When the audience for scientific writing shifts from the scientific community to the general public, changes must be made to accommodate to a wider audience. Both “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts” by Jeanne Fahnestock and “Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America” by Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer address whether these accommodations are ethically sound.
Fahnestock explains the genre shift that occurs when a rhetorical situation necessitates that a scientific text address a larger audience: “With a significant change in rhetorical situation comes a change in genre, and instead of simply reporting facts for a different audience, scientific accommodations are overwhelmingly epideictic, their main purpose is to celebrate rather than validate” (Fahnestock 278-279). This genre shift is also addressed by Killingsworth and Palmer who focus on how appealing to human interests rather than a scientific community causes change: “The emphasis on human interest carries the journalist out of the field of natural science and into the action-oriented fields of social movements and politics” (Killingsworth, Palmer 135).
In response to whether these accommodations of scientific texts for broader audiences is ethically sound: These accommodations, while appealing to a larger audience, take on epideictic aims in which the public is learning about new scientific findings but the facts are no longer validated which is causing these texts to lose their pedagogical nature. This also begs the question of what the public is actually gaining if the information is not validated and scientifically accurate.
In “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts,” Fahnestock examines two magazines, both published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which two texts on the same subject provide very different background information and scientific information because their intended audience and purpose for reading changes from the scientific community to a lay audience. Fahnestock says, “Accommodating the scholarly piece for the non scholarly magazine is not, therefore, simply a matter of translating technical jargon into nontechnical equivalents” (Fahnestock 280). While the change in jargon is only intended to accommodate readers who are not experts on the subject, the information is still changed in the shift of this rhetorical situation, which Fahnestock mentions saying, “The science accommodator is not telling an untruth; he simply selects only the information that serves his epideictic purpose” (Fahnestock 281). Even though these changes may not be made with any intention of lessening the information provided to the broader audience, if the broader audiences are unaware of the information they may be losing, ethics can be called into question.
Killingsworth and Palmer address the ethics of the change in rhetorical situation from a scientific audience to a broader audience by examining what happens when there is a change from a “news” story to a “human interest” story. According the “Ecospeak” article, “Human interest is the leading factor in determining what scientific activities will be covered as big stories” (Killingsworth, Palmer 134). Killingsworth and Palmer recognize two issues with the human interest approach: “First, it insists that science must have social value outside of its own pursuits…that science cannot be an end in itself…Second, this approach insists that science must not only be applied to general human problems but…science must solve human problems” (Killingsworth, Palmer 135). This is creating a movement from providing information from a scientific outlook to a journalistic approach based on social movements and politics to draw attention rather than provide accurate information to the public. It appears that this is also an issue for Fahnestock who says, “In the space limits of a short notice in a magazine of popularized science, there is not room for the qualifications a more knowledgeable audience would demand, qualifications that show the author’s awareness of the criticism and refutation that an expert audience could raise against his inferences” (Fahnestock 283). Because broader audiences are unaware of the lack of information they are receiving in comparison to expert audiences, there is no demand for a change in the way popularized science magazines and journals present their information.
The “Ecospeak” article pays particular attention to magazines like Time, one of the largest circulated magazines in the world. Because these types of publications focus largely on human interest stories, “It portrays what scientists often disparagingly call the ‘popular image of science,’ preferring applied research and engineering to theoretical concerns, and wavering between reverence and mistrust in its portrayal of the esoteric knowledge of scientists” (Killingsworth, Palmer 141). Rather than focusing on providing accurate and scientific information to its broad audience, these magazines pick articles highlighting big issues for their cover stories to receive attention and readership.
Whether it should still be considered ethically unsound to provide inaccurate and unvalidated information to a general audience who is unaware of this issue is a difficult question to tackle but one that is worthy of attention and discussion.
Link to blog that this was in response to.
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