<p>Strategic narratives (persuasive use of story systems) in science communication have been gathering<br>increasing support, especially in the face of misunderstandings about high-impact climatic change and hydrometeorologic extremes.<br>The use of these narratives reveals, in line with linguistic research, that traditional scientific discourse<br>conception has become outdated. Should scientific discourse be centered on the description of discoveries?<br>Should the role of political discourse be to convince someone to act? Before answering these, it is necessary to<br>understand the crucial function that uncertainty plays in communication, along with its consequences in the<br>concepts of objectivity and truth. More importantly, understanding its role in scientific society and sustainability.<br>Unable to eliminate uncertainty altogether, science becomes an essential escort to recognize, manage<br>and communicate its pertinency. However, the most popular strategic narratives sideline uncertainty as a threat.<br>Denialists follow a similar approach, though they communicate uncertainty to discredit evidence. Comparatively,<br>in their latest Assessment Report, the IPCC characterized uncertainty whilst stating: &#8220;uncertainty about impacts<br>does not prevent immediate action&#8221;.<br>Scientific discourse outputs and social reality constructions influence each other. The moralization of<br>science communication reveals how XVII century revolutionary skepticism can now be perceived as a threat, and<br>facts expected from science can be deemed dogmatic truths and perceived as decrees through rationalism and as<br>an extension of Judeo-Christian philosophical influence. Equally important, uncertainty reinforces individual<br>freedom, while society grasps and recognizes certainty as security and demands it from institutions, accepting<br>degrees of authoritarianism to maintain a tolerable living condition.<br>From &#8220;Climate Emergency&#8221; to &#8220;Thousand-Year Flood&#8221;, public interest in climatic change and extremes<br>increases following high-impact events, yet trust in science plunges into a deep polarized divide among absolute<br>acceptance and outright rejection relative to the bold headlines conveyed not only in the media but also in some<br>scientific literature.<br>Political, religious and activist leaders strike one as prophets acting in the name of science. From<br>rationalism to rationality, scientific culture is pivotal to the analysis of complexity, objectivity, and uncertainty in<br>the definition of truth (absent from epistemological discussions for centuries). Humor/sarcasm, literature or<br>dialectic are examples of how to communicate entropy of scientific models, while reflecting about the role,<br>uncertainty, and mistake, retain in life.<br>&#8220;People want certainty, not knowledge&#8221;, said Bertrand Russel. However, neither science nor democracy<br>work like that, rather taking reality as having shades of grey instead of a reduced black-or-white dichotomy.<br>Science is not about giving just one single number to problems clearly not reducible to such, as that gives a false<br>sense of certainty and security in an entropic world where we cannot control everything.<br>In order to objectively analyze discourses in light of their uncertainty features, detecting whether they<br>contain polarized, absolutistic narrative patterns, we introduce a new process-consistent Artificial Intelligence<br>framework, building from Perdig&#227;o (2020, https://doi.org/10.46337/200930). The complementarity of our<br>approach relative to both social and information technologies is brought out, along with ways forward to reinforce<br>the fundamental role of uncertainty in scientific communication, and to strengthen public confidence in the<br>scientific endeavor.</p>
Visual communication in research: a third space between science and art
