Alternative diagrammatic formalism similar to classi-

Over the years the question of ‘exclusivity’ in science language has been raised many times. The technicality and abstraction which characterises scientific language is a double-edged sword. Whilst it extends the meaning potential of language considerably, allowing for new kinds of relationships between grammar and semantics to construe new kinds of meanings, the very process of technicality and abstraction renders scientific language inaccessible to many (cf. the ‘black-boxing’ referred to by Bazerman in Chapter 2). The differential access to scientific meaning amongst individuals means that the meaning potential of scientific language can be easily translated into a tool for political and economic domination within and between societies. This phenomenon has been commented upon both by lay observers, who criticise the ‘jargon’ of science and technology, and by critical theorists, who express concerns that the users of scientific forms language (including linguists) employ scientific language purely to enhance their own power and prestige, and not for the construal of distinct kinds of knowledge.

What is to be done about this inequality, be it potential or actual? The most obvious response is to ‘translate’ scientific language into ‘everyday language’, to remove the technicality and abstraction so that all ‘normal’ users of language may have access to it. This response has been a popular one in a number of fields, from the ‘plain English’ movement (Solomon 1996) in law and business to attempts in the 1980s to introduce narrative texts and advertisements as a way of teaching science in the junior secondary school. Despite these attempts to translate the language of science, technicality and abstraction persists. Indeed, some areas of ‘everyday’ or popular culture seem not just to accept the technicality of science, but to celebrate it. The popularity of television series such as Star Trek and the Star Wars movie trilogy make it hard to ignore the apparent fascination with technicality of a significant proportion of the community.

The debate about the accessibility of scientific language to the non-specialist reader assumes, of course, that we have a clear understanding of the nature of both ‘technical’ scientific discourse and ‘popular’ forms. Whilst we know a considerable amount about the former, how much do we know about the latter?

What is the meaning of the term ‘popularisation’ when it comes to scientific discourse? Do ‘popular science’ and ‘science fiction’ construe meanings in the same way that research science construes meanings? The two chapters in this section look at the issue of the popularisation of scientific discourse in two different but complementary ways.

In examining the ‘popular science’ writings of American biologist Stephen Jay Gould, Fuller argues that ‘popular’ does not necessarily mean ‘accessible to the general reader’, nor ‘open to a range of narrative voices’. Fuller suggests that, rather than translating scientific discourse into forms which make it more

‘everyday’, the popularising of scientific discourse for writers such as Gould involves the translation of the scientific into another uncommonsense discourse, that of the liberal humanities. Through a careful analysis of the generic structure of several of Gould’s articles, Fuller shows how Gould places competing scientific theories and opinions side-by-side, presenting science as a set of contested ideas about the physical world, but couches them within a grand narrative, so that only one authoritative voice, Gould’s own, emerges at the end of the text. The ideal reader constructed through Gould’s texts, suggests Fuller, is not the general reader, but a middle-class, probably male reader with a liberal education. The ‘popularisation’ of science in Gould’s writing does not make it any more accessible for the non-specialist reader, nor does it remove the potential for domination in scientific discourse. It simply makes it accessible to another dominant group, providing those educated in the liberal humanities with another set of discursive tools with which to exercise symbolic control.

Cranny-Francis, on the other hand, examines a field of language activity that is genuinely popular, that of science fiction. Even though she demonstrates that emergence of science fiction as a genre within fiction writing is intimately linked to the historical development of western science itself, Cranny-Francis suggests that it is the ‘fiction’ rather than the ‘science’ which drives science fiction. In presenting an historical overview of the development of science fiction she shows how the genre has exploited the potential of fiction to examine and challenge social realities. The use of technicality and scientific detail, argues Cranny-Francis, is not to construe meanings in the same way as the discourse of research science, but to draw attention to the very constructedness of our environment (especially in the late twentieth century) and therefore open it to challenge. For Cranny-Francis the challenge to the hegemony of scientific discourse in science fiction writing comes not from the demystification of technicality within narrative forms, but in the use of technicality as a vehicle for social critique.

Both Fuller and Cranny-Francis make use of a range of analytical techniques, drawing in particular on contemporary critical theory. Fuller shows how it is possible to address the kinds of concerns voiced by Bazerman, Latour and Myers about the invisibility of social processes in the construction of scientific discourse from the perspective of a socially situated linguistic theory. Cranny-Francis shows how a Bakhtinian conception of genre as a ‘dialogic’ social

artefact (Bakhtin 1981) can be used to explore the location and function of texts in a social context, taking into account the ongoing evolution of science fiction genres across a range of media.

REFERENCE

Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays by M.M.Bakhtin Austin, TX:

University of Texas Press.