Scientists are well, not fondly, known, for spouting jargon, but even greater impediments to understanding what we do and how are the meanings we assign to common words.
That scientists, what we do, and how we do it are often poorly understood by nonscientists is no secret. Obvious impediment among our spoken and written words are multisyllabic, often crudely Greek- or Latin-derived babels of jargon. Specialty-specific words are crafted to describe our subjects of study more accurately and precisely than is possible with more common words — without the baggage of connotations that more widely used words inevitably accrete. Albeit with difficulty, this impediment in communication can be overcome in much the same manner as one can learn a foreign language. Indeed published dictionaries exist for physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences as well as mechanical, electrical, civil and chemical engineering and material science, among other subfields. Interdisciplinary scientists make strides in large measure because they are polyglots of otherwise balkanized jargons.
"The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." ~Richard Feynman
Philosophers study the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. One might look to the philosophy of science to get an understanding of what scientists do and can or can’t do. Unfortunately, the jargon of philosophers of science is even more turgid than that of science. Their writings can be an especially frustrating place to look for a basic introduction to practices of scientific methods, their virtues and their limitations. Instead of simple explanations of what scientists do from day to day, one finds competing, complicated ideas about how science should be done (from philosophers most of whom do not themselves practice science). One also finds arguments that there is no such thing as “the scientific method.” Most of these arguments surround the first of these three words because indeed scientists producing new knowledge don’t all go about it the same way. Philosophers of science are also naturally attracted to scientific revolutions and giants like Newton and Darwin rather than to the practice of everyday science by everyday scientists.
Science textbooks or topical books on particular fields of science are not much help. Although they are excellent places to find what scientists have learned, they do not in general describe the practices that produced that information. Some argue that science labs and lab manuals provide an introduction to the scientific method by having students do what scientists do. In a majority of these venues, however, the methods are not aimed at finding out something yet unknown, but rather at replicating results and methods that are well known, at least to someone with a teacher’s manual.
A more insidious communications issue, however, hides what and how scientists think, what they do and what they mean. In addition to opaque jargon, we scientists also use many common words but intend different connotations and even denotations than in the vernacular. The words are familiar, but their intended denotations are not. To the uninitiated our usage is translucent at best. With these words we scientists do not appear to be using a foreign language, but in important ways we are. This blog delves particularly into those differences in meaning for common words such as question, proof, theory, belief and skepticism. Science is a way of thinking that is well camouflaged by common words.
Scientific revolutions (e.g., in planetary trajectories, evolution, relativity, and plate tectonics) have gotten the spotlight, and deservedly so. This blog, however, is about evolution of the scientific method outside the spotlight, mostly over the last two centuries. Many of the descriptions I still find of scientific practice are based on approaches that were discarded decades ago and with good reasons. It is past time to drive silver stakes into these zombie philosophies.
The collective aim of my explorations is to improve understanding of how scientists think and what they do. Blunt evidence of the need comes from visiting Google Images under the search term “scientist.” Contrary to the photograph album that appears, most of us neither wear white lab coats most of the time nor spend much time staring through safety glasses at brightly colored liquids in Erlenmeyer flasks. Nor do as many of us look like Einstein as browsing those images would have you believe. Your neighbor could be one of us.
The problem lies not with Google’s choice of images: One simply can’t distinguish a scientist by visual inspection (although dated jokes about pocket protectors and slide rules among engineers do spring to mind). What sets us apart are particular “habits of mind” nurtured early in our scientific training and developed continually thereafter. The great educator Arthur Costa makes a compelling case for continuing life-long learning by attending to the attributes that human beings display when they behave intelligently. Professor Emeritus Costa lists 16 valuable habits that are intended to be neither exhaustive nor to apply to scientists alone.
My hope is that this exploration of what scientists mean will give insight into those habits of mind that are particularly valuable in the pursuit of scientific goals and how and why scientists redirect and hone some habits in particular. The 16 habits of mind listed by Dr. Costa are:
• Questioning and posing problems
• Thinking about thinking (metacognition)
• Remaining open to continuous learning
• Thinking flexibly
• Persisting
• Finding humor
• Striving for accuracy
• Gathering data through all the senses
• Thinking and communicating with clarity and precision
• Thinking interdependently
• Creating, imagining, and innovating
• Responding with wonderment and awe
• Applying past knowledge to new situations
• Taking responsible risks
• Listening with understanding and empathy
• Managing impulsivity
All 16 (and others not listed) are of use to scientists, and only the last two go without some further mention in my exploration because their practice and their resulting rewards seem to differ little between scientists and nonscientists. Science humor gets a few explicit sentences here, and random insertions hereafter. Scientists are prone to practical joking, frequently employing Rube Goldberg (an engineer who became a cartoonist) devices: We sometimes see humor in our overly complicated equipment and approaches. Puns and double entendre fit snugly into the scientific mind. Scientists train to carry more than one idea at a time about how a natural process works while we ponder what observations or experiments might discern the better of the two, giving us unusual proclivity to pun (use two or more words that sound similar but have different, often wildly divergent, meanings) and to engage in double entendre. A classic example of humor jumping two otherwise parallel tracks is the statement that, “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.” Widely attributed to Groucho Marx, the sentence and its linguistic analysis appeared in Scientific American in 1966, nearly two decades before Groucho began using it so well. Fair warning: Puns may follow. Many scientists also have an affinity for Far Side cartoons because of Gary Larsen’s radical shifts from usual perspectives, such as his classic cartoon of two monsters under a child’s bed fearing the occasional noises above them. If you can’t carry two conflicting ideas at the same time or hate uncertainty, you may want to consider a different endeavor.
Costa, A.L. and B. Kallick, Eds. 2008. Learning and Leading with Habits of Mind: 16 Essential Characteristics for Success. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA.
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