essay on language science

September 1, 2020

The Language of Science

How the words we use have evolved over the past 175 years

By Moritz Stefaner , Lorraine Daston & Jen Christiansen

Moritz Stefaner and Christian Lässer

Credit: Moritz Stefaner and Christian Lässer

Since at least the 17th century, science has struggled with words. Francis Bacon, visionary of a new, experimental natural philosophy, called language an “idol of the marketplace”: a counterfeit currency we trade in so habitually that we no longer notice the gap between words and the world. True to its Baconian ideology, the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest scientific societies, made nullius in verba (roughly, “on no one's word”) its motto soon after it was established in 1660. Satirist Jonathan Swift parodied the Royal Society's suspicion of language in Gulliver's Travels , published in 1726: instead of conversing, some members of the Academy of Lagado carry around a sack of things that they exchange instead of words. Science aspired to show, not tell.

Yet science has never been speechless. Scientific journals also began in the 17th century, and since then, science has been all about communication—first and foremost between scientists and other scientists, but also with a broader public fascinated by the latest discoveries, inventions and speculations about fossils, electricity, atoms, computers, genes and galaxies. How to communicate about the world in words? Into the crack between words and things sprang images: woodcuts, engravings, lithographs, photographs, diagrams, graphics of all kinds. Modern science is ingeniously, intrinsically and extravagantly visual. No wonder “see” is a word whose popularity spans all 175 years of writing about science and technology in Scientific American .

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It is entirely in keeping with the visual spirit of scientific communication that the very words used in all 5,107 issues of Scientific American since 1845 should be turned into an image. Like the patterns in marbled paper, the word frequencies undulate, soaring and plunging as a function of time to track the way science talked about itself to itself. Epistemic virtues (which are to knowledge what moral virtues are to goodness) such as “certainty,” flanked by its boon companions “universal,” “rational” and “truth,” spiked in the middle decades of the 19th century, whereas clusters such as “imagination,” “intuition,” “conjecture” and “interpret” peaked suggestively between the 1950s and the 1970s. After World War II, when the most prominent scientists of the day—Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling—reflected on the wider significance of their science for a nonspecialist audience, values and assumptions taken for granted in research journals came out into the open in the pages of Scientific American .

Just as revealing as the jagged peaks and troughs are the trajectories of words that have persisted over time: “average,” “exception,” “cause,” “experiment,” “observation,” “standard,” “skill” and, yes, “see.” Instead of the Alps, these word landscapes resemble gently rolling hills: they have their ups and downs, but for the most part they are as steady as the horizon. They represent the enduring practices of science that survive revolutions in theories and even shifts in epistemic virtues.

Scientific images are multipurpose tools: they represent things, relationships, even arguments. But just as a map does not duplicate the territory it represents, words do not mirror the world in every detail. Although the relative frequencies of words used are highly suggestive, they cannot convey the texture of the magazine issue by issue. A reader nowadays might wonder: Where are the women? Why are some fields of research missing? Who paid for science back then? No image can tell the whole story, if only because the story that interests us changes over time. When images do succeed, they enlist sight in the cause of insight—in this case, a rippling physiognomy of 175 years of science for the curious public.  —L.D.

Credit: Moritz Stefaner and Christian Lässer ( graphics ), and Jen Christiansen ( captions )

To learn more about how the data were collected, analyzed and visualized, see “ How to Turn 175 Years of Words in Scientific American into an Image .” To search for your own favorite words and to explore other juxtapositions, visit “ Explore 175 Years of Words in Scientific American .”

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Speaking, writing and reading are integral to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language – what words and phrases they unconsciously choose and combine – can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguistics scholars seek to determine what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is acquired and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford . “Discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.”

The stories below represent some of the ways linguists have investigated many aspects of language, including its semantics and syntax, phonetics and phonology, and its social, psychological and computational aspects.

Understanding stereotypes

Stanford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use can correspond with biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

One study showed that a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can subtly perpetuate sexist stereotypes. Because of the statement’s grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Language can play a big role in how we and others perceive the world, and linguists work to discover what words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally

New Stanford research shows that sentences that frame one gender as the standard for the other can unintentionally perpetuate biases.

Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

New Stanford research shows that, over the past century, linguistic changes in gender and ethnic stereotypes correlated with major social movements and demographic changes in the U.S. Census data.

Exploring what an interruption is in conversation

Stanford doctoral candidate Katherine Hilton found that people perceive interruptions in conversation differently, and those perceptions differ depending on the listener’s own conversational style as well as gender.

Cops speak less respectfully to black community members

Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police.

How other languages inform our own

People speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it.

Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages other than our own and how they develop over time because it can help scholars understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

“All this research can help us discover what it means to be human,” Jurafsky said.

Stanford PhD student documents indigenous language of Papua New Guinea

Fifth-year PhD student Kate Lindsey recently returned to the United States after a year of documenting an obscure language indigenous to the South Pacific nation.

Students explore Esperanto across Europe

In a research project spanning eight countries, two Stanford students search for Esperanto, a constructed language, against the backdrop of European populism.

Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language​

A computer scientist discusses the evolution of computational linguistics and where it’s headed next.

Stanford research explores novel perspectives on the evolution of Spanish

Using digital tools and literature to explore the evolution of the Spanish language, Stanford researcher Cuauhtémoc García-García reveals a new historical perspective on linguistic changes in Latin America and Spain.

Language as a lens into behavior

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns correspond to particular behaviors, including how language can impact people’s buying decisions or influence their social media use.

For example, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online to better understand how a polarization of beliefs can occur on social media.

“We live in a very polarized time,” Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Analyzing the tweets of Republicans and Democrats

New research by Dora Demszky and colleagues examined how Republicans and Democrats express themselves online in an attempt to understand how polarization of beliefs occurs on social media.

Examining bilingual behavior of children at Texas preschool

A Stanford senior studied a group of bilingual children at a Spanish immersion preschool in Texas to understand how they distinguished between their two languages.

Predicting sales of online products from advertising language

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky and colleagues have found that products in Japan sell better if their advertising includes polite language and words that invoke cultural traditions or authority.

Language can help the elderly cope with the challenges of aging, says Stanford professor

By examining conversations of elderly Japanese women, linguist Yoshiko Matsumoto uncovers language techniques that help people move past traumatic events and regain a sense of normalcy.

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?  By Lera Boroditsky

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.

Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5

An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old."

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That's a lot of stuff!

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

1 S. C. Levinson and D. P. Wilkins, eds., Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2 Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3 B. Tversky et al., “ Cross-Cultural and Developmental Trends in Graphic Productions,” Cognitive Psychology 23(1991): 515–7; O. Fuhrman and L. Boroditsky, “Mental Time-Lines Follow Writing Direction: Comparing English and Hebrew Speakers.” Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2007): 1007–10.

4 L. Boroditsky, "Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?" Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2007): 34.

5 D. Casasanto et al., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English, Indonesian Greek, and Spanish," Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004): 575–80.

6 Ibid., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English and Greek" (in review); L. Boroditsky, "Does Language Shape Thought? English and Mandarin Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology 43, no. 1(2001): 1–22.

7 L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–79.

8 L. Boroditsky, "Linguistic Relativity," in L. Nadel ed., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (London: MacMillan, 2003), 917–21; B. W. Pelham et al., "Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 4(2002): 469–86; A. Tversky & D. Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211(1981): 453–58; P. Pica et al., "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group." Science 306(2004): 499–503; J. G. de Villiers and P. A. de Villiers, "Linguistic Determinism and False Belief," in P. Mitchell and K. Riggs, eds., Children's Reasoning and the Mind (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, in press); J. A. Lucy and S. Gaskins, "Interaction of Language Type and Referent Type in the Development of Nonverbal Classification Preferences," in Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 465–92; L. F. Barrett et al., "Language as a Context for Emotion Perception," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(2007): 327–32.

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The Hidden Bias of Science’s Universal Language

The vast majority of scientific papers today are published in English. What gets lost when other languages get left out?

Newton’s Principia Mathematica was written in Latin; Einstein’s first influential papers were written in German; Marie Curie’s work was published in French. Yet today, most scientific research around the world is published in a single language, English.

Since the middle of the last century, things have shifted in the global scientific community. English is now so prevalent that in some non-English speaking countries, like Germany, France, and Spain, English-language academic papers outnumber publications in the country’s own language several times over. In the Netherlands, one of the more extreme examples, this ratio is an astonishing 40 to 1.

A 2012 study from the scientific-research publication Research Trends examined articles collected by SCOPUS, the world’s largest database for peer-reviewed journals. To qualify for inclusion in SCOPUS, a journal published in a language other than English must at the very least include English abstracts; of the more than 21,000 articles from 239 countries currently in the database, the study found that 80 percent were written entirely in English. Zeroing in on eight countries that produce a high number of scientific journals, the study also found that the ratio of English to non-English articles in the past few years had increased or remained stable in all but one.

This gulf between English and the other languages means that non-English articles, when they get written at all, may reach a more limited audience. On SCImago Journal Rank —a system that ranks scientific journals by prestige, based on the citations their articles receive elsewhere—all of the top 50 journals are published in English and originate from either the U.S. or the U.K.

In short, scientists who want to produce influential, globally recognized work most likely need to publish in English—which means they’ll also likely have to attend English-language conferences, read English-language papers, and have English-language discussions. In a 2005 case study of Korean scientists living in the U.K., the researcher Kumju Hwang, then at the University of Leeds, wrote: “The reason that [non-native English-speaking scientists] have to use English, at a cost of extra time and effort, is closely related to their continued efforts to be recognized as having internationally compatible quality and to gain the highest possible reputation.”

It wasn’t always this way. As the science historian Michael Gorin explained in Aeon earlier this year, from the 15th through the 17th century, scientists typically conducted their work in two languages: their native tongue when discussing their work in conversation, and Latin in their written work or when corresponding with scientists outside their home country.

“Since Latin was no specific nation’s native tongue, and scholars all across European and Arabic societies could make equal use of it, no one ‘owned’ the language. For these reasons, Latin became a fitting vehicle for claims about universal nature,” Gordin wrote. “But everyone in this conversation was polyglot, choosing the language to suit the audience. When writing to international chemists, Swedes used Latin; when conversing with mining engineers, they opted for Swedish.”

As the scientific revolution progressed through 17th and 18th centuries, Gordin continued, Latin began to fall out of favor as the scientific language of choice:

Galileo Galilei published his discovery of the moons of Jupiter in the Latin Sidereus Nuncius of 1610, but his later major works were in Italian. As he aimed for a more local audience for patronage and support, he switched languages. Newton’s Principia (1687) appeared in Latin, but his Opticks of 1704 was English (Latin translation 1706).

But as this shift made it more difficult for scientists to understand work done outside of their home countries, the scientific community began to slowly consolidate its languages again. By the early 19th century, just three—French, English, and German—accounted for the bulk of scientists’ communication and published research; by the second half of the 20th century, only English remained dominant as the U.S. strengthened its place in the world, and its influence in the global scientific community has continued to increase ever since.

As a consequence, the scientific vocabularies of many languages have failed to keep pace with new developments and discoveries. In many languages, the  words “quark” and “chromosome,” for example, are simply transliterated from English. In a 2007 paper, the University of Melbourne linguist Joe Lo Bianco described the phenomenon of “domain collapse,” or “the progressive deterioration of competence in [a language] in high-level discourses.” In other words, as a language stops adapting to changes in a given field, it can eventually cease to be an effective means of communication in certain contexts altogether.

In many countries, college-level science education is now conducted in English—partially because studying science in English is good preparation for a future scientific career, and partially because the necessary words often don’t exist in any other language. A 2014 report from the University of Oxford found that the use of English as the primary language of education in non-English speaking countries is on the rise, a phenomenon more prevalent in higher education but also increasingly present in primary and secondary schools.

But even with English-language science education around the world, non-native speakers are still often at a disadvantage.

“Processing the content of the lectures in a different language required a big energetic investment, and a whole lot more concentration than I am used to in my own language,” said Monseratt Lopez, a McGill University biophysicist originally from Mexico.

“I was also shy to communicate with researchers, from fear of not understanding quite well what they were saying,” she added. “Reading a research paper would take me a whole day or two as opposed to a couple of hours.”

Sean Perera, a researcher in science communication from the Australian National University, described the current situation this way: “The English language plays a dominant role, one could even call it a hegemony … As a consequence, minimal room or no room at all is allowed to communicators of other languages to participate in science in their own voice—they are compelled to translate their ideas into English.”

In practice, this attitude selects for only a very specific way of looking at the world, one that can make it easy to discount other types of information as nothing more than folklore. But knowledge that isn’t produced via traditional academic research methods can still have scientific value—indigenous tribes in Indonesia , for example, knew from their oral histories how to recognize the signs of an impeding earthquake, enabling them to flee to higher ground before the 2004 tsunami hit. Similarly, the Luritja people of central Australia have passed down an ancient legend of a deadly “fire devil” crashing from the sun to the Earth—which, geologists now believe, describes a meteorite that landed around 4,700 years ago.

“It is all part of a growing recognition that Indigenous knowledge has a lot to offer the scientific community,” the BBC wrote in an article describing the Luritja story. “But there is a problem—indigenous languages are dying off at an alarming rate, making it increasingly difficult for scientists and other experts to benefit from such knowledge.”

Science’s language bias, in other words, extends beyond what’s printed on the page of a research paper. As Perera explained it, so long as English remains the gatekeeper to scientific discourse, shoehorning scientists of other cultural backgrounds into a single language comes with “the great cost of losing their unique ways of communicating ideas.”

“They gradually lose their own voice,” he said—and over time, other ways of understanding the world can simply fade away.

Language and Scientific Research

• © 2021
• Wenceslao J. Gonzalez 0

Center for Research in Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of A Coruña, Ferrol, Spain

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• Provides a comprehensive exploration of the semantics of science
• Covers both basic scientific research and the development of applied science
• Argues that language affects the structure and dynamics of science and is therefore not a mere expressive instrumental sign

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, the relevance of language for scientific research.

Wenceslao J. Gonzalez

The Problem of Reference and Potentialities of the Language in Science

Semantics of science and theory of reference: an analysis of the role of language in basic science and applied science, on the role of language in scientific research: language as analytic, expressive, and explanatory tool.

• Ladislav Kvasz

Language and Change in Scientific Research: Evolution and Historicity

Scientific inquiry and the evolution of language.

• Jeffrey Barrett

Language, History and the Making of Accurate Observations

• Anastasios Brenner

Scientific Language in the Context of Truth and Fiction

The evolution of truth and belief, models, fictions and artifacts.

• Tarja Knuuttila

Language in Mathematics and in Empirical Sciences

On mathematical language: characteristics, semiosis and indispensability.

• Jesus Alcolea

Characterization of Scientific Prediction from Language: An Analysis of Nicholas Rescher’s Proposal

• Amanda Guillan

Back Matter

• Historicity
• Mathhematics

About this book

This book analyzes the role of language in scientific research and develops the semantics of science from different angles. The philosophical investigation of the volume is divided into four parts, which covers both basic science and applied science: I) The Problem of Reference and Potentialities of the Language in Science; II) Language and Change in Scientific Research: Evolution and Historicity; III) Scientific Language in the Context of Truth and Fiction; and IV) Language in Mathematics and in Empirical Sciences.

Editors and Affiliations

About the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Language and Scientific Research

Editors : Wenceslao J. Gonzalez

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60537-7

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-60536-0 Published: 28 April 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-60539-1 Published: 28 April 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-60537-7 Published: 27 April 2021

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XI, 285

Number of Illustrations : 15 b/w illustrations

Topics : Philosophy of Science , Philosophy of Language

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The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics

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Semantics is the systematic study of linguistic meaning. The past fifty years have seen an explosion of research into the semantics of natural languages. There are now sophisticated theories of phenomena that were not even known to exist mere decades ago. Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. The aim of this volume is to re-address these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorizing. The volume addresses a range of foundational questions about formal semantics: what is the best methodology for semantic theorizing, and should experimental techniques play a crucial role? How should we understand the use of formal tools such as model theory, and are there better formal alternatives? How should we think about compositionality? What does semantic theory tell us about the language faculty or linguistic competence? What are the advantages of dynamic semantics? How do formal semantic theories relate to philosophical notions of context, content, interpretation, and propositions?

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Literature and science.

• Michael H. Whitworth Michael H. Whitworth Faculty of English Language and Literature, Merton College Oxford
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.990
• Published online: 28 September 2020

Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.

• Gillian Beer
• historicism
• inscription
• Bruno Latour
• literature and science
• science studies

The historicist study of the relations of literature and science is a critical practice that draws eclectically on a range of linguistic, literary, and cultural theory, and which has also been significantly informed by concepts and practices in the fields of history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. These bodies of theory have crucially enabled it to overcome deeply ingrained cultural assumptions about the relative statuses of literary and scientific forms of knowledge, but its focus on historical frameworks and contingencies means that practitioners have not always fully articulated their working premises, preferring in many cases to build on the practices of their predecessors. As a field, it has been open to theory but ambivalent about theorization. Moreover, it exhibits significant internal divisions regarding methodology. In part these correspond to the periods under study, but there are also significant methodological divergences associated with North America and the United Kingdom. Although there is significant interaction between Anglophone critics as well as many exceptions to the rule, North American practice as exemplified by Configurations , the journal of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, takes a greater interest in contemporary culture, including developments such as posthumanism, visual cultures, digital humanities, programming languages, and video games; it is less interested than its British counterpart in historical literature and culture, as well as in the ways that the incorporation of science into a specifically literary discourse may transform it or call into question its authority. Since the early 21st century , the North American school has used the work of Bruno Latour to crystallize its methodological presuppositions. It is the contention of this article that although such theorization may bring methodological clarity and maintain an alignment between the field and the field of science studies, it does so at the cost of neglecting a wide range of ideas, methods, and practices that have proved fruitful in the past. However, by considering Latour and other theorists one may brings to the surface hidden theoretical assumptions in seemingly untheorized work. The present article considers a range of critical works, from 1980 to the present, but gives particular prominence to Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots ( 1983 ) because Beer’s practices have been widely influential.

The phrase “literature and science” signifies many things, not all of which are considered here. One is the use of quasi-scientific methodology in literary criticism, drawing on contemporary science and particularly on the fields of neurology, evolutionary theory, and evolutionary psychology. The possibility of literary criticism building on a supposedly scientific foundation has a long history—there are examples in the Victorian era and in the early 20th century , notably I. A. Richards. 1 Some of the authority of psychoanalytical and structuralist literary criticisms came from the scientific status of the specialist bodies of theory on which they drew. In that regard, critics such as Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll are part of a longer tradition. 2 Critics of them have drawn attention to the reductiveness of the method, its dependence on a selective reading of the science it draws on, and to its uncritical trust in its authority, though as Alan Richardson has noted, critics sometimes conflate distinct practices such as evolutionary psychology and cognitive criticism. 3

The phrase “literature and science” also signifies a longer tradition of debate about the value of “culture” and its relation to scientific ideals of knowledge. If its rhetorical touchstones lie in the early 19th century —William Wordsworth’s line “We murder to dissect” from the poem “The Tables Turned” and John Keats’s phrase “Unweave a rainbow” from the poem “Lamia”—its canonical prose articulation came into being in the late 19th century in the debate between Matthew Arnold and T. H. Huxley. 4 It continues through the 20th century in a range of lectures and essays, reaching its most familiar form in C. P. Snow’s lecture and book The Two Cultures ( 1959 ). 5 Generally speaking, “literature,” “science,” “poetry,” and related terms are spoken of as ahistorical abstractions; history, if it figures at all, is present only in the form of a narrative of decline of one side or the other. Very often the debate is a coded displacement of another topic—religion for Arnold and Huxley, and social class for Snow. Methodologically, the tradition of debate has little to offer the historicist study of the two fields, but its texts are relevant insofar as they articulate a range of deeply ingrained beliefs about both and thereby represent a horizon of expectations in relation to which practitioners of historicist study need to articulate their work.

Though literature and science as quasi-scientific method and as cultural debate can be excluded on principle, there are other definitions that are not fully represented here for reasons of space. First, the field of literature and medicine has long overlapped in significant ways with literature and science, but also has distinct practices that cannot be covered here. Second, the place of technology in the field is even more vexed and unresolved, but the present article does not attempt to give a full account.

Early Practices, 1926–1978

The origins of the field can be traced to Carl Grabo’s A Newton Among Chemists ( 1930 ), a study of the place of science in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and several works by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, including The Microscope and English Imagination ( 1935 ) and Newton Demands the Muse ( 1946 ). Behind both lay works of cultural history such as A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World ( 1926 ), which gave Grabo his title and which was also a point of reference for Nicolson, and the tradition of “the history of ideas,” as exemplified by Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being ( 1936 ). The terminology of Whitehead and the early literary critics has the flavor of its era, but certain conceptual tensions have persisted. On the one hand, the early critics often speak of systems of thought at a supra-individual level: an era’s “mentality” or “imagination” (as in “the 18th-century imagination”); such a conceptualization unites literature and science in a common field. On the other hand, critics found it necessary to speak in terms of the “impact” of science on literature, a relation that implicitly separates the two areas and that does so even when writers are granted the agency to “borrow” from science and to transform what they find. The primary questions of such early critics concerned how the concepts, images, aims, and technologies of a given science had significantly informed the literary texts of its era.

In 1978 , Nicolson’s former student, George Rousseau, wrote an account of the “state of the field,” which has also been read as an “obituary” for its early form, and which has become deeply embedded in the field’s self-conception. 6 Rousseau’s essay has become, at least symbolically, the point at which earlier critical practices and critical vocabularies were rejected. Rousseau divided the field between “philologists” and what he idiosyncratically called “theorists”: by theorists he meant historians of ideas who were aware of the historical changeability of definitions and who thus were reluctant to provide the monological glosses characteristic of the philological annotator; theorists were critics who advanced hypotheses about the evolution of an idea and who defended those hypotheses against alternative positions. 7 In saying this, Rousseau implied that the groundwork of philology was necessary but not sufficient, but he enabled an overreaction in which it was seen as unnecessary and antiquated.

From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field were concerned to move beyond the asymmetrical relation that dominated earlier work in which scientific influence dominated the literary and the cultural. Such a relation seemingly reproduces the dominance of science in contemporary European and North American society and so confirms the status of literature and the arts as being at best decorative. Practitioners were also concerned to elevate their work beyond the merely philological. In 1978 , there were already models for a future practice. Rousseau himself notes “The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form” ( 1968 ) by A. Dwight Culler, where the notion of literary form lifts the perspective above that of the merely local annotation. George Levine has praised Stanley Hyman’s The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers ( 1962 ) as a study that was willing to engage in the literary analysis of scientific texts rather than treating them as transparent sources for ideas. Jacques Barzun’s Darwin, Marx, and Wagner ( 1958 ) and Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos ( 1965 ) have also been noted as significant antecedents. 8

The field’s engagement with literary theory and with history and philosophy of science arises from the problem of how to bring science within conceptual reach of the concepts and practices of literary criticism without dissolving it as a distinct object of attention. Here, as elsewhere in this article, “science” usually means in practice a particular science in the form it took in a particular era. However, in moving beyond the asymmetry of Nicolson’s practice, the method nevertheless needs to respect the real asymmetries of a given historical moment.

The Conceptual Resources of History and Philosophy of Science

The positions within the history and philosophy of science that have been most enthusiastically absorbed within the field emphasize the changing nature of scientific theory and practice, the importance of creativity in scientific endeavor, and the role of nonscientific materials within that creativity. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ( 1962 ) was a key reference point for many critics from the late 1970s onward. It created a new agenda for the philosophy of science, which. since 1945 , had been focused largely on ahistorical questions under the influence of Karl Popper. 9 Kuhn foregrounded moments of major theory change in science. While what he called “normal science” may work in an accumulative way within a “paradigm,” making small adjustments to its theoretical outlook, over the course of time scientists would become aware of anomalies in nature that did not fit the paradigm, and which could not be accounted for through minor adjustments. Such anomalies require a major overhaul of scientific theory—the “paradigm shift.” The scientist must learn “to see nature in a different way.” 10 Kuhn’s focus on moments of change was important, as was the implication that at such moments scientific theorization was open to nonscientific influences. So too was his endorsement of the belief that conceptual structures create “ways of seeing” that may enable discovery or, indeed, obstruct it. 11

Also influential in this regard was the idea of tacit knowledge developed by the philosopher Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge ( 1958 ). In the summary of critic N. Katherine Hayles, “tacit knowledge” is “in some sense known,” but “cannot be formulated explicitly.” It guides the scientist “to the interesting fact, the one datum or experiment out of thousands that will prove useful.” 12 It is learned “by doing science” rather than by learning the formalized rules of science. 13 The idea of tacit knowledge suggests that although much of science is carried out in a rational and logical way that conforms to the public image of the discipline, it is bounded by assumptions that are subscribed to without rational justification. It is at this boundary that cultural elements can enter into science.

Another significant source lay in philosophical and linguistic thinking about metaphor and analogy, and particularly the work of Max Black and Mary Hesse. In this regard, literary critics were required to break from a deeply embedded cultural distinction between the literal and the metaphorical in which the metaphorical utterance is viewed as a decorative supplement to a literal core of meaning. In this view, while the metaphorical formulation of an opinion or feeling may be rhetorically more persuasive, it is ultimately reducible to the literal. In such a view, in Black’s later summary, metaphors are “expendable if one disregards the incidental pleasures of stating figuratively what might just as well have been said literally.” 14 In opposition to this view, Black and others advanced a cognitive view of metaphors: humans, including scientists, think through metaphors, and although metaphors can inhibit understanding, they can also assist in the modeling of reality. Once the idea of cognitive metaphor has been accepted, the distinction between metaphor and analogy becomes relatively slight, and the terms are often used as near synonyms. Griffiths, however, notes that metaphor often implies that one conceptual domain is stable and provides a model for the comprehension of another that is inchoate, while analogy—at least in some forms—allows for thinking in which both domains are reconceptualized in relation to each other. 15

Mary Hesse’s Models and Analogies in Science ( 1963 , revised and expanded 1966 ) took as its starting point the early 20th-century debate about scientific theorization between the French physicist Pierre Duhem and his British counterpart, Norman Campbell. Duhem had contrasted national styles of theory-making, favoring the “abstract and systematic” French style, and had deplored the British taste for mechanical models. Campbell had defended models and analogies—though not necessarily the mechanical model—as being not merely a sort of scaffolding that was removed when the theories were constructed, but instead an “utterly essential part” of them. 16 Moreover, while theories in Duhem’s sense risked being “static museum piece[s],” models were dynamic and open to development. 17 While it would be simplistic to equate paradigm shifts with changes of models and of metaphors, it is clear that metaphors and analogies serve “to anchor paradigms.” 18 As Kuhn wrote in 1979 , “Theory change [. . .] is accompanied by a change in some of the relevant metaphors and in the corresponding parts of a network of similarities through which terms attach to nature.” 19

Kuhn notes that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions says very little about the role of “technological advance” or of “external social, economic, and intellectual conditions in the development of the sciences”: it is, like Hesse’s Models and Analogies , an internalist account of science. 20 Nevertheless, both works enabled the approach that historicist literature and science sought, in which nonscientific external elements play a role in science in the making. The “irrationality” of the external elements is of lesser importance than their being culturally embedded.

It is perhaps surprising to find that Michel Foucault played only an ancillary role in the theorization of literature and science. The Foucault of The Order of Things ( 1966 , translated into English in 1970 ) and The Archaeology of Knowledge ( 1969 , translated into English in 1972 ) is mentioned in passing, and often in endnotes, as, for example, “a necessary precondition” for work in the field. 21 In Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields ( 1976 ), a work of science studies that has been influential on literature and science, Donna Haraway identifies The Order of Things as being of “exceptional importance for understanding the structure of thought in apparently diverse but contemporary fields,” and Foucault’s ability to recognize analogies across fields introduced an investigatory process that was absent from Kuhn or Hesse. 22 That many critics in the 1980s relegated their discussions of Foucault to endnotes while engaging with historians of science more prominently in the main text suggests they wished to align their work with Anglophone traditions in the history of science. And although there are many similarities between the field in the 1980s and the critical practices of New Historicism in the same era, the sidelining of Foucault suggests that the aspects of his work most prominent in the 1980s—the social sciences rather than the natural sciences, the asylum and the prison, and a focus on subjectivity and state power—were imperfectly aligned with the concerns of literature and science. 23

Reading Science

Nicolson’s practice was to treat scientific works as transparent media, using them as windows onto ideas rather than as texts to be interpreted. From the late 1970s onward, practitioners in the field endeavored to maintain symmetry between the treatment of literature and of science by turning their attention to scientific texts. Such a practice was particularly fertile in relation to texts from the 19th century . As Beer explains, scientists in the 19th century “shared a literary, non-mathematical discourse which was readily available to readers without a scientific training. . . . Moreover, scientists themselves in their texts drew openly upon literary, historical and philosophical material as part of their arguments.” 24 The privileging of the written products of science is not without its problems: it leaves unresolved whether (and how) literary critics can read the material artifacts and nonlinguistic inscriptions of science. Moreover, it raises the question of whether science writing for nonspecialist audiences (“popular science writing”) provides an adequate substitute for technical and particularly mathematical works, and, if it does, under what circumstances and with what provisos. Although material artifacts and the nonlinguistic have grown in importance, the practice of reading scientific texts remains central to the field.

As Stuart Peterfreund summarized in 1987 , “one begins by ‘reading’ science for the same concomitants of figurative effect that one has heretofore read literature for.” 25 Alongside that practice, however, one may read a scientific work for its explicit or implicit narrative and for a more impressionistic sense of its tone or atmosphere: Beer, in analyzing The Origin of Species alongside Darwin’s literary reading, foregrounds narratives of succession and restoration and notes how the theme of profusion is manifested in list-like sentences brimming with the names of species. 26 The impression of a natural world that is simultaneously teeming with new growth and threatened with a struggle for resources is interwoven by Beer with canonical literary texts, and also works of 19th-century political economy, most prominently those of Thomas Malthus.

At times the social and literary traces in scientific texts are prominent and easily spotted, at least by the critic who has been primed to look for them, but at other times they are subtler and require more sensitive and indeed tentative reconstruction. The same applies to the traces of science in literary texts: to move beyond texts that literally depict science or scientists necessitates a more subtle and historically informed attention. At times critics have drawn implicitly on a psychoanalytical model in which the scientific text is not fully conscious of its cultural debts and the literary text is not fully conscious of what it owes to science, and in which both require the delicate questioning of the analyst to bring the repressed material to light. Beer’s words on The Origin of Species are revealing in this regard: Darwin’s text “deliberately extends itself towards the boundaries of the literally unthinkable ” and Darwin never “raised into consciousness its imaginative and sociological implications.” 27 She goes on to say there is “ latent meaning ” present in The Origin , manifested in its moments of conceptual obscurity and in metaphors “whose peripheries remain undescribed.” 28 Later she writes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as a novel “enriched by a sense of multiple latent relations which are permitted to remain latent.” 29 The references to the unthinkable, to elements that cannot be raised into consciousness, and to the latent content of the text suggest, without ever explicitly specifying, the presence of Freudian psychoanalysis and of Freud’s distinction between the latent and manifest content of a dream. Beer mentions Freud in Darwin’s Plots , but as a late 19th-century and early 20th-century thinker, not as a guide to methodology. While it is possible that Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious ( 1979 ) was influential in this regard, the only work by Jameson that Beer cites in Darwin’s Plots is Marxism and Form ( 1971 ); the resource on which Beer was most probably drawing was Pierre Macherey’s Pour une théorie de la production littéraire ( 1966 , translated as A Theory of Literary Production [ 1978 ]). Macherey provides the idea of the literary work having an “unconscious” which is not equivalent to the authorial unconscious. 30

The analogy between Beer’s mode of interpretation and Freud’s is not exact: if scientists and recognizable scientific terminology can appear conspicuously in a literary text, the censorship is malfunctioning. The latent content of the dream is sometimes fully manifest in a way that Freud’s unthinkable acts should not be. As Beer cautions early in her study, one need not “infer that Darwin is offering a single covert sub-text”: “Nor indeed should we take it for granted that there is an over and under text, or even a main plot and a sub-plot. The manifest and the latent are not fixed levels of text; they shift and change places according to who is reading and when.” 31 But even though the topography of “under” and “over” is complex in this version of psychoanalysis, the debts are plain, as are the benefits. Such a model removes the inhibiting effect of charges of misreading in which correctness is determined by a literary scholar’s idea of the correct scientific meaning of a text. It allows for literary writers’ mistakes to be recuperated as “creative misprision,” and deflects the objection that literary critics have conflated Newton with a derivative “Newtonianism,” or Darwinism with “Darwinisticism.” 32 The psychoanalytic model is not explicit: to reconstruct the theoretical affiliations of historicist practices in literature and science, one needs to read critical texts much as practitioners themselves read their scientific and literary texts, piecing together shards of discourse to conjecture the full structure.

Underlying this model of reading are particular theories and conceptions of language that go beyond the insistence that language is inescapably metaphorical. In Beer’s Darwin’s Plots , Jacques Derrida is most often invoked for his skepticism about the stabilizing effects of an origin within a structure, but he is also implicitly present in Beer’s characterization of Darwin’s language, and metaphorical language more generally, as vital and flexible: “[f]or his theory to work,” writes Beer, “Darwin needs the sense of free play, of ‘jeu’ as much, or even more, than he needs history.” 33 Throughout the study, Beer deploys a rich figurative vocabulary to characterize language and metaphor: words dilate, contract, and oscillate; some kinds of metaphors “thrive,” they stretch, they expand, and they are hard to control; over a long quotation, Darwin’s metaphor of the tree is seen to “grow, develop, change, extend, and finally complete itself”; metaphor in general is “polymorphic,” with the implication of being polymorphically perverse; “its energy needs the barriers which it seeks to break down.” 34 There is a theory of language implicit within these metaphors. Beer’s own figurative language surreptitiously energizes the concepts that she more formally states in the language of theory. Beer’s emphasis on vitality and instability is also a polemic against the culturally engrained figuration of scientific language as sharp, hard, and inflexible, a view that for literary criticism was codified in the New Critics’ contrast of the direct and denotative language of science with the indirect and conative language of poetry. 35 Although Beer also notes moments when Darwin’s writing stabilizes meaning, as a writer she invests less in her accounts of them.

A decade or so later, Susan Squier drew on the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s idea of the “domaining effect”: an idea or metaphor that means one thing in one domain will subtly shift its meaning when transplanted. Habits of thought “are always found in environments or contexts that have their own properties or characteristics.” Ideas “are always enunciated in an environment of other ideas, in contexts always occupied by other thoughts or images.” 36 The domaining effect presupposes linguistic flexibility, but also accounts for the newfound stability that a concept may acquire when transplanted into a new domain. One may helpfully combine Strathern’s account of domaining with Richard Rorty’s account of how a pragmatist philosopher would explain the apparent “hardness” of scientific facts: when an experimental test confirms or disproves a hypothesis, “[t]he hardness of fact [. . .] is simply the hardness of the previous agreements within a community about the consequences of a certain event.” 37 In Strathern’s terms, some domains will create semantic rigidity while others will allow for flexibility. It is clear from Rorty’s account that the semantic effects are due not to an intrinsic property of the domain, but to social agreements surrounding its employment in specific professional environments.

The Social Dimension

While a synthesis of the work of Hesse, Black, Kuhn, and Foucault provided the primary guidelines for literature and science study in the decade following 1978 , the direction the synthesis took was guided by newer work in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) in which the prominent theorists were David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and Harry Collins. Until around 1970 , the sociology of knowledge had accepted the Popperian division between the proper domain of philosophy of science, a focus on the validation of scientific results, and of sociology, a focus on the origins of scientific ideas. 38 Moreover, it had taken an asymmetrical approach to truth and error, recognizing social and ideological factors only as the causes of error in science. Under the influence of Kuhn, sociologists recognized that there was a social element in the validation of results. The so-called strong program in the sociology of knowledge emerged around 1973 and went further, seeing all aspects of science as being open to cultural and ideological influences. 39 The four main principles of the strong program were concisely outlined by David Bloor. First, the sociology of knowledge had to locate “causes of belief.” Second, “no exception must be made for those beliefs held by the investigator who pursues the programme”; in investigating beliefs, the strong program was to be “impartial with respect to truth and falsity.” Third, it had to “explain its own emergence and conclusions: it must be reflexive.” Fourth, and most distinctively, “Not only must true and false beliefs be explained, but the same sort of causes must generate both classes of belief. This may be called the symmetry requirement.” 40

Bloor’s demand for symmetry has much in common with the symmetry that studies in literature and science sought to achieve as they moved away from the practices of Nicolson’s generation of scholars. Although in the field of literature and science the demand for symmetry was primarily motivated by a need to defend literary writers as active thinkers, not the passive recipients of science, and to defend literature as a form of knowledge in its own right, there is a strong similarity. Insofar as literature, from the point of view of science, may seem to entertain unscientific ways of thinking or even fundamentally consist of them, it stands for the “false beliefs” that are contrasted with science; and insofar as science, from the point of view of literature, may seem to present a reductive or limited view of the world, the positions are reversed.

The consequences of the demands for impartiality and symmetry are many and extend beyond the binary of science and literature. Opening up false beliefs for investigation allows for a consideration of sciences that appeared to become dead ends in the history of science but that were significant in their own moment; and it allows for a consideration of disciplines that were never fully accepted as science, even though in some cases they organized themselves in conventionally institutionalized ways, and for a consideration of the boundary work that excluded them. It allows for the consideration of, for example, neo-Lamarckism in early 20th-century biology, the persistence of the “ether” as an epistemic object in physics, psychical research, and the persistence of the idea of alchemy in early 20th-century physics. The strong program was also attractive to critics working on more canonical scientific ideas: both Beer’s Darwin’s Plots and Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists cite Barry Barnes’s Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory ( 1974 ). 41

By opening science to “external” influences, SSK allowed space for the research program that Rousseau had tentatively suggested in 1978 : a search for the ways in which “imaginative literature shapes science.” 42 The consequent difficulty was that of modeling the ways that literature and science could be simultaneously interconnected and yet distinct. From the late 1960s onward, historian Robert M. Young had hypothesized a “common intellectual context” for literature, science, theology, and other disciplines. The notion of a “common context” or “one culture” was vital in one phase of growth but, as Alice Jenkins has suggested, it is possible that the one culture was never a “historical reality” but an “imagined utopia.” 43 Although some critics have dismissed Beer and Levine for adhering to a simplistic one culture model, their own methodological reflections and critical practices speak of something more complex. 44 The metaphor of traffic between distinct disciplines is more productive, allowing practitioners to conceive of one-way and two-way traffic, of temporary obstructions and diversions, and of unequal flows in each direction. 45 Nevertheless, because of the preference for symmetry, “bidirectional flow is almost always seen as more prestigious and more defensible than unidirectionality.” 46

Weighing the Importance of Latour

Since 2016 , several overviews of the field have given a central place to science studies and have equated science studies with the work of Bruno Latour. 47 The focus on science studies underplays the continuing significance of longer-established intellectual resources deriving from the history and philosophy of science; the equation of science studies with Latour neglects the influence of the longer tradition of science studies that began with the establishment of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh in 1964 , from which grew the strong program. In the field of literature and science, the most often-cited works by Latour begin with Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts ( 1979 ), coauthored with Steve Woolgar, an anthropological study of a biological research laboratory undertaken from 1975 to 1977 , written as if the personnel were an unfamiliar tribe whose belief systems were unknown to the anthropologist observer. In a 1986 reprint, the word “social” was removed from the subtitle. 48 Latour’s The Pasteurization of France (French 1984 ; translated into English in 1988 ) took as its focus a historical scientific revolution, that is, Louis Pasteur’s transformation of medicine and hygiene into a science; methodologically, it focused on the texts of three scientific journals and it expanded the range of “actors,” “agents,” and “actants” to be broader than the usual humanist ideal, to include nonhuman, collective, and figurative entities. 49 Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society ( 1987 ) offered a more theoretical overview of method and crystallized a “performative” notion of scientific fact, according to which the factuality of a fact was secured by its being accepted and used by later scientists. Latour’s work was given great prominence in the first and second issues of Configurations , the journal of the predominantly North American organization called the Society for Literature and Science. 50 Although there have been dissenting voices in Configurations and elsewhere, these issues sent out a strong message about methodology. 51

The opening chapter of Laboratory Life presents scientists as “compulsive and almost manic writers,” as “a strange tribe who spend the greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing.” 52 To the anthropologist persona of the opening chapter, the notion of “inscription” makes sense of what had at first been a confusing environment: “It seemed as if there might be an essential similarity between the inscription capabilities of apparatus, the manic passion for marking, coding, and filing, and the literary skills of writing, persuasion, and discussion”; the laboratory “began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription.” 53 The phrase about literary inscription has often been quoted in the context of literature and science studies, and to quote it in such contexts is to subtly alter its meaning through a domaining effect. Though Latour is interested in texts—necessarily so in The Pasteurization of France —and in treating material elements as if they were texts (seeing a copy of an English dictionary, Laboratory Life draws an analogy with racks of chemical samples that “might be called material dictionaries”), the respects in which his texts are literary is open to question. Published scientific papers certainly have their own tacit rules of form and style, as do informal scientific communications, but they are not those of literature in the sense of fiction, poetry, or drama. One can acknowledge the insufficiency of purely formalist attempts to define the literary while still being able to recognize the formal differences between scientific and literary inscription. Surprisingly, though, critics quoting the phrase from Laboratory Life do not usually note the problem with the term “literary.”

Setting aside the problematic term, it is clear why Latour’s interest in inscription makes his work significant in the field of literature and science but, at around the time that Laboratory Life was published, practitioners were assembling their own toolkit of concepts. It is true that the role of metaphor in theory formation, as highlighted by Black, Hesse, and others, is primarily cognitive and does not imply inscription, but any evidence-based historical study necessarily depends on written evidence of figurative language. Darwin’s Plots , as an exemplar of practice, makes use not only of the multiple editions of The Origin of Species that appeared in Darwin’s lifetime, but also of his letters and notebooks. As Devin Griffiths notes, “Darwin is the central figure of Literature and Science because his writing was his science.” 54 And to the extent that Latour’s interest in inscription also includes reading—in the opening vignettes of Laboratory Life , “Julius” comes in to the office “eating an apple and perusing a copy of Nature ”—it is clear that, by the mid-1980s, the field was systematically focused on investigating what scientists read and in analyzing it. 55 The practical work of tracking a scientist’s reading may seem philological in the pejorative sense, but it provides an essential foundation for the more imaginative parts of the analytical process. The innovation in Laboratory Life comes first in its recognition that inscription is present in contemporary science, and second, in its suggestion that the kinds of inscription generated by laboratory computers may be as worthy of the name as the writing in a scientist’s notebook or a paper in a scholarly journal.

The claim “that scientific facts are constructed and not discovered” is, according to T. Hugh Crawford, one of the most productive elements in Laboratory Life . 56 Mark Morrisson accords with this view, though he focuses on Science in Action where Latour gives an account of the “black box” view of science: a fact or a machine has been black boxed when, “no matter how controversial their history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial or academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count.” 57 Latour’s approach, by contrast, is to uncover the workings of the black box and to emphasize science “in the making” or “in action.” Nicolson and others working in the History of Ideas tradition could rightly be criticized for black boxing ideas from science, focusing only the outputs—completed ideas—and then considering literary representations and responses. But in 1962 , Kuhn’s emphasis on paradigm shifts had reminded scholars that theories are actively constructed. In Darwin’s Plots , a great deal of Beer’s discussion concerns Darwin’s struggle to frame his theory in the right way and to balance different intellectual and ideological claims; she repeatedly characterizes his theory as shifting and unsettled. It is true that her focus is on the making of a scientific theory, while Crawford draws attention to the construction of facts. But Beer also analyzes the adjectives with which Darwin modified “fact”—facts were often “wonderful” or “extraordinary”—and the wider cultural discourse on fact. The latter yields conclusions that suggest that Science in Action and Darwin’s Plots share common roots in the pre-Latourian science studies of the 1970s: as Beer notes, “In their use of the word fact they [the Victorians] often combine the idea of performance with that of observation. Fact is deed as much as object, the thing done as much as the thing categorised.” Moreover, facts are performed through acts of rhetorical assertion: “The word ‘fact’ authenticates.” 58 Although Latour, with concepts such as black boxing, has devised more sophisticated tools for discussing method in literature and science, if the field is seen as primarily a historicist critical practice, then it is clear that “inscription” and “science in the making” were established within that practice before Latour’s conceptualizations of them were widely known.

Although Latour’s work is often identified with science studies, his thinking has diverged from SSK. In this regard, in the field of literature and science, his work has seemed to offer an escape route from several related dead ends or polarized binaries. Although in the 1980s the field focused on science in the making in the sense of theory formation, it had little to say about the day-to-day experience of science as an activity. Its emphasis was on science as knowledge, not science as practice. Moreover, it had little to say about the materiality of science, whether understood to be the built and socially organized spaces in which scientific activity takes place or the materiality of scientific experiments, instruments, and samples. It is widely recognized that around 1989 , there was a material turn in the history of science: chapters by Simon Shaffer and J. A. Bennett in the collection The Uses of Experiment ( 1989 ) have been seen as prominent early examples. 59 The material turn may also be understood as a pragmatic turn or turn to practice. Closely connected to the material turn is a spatial one that takes as its objects such things as the laboratory, the museum, the field (as in scientific “field work”), and the garden. 60 The material and pragmatic turns in science studies may seem to displace metaphor as a central concern of the field of literature and science. One possible response is to conceive of the field branching away from science studies, retaining its concern with figurative conceptualization as a necessary point of connection between literature and science. However, it is also possible to see a continuing role for metaphor in a newly material account of science. 61

In 1992 , Andrew Pickering, noting the emerging interest in scientific practice, argued that SSK’s focus on science as knowledge had reached a conceptual impasse. SSK saw the “technical culture of science” as a “single conceptual network,” and insofar as it was interested in science as practice, it saw practice “as the creative extension of the conceptual net to fit new circumstances.” Moreover, it saw practice as guided by interest, in the sense of factional “interests.” 62 In Pickering’s summary, SSK’s account of science is “thin, idealized, and reductive”; it lacks the “conceptual apparatus” to capture “the richness of doing science, the dense work of building instruments, planning, running, and interpreting experiments, elaborating theory, negotiating with laboratory managements, journals, grant-giving agencies, and so on.” 63 It may achieve conceptual closure in its explanations, but it does so at the cost of terrible reductiveness. Joseph Rouse, developing Pickering’s argument, identifies a structural problem with sociological explanation: scientific knowledge, the thing to be explained, must be sharply differentiated from the social, the factor that explains it. 64 This binary reproduces the science’s inaugurating binary division of the world into observer and observed, science and nature; these conceptual dichotomies “guarantee the very hegemony of the natural sciences” that SSK wishes to dispute. 65 Latour—and Actor-Network Theory more generally—promise an escape from a deadlocked binary opposition in which scientific knowledge is either given by nature or “dictated by society.” 66

Surveying this argument, James Bono notes that the position taken by Pickering and Rouse is by no means the only one possible: for example, Peter Dear has argued persuasively for a “sociocultural” history of science. Moreover, in a move analogous to the present argument, Bono notes that Latour was far from the first to contest the foundational binaries within science studies. 67 However, if literature and science is conceived as a historicist critical practice, it can be seen that the most widely imitated practitioners have, when confronted by binaries of realism and social constructivism, found ways of negotiating between them, which keep in play the claims of both. The negotiation is to be found not in the conceptual apparatus of any particular body of theory, but in the critical writing itself at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, and above. It is found in an agile movement between particular phrases, situated in their complex social and discursive networks, and reflexive considerations of method. Pickering’s criticism of conceptual closure parallels the concerns of many literature and science practitioners. A significant criticism of Nicolson’s work is that, by settling literature on a scientific base, she excludes “other simultaneous significations” and “over-stabilize[s]” the reading, even when praising “innovation and disturbance.” 68 One procedure for resisting such stabilization is to introduce points of reference beyond the binary of literature and science: a “third element” that creates instabilities in the binary. Jenkins gives the example of Laura Otis using imperial discourse in relation to 19th-century biology and literature; the present author, writing about spacetime in modernism and in post-Einsteinian popular science writing, turned to global telegraph systems and the discourse around simultaneity that accompanied them. 69 The introduction of the third element does not in itself guarantee destabilization: it is equally possible for it to be recruited as the factor that monocausally “explains” both the science and the literature. The avoidance of such reductiveness requires careful conceptualization of relations between the elements, but also involves care in the writing. Even in full-length monographs, the spirit of essayism is an important one to the discipline in the sense of a form of writing that is tentative, exploratory, and provisional.

This article has considered only three concepts strongly associated with Latour: literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation. Many others may be examined in a similar way, with the aim of distinguishing what is truly original in his work and what has precedents in earlier theory and practice in the field. His notion of “technoscience” would be high on the list. 70 So too would his extension of agency to nonhuman actants, a move that shines an interesting light on the field’s unresolved relation to conventional humanist notions of agency.

One unfortunate and unintended effect of George Rousseau’s 1978 “State of the Field” essay is that, in rejecting the works of the philologists and even of Nicolson, it inaugurated a dynamic of supersession in which each new generation of critics ritually rejects the methodologies and conceptual tools of the previous one. The present article has not been innocent of the practice in relation to Nicolson; it is easy to caricature her work and it deserves a more sympathetic revaluation. The tendency to identify a valid method with Latour’s work is a symptom of this dynamic. To restrict the conceptual toolbox of the field and to dismiss older practices as unsophisticated is to impoverish its possibilities. Practitioners in the field need to recognize the critical concepts that are implicit in apparently untheorized moves and that are embodied in the writing, though never explicitly named. Practitioners achieve what they have done by standing on the shoulders of giants, by surveying the full range of past critical practices rather than simply looking out for the next wave.

Discussion of the Literature

A student-oriented introduction to critical work in the field is presented by Willis and another is presented by Morrisson, with a chronological focus on modernism. 71

Rousseau’s 1978 survey of the field inaugurated a subgenre of reflective survey: following him, in 1987 Peterfreund identified the importance of figurative language as crucial to the resurgence of the discipline while Bono, in 2010 , highlighted the turn to the performative and the material, as well as the growing importance of Bruno Latour. 72 In 1981 , Rousseau performed a similar service for literature and medicine. Since then, work in that field has tended to focus on narrative in clinical case reports and case histories, and on trying to recover the perspective of patients from documents dominated by clinicians. 73 In 2017 and 2018 , under the general title “The State of the Unions,” special editions of the journals Configurations and Journal of Literature and Science surveyed the field from a range of viewpoints from both sides of the Atlantic. 74 Though in the early 1980s works on literature and technology were less theoretically reflective than those on literature and science, the theoretical perspectives of Donna Haraway—particularly her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” and her collection of essays Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature —and of Friedrich Kittler have been highly influential; works by Armstrong and Goody have developed the field in a more theoretically reflexive direction. 75

Beer’s 1989 survey is particularly strong on questions of influence and interchange, and Jenkins’s 2016 discussion of method gives significant space to the “one culture” and “two-way traffic” models. 76 Levine’s personal reflections on the growth of the field give an account from the perspective of someone trained in mid- 20th-century close reading and also reflect on the unavoidability, even in historicist work, of making scientific truth claims. 77 Levine’s “Why Science Isn’t Literature” valuably reflects on the importance of differences. 78

On metaphor, Ortony’s collection of essays is still valuable; Lakoff and Johnson’s work has been less influential in the field than may be expected; Whitworth and Bono note the difficulty with its argument that metaphors are grounded in the body. 79 Griffiths focuses on analogy as distinct from metaphor, differentiating formal and harmonic analogies. 80

Given that the science in literature and the literature in science are often visible only in fleeting glimpses, questions of validity and evidence recur: Lance Schachterle provided some valuable practical criteria in 1987 , as did N. Katherine Hayles in 1991 . 81

The relations of history of science with science studies have been constantly changing: Daston gives a very clear account that is in part a response to Jasanoff. 82 There have been dissenting voices in relation to Latour from several perspectives. 83 For the debates between sociology of scientific knowledge and Latourian Actor-Network Theory, Pickering’s collection of essays is crucial, though best approached through essays by Rouse and Bono. 84 The role of feminist studies of science has provided the field of literature and science with a significant social point of reference. Work by Keller and Harding was especially influential in the 1980s and 1990s. 85

Further Reading

• Beer, Gillian . Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.
• Beer, Gillian . Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter . Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
• Biagioli, Mario , ed. The Science Studies Reader . New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Clarke, Bruce . Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
• Hayles, N. Katherine , ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
• Henderson, Linda Dalrymple . The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art . Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Leonardo Books, 2013.
• Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . 4th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
• Latour, Bruno , and Steve Woolgar . Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts . 2nd ed. New postscript and index by the authors. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
• Leane, Elizabeth . Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies . Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007.
• Levine, George , ed. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
• Levine, George . Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Middleton, Peter . Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Ortony, Andrew , ed. Metaphor and Thought . 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Peterfreund, Stuart , ed. Literature and Science: Theory & Practice . Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990.
• Preston, Claire . The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Willis, Martin . Literature and Science: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism . London: Palgrave, 2015.

1. For an overview of Victorian “scientific” literary criticism, see Peter Garratt, “Scientific Literary Criticism,” in The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science , ed. John Holmes and Sharon Ruston (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 115–127; the best-known early 20th-century example is I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1924).

2. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Joseph Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” Style 42, no. 2–3 (2008): 103–135; and Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2009).

3. Eugene Goodheart, “Do We Need Literary Darwinism?” Style 42, no. 2–3 (2008): 181–185; Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–347; and Alan Richardson, “Literary Studies and Cognitive Science,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 207–222, 208–209.

4. Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science,” in The Complete Prose Works , ed. Robert Henry Super (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974 [1882]), vol. 10, 53–73; and Thomas Henry Huxley “Science and Culture,” Nature 22 (October 1880): 545–548.

5. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

6. George S. Rousseau, “Literature and Science: The State of the Field,” Isis 69, no. 4 (1978): 583–591; and Stuart Peterfreund, “Literature and Science: The Present State of the Field,” Studies in Literature 19, no. 1 (1987): 25–36, 26.

7. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 584–585.

8. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 585, note 7; George Levine, “Why Science Isn’t Literature: The Importance of Differences,” Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167 ; and Gillian Beer, “Science and Literature,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science , ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor et al. (London: Routledge, 1989), 790.

9. David Bloor, “Two Paradigms for Scientific Knowledge?” Science Studies 1, no. 1 (1971): 101–115.

10. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 1 .

11. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 4th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 195 .

12. N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 39.

13. Kuhn, Structure , 190.

14. Max Black, “More About Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought , ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27 ; also an essential point of reference is Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , n.s. 55 (1954): 273–294.

15. Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 17–20, 27–39.

16. Norman Campbell quoted by Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 5.

17. Hesse, Models and Analogies , 4.

18. Susan Merrill Squier, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 26.

19. Thomas S. Kuhn, “Metaphor in Science” in Metaphor and Thought , ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 533–542 (539) .

20. Kuhn, Structure , xliv.

21. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 268; similarly, Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 208–209; and George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 276.

22. Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors that Shape Embryos (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004), 25 (n. 23).

23. George S. Rousseau, “Introduction,” Configurations 7, no. 2 (1999): 127–136; Frank Palmeri, “History of Narrative Genres after Foucault,” Configurations 7, no. 2 (1999): 267–277.

24. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 6–7.

25. Peterfreund, “Literature and Science: The Present State,” 28.

26. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 32, 41.

27. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 99, her emphasis.

28. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 100, her emphasis.

29. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 173.

30. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production , trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 92; and Beer cites Macherey (alongside Derrida) in relation to the question of origins: Darwin’s Plots , 18.

31. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 52.

32. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 7; Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 587; and Morse Peckham, “Darwinism and Darwinisticism,” Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (1959): 19–40.

33. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 97; elsewhere, Beer quotes from Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: Darwin’s Plots , 62.

34. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 38, 92, 94.

35. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (1947; rev. ed. London: Dennis Dobson, 1968), 1–7.

36. Marilyn Strathern, quoted by Squier, Babies in Bottles , 26–27.

37. Richard Rorty, “Texts and Lumps,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 53–68, 3.

38. R. G. A. Dolby, “Sociology of Knowledge in Natural Science,” Science Studies 1, no. 1 (1971): 3–21, 5.

39. Joseph Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 1–22, 3–4.

40. David Bloor, “Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 4, no. 2 (1973): 173–191, 173–174.

41. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 4; Levine, Darwin and the Novelists , 6.

42. Rousseau, “Literature and Science,” 587.

43. Alice Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures: Science, Literature, and Disciplinary Boundaries,” in Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture , ed. Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 402–416, 407–410.

44. Steven Meyer, “Introduction,” Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5; and Devin Griffiths, “Darwin and Literature,” Cambridge Companion , 67.

45. Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 410–412.

46. Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 412.

47. Mark S. Morrisson, Modernism, Science, and Technology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 21–25; and Meyer, “Introduction,” 1–21.

48. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 281 .

49. Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 252, n. 11.

50. Bruno Latour, “Pasteur on Lactic Acid Yeast: A Partial Semiotic Analysis,” Configurations 1, no. 1 (1993): 129–146; Bruno Latour and T. Hugh Crawford, “An Interview with Bruno Latour,” Configurations 1 no. 2 (1993): 247–268; the Society for Literature and Science was founded in 1985, but since 2004, it has been known as the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, or SLSA.

51. See, e.g., Timothy Lenoir, “Was the Last Turn the Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas,” Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994): 119–136.

52. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 48, 49.

53. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 51–52.

54. Griffiths, “Darwin and Literature,” 64; his emphasis.

55. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life , 15; and Gillian Beer, “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in The Darwinian Heritage , ed. D. Kohn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 543–588.

56. T. Hugh Crawford, “Science Studies and Literary Theory,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Steven Meyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 121.

57. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), 3; discussed in Morrisson, Modernism , 23.

58. Beer, Darwin’s Plots , 81, her emphases.

59. Schaffer and Bennett are instanced by Liba Taub, “Introduction: Reengaging with Instruments,” Isis 102, no. 4 (2011): 689–696; for a fuller discussion of the “material turn,” see Thomas Söderqvist, [untitled review], The British Journal for the History of Science 43, no. 3 (2010): 506–508.

60. Crosbie Smith, Jon Agar, and Gerald Schmidt, eds., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 1998); and David N. Livingstone, “Making Space for Science (Produktion Von Räumen Der Wissenschaft),” Erdkunde 54, no. 4 (2000): 285–296.

61. James J. Bono, “Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice,” in Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge , ed. Sabine Maasen and Matthias Winterhager (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2001), 215–234.

62. Andrew Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice,” in Science as Practice and Culture , ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 1–26, 4.

63. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 5.

64. Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” 9–10; see also Bruno Latour, “One More Turn After the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World,” in The Social Dimensions of Science , ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1992), 272–292.

65. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 20.

66. Pickering, “From Science as Knowledge,” 21.

67. James J. Bono, “Science Studies as Cultural Studies,” in Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science , 156–175; and Peter Dear, “Cultural History of Science: An Overview with Reflections,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 20, no. 2 (1995): 150–170.

68. Beer, “Science and Literature,” 789.

69. Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 404–405, citing Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science and Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 170–197.

70. Latour, Science in Action , 174–175; Morrisson, Modernism , 23.

71. Martin Willis, Literature and Science: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (London: Palgrave, 2015) ; and Morrisson, Modernism .

72. Rousseau, “Literature and Science”; Peterfreund, “Literature and Science”; and James J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,” Isis 101, no. 3 (2010): 555–559.

73. George S. Rousseau, “Literature and Medicine: The State of the Field,” Isis 72, no. 3 (1981): 406–424; Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below,” Theory and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 175–198; Brian Hurwitz, “Form and Representation in Clinical Case Reports,” Literature and Medicine 25, no. 2 (2006): 216–240; George S. Rousseau, “Medicine,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science , ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (New York: Routledge, 2011), 169–180; and Monika Class. “Introduction: Medical Case Histories as Genre: New Approaches,” Literature and Medicine 32, no. 1 (2014): vii–xvi.

74. Melissa Littlefield and Martin Willis, eds., Journal of Literature and Science 10, no. 1 (2017), and Rajani Sudan and Will Tattersdill, eds., Configurations 26, no. 3 (2018).

75. Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Lisa M. Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65–107; Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , trans. Michael Metteer, and Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter , trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Alex Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011).

76. Beer, “Science and Literature,” 783–798; and Jenkins, “Beyond Two Cultures,” 402–416.

77. George Levine, “Science and Victorian Literature: A Personal Retrospective,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12, no. 1 (2007): 86–96.

78. Levine, “Why Science Isn’t Literature,” 165–181.

79. Andrew Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993) ; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake , 8–16; and Bono, “Why Metaphor?.”

80. Griffiths, The Age of Analogy .

81. Lance Schachterle, “Contemporary Literature and Science,” Modern Language Studies 17, no. 2 (1987): 78–86; and N. Katherine Hayles, “Introduction,” in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science , ed. N. Katherine Hayles (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 19–20 .

82. Lorraine Daston, “Science Studies and the History of Science,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2009): 798–813; and Sheila Jasanoff, “Reconstructing the Past, Constructing the Present: Can Science Studies and the History of Science Live Happily Ever After?” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 4 (2000): 621–631.

83. James Robert Brown, “Latour’s Prosaic Science,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 2 (1991): 245–261; Simon Schaffer, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22, no. 1 (1991): 174–192; Friedel Weinert, “Vicissitudes of Laboratory Life,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43, no. 3 (1992): 423–429; Timothy Lenoir, “Was the Last Turn the Right Turn? The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas,” Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994): 119–136; and David Bloor, “Anti-Latour,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 1 (1999): 81–112.

84. Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rouse, “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?”; and Bono, “Science Studies as Cultural Studies.”.

85. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599.

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Essay on Science in English: Check 200, 300 & 500 Words Essay

Science is the study of logic. It explains why the world is round, why stars twinkle, why light travels faster than sound, why hawks soar higher than crows, why sunflowers face the sun and other phenomena. Science answers every question logically rather than offering mystical interpretations. Students are very interested in science as a topic. This subject is indeed crucial for those hoping to pursue careers in science and related professions.

People who are knowledgeable in science are more self-assured and aware of their environment. Knowing the cause and origin of natural events, a person knowledgeable in science will not be afraid of them.

However, science also has a big impact on a country’s technological advancement and illiteracy.

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English-language Long and Short Science Essay

Essay on science  (200 words), essay on science (300 words), essay on science (400 words), essay on science (500 words), essay on science (600 words).

We have included a brief and lengthy English essay on science below for your knowledge and convenience. The writings have been thoughtfully crafted to impart to you the relevance and meaning of science. You will understand what science is, why it matters in daily life, and how it advances national progress after reading the writings. These science essays can be used for essay writing, debate, and other related activities at your institution or school.

Science entails a thorough examination of the behavior of the physical and natural world. Research, experimentation, and observation are used in the study.

The scientific disciplines are diverse. The social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences are some of them. Subcategories and sub-sub-categories have been created from these basic categories. The natural sciences include physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and astronomy; the social sciences include history, geography, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, social studies, and anthropology; and the formal sciences include computer science, logic, statistics, decision theory, and mathematics.

The world has positively transformed because of science. Throughout history, science has produced several inventions that have improved human convenience. We cannot fathom our lives without several of these inventions since they have become essential parts of them.

Global scientists persist in their experiments and occasionally produce more advanced innovations, some of which spark global revolutions. Even if science is helpful, some people have abused knowledge, usually those in positions of authority, to drive an arms race and destroy the environment.

There is no common ground between the ideologies of science and religion. These seeming opposite viewpoints have historically led to a number of confrontations and still do.

Science is a way to learn about, comprehend, examine, and experiment with the physical and natural features of the world in order to apply it to the development of newer technologies that improve human convenience. In science, observation and experimentation are broad and not restricted to a specific concept or area of study.

Applications of Science

Science has given us almost everything we use on a daily basis. Everything, from laptops to washing machines, microwaves to cell phones, and refrigerators to cars, is the result of scientific experimentation. Here are some ways that science affects our daily lives:

Not only are refrigerators, grills, and microwaves examples of scientific inventions, but gas stoves, which are frequently used for food preparation, are as well.

Medical Interventions

Scientific advancements have made it feasible to treat a number of illnesses and conditions. Thus, science encourages healthy living and has helped people live longer.

Interaction

These days, mobile phones and internet connections are necessities in our life and were all made possible by scientific advancements. These innovations have lowered barriers to communication and widened global connections.

E nergy Source

The creation and application of numerous energy forms have been facilitated by the discovery of atomic energy. One of its greatest innovations is electricity, and everyone is aware of the effects it has on daily life.

Variety in Cuisine

There has also been an increase in food diversity. These days, a wide variety of fruits and vegetables are available year-round. It’s not necessary to wait for a given season to enjoy a certain meal. This modification is the result of scientific experimentation.

So, science is a part of our daily existence. Without scientific advancements, our lives would have been considerably more challenging and varied. Nonetheless, we cannot ignore the fact that a great deal of scientific innovation has contributed to environmental deterioration and a host of health issues for humankind.

There are essentially three main disciplines of science. The Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Formal Sciences are some of them. To examine different aspects, these branches are further divided into subcategories. This is a thorough examination of these groups and their subgroups.

Scientific Subdisciplines

Natural Science

This is the study of natural phenomena, as the name implies. It investigates how the cosmos and the world function. Physical science and life science are subcategories of natural science.

a) Science of Physics

The subcategories of physical science comprise the following:

• Physics is the study of matter’s and energy’s properties.
• Chemistry is the study of the materials that make up matter.
• The study of space and celestial bodies is called astronomy.
• Ecology is the study of how living things interact with their natural environments and with one another.
• Geology: It studies the composition and physical makeup of Earth.
• Earth science is the study of the atmosphere and the physical makeup of the planet.
• The study of the physical and biological components and phenomena of the ocean is known as oceanography.
• Meteorology: It studies the atmospheric processes.

The subcategories of life science include the following:

• The study of living things is called biology.
• The study of plants is known as botany.
• The study of animals is known as zoology.

c) Social Science

This includes examining social patterns and behavioral patterns in people. It is broken down into more than one subcategory. Among them are:

• History: The examination of past occurrences
• Political science is the study of political processes and governmental structures.
• Geographic: Study of the atmospheric and physical characteristics of Earth.
• Human society is studied in social studies.
• Sociology: The study of how societies form and operate.

Academic Sciences

It is the area of study that examines formal systems like logic and mathematics. It encompasses the subsequent subcategories:

• Numbers are studied in mathematics.
• Reasoning is the subject of logic.
• Statistics: It is the study of numerical data analysis.
• Mathematical analysis of decision-making in relation to profit and loss is known as decision theory.
• The study of abstract organization is known as systems theory.
• Computer science is the study of engineering and experimentation as a foundation for computer design and use.

Scientists from several fields have been doing in-depth research and testing numerous facets of the subject matter in order to generate novel ideas, innovations, and breakthroughs. Although these discoveries and technologies have made life easier for us, they have also permanently harmed both the environment and living things.

Introduction

Science is the study of various physical and natural phenomena’ structures and behaviors. Before drawing any conclusions, scientists investigate these factors, make extensive observations, and conduct experiments. In the past, science has produced a number of inventions and discoveries that have been beneficial to humanity.

I deas in Religion and Science

In science, new ideas and technologies are developed through a methodical and rational process; in religion, however, beliefs and faith are the only factors considered. In science, conclusions are reached by careful observation, analysis, and experimentation; in religion, however, conclusions are rarely reached through reason. As a result, they have very different perspectives on things.

Science and Religion at Odds

Because science and religion hold different opinions on many issues, they are frequently perceived as being at odds. Unfortunately, these disputes occasionally cause social unrest and innocent people to suffer. These are a few of the most significant disputes that have happened.

The World’s Creation

The world was formed in six days, according to many conservative Christians, sometime between 4004 and 8000 BCE. However, cosmologists assert that the Earth originated about 4.5 billion years ago and that the cosmos may be as old as 13.7 billion years.

The Earth as the Universe’s Center

Among the most well-known clashes is this one. Earth was considered to be the center of the universe by the Roman Catholic Church. They say that it is surrounded by the Sun, Moon, stars, and other planets. Famous Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei’s discovery of the heliocentric system—in which the Sun is at the center of the solar system and the Earth and other planets orbit it—led to the conflict.

Eclipses of the Sun and Moon

Iraq was the scene of one of the first wars. The locals were informed by the priests that the moon eclipse was caused by the gods’ restlessness. These were seen as foreboding and intended to overthrow the kings. When the local astronomers proposed a scientific explanation for the eclipse, a disagreement arose.

There are still many myths and superstitions concerning solar and lunar eclipses around the world, despite astronomers providing a compelling and rational explanation for their occurrence.

In addition to these, there are a number of other fields in which religious supporters and scientists hold divergent opinions. While scientists, astronomers, and biologists have evidence to support their claims, the majority of people adhere closely to religious beliefs.

Not only do religious activists frequently oppose scientific methods and ideas, but many other facets of society have also taken issue with science since its discoveries are leading to a host of social, political, environmental, and health problems. Nuclear weapons are one example of a scientific invention that threatens humanity. In addition, the processes involved in preparation and the utilization of the majority of scientifically created equipment contribute to pollution, making life more difficult for all.

In the previous few decades, a number of scientific advancements and discoveries have greatly eased people’s lives. The previous ten years were not an anomaly. A good number of important scientific discoveries were acknowledged. The top ten most amazing recent scientific inventions are shown below.

New Developments and Findings in Science

Amputee Gains Control of Biomechanical Hand via Mental After a tragic accident took away his forearm, Pierpaolo Petruzziello, an Italian, used his mind to control a biomechanical hand attached to his arm. The hand used wires and electrodes to connect to the nerves in his arm. He became the first to become skilled at doing motions like gripping objects, wriggling his fingers, and moving.

The Global Positioning System

In 2005, the Global Positioning System, or GPS as it is more often known, went into commercial use. It was incorporated into mobile devices and worked wonders for tourists all over the world. Traveling to more recent locations and needing instructions couldn’t be simpler.

The Self-Driving Car Toyota debuted Prius shortly after Google launched its own self-driving car experiment in 2008. The accelerator, steering wheel, and brake pedals are absent from this vehicle. It runs without the need for user input because it is driven by an electric motor. To guarantee that the driverless experience is seamless and secure, it is integrated with specialized software, a collection of sensors, and precise digital maps.

Android, widely regarded as one of the most significant innovations of the decade, revolutionized the market by flooding it with devices running Java and Symbian earlier on. These days, Android is the operating system used by the majority of smartphones. Millions of applications are supported by it.

c) Computer Vision

A number of sub-domains fall under the umbrella of computer vision, including learning, video tracking, object recognition, object pose estimation, event detection, indexing, picture restoration, and scene reconstruction. In order to produce symbolic information, the field includes methods for processing, analyzing, obtaining, and understanding images in high-dimensional data from the real world.

d) Touch Screen Technology

It appears that touch screen technology has taken over the planet. The popularity of touch screen gadgets can be attributed to their ease of use. These gadgets are becoming quite popular everywhere.

e) Method of 3D Printing

The 3D printer is capable of producing a wide range of items, such as lamps, cookware, accessories, and much more. Alternatively referred to as additive manufacturing, this process uses digital model data from electronic data sources like Additive Manufacturing Files (AMF) to construct three-dimensional items of any shape.

Git Hub is an online hosting service and version control repository that was founded in 2008. It provides features including bug tracking, task management, feature requests, and the sharing of codes, apps, and other materials. The GitHub platform was first developed in 2007, and the website went live in 2008.

f) Smart Timepieces

The market for smart watches has been around for a while. The more recent models, like the one introduced by Apple, have garnered enormous popularity and come with a number of extra capabilities. Nearly all of the functionality found on smartphones are included in these watches, which are also more convenient to wear and use.

g) Websites for Crowdfunding

The emergence of crowdsourcing websites like Indiegogo, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe has been a blessing for innovators. Inventors, artists, and other creative people can share their ideas and gain the funding they need to put them into action by using these websites.

Global scientists constantly observe and experiment to develop new scientific discoveries that improve people’s lives. Not only do they consistently create new technologies, but they also adapt the ones that already exist whenever there is an opportunity. Even while these innovations have made life easier for humans, you are all aware of the numerous environmental, social, and political risks they have brought about.

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Essay on Science- FAQs

Who is father of science.

Galileo is the father of science.

Why is it called science?

The word “scientia” has Latin origins and originally meant “knowledge,” “an expertness,” or “experience.”

What is science for students?

Science is the study of the world by observation, recording, listening, and watching. Science is the application of intellectual inquiry into the nature of the world and its behavior. Think like a scientist, anyone can.

What is science’s primary goal or objective?

Science’s primary goal is to provide an explanation for the facts. Moreover, science does not prohibit the explanation of facts in an arbitrary manner. Additionally, science organizes the data and develops theories to explain the data.

Describe what a scientific fact is.

Repeatable, meticulous observations or measurements made through experiments or other methods are referred to as scientific facts. Furthermore, empirical evidence is another name for a scientific fact. Most importantly, the development of scientific hypotheses depends on scientific facts.

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Essay on Science in Everyday Life

500 words essay on science in everyday life.

Science is a big blessing to humanity. Furthermore, science, in spite of some of its negativities, makes lives better for people by removing ignorance, suffering and hardship. Let us take a look at the impact of science in our lives with this essay on science in everyday life.

                                                                                                                   Essay On Science In Everyday Life

Benefits of Science

Science very efficiently plays the role of being a faithful servant of man. In every walk of life, science is there to serve us. We require the benefits of science whether in our home, in office, in a factory, or outside.

Gone are the days when only wealthy people could afford luxuries. Science has made many luxurious items of the past cheaper in price and has brought them within the reach of everybody.

Computer technology is one huge benefit of science. Nowadays, it would be unimaginable to consider living without computing technology.

A huge number of professions now rely totally on the computer and the internet. Besides, the computer and the internet have become our biggest source of entertainment in our everyday life.

Automobiles, an important scientific invention, has made our lives easy by significantly reducing everyday commuting time. The air conditioner is another scientific invention that has made our lives bearable and comfortable in the face of extreme weather conditions. Also, in the field of medical science, high-quality medicines are available that quickly remove any ailment that can happen in everyday life like headache, sprain, cough, allergy, stomach ache, fatigue etc.

Dark Side of Science

In spite of its tremendous benefits, there is a negative side to science. Science, unfortunately, has also done some disservice to humanity due to some of its inventions.

One of the biggest harms that science has brought to humanity is in the field of armament. Although some hail the invention of gunpowder as a great achievement, humanity must rue the day when this invention happened.

Steadily and relentlessly, the use and perfection of gunpowder have taken place in many new and more destructive weapons. As such, humanity now suffers due to weapons like shells, bombs, artillery, and guns. Such weapons threaten the everyday life of all individuals.

Another disservice of science has been the emission of pollution. A huge amount of radioactive pollution is emitted in various parts of the world where nuclear energy production happens. Such pollution is very dangerous as it can cause cancer, radioactive sickness, and cardiovascular disease.

Of course, who can ignore the massive amount of air pollution caused by automobiles, another scientific invention. Furthermore, automobiles are an everyday part of our lives that emit unimaginable levels of carbon monoxide in the air every year. Consequently, this causes various lung diseases and also contributes to global warming and acid rain.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Science in Everyday Life

There is no doubt that science has brought about one of the greatest benefits to mankind, in spite of some of its negativities. Furthermore, science certainly has made the most impact in adding comfort to our everyday lives. As such, we must always show utmost respect to scientists for their efforts.

FAQs for Essay on Science in Everyday Life

Question 1: What is the most important or main purpose of science?

Answer 1: The most important or main purpose of science is to explain the facts. Furthermore, there is no restriction in science to explain facts at random. Moreover, science systematizes the facts and builds up theories that give an explanation of such facts.

Question 2: Explain what is a scientific fact?

Answer 2: A scientific fact refers to a repeatable careful observation or measurement that takes place by experimentation or other means. Furthermore, a scientific fact is also called empirical evidence. Most noteworthy, scientific facts are key for the building of scientific theories.

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• Science Essay for Students in English

Science Essay

Since ancient times, we see various developments in the world. At present, the world is full of electronic gadgets and mechanical machines. The machine does every activity in our surroundings. How did it become possible? How did we become so technologized and modern? It was all made possible because of science. Science plays a major role in the development of our society and makes our lives easier and smooth.

Science in our Daily Lives

As we know that Science has made many changes to our lives. Here are a couple of the applications of science in day-to-day life. First of all, transportation has become easier with the help of science as it simplifies long-distance traveling. It reduces the traveling time, helps to build various high-speed vehicles, etc. Over the years, these vehicles have totally changed the phase of our society. Science has upgraded steam engines to electric engines, cycles with motorcycles and cars, etc. This helps to save time and effort for every human being. Secondly, Science helps us to reach the moon. But it doesn't stop there. It also gave us an overview of Mars. This is one of the greatest achievements of human beings with the help of science. Without Science, it could be impossible. Due to the scientific inventions of satellites by scientists, we are able to use high-speed internet connections. Science is the heart of our society, without its function nothing can be made. It gave us a lot of things at the present time. This is the reason why the teacher in our schools teaches Science from an early age.

Science as a Subject

We started to learn about science as a subject in our school right from class 1. It is due to the importance of science in every part of life.  In Class 1, science taught us about the Solar System, the 8 planets, the sun, the orbit, etc. Most importantly it tells us about the origin of our planet Earth. Science taught us everything, and we cannot deny that Science helps us in shaping our future. It not only tells us about our future but also tells us about our past.

In class 6, Science is broadly classified into three subcategories. They are Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. 

Physics is a part of science that deals with the fundamental constituents of the universe. It is an interesting and logical subject. It covers numerous topics such as mechanics, optics, electronics and the most important astrophysics. With the help of physics, we make cars, aeroplanes, house appliances and many others.

Chemistry is a subject that deals with an element found inside the earth's surface. It helps us in making various products such as medicine and cosmetics etc.

Biology is a subject that deals with living organisms. It is subdivided into two types: Botany and Zoology. It teaches us about various parts of our Human body, cells in the body such as blood cells, etc. 

Wonders of Science

It is an era of scientific development. Many wonderful discoveries and inventions have been made by science. With its help, even impossible things have become possible now. One of the greatest wonders of science is the invention of electricity. Electricity is a great source of power. It moves our fans, cooks our food, lights our houses and shops, and runs our machines. It has brought about a revolutionary change in every field of life. Science gave us useful things such as mobile phones, telephones, etc. to stay connected. Science has done wonders in the field of agriculture, farmers in scientific tools for cultivation and growing more foods, crops, fruits, etc. Means of transport like buses, cars, trains, airplanes, and ships are also the contribution of science. Today we can reach any part of the world within a few hours. Medical science has made great progress. It has given legs, ears, and eyes to the disabled. For entertainment, it has given radio, television, cinema, and pictures to man. Science has given us computer and information technology. Nuclear energy is also a wonder of science. 

All these are some of the wonders of science.

FAQs on Science Essay for Students in English

1. Is Science a blessing or a curse?

The present age is the era of science and technology. Like every other thing, it also has its positive and negative sides. It is with the help of science that our life has become easier. Scientific invention helped us to conquer time. It has given us modes of communication, entertainment and education. Nowadays, even fatal diseases are curable with the aid of modern developments in the field of medicine. Some people misuse the boon and produce powerful weapons to destroy mankind. Pollution is also a side effect of scientific inventions. Science is actually a blessing. But it becomes a curse when we use it in the wrong way.

2. What are some of the useful things that science gave us?

Science gave us useful things such as mobile phones, telephones, etc. to stay connected. Science has done wonders in the field of agriculture, farmers in scientific tools for cultivation and growing more foods, crops, fruits, etc. Means of transport like buses, cars, trains, airplanes, and ships are also the contribution of science. Today we can reach any part of the world within a few hours. Medical science has made great progress. It has given legs, ears, and eyes to the disabled. For entertainment, it has given radio, television, cinema, and pictures to man. Science has given us computer and information technology

3. What are the examples of science in everyday life?

We use bicycles, cars, and bikes to travel from one place to another, all these are inventions of science. 

We use soaps, shampoos, etc., and other cosmetics that are also given by science.  

We use LPG gas, stove, etc. for cooking, these are all given by science. 

Even the house in which we live is a product of science. 

The iron which we use to iron our clothes is an invention of science even the clothes we wear are given by science.

4. What are the uses of Science in Agriculture?

Science has made its mark in the field of agriculture by contributing a bigger part. In present days scientific inventions are made available even for sowing the seeds on fields. Scientific inventions such as tractors, threshers, drip irrigation systems, sprinkler irrigation systems, etc. all are given by science. All fertilizers are also given by chemical science.

5. What are the uses of Science in the Communication field?

The following are some of the uses of science in the Communication field.

Science has made the world very small and connected. With the help of science, you can talk to anyone anywhere within a fraction of seconds. Telephones, mobile phones, computers, etc. are the inventions of science. All these mediums of communication are available at a very low affordable cost as well. So, all are within the reach of the common man. Science has made it very easy and cheap to talk to someone using a mobile phone.  

6. How science makes our life easy?

Science makes our life very easy in various ways:

We easily communicate and travel.

Because of science we easily cure any disease like cancer, malaria and another deadly disease

Science made it easy for the farmer to save their crops from pests and many other problems.

7. How does science improve our communication system?

Science improves communication in the way that at past we cannot talk to anyone face to face or by voice. With the help of mobile, we are now able to contact anyone at any place. The invention of computers and modification are also very helpful in communication.

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

Title: transformers are ssms: generalized models and efficient algorithms through structured state space duality.

Abstract: While Transformers have been the main architecture behind deep learning's success in language modeling, state-space models (SSMs) such as Mamba have recently been shown to match or outperform Transformers at small to medium scale. We show that these families of models are actually quite closely related, and develop a rich framework of theoretical connections between SSMs and variants of attention, connected through various decompositions of a well-studied class of structured semiseparable matrices. Our state space duality (SSD) framework allows us to design a new architecture (Mamba-2) whose core layer is an a refinement of Mamba's selective SSM that is 2-8X faster, while continuing to be competitive with Transformers on language modeling.

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