The processes of scientific popularization

2.3.2.1 Lexico-grammatical and rhetorical shifts in expression

As mentioned in Section 2.2 above, this study differs from previous studies of vaccine-critical discourse or MMR discourse online in that it is concerned with uncovering the ways in which scientific claims travel and how they are rearticulated as they do so. The complexity of the processes involved is increasingly recognised. The ‘canonical’ or ‘culturally dominant’ view of scientific popularization, whereby scientific knowledge is disseminated to the public in a simplified and, at worst, distorted, form (Hilgartner, 1990) has been roundly challenged. The dissemination of scientific knowledge to a wider audience does not take place by means of a one-way, linear process; instead, scientific and popularization genres interact with each other in complex ways (Myers, 2003). Scientific claims circulate in a complex network of

intertextually related genres (Solin, 2004). As scientists make greater efforts to enhance public understanding of science, the boundaries between scientific and popularized accounts have become more porous, with some scientific journals making a concerted effort to present research in ways which are more accessible to a more general audience (Fahnestock, 2004).

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Scientific knowledge is also transmitted through interaction between scientists and journalists (Ciapuscio, 2003) or doctors and patients (Gűlich, 2003). In all of these situations, particular accommodations are made. Reformulations are made, for example, by repetition or

paraphrase (Ciapuscio, 2003; Gűlich, 2003). Illustration is offered, variously expressed through use of exemplification, scenarios, and metaphor (Gűlich, 2003). Meanings are

negotiated between interactants (Ciapuscio, 2003; Gűlich, 2003) and new meanings emerge as scientific claims move between discourse communities (Beacco et al., 2002; Moirand, 2003).

It has long been accepted that, when scientific claims move from their source domain, they undergo particular lexico-grammatical and rhetorical transformations which can imbue them with an authority often lacking in the original text (Myers, 1994). For example, hedges and qualifications tend to disappear, so that claims are expressed with a greater degree of certainty in a popularization than in the original scientific report (Fahnestock, 1986). The tentativeness which is a feature of scientific writing is thus diminished in popularized accounts (Myers, 1994). There may be a shift in the use of metaphors, especially where new concepts or new threats are an issue. For example, the metaphor of decoding a text was drawn on in stories about the decoding of the human genome in the Spanish press (Calsamiglia and van Dijk, 2004). More interestingly, while the use of war metaphors has been a characteristic of discourse about disease and immunity for a century or more, the emergence of the newly discovered SARS virus occasioned the use, in the British press, of new metaphors (Wallis and Nerlich, 2005). The war metaphor was replaced by the conceptual metaphor SARS IS A KILLER, so that the disease was not represented as an army, but as an individual acting alone (ibid.). Finally, the narrative of the scientific process is replaced by a narrative which

emphasises the scientist as actor (Myers, 1994) and there is greater emphasis in

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popularizations on expressing evaluative assessments about the value of the research (Fahnestock, 1986).

Framing is reflected in the structure of news articles, in which the nucleus (the headline, subheadings and opening paragraph) indicates how the writer intends the reader to interpret the overall message (White, 1997). This represents a particular challenge when using corpus techniques to uncover meaning. The way one interprets a quotation in a news article from, for example, a representative of the DoH saying that there is no evidence of a link between MMR and autism, is likely to vary depending not only on the reporting verb used but on the

ideational content expressed in the headline. Corpus methods tend to divorce individual utterances from their wider context. This problem is discussed further in Chapter Three and the methodological considerations are addressed in Chapter Four. Analysing the framing of smaller, cited stretches of text in news articles in corpus data presents less of a challenge, since reporting verbs and expressions referring to sources generally occur relatively close to the node-word. An obvious way of analysing framing is to examine the evaluative meanings encoded in reporting verbs and in the ways in which a source is referred to. Meanings may be encoded in implicit ways, though. Taylor (2010), for example, notes that terms such as the science, (the) research, (the) scientists and (the) experts are increasingly used in science stories in the British press in appeals to authority, in place of more specific terms. The expressions the science and the research are frequently used in the role of Actor in Material processes (e.g. the science shows) or Sayer in a Verbal process (e.g. the science suggests). In this way they are represented as autonomous entities whose authority is to be trusted (ibid.:

233-238).

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Not all features which are typical of scientific writing are transformed in popularizations. In scientific articles aimed at a more general audience, the core argument is generally

maintained, even though certain accommodations are made which may occasion a shift in meaning, such as, for example, making causal relations appear more certain (Fahnestock, 2004). Jones (2013: 46-47) points out that nominalization is often carried over into journalistic accounts and comments on the use of the terms uncertainty and links in the following citation from a news story on MMR in the Daily Mail, 2 February, 2002:

Although health chiefs insist that the MMR vaccine is safe, many parents have been put off by the uncertainty over possible links to autism and bowel disorders.

(cited in Speer and Lewis, 2004: 174, reproduced in Jones, 2013: 46)

Jones (2013: 46-47) argues that the term uncertainty nominalizes the process of public debate which arose from Wakefield’s claims and thus conceals agency, while the nominalized form links, even though hedged with the word possible, represents the causal hypothesis as more certain than it was.

The observation that certain features thought to be typical of scientific writing may be found in popularizations supports the observation that the boundaries between scientific and

popularization discourse are fuzzier than once thought (Myers, 2003). There is some evidence that scientific writing might, at times, show features which are more typical of popularized texts. In their examination of four news articles on MMR and two scientific articles (one of them the paper by Wakefield et al., 1998), Rundblad, Chilton and Hunter (2006) found that, although the article by Wakefield et al. (1998) conformed in some respects to what one would expect from an academic paper, in other respects it displayed features more typical of news articles. The low frequency of deontic modals used was as expected in a scientific article and

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stood in contrast to the use of deontic modals in the news articles. However, it included a lower proportion of epistemic modals than is typical in scientific writing and the proportion of vague or generic (as opposed to specific) references and references to named authors was more in line with what was found in the news articles.

2.3.2.2 New forms of public discourse about science

One can also approach the analysis of popularization from the point of view of discourse. It is posited that a new form of public discourse about science has emerged, characterised by the mixing of different voices (the voice of the scientist, government officials, the journalist or even the public), so that what results is a patchwork of intertextual chunks of language (expressed through direct and indirect quotation) and elements of interdiscursivity (language use characterised by different ways of representing the world). The phenomenon that Boyce (2007) described, whereby the MMR issue was frequently depicted as a political issue, is part of a general trend in media discourse about science. In media reporting of science issues, there is less concern with explaining scientific ‘facts’ and greater focus on examining the social issues at stake, especially where there is a political dimension to an issue (Moirand, 2003).

The journalist typically makes analogies between the issue or event at hand and other issues and events, thus appealing to (and contributing to) an ‘interdiscursive memory bank’, which is drawn on to frame debates (Beacco et al., 2002; Moirand, 2003). The idea of the

interdiscursive memory bank chimes with Bellaby’s (2003) suggestion that, to fully

understand parents’ thinking on the risks of MMR, one needs to consider broader social and historical factors. Analysing interdiscursive relations also offers a potentially fruitful way of approaching analysis of the JABS corpus. But the concepts of discourse and interdiscursivity are problematic and raise questions of how one defines discourse(s) and how one identifies a

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specific discourse. These questions are addressed in Chapter Three. For now, the discussion moves on to the topic of expertise.