Images of Science: A Reality Check

It will be argued that the dominant form of current academic science is based on ideas and concepts about science and research that date back to philosophy and sociology that was developed since the 1930s. It will be discussed how this philosophy and sociology of science has informed the ideas, myths and ideology about science held by the scientific community and still determines the popular view of science. It is even more amazing when we realize that these ideas are philosophically and sociologically untenable and since the 1970s were declared obsolete by major scholars in these same disciplines. To demonstrate this, I delve deep to discuss the distinct stages that scholars in philosophy, sociology and history of science since 1945 to 2000 have gone through to leave the analytical-positivistic philosophy behind. I will be focusing on developments of their thinking about major topics such as: how scientific knowledge is produced, the scientific method; the status of scientific knowledge and the development of our ideas about ‘truth’ and the relation of our claims to reality. It will appear that the positivistic ideas about science producing absolute truth, about ‘the unique scientific method’, its formal logical approach and its timeless foundation as a guarantee for our value-free, objective knowledge were not untenable. This is to show how thoroughly the myth has been demystified in philosophy and sociology of science. You think after these fifty pages I am kicking a dead horse? Not at all! This scientific demystification has unfortunately still not reached active scientists. In fact, the popular image of science and research is still largely based on a that Legend. This is not without consequence as will be shown in Chap. 10.1007/978-94-024-2115-6_3. These images of science have shaped and in fact distorted the organisational structures of academia and the interaction between its institutes and disciplines. It also affects the relationship of science with its stakeholders in society, its funders, the many publics private and public, and policy makers in government. In short, it determines to a large degree the growth of knowledge with major effects on society.

Sublime sacrifice or total revenge: images of science and the scientist in an American horror film

Hollywood horror films, which belong to a special genre of cinema, have been extremely sensitive to the topic of scientific and technological progress and the role of research scientists in shaping and promoting the technological picture of the world since their inception. The steadily increasing popularity of visual images of science and scientists in popular culture sets the tone for the development of themes and storylines of this genre. They became the immediate fabric of horror films, but unlike politics, art, and religion, Hollywood cinema first looked at the situation from the point of view of its existential dimension. And if the leading social institutions were interested in science only from the point of view of its social utility and pragmatism, then Hollywood horror cinema managed to reveal the existential emptiness and tragedy of the researcher, whom the government plunges into a continuous and mad race for scientific discoveries. It is in this genre that the destinies of human and the nature represented by human mind, enclosed in the narrows of technological civilization, are most clearly drawn. The image of a scientist in an American horror film is outlined in two main trends, negative and positive. Negative visualization is associated with the image of a mad researcher who uses the potential of his intelligence for sophisticated revenge on the social environment. The positive model, due to the demonstration of outstanding achievements of scientists, involves a nightmarish visualization of all possible deviations of power and defects of the social system that are not able to adequately operate with the achievements of science.

In Search of an Evanescent Object: Science and Its History

The authors start from the premise that science is an empirical manifold and then examine different ways of dealing with it. The traditional essentialist approach would construct a single “essence,” a unique and normative set of distinctive qualities that is to be found with minor variations in any branch of science. The usual elements in such a set are the concepts of fact, method, theory, experiment, verification and falsification, while any social, political and cultural processes or factors are discounted as external and collateral. This approach would provide a relatively straightforward account of what science is and reliably distinguish science from everything that is not science so that its claim to autonomy would be supported by a normative “strong” image of science. The history of science would then be reduced to a selection of illustrations of how that essence was formed and implemented. The most well-known versions of this essence and strong image are derived from a logical positivist philosophy of science and from the self-descriptions of many scientists, which are usually considered the authoritative explanation of science and often referred to when science is popularized. The authors point out some considerations that cast doubt on this privilege of self-description. Furthermore, scientificity requires that science itself become an object of specialized research. Studying the activities of scientists and scientific communities using the empirical methods of sociology, history and anthropology has exposed a divergence between the normative “strong” image and the actually observed variety of sciences, methodologies, ways to be scientists, etc. When those empirical disciplines are applied to science, they do not provide an alternative “strong” image of it, but instead construct a relativized and pluralistic “weak” one. The authors locate the crux of the dilemma of choosing between these images of science at the point where the desire to study science meets the urge to defend its autonomy. The article closes by briefly describing the current state of the history of science and outlining the possible advantages of choosing the “weak” image.

Szalone badania i legitymizacja autorytetów — wyobrażenia nauki w horrorze lat pięćdziesiątych

Mad research and authorities’ legitimacy — images of science in the horror movies of the 1950sThe aim of the article is to analyze how the cinematic images of science in the American horror movies of the decade following the creation of the nuclear bomb affect the way the viewers conceptualize the activity of scientists. The text explores four theoretical fields important for this subject — a parallel positive and negative valorization of science, the impact of 1950s horror cinema on the public’s attitude towards scientists and their research, the role of technohorror in the legitimacy of authorities and the indispensability of researchers in overcoming crises presented by films.

‘You Know the Business and I Know the Chemistry’: The Scientific Ethos of Breaking Bad

We conduct an analysis of the American television drama Breaking Bad as a show that resists the label of 'science fiction', while its use of scientific imagery and discourse create what we call a 'scientific ethos'. This essay explores the use of science as an appeal to intelligence and credibility in Breaking Bad. We include a theoretical discussion of how ethos emerges in serial television narratives, an analysis of the show's textual construction of its ethos, and a discussion of the intertexual and social effects of that ethos. Finally, we recommend the adoption of a rhetorical perspective in analysing how images of science circulate in fictional texts.