The manipulation of scientific language

There are several ways in which scientific language can be manipulated:

• By trying to take advantage of the prestige of science where it shouldn’t be applied, to obtain benefits of some kind. For example: when a product or a plan is advertised as the result of a scientific study that has not actually taken place. Over time, this effect usually materializes in an incorrect use of the most advanced scientific terms of the moment. At the end of the 19th century, many products carried adjectives related to the telegraph or radio broadcasting; in the early 20th century, the element radium and radioactivity were widely used, before their harmful effects were discovered; in the middle 20th century the word atomic was in vogue; at the end of the 20th century, the terms computerized, electronic and biotechnological were preferred; and at the beginning of the 21st century the most used terms are ecological, sustainable and environmentally friendly. The scientific value of all these qualifiers is almost null.
• By presenting as scientific something that is not science, but philosophy. Along history, this has occurred several times in various forms. At present it is very common among supporters of materialism, who try to cast this philosophical theory as though it were science. I have talked about this in several posts in this blog, such as this one.
• 
  By presenting as established by science a theory that is really a hypothesis with no real foundation. This can occur on several levels. For instance, the several  multiverse theories (some of which are incompatible with the others) are just speculation. Another, more acceptable level, corresponds to those theories that fit the existing data, but have failed to make any surprising accurate predictions. These theories (such as the standard cosmological model and the theory of cosmic inflation, the inflationary multiverse excluded) must be considered tentative, far removed from other theories that have made such predictions, such as General Relativity, quantum mechanics, the standard model of particle physics, or the cosmological theory of the Big Bang. Regarding this, see this post.
• Another frequent form of manipulation of scientific language is based on the intrinsic ambiguity, both syntactic and semantic, of human languages, in which a large part of our scientific heritage is expressed. Yes, mathematics provides a way of escaping that ambiguity, but it can’t always be used, and it is beyond the reach of many people, thus popular science is easily manipulated, or at least misunderstood, as I have indicated frequently in my blog posts. I talked about the two forms of ambiguity in a post in this blog about machine translation.

In an article on the manipulation of scientific language, Tongnian Wang says this:

Language is a human product, therefore receptive to all types of manipulation for desired results; this is indisputably a weakness of linguistic communication… There is inevitable use of ‘axioms, postulates, definitions and hypotheses’ in scientific methodology – and this is the main stage where manipulation of language happens.

Like any human activity, science can be manipulated. This is the reason why we must always be ready to detect manipulations, reject them and report them.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca