From among the many levels at which the issue of language in
relation to science is relevant, two are critical: discovery and
explanation. In all fairness, it should be said that literacy
never claimed to be a way towards scientific discovery, or that
language is the instrument making discovery possible. The main
claim is that access to science, and thus the possibility to
continue scientific work, is primarily through language. This
assertion was correct in the past as long as scientific practice
took place in a homogeneous cognitive context of shared
representations of time and space. Once this context changed,
the built-in language metrics of experience, what is called the
ratio, the shared measure, started to get in the way of new
discoveries and efficient explanations of previous discoveries.
Among the many new codes scientists use today, symbolic
reasoning (used in mathematics, logic, genetics, information
science, etc.) is the most pervasive. All in all, a transition
has been made from a centralized scientific practice to new
experiences, which are quite often independent of each other and
better adapted to the scale of the particular phenomenon of
interest. This independence, as well as sensitivity to scale,
results from different objects of specialized disciplines, from
different perspectives, and from different sign systems
structured as research tools or as medium for constituting
efficient explanatory theories.
Plato would have barred entrance to the Academy to those who did
not master mathematics: "Let no one enter who is not a
mathematician." In today's world, the guardians of science would
require logic, and others the mastery of artificial languages,
such as programming languages, themselves subject to improved
focus (as in object programming) and increased computational
efficiency. In the time of Socrates, "the orator," language was
ascertained to be constitutive of cities, laws, and the arts. In
the time of the Roman poet Lucretius, physics was written in
verse (7,000 lines of heroic hexameter were used to present
Epicurus' atomic theory). Galileo preferred the dialogue,
written in colloquial Italian, to share discoveries in physics
and astronomy with his contemporaries. With Newton, equations
started to replace words, and they became, almost to our time,
the vocabulary of physics. Very similar developments took place
in the evolution of science in China, India, the Middle East. The
emergence of new visual or multimedia languages (of diagrams,
systems of notation, visual representations, mixed data types)
corresponds to the different nature of visual and multimedia
experience. They are steps in the direction of deeper labor
division, increased mediation, and new forms of human
interaction-in particular, of a practice that is more
intensional than extensional.