Communicating Science: a Modern Event

From Firenze University Press Journal: Substantia

Antonio Di Meo, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

The emphasis that is generally put in modern science on the problem of communication has a very profound raison d’ être: compared to many other forms of knowledge, science is by its very nature an intersubjective, public, collaborative and democratic (at least in principle) enterprise.

The modern scholar of nature, in fact, cannot but communicate first of all to his colleagues the results of his research, since, in the final analysis, science is a socially shared and socially validated corpus of knowledge. Only the work which is actually understood by other scientists and used hic et nunc counts for the progress of science. The results of research must therefore be made public. Whatever scientists think or say individually, their findings cannot be considered as belonging to scientific knowledge until they have been report-ed and recorded on a permanent basis.

This imperative has been (and is) often motivated as a moral obligation; as a service rendered to humanity in general, but it has a foundation in the very structure of the functioning of modern science, which has been born and developed since the Late Renaissance in opposition to an elitist tradition of knowledge and its transmission. Within this tradition, the language — often allegorical, metaphorical and analogical — served rather to conceal the contents of knowledge reached from the public of the uninitiated than to reveal them, in order to delimit its acquisition to restricted and selected circles of interlocutors, to the ‘elected’, precisely.

The very idea of progress, which, as is well known, is strongly linked to the beginnings and developments of modern science, since it implies a transgenerational relationship, refers to the possibility of communicating over time that only appropriate language can allow, which must use concrete means capable of making such transmission possible. But this implies in advance that the very idea of translating and transmitting one’s own thought in written form and accessible to most people is considered positive and valued. After the first phase of the correspondence in terms of private contacts, even coordinated as in the case of Marin Mersenne and its “cenacolo” of the so called Academia Parisiensis at the beginning of seventeenth century, from the sixteenth century the scientific communication developed through networks of intellectual and curious individuals.

These collectives were initially unformal, like the Gresham College, the Bureau d’adresses, l’Académie de Montmor and so on, but they were soon (1657–1666) replaced by real scientific Academies as the Accademia dei Lincei, the Académie Royale des Sciences, the Royal Society of London and all the other ones that were progressively constituted between ‘700 and today in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13128/Substantia-923

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