Science in popular culture: Contested meanings and cultural authority in America, 1832--1994.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The meaning of "science" has varied considerably over the last several centuries. It has now become an important and powerful word. But the evolution of depictions of science has not been explored in detail. When did now-familiar notions such as a unique "scientific method" or a special community of "scientists" come to be associated with science? What did the spread of these terms say about the ways in which people thought about science? How did discussion of the relationship between science and other categories of knowledge change, and how did such changes shape the importance of being scientific? To answer these questions, I examine popular depictions of science during a number of important nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific controversies, namely those over phrenology, evolution, relativity, and UFOs. My concern is with the American context, and particularly with those aspects of discussion and debate that occurred in magazines and books intended for general readers.
Science-talk, as I call it, has varied within any given moment of history, too. An evaluation of the changing and multiplicitous meanings of science shows that Americans' descriptions often had a dual nature. Increasingly over the last two centuries, the words and images used to define science placed it behind larger and more impermeable rhetorical boundaries. These boundaries helped to distinguish science and opened the door to attestations to its power and prestige in contrast with other forms of knowledge. But a science more easily set apart was also one more easily set aside. As the rhetorical boundaries around science grew, they sometimes severed links between science and the world of ordinary phenomena and concerns, making the scientific remote, inaccessible, and potentially ignorable. The dual nature of science-talk has carved a seemingly paradoxical place for depictions of science in modern American culture, as both a means of asserting authority and as a marginal element of popular discussion. This result suggests a more nuanced picture of the so-called "cultural authority of science" than has typically been offered by historians and sociologists.