Language and Science

In what way has scientific language been used to represent nature? How does conceptualisation of nature - and the use of language - affect the way that we think, decide, act? How do representations of nature reflect the values, beliefs and models of science and policy? This chapter has a double aim. One aspect is to cast light on scientific language. Thanks to the custom of using a synoptic, nominal and specialist language, scientific knowledge has expanded enormously, with specific aspects of the natural processes being described at an increasing level of detail. However the use of such language has contributed to excluding the public from the decision-making processes and to transmitting an idea of science as a body of reliable and consolidated knowledge about a stationary and stable natural world. The other aim of this chapter is to shed light the human experience – of oneself and the world in which we are hosted. Such experience transmits the sense of change and transformation, or transient and impermanent states, which are expressed by means of a verbal language, with which people tell the facts and the stories, describe processes, compare experiences. In such a world of changes and mutations, the extraordinary possibilities recently offered by techno-science- have enormously expanded the scale and rate of change of human actions on eco-systems. A critical reflection on language can promote a more balanced dialectical relationship between the tension towards crystallization of scientific knowledge (nominalization) – which create power imbalances and alienate the non-experts – and the necessary need for a change of vision, explanations, concepts, words, from which new knowledge is produced.