Accommodating Science

Abstract

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

Access, accommodation, and science: Knowledge in an “open” world

“…Moving from one genre to another also causes some changes to the information contained within each, tells us. This is not, she reminds us, "simply a matter of translating technical jargon into non-technical equivalents" [10]. Instead, changes to the rhetorical appeals made in an article are part of the accommodations for the new audience.…”

“…Instead, changes to the rhetorical appeals made in an article are part of the accommodations for the new audience. For example, a writer could appeal to the "wonder" of a topic [11]. Why is this research important or interesting, generally?…”

The Popularization of Specialized Knowledge Through Ted Talks: The Case of Positive Psychology

“…The third group of speakers is represented by a public that has not mastered this language yet (e.g., students), and the fourth level of communication corresponds to the most accessible and popular one which takes place when specialists communicate with non-specialists. Fahnestock (1986) maintains that there is a process of accommodating results and discussions of scientific investigation targeted to different audiences and outlines how scientific knowledge is conveyed from expert to non-expert audiences. In fact, she assumes that "scientific accommodations are overwhelmingly epideictic; their main purpose is to celebrate rather than validate (ibid., 1993, p. 19).…”

How Journalists Establish Trust In Numbers And Statistics: Results From An Exploratory Study

“…Because these debates are often integral to the process of defining a social problem, raising their visibility in the media, they also give rise to multiple politics of numbers. In this process, disputes about what deserves to be measured are necessarily normative in part, but their expression in numbers makes them seem like something beyond norms (Amberg & Hall 2010;Fahnestock 1986;Strathern 2000). This logic is taken up and strengthened by advocacy groups and social movements, who know the rhetoric of rationality, expressed through numbers, gives them credibility and improves access to news coverage (Best, 1987).…”