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Chapter 13 the language of nature • I • To judge from some of the ancient creation narratives, the world arose as a visible manifestation of speech.“In the beginning was the Word.”First there was formlessness and chaos, and then the divine voice flashed forth like lightning in the darkness.“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The world began to assume visible, comprehensible form. Whatever we may now think of the old visions of creation, we can remain sure of one thing: without the speaking of the Word—without language —we would have no science, with its striking power to illuminate the world.This observation may seem trite; no one will deny that we must use words in order to achieve and record our scientific understanding, or to pass it on to future generations. But once we stop to reflect upon the fact that science is always a science of speech, a remarkable thing begins to happen. We find ourselves transported to a richly expressive realm of scientific meaning that is as far removed from cramped, traditional notions of science as the first day of creation was from the primeval chaos. The truths capable of revolutionizing our understanding can sometimes be so close to us that we fail to notice them. So it is with science and language. The crucial point is easy to miss: it’s not that we humans just happen to need words in order to talk scientifically about a world that in its own right has nothing to do with language.Rather,it’s that our need for words testifies to the word-like nature of the world we are talking about. I (Steve Talbott) realize that this last statement will provoke surprise and skepticism in many readers of our day. And yet, as long as there has been science, leading scientists have routinely referred to the “language of nature”—not, perhaps, with a clear notion of their own meaning, 158 • Science Evolving but with an evident comfort and sense of rightness about the usage. There is good reason for this. After all, the whole point of our language, our speaking, is to characterize something other than our own speech. When we say“atom”or“energy”or“mass,”we are speaking about something . We seek to elucidate an aspect of the world. To the extent that the meaning of our scientific descriptions is not at the same time the meaning of the world, the descriptions fail as science. As scientists we are always trying to speak faithfully the language of nature. In slightly different terms: the world is in some sense a text waiting to be deciphered—which is why we can in fact decipher it into a scientific description. As with any text, we expect the world-text to make sense, to hold together conceptually, to speak consistently, to justify itself to our reason. These are demands we can bring only to whatever is word-like. The intimate relation between the meaning of our words and the meaning we find in the world may be so obvious as to seem almost trivial, yet its implications are so profound as to have mostly escaped the notice of working scientists. If we took the fact of the world’s speech seriously—the world speaks!—there would be none of the usual talk about a mechanistic and deterministic science, about a cold, soulless universe, or about an unavoidable conflict between science and the spirit. Confronting the many voices of nature, we would inquire about their individual qualities and character, we would look for the direction of their expressive striving, and we would struggle to grasp the aesthetic unity of their various utterances—all of which is to say: we would listen for their meanings. The necessity for such inquiry is implicit in a world that speaks and also in the scientist’s employment of speech to translate the world text. What I wish to suggest is that, by turning a deaf ear to a resonant world and even to our own speech, we underwrite many of the limitations and contradictions of the science we have today. As for what I mean by speech and word-like, I hope this will emerge with greater clarity over the course of this chapter. Suffice it to say for now that everything word-like presents itself as a perceptible exterior bearing an inner and partly conceptual meaning (Barfield 1977).* The * Purely conceptual content—thought without words, to whatever...

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