Scientific Discourse

While I was reading Bitzer, I came across a quote on page 8 that confused me. “Neither scientific nor poetic discourse requires an audience in the same sense.” (The sense being that the audience is composed of “those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change.”) He further adds that “the scientist can produce a discourse expressive or generative of knowledge without engaging another mind.” There is a rhetoric to science. A scientist’s audience is mostly made up of other scientists. Other scientists are capable of being influenced by the author and they can also serve as mediators of change. Indeed, that is the whole thought/concept of science: All scientists publish and publicize their findings in hopes of expanding scientific knowledge even further. It is blasphemous in science to keep your findings to yourself.  Yes, a scientist can create a discourse that is generative of knowledge all by his- or herself, however where would science be today if that was how scientists actually operated? Nowhere.

In my Writing about Science class we have been looking at science writing (writing about science for a non-scientific audience, like the public). We took news articles written about scientific discoveries and compared the two, in terms of language and what content was or was not given to the public. Most of the articles the class found were fairly factual and didn’t have any glaring errors. Most of the articles featured information that was pulled from the Results and Discussion sections of scholarly papers. Technical language and results were left out. Where I mostly take issue is with the headlines used for each article. One example that sticks out in my mind is a study of women who take vitamins. The headline of the news article was along the lines of “Vitamins lead to early deaths.” The article reported that more women who took vitamins died an average of a few years younger than women who took no vitamins. The scholarly paper and news article did both go onto specify that this could be because women who take vitamins may have some health condition that already adversely affects their health; it may not be only vitamins that affect the age of death. While the news article did point this out, the headline was so shocking, readers may not have understood that vitamins can still positively affect their health.

When Vatz speaks about the essence of rhetoric and situations he says that “situations obtain their character from the rhetoric which surrounds them or creates them” (p. 159). Further down on the page he also says “there was a ‘Cuban Missile  Crisis’ in 1962, not because of an event, but mainly because acts of rhetorical creation took place which created a political crisis as well.” What does that mean for climate change? I know that there seems to be data supporting either view, but does all the talk (i.e. rhetoric) around the subject give it validity (or power)? A less hairy example would perhaps be Pluto. Science journalists picked the story up and ran with it. The drama surrounding the situation came from the “talk” around it. The simple fact that Pluto was no longer considered, by definition, a planet does not stir the pot by itself, nor does any other fact by itself.