Language as a Scientific Tool

Shaping Scientific Language Across Time and National Traditions

Miles MacLeod, Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman, Ekaterina Smirnova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317327493
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Language is the most essential medium of scientific activity. Many historians, sociologists and science studies scholars have investigated scientific language for this reason, but only few have examined those cases where language itself has become an object of scientific discussion. Over the centuries scientists have sought to control, refine and engineer language for various epistemological, 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 scientific 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 understudied cultural and linguistic venues such as Eastern European and medieval Hebrew science.

1 Introduction

Miles MacLeod, Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and Ekaterina Smirnova

DOI: 10.4324/9781315657257-1

It goes without saying that language is the central medium in which science operates. However, it is not the only medium of science. Science takes place in material practices and processes; it takes place in spaces like laboratories and computer labs, it communicates and constructs through visual images and graphical representations. But the fundamental part of language in communicating and recording information, and in theory-building itself, has rightly attracted a spectrum of philosophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science interested in language. These scholars have been primarily interested in how the cultural constraints of language have informed and determined the practice of science, fueled scientific controversies, and governed the shape and content of scientific theories.¹ One might see little room for yet another volume that explores how the language in which scientists have operated and communicated reflects or embodies a scientific culture, a culture which in turn reflects or embodies wider political and socio-cultural practices, relations, and attitudes. Nor would there seem room for yet another volume on how scientists employ rhetoric and linguistic devices to convince or cajole others to their point of view. In fact we do not provide a discussion about scientific rhetoric, although we will not deny that much of what we have documented has rhetorical function and could be studied as such.

What our collection of texts is interested in is somewhat different. As much as language is a medium of science, it is also at times an object of active scientific reflection and manipulation. Scientists and natural philosophers have a history of discussing, theorizing about, and restructuring language in science.² This history traces back to ancient discussions about nature and culture, through medieval discussions on instrumentation, and into the earliest sixteenth and seventeenth centuries concerns with specialized natural historical and experimental language, universal languages, and mathematics as the language of the heavens.³ It might even be said that as soon as anything that can be roughly considered “science” existed there have also been discussions and debates on language, if only on the matter of scientific terminology—one only has to think of the frequent discussions amongst scientists of various nations or ethnic groups regarding how to vernacularize science into a particular national or ethnic language. And certainly, terminology planning commissions—both national and international—have played an integral part in driving scientific thought about language at least since the late nineteenth century. Finally, the recent advent of computation has turned scientific attention to questions regarding the relationships between natural languages and computational or mathematical languages.⁴ At the same time, the issue of how to translate scientific writings from a natural language to another, and thus facilitate the transfer of knowledge, constituted a parallel, although not equal, source of questions on how to model language to enable flexibility and creativity for generating new terminology and enable intercultural communication at the same time. Here we are in company with feminist and postcolonial studies, which have recently begun to explore the broader societal role of scientific language as a means of controlling cultural hegemony.⁵

We are interested in the historical and contemporary episodes in which scientific groups have taken up the subject of language themselves and attempted to reform or restructure it to achieve what has turned out to be a wide range of instrumental goals. For these episodes we find the tool metaphor most apt, since in the cases we discuss, natural philosophers and scientists are concerned with how to shape, manipulate, and define either language as a whole or particular languages in order to achieve a certain end, and in many instances this has afforded them philosophical claims about language and its role in science and society more broadly.

In more concrete terms Language as a Scientific Tool considers cases in which researchers have objectified the linguistic medium in which they ordinarily operate, attempting to analyze it and ultimately control or reform it in some way. We study the means by which these processes of objectification and manipulation have taken place, but also the variety of ends that these linguistic restructuring projects have been put to and the constraints governing them. These ends are diverse and reflect the cultural and social contexts in which they are historically situated. They have included epistemic ends that aim to define and construct scientific language in a way that best reflects a set of historically contingent epistemic values. Such values express how language needs to be understood and applied to best obtain and report information about the world. They have historically included preferences and claims for clarity, tractability, and communicability but also translatability and more recently computability.⁶ These ends have also included desires to use ideas and concepts of language to impose or promote an ontological perspective that privileges certain languages like the languages of mathematics and physics. In this respect, attempts have been made historically to portray language as out there in the universe, or at least to centralize the role of the metaphor of language in representing the basic organization of nature. Finally, much of the scientific concern with language has been driven by nationalistic ends as scientists have sought to give their own linguistic groups access to knowledge, but also to gain nationalistic control over its production through processes of vernacularization.⁷

As such we are concerned with a plethora of issues related by the common disposition of scientists and natural philosophers to treat language as a tool. We map some of the different historical and cultural contexts in which this disposition has taken shape, and discuss how these contexts have driven particular interactions with the subject of language or individual languages, and the particular structures and properties of languages and their evolution in these contexts. Themes which bubble to the surface as a result of these case studies include the relationship between general or natural languages and the subcategories of scientific languages; the connection between the emergence of national languages and the development of science within national settings; and the relations between the creation of scientific languages and the appearance of new scientific disciplines. Of particular interest is the repeated tension between the constraints of everyday languages and entrenched scientific languages, with the social and cultural contexts they embody, and the desire of scientists to manipulate and deploy language to particular ends. These have frequently collided in scientific processes of reforming language, requiring compromise and the negotiation by scientists of thickets of meaning and the resistance of language to control. Language as a Scientific Tool is the first volume to explicitly tackle these questions across a range of historical and cultural contexts.

In particular we pay attention to science in languages other than English, bringing together scholars working on the historical reception of science and the modern production of science in European and Eastern European languages. We have obtained perspectives on these questions of language from places and historical contexts that are under-represented in contemporary history, sociology, and philosophy of science but that are necessary to having any broad scope of understanding of how language has been manipulated and reformed in different cultural environments and what different ends have informed this process.

The volume is arranged in an opening essay and three parts, each unfolding a different approach to the complex relationship between language and science. In his opening essay, Matthias Dörries understands the emergence of modern physics as inseparable from the practices and knowledge of languages. While the statement that modern science in Europe evolved from Renaissance culture and its study of ancient texts and languages is a commonplace in standard histories of science, Dörries argues that historians have only recently started to study systematically the linguistic and literary environments that nurtured new ideas in early modern natural philosophy. His essay compares ways in which the research of three physicists (Galileo, Heinrich Kayser, and Werner Heisenberg) referred to language in their scientific research, proving that their reflection on language remarkably intertwined with their scientific work, rather than merely constituting marginal and anecdotal concerns.

Part 1 of the volume addresses some of the discourses and contexts in which language itself has become a participant and taken on functional roles and how specific problems came to be viewed as problems of language or problems language should resolve. In the first place we are interested in the historical links that track the emergence of one of the principal ways in which language is considered a tool for much of modern science, namely, as an arbitrary symbolic system of representation. This occurs during the period usually labeled the Enlightenment and is tied up in the Western context with anti-Aristotelian philosophical movements. Today, the idea that language is an arbitrary tool rather than a resource of intrinsic facts about the world is a universal attitude. It is a given for most scientific enterprises except perhaps physics and mathematics, as mathematics has a long history of being treated as a language with ontological significance. As Miles MacLeod explains, this attitude was not one that came down from posterity to natural philosophers of the seventeenth century, but had to be constructed. Those most active in this construction were the British Empiricists, who traced their ideas to Francis Bacon's early polemics against the “idols of the marketplace”. Indeed this reconstruction of language as arbitrary and free of any inherent meaning about the world or the universe served many contextual purposes such as rhetorically undermining competitors like scholasticism, undergirding specific epistemic and ontological values of experimental philosophy and natural history. The reconstruction of language as a tool at the hands of people like Locke was a deliberated construction. Whatever scientists think obvious today was not necessarily obvious at the time and had to be justified in complex ways and articulated to serve various argumentative ends.

The seventeenth century also constitutes the starting point of the essay by Jerzy Biniewicz, who changes the geographical coordinates of his study from Britain to Poland. His essay analyzes the first scientific and scientific-didactic texts that appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with a view to understanding the mechanism of forming a scientific picture of the world that differed from popular knowledge. Language hence appears as an instrument of thinking, description, and communication that enables encoding, describing, and communicating the world. Martin Herrnstadt and Laurens Schlicht's essay connects discussions on language with those on history in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, a time when language was situated in the complex intersections between nature, the savage, and civilization and interest in the “real” savage or the “real” native grew, as the writings of Roch Ambroise Sicard, Jean Itard, or Joseph-Marie Degérando illustrate. This interest is inseparable from a specific view on what history is and from a larger willingness to explore the “real” nature of language, which was thought should conform to the universal laws behind reason. By focusing on the figures of the savage and the deaf-mute, Schlicht demonstrates how language became simultaneously a tool and an object of research and how research on the roots of language was paradoxically based on empirically studying individuals without any language at all. Finally, Priya Venkatesan Hays shows that when assessing question of uncertainty in scientific language, politicians and scientists seem to be on opposite ends of the epistemological spectrum. Politicians would like for scientists to caveat their claims, while amongst scientists the opposite occurs. Venkatesan Hays's essay addresses how scientists mediate the uncertainty and ambiguity of language to manage the rhetorical effects of language in their work.

Part 2 deals with the creation of scientific terminology through four case studies with different national backgrounds and linguistic combinations. The first essay is by Josefina Rodríguez Arribas, who focuses on three twelfth-century treatises in Hebrew by Abraham ibn Ezra devoted to the description and explanation of astrolabes. These treatises, which are amongst the earliest manifestations of scientific writing in Hebrew, are a means to research on the process of specialization and creation of technical terms in Hebrew in the Iberian Peninsula. Rodríguez Arribas argues that the scientific writings of authors such as Abraham ibn Ezra made medieval Hebrew a language capable of communicating science and of scientific research. The second case study investigates a particular transformation of the concept of opyt in Russian language at the verge of modernity. Ekaterina Smirnova explains that in Russian the term opyt designates two different concepts which in most European languages are expressed by different words: the concept of knowledge and skills and the concept of specially conducted and controlled procedures of testing and examination (in English, experience and experiment, respectively). The essay concentrates on this particular example to show how the appropriation and further usage of scientific concepts from other languages is influenced and constrained by the linguistic and cultural contexts of the translating language.

Third, Jan Surman traces the interrelations between science, language, and nationalism in nineteenth-century chemistry by focusing on the history of the term oxygène. Surman claims that the puristic renaming of the term in Danish and Polish can be understood as an intersection between scientific theory, an applied concept of scientific language, and the proposed ideal of national language. When the French Morveau-Lavoisier nomenclature system was established, it treated chemistry as a linguistic system, which opened a way for different appropriations of the terminology. As the terms were to denote “unique” features of their chemical objects, in due course the development of chemistry challenged traditional nomenclature, creating an opportunity to re-name compounds whose names were “false”. The phenomenon of name replacing occurred in Danish and Polish during the discussion about vernacularization of the language of science. While Lavoisier intended to make his terms “abstract” by choosing Greek forms, scholars opting for the vernacular were resolved to make science more understandable (as they put it), which led to different outcomes and generated new issues. In the fourth case study, Helena Durnová discusses the role of language in the history of computing technology: in the 1950s, the terminology in computing technology was still unstable, and different terms—loaded with ideological implications—were chosen by different groups. Concentrating on the use of language in the computing technology communities in the Soviet bloc, in particular in Czechoslovakia, this essay maps the use of various terms and discusses the possible strategic choices scientists faced in their construction of computational languages. Special emphasis is placed on those scientists concerned with translation into their own mother tongue and on how their terminology mirrored their belief in the power of the new technology.

Part 3 approaches from different perspectives the historically recurring issue of universal languages and their implication for scientific development. Rocío G. Sumillera's essay focuses on the interest in the seventeenth century in the creation of a universal language that would overcome the obstacles of the multiplicity of tongues, as well as solve the arbitrary relationship between things and words. Attention is particularly drawn to John Wilkins's An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) and to its impact on the literary imagination of Jonathan Swift: in Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift generally mocks the linguistic projects of the Royal Society, including the invention of a universal and philosophical language. Notwithstanding the apparent opposition between Wilkins's and Swift's linguistic ideas, both authors ultimately share the conviction that linguistic mutability is undesirable whereas a fixed language is the ideal. A different universal language project is analyzed by Markus Krajewski: the standardized auxiliary language designed by laymen such as Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof or Johann Martin Schleyer and advocated by renowned European scholars such as Louis Couturat and Wilhelm Ostwald around 1900. Because the project of the World Auxiliary Language Movement—which followed the example of Ido, a derivative of Esperanto—coincided with the beginning of World War I, the simplified globality the linguistic scheme aimed to establish was drastically interrupted.

To close the volume, Scott L. Montgomery reflects on the fact that English is currently the first world-scale language in the natural sciences, on the impact of a global language on science in the present, and on the limits and drawbacks of a powerful lingua franca gaining authority. Montgomery sets out to answer whether there are important disadvantages that stand out, and, if so, how serious they are both for the present and the future. Given the many years of training and the intense competition for resources and rewards in contemporary science, Montgomery postulates different ways to address such problems. Questions about fairness, access to knowledge, and linguistic diversity, for instance, are nowadays regularly posed, and this chapter precisely tackles central issues for the future of scientific endeavor, in terms of researchers themselves and their social practices.

One of the conclusions emerging from these essays is that language, the indispensable tool for science, is able to reflect, represent, and communicate the complexities and changing thoughts of scientific imagination and inventiveness thanks to its ever-changing nature and mal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Modern Science and the Spirit of Language, Literature, and Philology
• PART 1 Language, Rhetoric, and History
• PART 2 The Creation of Scientific Terminology
• PART 3 Imagining Universal Languages
• Contributors
• Index