Literature and Science

Question 1

What happens to science when it becomes part of literature?

Answer 1

• Discursive communities = people who share a set of discourses, understood as basic values and assumptions, and ways of communicating about those goals. (e.g., those who read and/or contribute to a particular academic journal)
• Science and scientific discourse don’t always match up.
• Science fiction acts as a spotlight to show how the above argument becomes visible.

Question 2

Narrative Structures in Scientific Discourse

Answer 2

• Astrobiology = study of life in the universe
• Tension between scientific activity and the discourse around it
• “colonize” and “conquer” when people talk about space (especially in the world of Trump), see language
• Colonial discourse around space exploration
• Johnson creates a narrative of Mars

Question 3

Scientific Discourse in Science Fiction

Answer 3

Tchaikovsky: Children of Time
- Draws on ideologies of human dominion, not scientific discourse
- The longer the story continues, the less it fits traditional language games
* Even when language games don’t work anymore, we have no alternative

Allan: The Art of Space Travel (short story)
- Concerned with speaking about the world
- They’re displaced from their environment that they are used to (see quote about sharks)
* Disconnect from her former scientific environment –> Impossibilities of the language games that Meldoy has, the discourse doesn’t work anymore because the community doesn’t respond to them anymore.
* We accepted the rules of the language games as they are –> we trust the scientific community that things are as they say, but how can we know for sure. I know the world is round, but we have no direct personal experience. We know it’s round because we participate in the language games with the experts

Question 4

Incommensurability — Language Games (Wittgenstein)

Answer 4

• The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore, as it were, entangled in our own rules.
• What kind of grounds have I for trusting textbooks of experimental physics? I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. […] I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a very scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.

Question 5

Incommensurability

Answer 5

theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages do not overlap sufficiently to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other

Question 6

Reading Science Fiction

Answer 6

• Reality is scary, especially with climate change, especially since the pandemic. Believing in aliens is like believing in God: suddenly there’s an explanation for everything that’s gone wrong with the world. Suddenly there’s a cause you can believe in, a ready-made family. (Allan)
• Nothing is more important than the construction of fictional concepts, which will teach us at last to understand our own. (Wittgenstein)