On Monday 29 September 2003 8:51 am, David Preiss promulgated:
> pretentiousness and the literary and the implicit contrast between science
> writing as transparent and non science (literary?) writing as non
> transparent,
David,
Without having checked the context of the quote to see whether the author
would disagree with my opinion, I offer this: In my prior life as a
scientist i found that the quality of text is highly valued within the field
of science. There is a tension in presenting highly technical material in a
way people who have not had years of training can understand, and to do so
without sacrificing how well the text represents current understandings. I
did not take the statement to be an implicit contrast.
There are disagreements in the field and the web is a self-publishing means
through which people can disagree more openly. For example, do a google
search on "bad science", click the first hit, and folloe the link to "bad
meteorology". I find it interesting how metaphor, which is often useful to
help people build conceptual knowledge (there is a substantial group of
scinece ed researchers pusuing this strategy) can be considered "incorrect".
There is an opinion about macro-level description being wrong from a
micro-level perpsective.
Oops. More than you asked, and more than i had time for.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 01 2003 - 01:00:08 PDT