One of my publications is:
Taber, Keith S. (2025) What's the point of explaining science in the public domain? Seminar paper presented on-line to CRESTEM (Centre for Research in Education in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) at King's College London, 5th February, 2025.
View the talk:
Abstract:
As a professional science educator, I have put a high priority on teaching for understanding. I always wanted my students to make good sense of the concepts being taught (be that force, bond, or later in my career, idiographic research). And despite having a healthy scepticism for the notion of canonical accounts of science (and even more so for any expectation that curriculum specifications could match such ideals), I have also seen objective understanding as the teacher's prior concern. It is good if Alice feels that she understands nucleophilic substitution, but ultimately she needs to be able to demonstrate that she can apply the idea in a way that matches an examiner's expectations. Recently I have been paying attention to the wide range of devices used by science communicators (scientists, popular science authors, journalists) to explain unfamiliar scientific ideas. In science teaching the familiarisation step (for example, perhaps referring to the nucleus of a cell as its brain), is seen as the starting point for developing a scientifically acceptable understanding. Subjective understanding – that is, feeling 'that makes sense' – is important, but not sufficient. But should that also apply to public science communication outside of education? This talk will present a range of examples of scientific ideas being introduced in these informal learning contexts – posing the question of what sense are readers/listeners meant to make of them; and the broader question of whether subjective understanding should be a sufficient target outcome in these cases.
Introduction
Good afternoon. Thank you for taking time to listen to me today. I am going to present you with some short extracts from examples of science communications of various forms that I would like you to interrogate.
In doing so I will offer some guide questions, and I very much look forward to your views at the end of the talk. However, I am going to start by setting out some background that offers a position from which to interrogate my examples.
'Science communicator'?
I want to begin by just suggesting how I will use the term 'science communicator' in an inclusive sense. So, among science communicators are:
- teachers, whether generalist teachers of lower ages asked to teach some science, specialist science teachers and lecturers from within more specialist science disciplines
but also:
- scientists writing for other scientists in research papers, monographs and review articles
- scientists, sometimes the same ones of course, writing or talking to more general audiences through talks, books, interviews, videos or whatever
- journalists who report on science,
- authors of popular science books, which may overlap with previously categories in that these authors may be scientists themselves or science journalists, but sometimes are in a somewhat discrete group of 'science writers' who specialise in 'trade' books
- as not everyone works with written texts, I perhaps need to also include the writers and producers of scientific documentaries and the like in case some of these people are not already found in my previous categories.
I should also perhaps include a group of people who are academics, and who write about science, but are not natural scientists themselves. These may be historians, philosophers, sociologists and the like. Their focus may not be the science per se. So, for example, the historian of science is looking to describe and explain history, not science, and may be more interested in a now defunct perspective or theory than current canonical understanding, but nonetheless may feel at some points a need to offer a scientific account as background for their argument.
Perhaps I should also include people like myself in this category, science educators, as sometimes in writing about the teaching of science it is appropriate to set out the science as background for making pedagogic points.
'Science communication'
I am going to make what I think is a reasonable claim, which is that, when such science communicators set about communicating science, an aim is, at least sometimes, to lead their audience to understand that science. That is, one purpose of the science lesson, or lecture; of the scientific paper, or monograph; of the news report, or science documentary; of the 'popular science' book; or the outreach talk given by a scientific researcher, is to facilitate members of an audience in coming to a new understanding of some science. In this sense, all scientific communication may be considered to have a pedagogic intent.
However, I would also like to draw a key distinction between two meanings or senses of 'understanding'. I am certainly not suggesting that these are mutually exclusive, just that they can be considered as somewhat independent of each other.
Objective and subjective understanding
I will refer to these two somewhat distinct foci as objective and subjective understanding. Subjective understanding is an internal thing. You read or her something. You may feel it clearly makes sense, and you fully understand it. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps it was completely, as the idiom goes, 'over your head' and you have not the vaguest idea what was meant. That is rare perhaps, but there are certainly shades of confidence one may feel in one's understanding.
Now subjective understanding is perhaps more about feeling than thinking – or at least it seems to be largely informed by implicit knowledge. One comes out of a lecture or finishes reading a paper, and one has a feeling about the extent to which one had understood. I think subjective understanding is – initially at least – more an affective evaluation than a conceptual one.
By contrast, objective understanding is not about how well you feel you understand, but the extent to which you can demonstrate understanding to others against some community-agreed criteria. Teachers know all about this. Efforts are made to set up assessment activities which give a valid and reliable measure of whether the learners understand food webs, capacitors in parallel, or electrolytic cells. I should point out that often the key referent here is not current canonical scientific knowledge; but some curriculum model located at some turn of the spiral curriculum – which likely simplifies, and sometimes oversimplifies, the science.
[That is important, but having noted that, I think we can bracket it away for present circumstances. After all, even current canonical science is no more than a particular account currently judged by the relevant sub-groups of the scientific community as our best partial account of some phenomena based on the data collected and analysed so far. I could go further than that – I have suggested elsewhere that canonical scientific concepts are ideal referents but have no real content: perhaps like unicorns as difficult to exemplify in practice as the lady of leisure, the perfect gentleman, the ideal state, the perfectly equitable and just society, or full employment.]
Correlation?
Anyway, I think to the questionable extent that it is meaningful to apply quantitative terms to a feeling like subjective understanding, there is likely to be a positive correlation between measures of these two forms of understanding. People are more likely to feel they understand something when (objectively) they do. People are more likely to be able to demonstrate objective understanding of those things they feel make sense to them.
Understanding
But those of you who are practicing teachers are likely to agree when I suggest that even if such a correlation is statistically significant it would not approach unity. We have all surely experienced learners who can regularly get high marks on questions about some bit of science that they persist in claiming makes little sense to them. That can be very frustrating as we cannot direct all such learners to scientific fields like quantum mechanics. Similarly, we have all had those happy, smiling students nod to conform they have fully understood something that we later find they have not understood in anything like the way intended. Perhaps we could send that group off to become post-modernist social scientists, but that would be a loss for the natural sciences!
So, here comes the crux of my talk, which is, in effect, a question.
Should science communication be about promoting subjective or objective understanding?
Now, I argue that in teaching, and in scientific papers, both are really important. We want our students to be able to get right answers in assessment, and feel confident about their knowledge. The same surely applies with regard to authors and their colleagues with when talking about research reports and reviews within a scientific community.
But what about the brief news report item, the science documentary, the popular science book, the outreach talk intended to engage a general audience, and the like. Should these be intended to bring about subjective and objective understanding – or is subjective understanding sometimes enough? If a journalist has a 30 second spot to explain some breakthrough in cancer research or new discovery in deep space, is it enough to give the audience members a feeling that they have got the gist of the scientific achievement? If someone reads a popular science book about the immune system or black holes or volcanoes, should they only expect to feel they have learnt something or have a reasonable expectation of actually acquiring some creditable knowledge?
Examples of figurative language…
Since retirement has given me more time for reading for interest, I have come to be rather obsessed with such questions because of the large number of metaphors and analogies and the like I have noticed. Some seem ingenious and apt. But, some of these I have felt would only work for someone who already understood the scientific point being made, and some I felt did not really explain very much, but just offered a familiar image or comparison which might act at best as a kind of placeholder for genuine understanding. For example, a phrase like 'the nucleus is the brain of the cell' could be a very productive one if it was the starting point for an enquiry into in what sense or senses the nucleus of a cell might be said to be like – or unlike – a person's brain in their body. But by itself, it is just a motto, a slogan, that may give the impression that I understand what the cell nucleus does – it is the cell's brain.
Some comparisons that are used to introduce people to technical ideas are more obvious than others:
I've posted this challenge where I have separately listed 10 scientific concepts and the comparisons used to help explain them. Of course, in the original sources there was useful context, but when isolated like this I am not sure it is obvious which scientific idea matches which comparison. Indeed, I am not sure I can now explain some of these links.
The constructivist perspective
I am now almost ready to ask you to look at some examples.
First, however, I am just going to reiterate some basic ideas about learning and understanding that I suspect are widely familiar in our community. However, teachers should be wary of making such assumptions, so just in case…
Human learning is incremental, interpretive, and iterative. It is incremental because a person's working memory has a very limited capacity to handle new information. So complex material needs to be deconstructed into modest learning quanta which are presented at a pace human cognition can cope with.
Learning is interpretive because in order to make sense of new information we rely on the resources we already have available. This is why comparisons with what is already familiar are so useful – they help make the unfamiliar familiar . Because learning is incremental and interpretive it tends to be iterative – we tend to more readily accept things that fit with our existing way of thinking and build up new understandings accordingly.
But back here, in the real world, teaching often goes wrong because teaching is not made sense of in the way the teacher hoped. Teachers can at least monitor how they are understood using formative assessment techniques, and so adjust their presentations. That facility is not available to the science communicator writing a text or being interviewed on the radio or giving a one-off public talk.
So, to some examples…
Similes
Descriptive simile
I want to start by considering similes, where the science communicator sets out to make the unfamiliar familiar by pointing that in some sense the unfamiliar target is a bit like something already familiar. Some of the most basic and unproblematic examples I have found are where naturalists are describing some species, so perhaps a part of a plant, by suggesting it is shaped like some familiar everyday item.
Of course, even here, as with this comparison, we are reliant on the audience having the right interpretive resources, and some comparisons may go out of date and may be less clear to a contemporary reader.
I think this is an interesting example because it shows us that Darwin was confident that his correspondents would be familiar with the story of poor Lot's wife (who tends to only be known as a plus one). As he was writing to a university Professor who had to be an ordained Church of England priest to quality for his teaching post, this seems a fair assumption. Henslow shared Darwin's letter with members of a scientific society, who would all also be assumed to be familiar with this story. I am not sure how true this would be today?
However, I would also point out that neither Darwin or Henslow or indeed anyone else alive at that time had ever seen Lot's wife, either before or after she became collateral damage in what was supposed to be God's imprecisely-targeted wrath. I guess that in the days before television, personal computers and mobile phones people had to create their own entertainment by imagining scenes of death and destruction they read about for themselves. That is a slightly cynical point, but I do suspect that for Darwin and Henslow, and their discourse community [but not for many people in large parts of the world today], a reference to Lot's wife would likely bring a very specific and vivid image to mind. Otherwise, the simile has no value.
Similes
I am using literary terms like simile and metaphor. There is a distinction there that I think is important. A simile is marked as a comparison. So it may be to suggest X is like Y, or X is Y-like or X does something in the way Y does. Or it may report that X is said to be a Y, but the Y is put in 'scare quotes', or there is a qualification such as 'so to speak', 'if you like', or 'in a sense' to mark the simile.
Here are some examples which you may, or may not, interpret as the science communicator intended. I am not going to comment much on these examples, as I would like to give you all a chance to reflect on them.
Here is a selection of other examples, or at least my 'headline' versions of them:
[see https://science-education-research.com/public-science/examples-of-science-similes/ for further details of the original quotes.]
Metaphor
I use the label metaphor when we are told an X is a Y without any indication this is meant figuratively, not literally. This potentially adds an extra burden for the audience, as they have to first spot that a comparison is being made, before they can interpret the meaning. Here are some examples which you may or may not interpret as the science communicator intended.
Extended metaphor
Take a theme and run with it (well, figuratively speaking, of course).
Sometimes one comes across extended metaphors, which start to approach formal analogies. Here are some examples which you may or may not interpret as the science communicator intended.
From the same source:
This is an example of the metaphorical density of figurative language in some popular science writing. And it is not a complete outlier.
This is perhaps an extreme example, as this book sets out to present disease and immunity in terms of an extended military analogy. Of course, this is by no means unique to this account, but I doubt many other uses of the analogy have involved such an intensive bombardment of a reader. In many ways this is a useful analogy, but whereas a good teacher would examine both its strengths and limitations, knowing that areas of difference are also useful teaching points, the popular science author may not.
Simile-to-metaphor transitions
One common feature illustrated in this next example is how a comparison introduced initially as a simile ["sort of lights a fire"] is then treated as a metaphor ["that fire"] – presumably for economy of expression.
Idioms
Idioms seem to me to be metaphors that become conventionalised. Presumably at some point someone who first used an idiom meant it as a metaphor, and expected its meaning to be clear to an audience Over time, the phrase has come to stand for a whole class of situations with something in common. Now the key distinction between a new metaphor and an idiom is that a naive person has at least a decent chance of making sense of most metaphors as the comparisons have been chosen to be meaningful to the audience. However, the particular metaphorical meaning of idioms have to be familiar already to make sense, and I assume may be especially challenging to second language learners.
Consider this example:
Now there is clear simile there about the rocket, and I think the extended metaphor about about the cannonball and shotgun would be clear to most people. I think most people could work these comparisons out. But what about "a Hail Mary approach". Hail Mary is a traditional Catholic Prayer. ["Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen."]
What has that got to do with asteroids?
Of course 'Hail Mary approach' is nothing to do with offering a prayer, but is said to mean a 'last ditch' effort. [Presumably, the origin is from the idea that when all other options for action intended to bring about some outcome have been tried and failed, prayer is the only option left.] But then isn't 'last ditch' also an idiom. [There seem to be two alternative idiom variants here – 'as clear as ditchwater' and 'as clear as dishwater'.] Someone unfamiliar with English idioms might wonder what ditches have to do with anything. So, that's as clear as ditch water then.
And science communication is populated, so to speak, by a great variety of metaphors, such as:
Again these are 'headline' versions of longer quotes. See https://science-education-research.com/public-science/examples-of-science-metaphors/
Analogies
I consider an analogy to be a comparison between two conceptual structures where an explicit mapping is offered. Here are some examples of what I mean by this. I am not going to talk about analogy in any depth today as a well-framed analogy offers a clear mapping between the positive features that are analogous across the two systems; so, although analogies may be more or less useful to an audience, and still require the analogue to already be familiar, the reader or listener is not left to work out the relevance of the comparison for herself.
I would just take the opportunity to point that when used in teaching, it is important to highlight the negative as well as the positive features of analogies (just as it is important to introduce new concepts through non-examples as well as examples). We may think it is obvious that all electrons are identical and this need not be pointed out, but if the old atom as a tiny solar system analogy is met, why should a learner realise that unless it is pointed out? If that seems an extreme example…
"When Rutherford (following Nagoka) conceived of the atom as a miniature solar system – electrons circling the nucleus as planets circle the sun – some philosophers suggested that electrons might really be planets with mountains, oceans and even living creatures."
Norwood Russell Hanson
I do not expect you to take in the details of this following example, but just wanted to show that structural analogies between conceptual systems can get quite complex:
This was a headline in a science magazine. But the comparison was actually suggested in the primary scientific literature.
What might a non-specialist understand from the text:
I rather likes this analogy, represented schematically here:
Perhaps everyone should know the story of the accidental discovery of the Americas: a discovery that came as no surprise to the people already living there of course. But I wonder about the additional cognitive load for a reader who lacked this point of reference.
(Perhaps today we would no longer be surprised if our overseas communications were translated en route?)
Again, there are many more examples out there:
Anthropomorphism
A particular class of metaphors are those which present nonhuman entities as having the feelings, perceptions, motivations, reflections, intentions and actions of people. This issue of the scientific validity of engaging figurative phrases was one I was already concerned about in my doctoral studies. I wrote a paper with my supervisor, Mike Watts, about the anthropomorphic language used by my students in talking about atoms and bonds and electrons and the like – as in these examples :
I came to the conclusion such anthropomorphism could be a useful temporary crutch (if you excuse my metaphor) in coming to think about the unfamiliar micro-world so critical in making sense of chemistry – making that unfamiliar world seem familiar enough to not seem scary and too abstract, and so allowing the potential for the development of more canonical arguments and explanations. But, too often, these intended temporary pseudo-explanations become permanently adopted by learners as if the explanations they need to learn and apply.
This last example is a from a fascinating account written by a neurodiverse biochemist who argues that she understands human relationship in terms of chemical interactions. My own reading of what is going on is rather different, but she is clearly in the privileged position to comment.
Perhaps some anthropomorphism is more difficult to take literally, and so more easily recognised as figurative?
When other examples of anthropomorphism may be more insidious:
This is from the great Richard Feynman. But I do not find this explains very much at all:
The big issue here is not that a person has to work hard to make sense of such passages, but rather that they are easily made sense of – as long as one accepts that inanimate objects such as molecules and electrons and so forth have feelings and perceptions, and thoughts and desires and intentions, and act deliberately. It is the most natural thing in the world to understand clouds and stars and crystals and microbes through the way we experience the world – the problem surely is that this is not the scientific account and the scientific account may sometimes be obscured rather than revealed through such usage.
Again, this type of thing is common in science communication:
(Again, these are 'headline' summaries – see https://science-education-research.com/public-science/examples-of-anthropomorphism/)
What do you think?
My intention today is more to pose questions, rather than suggest answers. So, I want to finish with some points for discussion:
Normative questions:
- Should science communication be about promoting subjective or objective understanding?
- good enough to satisfy audience?
- sufficient to encourage public support for science?
- sufficient to encourage public support for science?
- but what if curiosity has been satiated by subjective understanding?
Empirical questions:
- If objective understanding is intended as an aim: how do members of the general public understand various examples of the use of figurative language in public discourse?
- do they usually notice the indicators of simile ('like', 'as', 'so to speak', etc.?)
- how often is metaphor appreciated as figurative, and needing interpretation?
- when a simile is transposed into a metaphor after introduction, does the audience recall that it is a figure of speech?
- is anthropomorphism recognised as a form of metaphor that needs to be interpreted?
- …and does this depend upon what is being anthropomorphised: mammal, microbe, molecule, manifold…?
- are idioms recognised for their intended meaning
- especially by second language speakers?
- do readers/listeners look for the points of 'negative analogy' as well as those that map from figure to target concept?
- If subjective understanding is sufficient: are members of the general public satisfied with figurative accounts as scientific explanations?
- Do they 'feel' they understand various examples of figurative language?
[I think there is a fascinating research project to be undertaken here.]
Over to you…
