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Scientific text as a special form of communication
Chernyakova Natalia Stepanovna, Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Northern People Institute E-mail: Cherns2011@yandex.ru
Scientific text as a special form of communication
Abstract: It is asserted in the article that scientific text, even being a product of spiritual culture, never ceased to be the main form of an objectivization of scientific thought and the means of special scientific communication. Keywords: science, scientific text, scientific knowledge, scientific communication.
There are two extremities in understanding of scientific text. The first one is demonstrated by common sense and public opinion which believe that absolute truth can be gained "now and here" in this scientific text or experiment, that scientific knowledge has impersonal character and that scientific information is absolutely independent from the author's form of its expression. The second one was developed in 20th century in some trends of philosophy and methodology of science which made no difference between scientific and any other texts — from mythological to fictional. Despite obvious exaggerations in both extremities there are some reasonable aspects which would be useful to consider.
First of all, neither common sense nor methodology ofscience have ever been mistaken in understanding of the scientific text as the main form of presentation of scientific thought, without which scientific thought could not exist as a social phenomenon, could not be stored and transferred in the process of scientific communication.
Like any other product of spiritual culture, objectivized knowledge ceases to be just knowledge, dying in material form of its embodiment, such as books, magazines, tapes, diskettes and other carriers. Knowledge as the ideal image of reality can exist solely in the mind, as its component, as a "living thought". So the page scribbled with formulas is not mathematical knowledge as such, if there is no consciousness that is able to read these formulas and extract from them some ideas. And ifno scientist on Earth can decode, de-objec-tivized the content of some scientific text, it means that society has lost a certain amount of knowledge and that, despite of having the material carrier of the result of scientific activity ofprevious generations, scientists cannot reveal the content of knowledge encoded, objectivized in this scientific text.
In order to find, to understand, to assimilate the knowledge potentially contained in scientific texts, a scientist must "learn to read" these texts, in other words, he must learn to extract from texts that content which will be recognized by him as knowledge. In the process of training and communicating with members of the scientific community, a scientist learns the language, concepts, ideas, principles of a particular scientific tradition and obtains not only the social status of a member of the scientific community, but the way of interpreting scientific texts consistent with some tradition as well.
Linguists, philosophers and methodologists of science have come to the conclusion that de-objectivization of the content of scientific text is a complex act of the communicative-cognitive activity, when the fate of the original communicative intentions of the author is solved at the level of perception and interpretation of texts. It means that a thought is not hidden behind a text and is not a spiritual substance of a text; it arises as a function of text in the procedures of its interpretation [1, 64-65], whereas the text is that immediate reality, through which the researcher seeks to enter into a dialogical relationship with the author of the text in order to understand it [1, 72].
The analysis of the development of scientific knowledge indicates that the birth as the inheritance of ideas in science is governed
not by dynamic, but by statistic laws, according to which the fate of each specific publication, containing a result of an individual research work of a scientist, is unpredictable. Studies have shown that the fate of the concept or semantic information contained in the text is solved often by the interpretation of the content of the text, which won a place in public practice by virtue of being statistically more often than any other, conformed to the spirit of the time, public interest, etc. The probability of inclusion of some result in the body of scientific knowledge is determined by a complex interplay of objective and subjective factors, among which a significant role is played by the form of expression of knowledge in the author's text and the character of manifestation of the author's origin in it.
The fate of an idea or concept recorded in scientific text depends in a very direct way on the author's form of expression of his ideas, because understanding of individual characteristics of the theoretical language and logic of reasoning of an author is often no fewer complexes than the scientific problem that he solves. So, for example, the book "Aether and matter" ofJoseph Larmor, "indigestible" even in the opinion of such eminent physicists like M. Born, contained in embryonic form the basic ideas of the theory of relativity. However, outside the specific logical and linguistic form that certain information received in the works of H. A. Lorentz, it was generally not accepted by the scientific community [3, 17].
Scientific text is the object of study, assimilation, critique, refutation in the process of interpretation; it is seen through the prism of various cognitive goals and tasks, under the influence of different socio-cultural, historical and individual peculiarities of scientific style of thinking. And although the de-objectivization of scientific thought does not require instruments and performers, the ideas obtained by any subject in the process of interpretation of a scientific text is the result of "joint activity" of the author of this text and of the subject perceiving it to the same extent as the musical composition is the result of "joint activity" of the composer, performers of his works and listeners.
Conceptuality as deeply permeates the language of science, as a native language permeates the language of fiction. But if the "language of Shakespeare" is not English language only, but the totality of artistic means of creating drama and poetry of Shakespeare, the "language of Newton" is not the English or Latin languages at all, but the language of classical mechanics. And the "language of Newton" is translated into "the language of Einstein" to the same extent, in which "the language of Shakespeare" is translated into "the language of Ionesco". The incompatibility of artistic means leads to an equally complete loss of artistic content, as the theoretical incompatibility — to the loss of the original conceptual meaning.
Ultimately, talking about the possibility of a completely adequate translation of scientific information into any language is possible only for the most formal part of scientific language — mathematical apparatus, though just the mathematical apparatus does not need in translation. However, the translation of the theoretical
Section 13. Philosophy
comments to the mathematical formalism will inevitably be associated with the semantic losses, increasing with the increasing conceptual differences in theoretical languages. Even at the level of linguistic expressions of the sense data there are significant differences, which increase at the level of theoretical explanation. "De-flogisticated air" and "oxygen" are not just different names for one and the same gas released by heating mercury oxide; this is the concepts of two different theories of combustion, and the meaning of these concepts cannot be adequately expressed in the language of theory inconsistent with them [4, 167-168].
Yet, there is prejudice not only in ordinary but even in scientific consciousness that the content of scientific text exists independently of the will of the author of the text, that scientific information is transmitted in the form of monological message of the sender to the recipient [2, 241], and, in contrast to the art-information, is not born in the process of communication of a perceiving subject with the author of the scientific text and is not a result of their joint activity. We cannot ignore the fact that even if the idea of the independence of scientific information from the forms of its expression and of the individuality of scientist is illusory, this illusion is created and maintained by scientists themselves during the actual research activities. Despite neither in natural sciences nor in humanities understanding of the text is absolutely identical to the author's intention, science, unlike art, is not only indifferent to these semantic losses, but deliberately includes them in its epistemological program. Why does it happening on?
Answering to this question, we could say that the indifference of science to the inevitable loss of scientific information during the conceptual transformations occurring in the process of perception and inheritance of the result of an individual scientific creativity is due not to the absence of losses themselves, but to the need of including this result in different theoretical contexts, without which neither understanding and verification of its content, nor transformation of the identified semantic invariant in intersubjective scientific knowledge are possible.
The meaning of cognitive activity of an individual scientist is to achieve such a result, which will be recognized by the scientific community as scientific knowledge. As a social phenomenon, scientific knowledge exists only within the scientific tradition, as ideas that are passed on from generation to generation and are really de-objectiv-ized at every moment of time. This means that, only assuming the
result of individual research activities as its own and including it in the process of scientific communication, scientific community makes this result a fact of social consciousness. And only in the process of continuous rework and convert of a new result scientific community can identify its true content.
Scientist perceiving and interpreting scientific text maintains an internal dialogue with the author of the text while at the same time he is alone with his own thoughts, guided by his own philosophical concepts, methodological attitudes and theoretical preferences. The effect of understanding of someone else's text occurs only when the text becomes a source of thought for a scientist perceiving it, when a scientist as interpreter identifies in the text such a content that is consistent with his own ideas and that might contribute to the decision of problems, which this scientist studies. That is why every subsequent interpretation of scientific text may reveal new meanings or new access to the content of it, sometimes very far from the original author's intent.
So, if we turn to the history of the Copernican revolution, we will see that, reading Copernicus and Ptolemy, Kepler perceives specifics not of the ideas of his great predecessors as such, but of planetary motions emerging through these ideas. Kepler understood Ptolemy better than Copernicus and Galileo did it, and understood Copernicus otherwise then Galileo, because he was looking for answers to those questions that neither Copernicus nor Galileo think about. Moreover, being convinced Copernican, Kepler made a decisive contribution to the change in the initial concept of Copernicus, completely destroying in the kinematic scheme of Copernicus that exactly in what the author himself saw the basic meaning of heliocentrism: the principle of uniform circular motions of the planets [5; 6].
But whatever a degree of uncertainty in establishing facts, in formulating problems, in using criteria of truth would be scientific texts turn neither into novels in which fictional characters express the author's ideas, nor in philosophical treatises about the nature of existence or in the humanitarian research ofvalue content of human life. For a scientist, exploring the natural processes and phenomena, to understand the scientific text means to understand the peculiarities of the studied material object, recorded in this text. Reading scientific text, naturalist seeks not for understanding of cultural, historical or individual specifics of the ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, but for the decision of some scientific problem.
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