Science, Language, and the Purity of Bottled Water

We need to renew our scientific lexicon, argues Evelyn Fox Keller, if we are to meet the challenges set by emerging fields like systems biology. Current scientific "ways of knowing"¹ are built around nouns and committed to entity realism, Keller argues. They are thus unsuited to encompassing the dynamic interactivity of living systems that has become the chief object of investigation in a growing range of scientific fields, notably ecology and epigenetics as well as systems biology. Keller suggests that other linguistic traditions, perhaps those that are verb- rather than noun-oriented, might offer resources for developing a better-adapted scientific lexicon.

But perhaps Indo-European grammatical categories like noun and verb are in themselves an obstacle, an ingrained element of a supposedly "universal" but in fact inherently anglophone scientific expression whose limits we need to recognize. As her argument unfolds, we realize that Keller is using the distinction between noun and verb as a metaphorical relationship, equivalent perhaps to that between node and edge in flowchart diagramming.² Although I shall continue to use Keller's labels noun and verb for convenience in what follows, I would argue that her essay makes the case for the value not so much of thinking with verbs per se as of thinking with specific verbs that denote process or relationship (to grow, to change, to respond, to become); with particular verbal forms, notably auxiliary verbs and modes of conjugation that express potential and flexibility (might, must, could, should), and gerunds, that in themselves convey process (growing, becoming); and with the prepositions (to, from, by, with, etc.) attached to verbs that likewise express relationships.

In seeking better ways to express complex and contingent relationships or systems in transformation, there is certainly much to be gained by reflecting on the resources offered by other linguistic traditions. For many reasons—political, institutional, and linguistic—English replaced Latin, then French, and finally German as the international language of Western and now global science. It helps, certainly, that modern English is among the most stripped-down of all languages, supremely well adapted to expressing "entity realism." Unlike other surviving Indo-European tongues—German, for example—by abandoning declensions and displacing all the burden of connection to prepositions, English grammar encourages English speakers to regard nouns as things-in-themselves.

Beyond the Indo-European language group, most linguistic traditions operate with parts of speech that only partially correspond to English verbs and nouns, if at all. Detailed aspects of identity, position, relationships, temporality, or potentiality may be expressed in prefixes, roots, and suffixes, in phonetic inflections or copulas. Native English speakers find languages like Luganda or Japanese extremely difficult because the simplest sentence requires a completely unfamiliar attention to qualitative states and relationships.

By contrast, there are languages where relationships clearly spelled out in English are left to the speaker or reader to intuit. In the classical Chinese that was the lingua franca of philosophical and scientific expression throughout East Asia until well into the nineteenth century, many terms are, in Western grammatical terms, polysemic. Whether the word wang 王 means "the king," "a king," "kingly," "to be king," "to act like a king / to rule," "to consider a king," or "to treat as a king" depends entirely on context. This semantic pliability complements the epistemological emphasis on processes and phases, ecologies and resonances to which Keller refers, a style of thinking that characterized classical Chinese ways of knowing at least from the era of the Huainanzi and still permeates Chinese medical reasoning today.

It is surely no coincidence that Joseph Needham, the great expositor of China's scientific traditions, was an embryologist. Trained to investigate patterns of becoming in organic systems, Needham was epistemologically attuned to Chinese ways of knowing, for which he foresaw a bright future in certain domains of modern science. In fields like mathematics or astronomy, he argued, the Chinese traditions were overtaken by and then fused with the European sciences in the seventeenth century, but in medicine and biological knowledge the fusion point had not yet occurred. Needham hoped that in these fields Chinese and Western ways of knowing...