The adequacy of science communication to the general public from an epistemological perspective

This prospected research advances an internalist view on the concepts of scientific literacy and effectiveness of science communication to the general public, within an epistemological framework.
The adequacy of science communication to the general public from an epistemological perspective
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Introduction

 Public interest in science has risen dramatically. At the same time, in the context of pressing global issues and accelerated scientific advancement, the academic community, governmental bodies, policy makers in any field, and media press must communicate the results of scientific activity to the general public. This double-faceted interest of acquiring scientific knowledge and communicating it has led to the growth of science periodicals and ‘e-learning’ platforms as media through which science is communicated and/or taught. However, this growth has been faster than the advancement of research dealing with science communication and education, which is still searching for an adequate foundation. As such, the real process of science communication is arbitrary, somehow chaotic, following the lines of ordinary discourse and the specific interests of the communicators, and is not guided by clear theoretical norms through which to ensure the correct understanding of the content and ultimately, of the scientific message. For instance, science periodicals seek to publish good “literary pieces” on scientific topics, their goal being to attract an audience by offering a pleasant and sharable reading experience rather than an accurate understanding of the topic.

Within educational science and communication science, the concepts of scientific literacy and effectiveness of science communication have been intensely debated in relation to the free types of education, but the research did not focus on the specificity of their target (the general public) in relation to the specificity of their object (science). In general, research maintained an exclusively externalist view for these concepts and associated them with the complexity and diversity of teaching science and less with the epistemic dimension of science communication as a transfer of understandable knowledge in particular conditions.

I argue that an internalist view on these concepts is necessary, aiming to answer the question of whether science communication (with a conceptual meaning that embeds understanding, message, and goal) to the general public is possible and in what form, within an epistemological theoretical framework developed around adequate concepts of understanding, scientific literacy, and effectiveness (of communication). The research should provide the criteria of adequacy of this specific communication and the basic theoretical norms that should optimise this complex process. The main premise of this approach is that adequacy and normativity for optimisation of this special communication can be neither defined nor elaborated as relative to subjective arbitrary elements featuring the social dimension of the phenomenon, especially the freedom of educational processes.

One of the main goals is to adapt the general epistemic concept of understanding to the investigated context, which assumes a “constrained gradualisable understanding”. Constraints refer to the specific conditions of both the communication and the audience (out-of-structure extraction, length/volume limit, “staying-in” feature, audience’s variable education background, etc.). Since the type of understanding required should be unique regardless of the constraints, we should focus on the communicated unit of knowledge – namely the popularised scientific text or discourse – which in its mere linguistic-logical-epistemic form is amenable to a theoretic-formal approach. The idea is to identify a certain “epistemic-readability” and logic of such a text which should make it understandable (in the sense of the new concept of understanding) under the previously mentioned constraints. (This “epistemic readability” is not required and is limited to syntax for other fields such as art, history, etc.) Then, we should explore ways to gradualise understanding so as to be consistent with the uniqueness of its type and its nature as a mental state.

Another important goal is to exploit the educational dimension of philosophy and history of science with respect to the foundation and methodology of science by identifying those fields, principles, and metatheoretical aspects able to contribute to a decisive answer to the following question: What is required for the reader/hearer to know about science in general in order to understand (in the investigated sense) a scientific discourse or piece delivered to him or her, under the mentioned constraints? And in what form should this required knowledge be implemented in or attached to the delivered text such that understanding is not fully dependent upon the reader’s or hearer’s educational background?

 Research context and theoretical framework

 Radically different views on the nature of the concept of scientific literacy have been expressed. Roth & Lee (2002) see it as a property of collective activity rather than individual minds. But how can we have collective understanding of a scientific fact as a mental state, which is supposed to be individual? Liu (2009) sees it as life-long participation in science and scientific activities; while making the notion extrinsic and intrinsic, this view makes scientific literacy something unattainable, which is problematic for any theory incorporating it. DeBoer (2000) argues that we should define scientific literacy in terms of specific goals suitable for particular situations, along with the content and methodologies most appropriate for the students of a community. Norris & Philips (2002) claim that its sense should not be derived too much from the concept of literacy in its fundamental sense (concerning reading and writing) – and this is the view that the current research will support and incorporate in the intended framework.

Overall, most analyses of scientific literacy have made this concept dependent upon the historical context and community. Such dependency restricts a broader sense for the concept, required to embed both the object of learning (a unique, objective, non-interpretable science) and the target (the variable subjective community). It also prevents development of theoretical frameworks through which to provide objective norms for adequate scientific communication and learning methodology. For deciding whether science communication to the general public is possible and finding these criteria of adequacy, empirical research (and generally the use of the usual tools of educational science) on the learning communities is not enough.

More recent research focused on the concept of effectiveness of science communication rather than scientific literacy. The background of the research relied on the major premise that the topic is complex, interdisciplinary in nature, and dependent upon phenomenological factors, including social ones. This premise runs on the line of thought that, like teaching, there cannot be a unique approach to science communication (Weigold, 2001), and thus no recipe for success or effectiveness. The proposed research aims to challenge this premise in what concerns amenability to theoretical treatment and the existence of criteria of adequacy and optimisation, by advancing an internalist view based on philosophical concepts with that of constrained understanding at its core and radical conceptual distinctions. Of course, complexity is still endorsed, but in the internalist view, it is related only to the epistemic-philosophical and linguistic nature of the topic and not to its social dimension. Still, effectiveness can be discussed in relation to the social aspects of science communication in an externalist view where educational, life, and social sciences are called to investigate the topic.

The “externalist complexity” of science communication and its effectiveness was seen to involve various general aspects: Cooke et al. (2017) employed the management of the communication and knowing the audience in quite a “rhetorical” way; Guenther and Joubert (2017) identified a dynamic of this kind of communication relative to the public understanding of science; Yuan et al. (2017) argued for the importance of two-way communication between scientists and the public, including interactive dialogical communication.         

There was also research– still in an externalist view – providing explicit criteria for determining effectiveness: Druckman and Lupia (2017) showed there are certain conditions under which choosing particular frames yields more effective communication. Martinez-Conde and Macknik (2017) argued that storytelling and narrative style can help communicate science to non-experts and improve the chance of success in science communication while plot-building enhances understanding. Olson (2018) argued that scientists need skills, in talking to students and writing papers and funding proposals as well as in science communication to the general public, which requires additional skills. However, these skills were seen more as targeting the act of (two-way) communication and less so the content of the communication. The skills criteria strengthen the importance of the training of the communicators, which was even assessed through empirical studies [see, for instance, (Rodgers et al. 2018)]. All such criteria do not differ much from those involved in effective science teaching. Yet, researchers admitted that the complexity of science communication to the general public has a pragmatic dimension that can only be investigated systematically and in an interdisciplinary setup by adapting scientific methods to the practical constraints of science communication (Fischhoff, 2019).

Internalist perspective of science communication in a theoretical-philosophy framework

 In a theoretical framework from an internalist perspective, the required pragmatism can be defined with the help of a special concept of understanding (what I previously called constrained understanding) and intelligibility, within a conceptual framework extracted from the philosophical disciplines entitled to investigate the topic – epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind. Complementarily to the externalist perspective, the research should focus on the content of communication as an epistemic unit independent of the complexity of both the act of communication and its audience.

Philosophy of science has a long tradition of making a tight connection between explanation and understanding, but only in the last two decades have researchers started to give understanding a substantial role in their theories (De Regt at al., 2009). Moreover, we should take seriously the possibility that scientific cognition is also affected by psychological manifestations related to some forms of understanding, including that of illusion (Ylikoski, 2009). Such problems increase the complexity of the topic and call on non-philosophical disciplines, such as cognitive sciences (including neurosciences) to investigate it. However, philosophy has its own arguments for answers to legitimate questions such as: What kinds of cognitive abilities are involved in understanding? What is the relationship between the understanding that explanations provide and the understanding that experts have of broader subject matters? Can there be understanding without explanation?  (Khalifa, 2017, pp. 80 – 124).

 The formal-theoretical approach I propose on epistemological grounds should be able to account for the pragmatism of the effectiveness of science communication and to provide criteria of adequacy that can be translated in the practice of science communication, despite its acknowledged (externalist) complexity. It should also be a unifying foundational element for the disciplines dealing with the topic further, since all have an epistemic dimension.

We should make the distinction between scientific literacy and science understanding, between science understanding and linguistic understanding, between science communication and science education. All these concepts are interrelated, and the general epistemological concept of understanding is constitutive for all; however, a special concept of understanding targets understanding of a communicated unit of knowledge.

In theoretical philosophy and linguistics, understanding is tightly related to meaning and context, not only in what concerns language, but as a general concept that involves valuable and distinguishable knowledge [see (Kvanvig, 2003, 2009), (De Regt and Dieks, 2005), (Grimm, 2014)]. But the meaning of scientific concepts, statements, and theories, and context of the creation, development, and application of science – all these are investigated within epistemology, foundations of science, philosophy of science, and of language. As such, not only the social and educational dimensions of science manifest themselves in science communication, but also the foundational aspects of science.

The necessity of turning to philosophy and history of science for science education has already been acknowledged [see the works of (Hills, 1992), (Matthews, 1994), (Mellado et al., 2006), (Höttecke and Silva, 2011), and others]. In-depth analysis of such arguments fairly offers an expectation to make them (or at least some of them) applicable to science communication also. McComas (2017) argued that the nature of science is the most important content issue in science teaching because it helps students understand the way in which knowledge is produced and validated within the scientific work. In spite of obvious distinctions, science teaching is also a form of science communication, and understanding is a key concept for the latter.

Such arguments constitute the certainty – unexpectedly for some people – that theoretical philosophy can be as practical and applicative as it is perceived as abstract, and social sciences (in particular educational science) would benefit by its methods and content.

 

In-text references:

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 De Boer, G. E. (2006). Scientific Literacy: Another Look at Its Historical and Contemporary Meanings and Its Relationship to Science Education Reform. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37(6), 582-601.

 De Regt, H. W. & Dieks, D. (2005). A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding. Synthese, Vol. 144, 137-170.

 De Regt, H. W., Leonelli, S., and Eigner, K. (Eds.). (2009). Scientific understanding: Philosophical perspectives. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

 Druckman, J. N. & Lupia, A. (2017). Using frames to make scientific communication more effective. In K. H., Jamieson,  D. M., Kahan and D. A. Scheufele (Eds.). The Oxford handbook of the science of science communication (pp. 243-252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 Grimm, S. (2014). Understanding as Knowledge of Causes. In A., Fairweather (Ed.). Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (pp. 329-346). Dordrecht: Springer.

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 Khalifa, K. (2017). Understanding, explanation, and scientific knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Kvanvig, J. L. (2003). The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 Martinez-Conde, S., & Macknik, S. L. (2017). Opinion: Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences114(31), 8127-8129.

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 Ylikoski, P. (2009). The illusion of depth of understanding in science. In H. W., De Regt, S., Leonelli, and K., Eigner (Eds.). Scientific understanding: Philosophical perspectives (pp. 100-119). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

 Yuan, S., Oshita, T., AbiGhannam, N., Dudo, A., Besley, J. C., and Koh, H. E. (2017). Two-way communication between scientists and the public: a view from science communication trainers in North America. International Journal of Science Education, Part B7(4), 341-355.

 

 

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