Semantic Pathologies and the “Laws” of Nature

This article was published in the March 2017 issue of Edge Science.
Edge Science is a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration.

     Mainstream science has strong social, financial, institutional, and even political drivers.  While this is not part of its preferred public image, many educated people understand it.  Research is by no means simply an observational and cognitive endeavor.  But it is also a linguistic endeavor, I want to show.  Even in cases where findings can be reduced to mathematical equations, there are underlying presuppositions, metaphors, and models that get expressed in human language.  I want to suggest and present evidence in this essay that English, by and large the lingua franca of world science, creates bias.  Speaking in certain ways is in a reciprocal relationship with thinking in certain ways.  What if the apparatus we use in our language to speak about scientific findings strongly favors the social, financial, institutional, and political drivers? 

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