9781138101050 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Communication in science. | Science—Language. |
Language, Universal.
Classification: LCC Q223 .L264 2016 | DDC 501/.4—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041763
ISBN: 978-1-138-10105-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-65725-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xi
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
MILES MACLEOD, ROCÍO G. SUMILLERA, JAN SURMAN,
AND EKATERINA SMIRNOVA
2 Modern Science and the Spirit of Language, Literature,
and Philology 9
MATTHIAS DÖRRIES
PART 1
Language, Rhetoric, and History
3 How Language Became a Tool: The Reconceptualisation
of Language and the Empirical Turn in Seventeenth-Century
Britain 25
MILES MACLEOD
4 The Beginnings of Scientific Terminology in Polish: Kłos’s
Algorithmus (1538) and Grzepski’s Geometria (1566) 42
JERZY BINIEWICZ
5 Language and History in the Context of the Société des
Observateurs de l’Homme (1799–1804) 57
MARTIN HERRNSTADT AND LAURENS SCHLICHT
6 Contested Boundaries: How Scientists Deal with Uncertainty
and Ambiguity in Language 74
PRIYA VENKATESAN HAYS
viii Contents
PART 2
The Creation of Scientific Terminology
7 Reading Astrolabes in Medieval Hebrew 89
JOSEFINA RODRÍGUEZ ARRIBAS
8 Opyt in the Social Lexicon of Modernity: The Experience/
Experiment Dichotomy 113
EKATERINA SMIRNOVA
9 Linguistic Precision and Scientific Accuracy: Searching for
the Proper Name of “Oxygen” in French, Danish, and Polish 131
JAN SURMAN
10 Mathematical Machines: Automating Thinking? 149
HELENA DURNOVÁ
PART 3
Imagining Universal Languages
11 Seventeenth-Century British Projects for a Universal
Language and Their Reception in the Augustan Age:
The Cases of John Wilkins and Jonathan Swift 167
ROCÍO G. SUMILLERA
12 One Second Language for Mankind: The Rise and
Decline of the World Auxiliary Language Movement
in the Belle Époque 187
MARKUS KRAJEWSKI
13 Impacts of a Global Language on Science: Are There
Disadvantages? 199
SCOTT L. MONTGOMERY
Contributors 219
Index 225
Figures
5.1 Illustration of the function of the judgement ( proposition)
from Sicard’s Cours d’instruction 65
11.1 Wilkins, A n Essay , Ddd2r 179
11.2 Wilkins, A n Essay, Ddd2 v 180
11.3 Wilkins, A n Essay, Eee2r 181