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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36897
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36897
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Our speech and writing is full of anthropomorphic language. We ascribe actions to inanimate objects and abstractions all the time. It is almost impossible to communicate effectively without doing this.

Unfortunately, there are people who think of language as a machine (rather like the way a programming language is a machine). To them, anthropomorphic language is simply wrong since the object or abstraction to which the action is ascribed cannot actually act. In most cases, they pick on surface examples of this with no idea of how deeply it actually runs in the language. Rivers don't run (they have no legs). Gravity does not pull (it has no hands). Winds don't blow (they have no lungs). We anthropomorphize everything. It is just how language works. (Language doesn't work and it doesn't receive a paycheck.)

Language is made up of stories and stories are an association of an action with a consequence. There is always an actor in a story. So "science helps" because to describe science we make it an actor and ascribe actions to it, because that is the kind of minds we have and the way we form concepts and communicate them.

The process by which the scientific inquiry of many individual people, and the communication of the results of that inquiry informs the expectations of individual people about how individual situations in the natural world may unfold is incredibly complex and "People who do science help us understand nature," does not begin to unpack that complexity.

If I wonder why my pen ends up on the floor when it rolls off the table, Newton does not appear at my side and give me a lecture on gravity. In fact, I probably learned about gravity from my parents or from a school teacher, none of whom conducted an scientific experiment in their lives. Try to explain in fully literal terms how the knowledge of gravity got into my head, and even what it means to say that I "understand" gravity, and you will be here all week.

So we compact all of that into a simple anthropomorphic story, "Science helps us understand nature." And that simple story is enough, most of the time, for us to reach a conclusion about how to act. (Do I make my kid sign up for science class?)

Sometimes, of course, we do need to unpack these statements. Sometimes they are not by themselves a sufficiently subtle guide to action and we need to break them down further in order to reach a more sophisticated conclusion about what action to take. (For instance, much of what is presented a "science" in newspapers turns out to be wrong or misunderstood. Most scientific experiments are never replicated, meaning that their conclusions are very shaky. And not all statements made by people who claim to be scientists are either supported by actual scientific experimentation or reasoning, or even amenable to experimentation and reasoning.)

But the fact that a statement like "Science helps us understand nature," is not fully correct in each and every instance does not mean it is bad writing. It may or may not be the appropriate message to give or to rely on in any particular case, but it may also be the story that is an appropriate guide to action in many cases.

And this is the nature of all stories, and therefore, finally, of all statements. They can always be unpacked. But the process of unpacking them is exhausting and we would get nothing done or said if we unpacked every statement all of the time. (Nor would we ever finish the process of unpacking, since we would express the unpacked elements of one figurative statement in other figurative statements because that is how language works.)

We communicate in stories, and when we analyse stories, we do so by telling stories, which are also subject to the same analysis. There is no bottom to this well. That is simply what language is.

Original score: 8