Abstract

MASSI, Luciana  and  QUEIROZ, Salete Linhares. Aspects of the Nature of Science in Scientific Discourse: Investigating the Meaning Effects of Scientific Language. Rev. Fac. Cienc. Tecnol. [online]. 2019, n.46, pp.101-121. ISSN 0121-3814.

Among the many challenges of Science Education (SE), familiarizing students with scientific language and getting them to understand aspects of the Nature of Science (NOS) are as important elements as teaching and learning scientific concepts. Although these first two challenges are widely explored in SE research, we see little concern in articulating them. We wonder to what extent canonical scientific language itself contributes to maintaining or breaking with views of science that reflect the way scientific knowledge is produced? In this sense, this theoretical article intends to explore these relations from the contribution of the French Discourse Analysis (DA), which allows us to recognize the meaning effects of the scientific text, and recent research on NOS, which discuss fundamental aspects for the understanding of the process of production of scientific knowledge. We identified three fruitful articulations between these perspectives, starting from the characterization of scientific discourse based on DA: the absence of subjectivity and the human dimension of scientific work; the interdiction to interpretation and communicative, historical and creative aspects of the scientific knowledge production process; and the explicit intertextuality and collective character of the scientist's work. We conclude that this kind of analysis illustrates that scientific language condenses elements that contribute both to ratify distorted views of science and to rectify them, which implies teaching and research in SE.

Keywords : Scientific language; nature of science; sense effects; speech analysis.

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