Change: Haldane, Atkins & Rees

Ray of light splashed my body as I lay on my back facing the sky. The heat of the summer day hugged my body, while a ponderosa pine towered over me but far enough away to not leave me in shadow. Its branches scratched the heavens.  

Feeling a wave of fatigue, I rolled onto my side and found a bee resting on the tip of my cup. The front half of its body was dipped toward the liquid within. I could have shooed it away, but its tiny movements enchanted me.

Haldane had once said that insects tend to avoid water because its force could prevent them from freedom and perhaps push them toward death. I found his statement to be interesting because I understood his logic and because it is something that I have witnessed numerous times. But yet, as I said in my opening two paragraphs, I once witnessed a bee taking a drink of liquid from my cup. Because of my observation, I have a tendency to refute that claim because it was not universal with regards to my case.

On the contrary though, how I do I know that the bee was drinking water from my cup? What if it was just storing water for some other use? What if insects don’t drink water at all? What if we just think they drink water because we (humans) do (and so what if science backs up the water drinking thing?)? I find it interesting that I had a tendency to refute these claims because they do not match up to my belief system. I also find it interesting how I had a tendency to think that what he said was universal even though he did not explicitly claim that what he said was “true”.

                         

Now, as I change thoughts, I remember this picture I had once seen. It depicts brain cells and the universe looking very similar to one another. I remember reading on the internet somewhere (perhaps a Facebook comment?) – a while ago – about how that “proves” the existence of God because of how similar they look. Why do some people need validation for their faith in God and for any belief system in general? Is it part of our biology to make and defend arguments? Perhaps another part of it is that people are attempting to change the cultural norm – Perhaps they are trying to sway more people to believe in what they believe in because they won’t be satisfied with a “truth” unless the entire world believes in it. And that makes me wonder something: Would something be considered “true” if every single subculture believed in something the same way? Would something be considered “true” if every single person/creature/organism in the whole entire outer space believed in it? Does “truth” even exist? Or is the concept “truth” something constructed by humans and the society in which we live?

Switching gears a little, I want to focus on Atkins’ discussion of change. When we look to persuade other people, such as with what we write, we are changing something within our readers’ minds. Atkins had said that when something is changed in science and within our opinions, something has to be destroyed in order for that to happen. With reference to our past discussions, I cannot help but think that all of this ties to persuasion, interpretation and uncertainties.

If I were to elaborate I suppose I would sort of repeat my response to Anjeli’s reply in my last blog post. However, here I’ll say a little bit more to bring my response to her in context to this topic: When a person reads something and interprets it within their mind, they can either accept the information or not. When they accept the information, it builds onto what they already know or it totally reconstructs what they already know. At first I didn’t think of the idea of something being destroyed in order for that knowledge shaping to take place, but I suppose it makes sense. In order for the reader to be persuaded by what they read, something that they knew previously had to be destroyed to better fit some other knowledge they currently have in relation to that topic.

To give a visual, the one thing going through my mind right now are puzzle pieces: Two thoughts fit together perfectly to form a piece of knowledge. And if an outside piece (or thought) mutates one of those two pieces, the corresponding partner may no longer fit and thus may fade away. As a result, the outside piece and the mutated piece may become one entity now in order to form another piece of knowledge.  

This discussion about rhetoric is pretty similar to science – Theories get reshaped constantly when new evidence either conflicts or reinforces them. Theories, like human knowledge, is alive and breathing – It is never absolute.

   
 

Persuasion, Interpretation and Metaphors

Long readings are long, but it definitely gave me a lot to think about :).

Well, to start things off, here’s how I interpreted (would this a pun?) the readings: Gross’ article mainly talked about persuasion, Mishra’s talked about picture interpretation and lastly, Lakoff & Johnson’s article talked mainly about the different types of metaphors. 

After looked over the notes I took for each of the articles, I noticed that each one contained “authority” in one way or another:

Gross mentioned that the writer has the authority/role with invention such as citing past papers (either within the body of the text or the reference section) in addition to knowledge sharing. An example would be passing down knowledge from teacher to student because in order to become an authority figure his/her self, one has to learn from other authority figures.

Next, when Mishra stated that pictures are supposed to be more valid than words, I began to think of the discussion of ethos in Gross’s article. I began to wonder that if by thinking of pictures as valid maybe people would give the pictures a type of authority. Because people feel that pictures are supposed to illustrate reality, perhaps that notion is what allows people the faith to rely on the information it seems to contain. Maybe it’s because of that notion of authority that science writers must be careful of the pictures they choose to use because any exaggerated, simplified or out of date picture may also skew the reader’s knowledge despite having words to accompany the pictures.

Toward the end of Lakoff & Johnson’s discussion, I began to think of authority and then based off of Gross’ discussion of student and teacher, I began to wonder about education. More specifically, I began to wonder if people come to definitions or usages of certain words (e.g metaphors) based on what they learn from authority figures (in case anyone who holds and distribute knowledge). For example when we write our profiles of the scientists – we have knowledge of who they are, but people in the class and in our instructor don’t necessarily know who they are yet.

On a second and final point, I want to (try to) tie what all three of these articles mean for us as science writers:

In Gross’ article I feel like the art of persuasion is getting the audience to believe in the knowledge of your piece, and I feel like this applies to researchers and other types of writers as well. When the writer is convinced that the knowledge they’ve come across in their field is worth assimilating within society, they will probably write about it in a way that gives off their feelings. Going off on a little bit of a tangent, I sort of wonder if this could be another place were certainty comes from. If the writer leaves out the “maybes,” “probably’s” and other uncertainties in their writing because they’re sure/satisfied with what they found, than perhaps the reader will have faith in the medium that they read. 

Mishra’s article discussed interpretation of the visuals within a piece of writing. I think this article mainly indicates that as writers we should be wary of what the reader will remember the most. Perhaps the one thing that could stick in their minds is not what we wrote, but is what we chose to display instead. This article discussed how pictures can create false interpretations for the reader in their hunt to pursue knowledge. At first when I read this article, I did wonder if it’s possible to give our readers more simple/precise pictures that can lead them to the same conclusions as the experts in that scientific field. However, that thought only makes me wonder about the types of pictures/diagrams/images that experts prefer vs. what the non-experts prefer. Can the picture looks the same for both groups of people due to their different values? And even if they can look the same, won’t different values/ways of thinking lead to different thoughts regardless?

I found Lakoff & Johnson’s discussion on metaphors to be interesting. I think what stood out to me the most was how different words and their usages in sentences have different meanings in different subcultures and main cultures. It made me think about how we should keep the culture of our main audience in mind. By keeping it in mind as we write, it could help us to better pay attention to our words which could ultimately aid in how we persuade our readers and how our readers will interpret our work.

Before I depart, here is one thing I thought of as I read through Mishra’s piece:

* Are pictures rhetorical? I know that rhetoric deals with language, written and spoken, but if the pictures provoke knowledge construction (whether accurate or not) and then can influence how people interact with other people (e.g pass on that knowledge to others), would that make pictures rhetorical then?