The Language of Science and the Science of Language: Scientific Discourse Past and Present 

by Sabine H. Seiler

Scientific observations and findings should be presented in a language that is free of the “colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables” (62) – that is how Thomas Sprat put it in his History of the Royal Society, a treatise first published in 1667.^[1] Essentially a reasoned and, at times, passionate defense of the Royal Society, which had been founded in 1660, Sprat’s History also addresses the issue of the “manner of discourse” in which science was to be recorded and conveyed. Sprat’s book thus constitutes an early effort to institute a discourse of science separate from other uses of language.

The seventeenth century – the period Foucault in The Order of Things terms the Classical Age^[2] – saw a great burst of interest in the sciences. In the Classical Age language was considered a transparent medium providing access to a world beyond itself. It represented the world and served as a communication tool that can be controlled and – possibly – perfected, that is, brought to congruence with the reality it designated. Language as designation and representation functioned very much like an instrument of scientific discovery and therefore required the same study and care as any other scientific apparatus. As Foucault puts it, in the Classical Age it is “of the very nature of language to be knowledge from its very first word. . . . Speaking, enlightening, and knowing are, in the strict sense of the term, of the same order” (89).

Above all, as a scientific instrument, language had to be kept free of anything that could interfere with the acquisition of knowledge: deception, lies, poetry, rhetorical figures, personal opinion, and personal, idiosyncratic style and diction. Accordingly, Sprat denounced at great length the use of rhetorical flourishes and embellishments designed to arouse the emotions and passions because they confused and weakened reason, the indispensable instrument in the acquisition of knowledge. Not surprisingly, the seventeenth century was also the great age of language reform; efforts at improving the language ranged from “tinkering” with it to the creation of artificial languages. Modified versions of such endeavors have survived into our own time – most of them, then as now, largely unsuccessful. And nothing came of the recommendations of the Royal Society’s own committee on improving the English language,^[3] despite several big-name supporters, such as Dryden, Defoe, and Swift.

Sprat summarized the Royal Society’s recipe for the new “plain” scientific style: it required the rejection of “all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style” and the adoption of “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can” (113). This last phrase already hints at the next logical step toward making language more “scientific”: mathematical formulas and equations. Mathematics, a far cry from the flowery style Sprat castigates, meets the criteria of being distinct from everyday language and being universal. In a sense, the mathematization of the sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a continuation, albeit with modifications, of the development begun in Sprat’s time in the early days of the Royal Society.

At the core of many language reform endeavors was the notion that words, above all nouns, are the names of things. The goal of science, then, was to give to all things their right and true name. Sprat made this notion part of his definition of the plain style, recommending a “return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words” (113). Of course, neither the seventeenth-century language reformers nor their zealous successors were able to achieve this misguided ideal. After all, for language to work, there must be common nouns that link entities sharing certain elements or characteristics but differing in other respects. Among other attempts at reforming the English language, Swift also satirized this particular notion. For example, in his 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels^[4] Gulliver visits the School of Languages at Lagado (part 3, ch. 5), where he finds the professors engaged in efforts at improving their language, efforts that very much resemble those in Swift’s own time: “The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.”

Not content with this, the professors proceed to the next logical step and work out a

Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. . . . Since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. . . . Many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. . . . But for short Conversations a Man may carry Implements in his Pockets and under his Arms, enough to supply him, and in his House he cannot be at a loss.

Though this satire demonstrated the absurdity of the idea that nouns are names for things and naming things the essential function of language, it does not question the concept of language as primarily a transparent means of communication. That concept was not really called into question until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when a different understanding of language emerged with the Romantic movement.

This new understanding was part of a radical shift that led to a focus on the underlying structure or cause of phenomena, the “hidden architecture” for which the visible “surface” characteristics are signs. Knowledge now consisted in the correct interpretation of the signs in the visible, sensorial realm to understand the underlying functions or causes they point to. No longer primarily the correct naming or designation of things, knowledge now required moving back and forth between a surface description and a realm largely inaccessible to the human senses.

In terms of language, this shift meant that words no longer simply represented the nonlinguistic world; instead they now are seen as pointing to the deeper, invisible connections between them, to the “hidden architecture” of language – the system of inflection and declension structuring it. Thus, comparative grammar and philology emerge, in other words, the study of how languages develop over time and what holds them together internally. While in Sprat’s time languages were ranked based on their degree of “perfection” or “truth,” in the Romantic era they were classified based on how they combine their elements. Similarities and differences in grammatical structure led to discoveries of kinships and genealogies among languages.

Clearly, this new view of language had profound and long-term consequences, not all of which can be discussed here. One of the major implications of the new philology is that language came to have a historicity of its own. It carried a memory going far back into the human past, a memory not recorded anywhere except in the changes that have shaped each language over time, such as consonant shifts. Words embody their own history: they bear the traces of past changes and forgotten kinships between languages.

Consequently, words say more than what their users mean to say; far from being reducible to names for things, words are never completely under the speakers’ control or even fully comprehensible to those using them. In the Romantic period words and language are freed from designation and instrumentality and endowed with a power and agency of their own.

The German writer and critic Friedrich Schlegel was one of the pioneers of this new philology, which can be traced in his critical fragments and other works, especially his lectures on language. For example, his essay “On Incomprehensibility” foregrounds the problematics of understanding once language no longer functions as a transparent medium.^[5] First published in the journal Athenaeum in 1800, the essay is ostensibly a response to readers’ complaints that many of the articles in that journal, especially those by Friedrich Schlegel, were largely incomprehensible. Like Sprat’s treatise, Schlegel’s essay is – or appears to be – a defense. However, as the essay demonstrates, no simple answer should be expected when Schlegel considers the question “Of all things that have to do with communicating ideas, what could be more fascinating than the question of whether such communication is actually possible?” (259). This fascinating question would, of course, not have occurred to Sprat or any of his contemporaries since they took the answer for granted. Perhaps we can say that to the extent we too take for granted an easy affirmative answer to this question, the seventeenth century’s concept of language as representation has managed to survive.

Schlegel, however, ultimately undermines the notion of language as primarily a means of representing and communicating content, and he does so by dissolving all so-called common-sense certainties about language, understanding, and reading in a generous bath of irony. Schlegel plays with and at every turn frustrates the readers’ desire to read this essay for clarification of the subject, for a “truth” to be conveyed and explained – that is, for the “bare knowledge of things,” as Sprat phrased it. Far from reducing incomprehensibility, Schlegel in this essay performs it and draws attention to his performance. Again and again Schlegel tantalizes readers with declarations that he intends to be serious, thorough, and clear, only to relativize and undercut the endeavor in the very next sentence, for example, alerting readers that things (and words) are not what they seem: “words often understand themselves better than do those who use them” (“On Incomprehensibility,” 260).

This sentence indicates, and in the rest of the essay Schlegel proves, that irony is not a glitch but a built-in feature of language. In Schlegel’s sense irony includes much more than merely saying the opposite of what is really meant; rather, here irony is a matter of the author’s self-reflexive awareness of the ironic possibilities in his or her writing. For example, Schlegel quotes one of his critical fragments in the essay, ostensibly in defense against the charges of incomprehensibility. However, the quote is followed by the comment: “I wrote this fragment with the most honorable intentions and almost without any irony at all” (263), and in the next paragraph Schlegel explains that the irony actually begins already in the fragment’s first sentence. Clearly, attempts by readers to separate the ironic parts of the fragment from the straightforward ones are doomed to fail, a failure highlighted by Schlegel’s own predicament: “ Irony . . . happens in more ways than one. For example, if one speaks of irony without using it, as I have just done; if one speaks of irony without in the process being aware of having fallen into a far more noticeable irony; if one can’t disentangle oneself from irony anymore, as seems to be happening in this essay on incomprehensibility . . . if irony runs wild and can’t be controlled any longer ” (267). 

The introduction of the fragment into the essay has thus increased incomprehensibility rather than reduced it. As Schlegel admits elsewhere in the essay, “A great part of the incomprehensibility of the Athenaeum is unquestionably due to the irony that to a greater or lesser extent is to be found everywhere in it” (265, second emphasis mine). “On Incomprehensibility” appeared in the Athenaeum, and therefore it is likely also permeated by irony (as indeed it is) and does not allow itself to be read simply for information, as a straightforward exposition.

Schlegel’s play with irony culminates in his bold reversal of the stated intention of the essay – namely, to clear up incomprehensibility and misunderstandings – in the question, “But is incomprehensibility really something so unmitigatedly contemptible and evil? Methinks the [well-being, Heil] of families and nations rests upon it” (268). Indeed, at the heart of language is incomprehensibility: words carry traces of a history we cannot fully comprehend and express meanings beyond the user’s influence. It is this openness to interpretation – that is, the opaqueness of language, the fact that words are not just names of things – that is the foundation of communication and comprehension. As Schlegel puts it: “And isn’t this entire, unending world constructed by the understanding out of incomprehensibility or chaos?” (268). Neither language nor extralinguistic reality is transparent, and all subsequent understanding of either of them is based on this primary fact.

In this essay, an early “performance” of the new understanding of language, Schlegel thus frees language from mere instrumentality; by locating irony at its center, he also grants language a certain independence from those who use it. In other words, rather than merely a window on extralinguistic reality, language is elevated to the status of mystery, one whose rites we may practice though we do not fully understand them. 

Notes