The Language of Science and the Science of Language: Scientific Discourse Past and Present
Language, a powerful technology
in itself, has had a peculiar and complicated
relationship to the sciences since at least the time when they first began to be systematized in the seventeenth century. At that time – which Foucault terms the Classical age – language was considered an instrument of
scientific discovery and occasioned numerous efforts to hone and polish it, to simplify it, and to increase its precision. Thus, the seventeenth century saw the first attempts to distinguish language as an instrument of science from ordinary language. For example, Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, commissioned by the Royal Society and first published in 1667, defines the new scientific discourse based on the prevailing conception of language as representation.
The nineteenth-century radical shift in the understanding of language – pioneered by the Romantic writers, especially Friedrich Schlegel – further complicated its relationship to science. As Michel Foucault explains in The Order of Things, language was freed from designation and instrumentality and endowed with a power and agency of its own. My presentation will trace the implications of these different and still persisting conceptions of language for contemporary scientific discourse.