Precision in language, and the politics of science

Science does not speak; only scientists speak. Philosophy does not speak; only philosophers speak. Fields do not exist independent of people. Also, they do not speak with one voice, unless there is only one person in the field in question. Disagreement is a sign that more than one person has committed their subjective minds- their potentially fallible reasoning on the basis of potentially incomplete knowledge, understanding, interpretations, and experience, whatever these may be, to thinking about the same topic. Of course, even speaking of knowledge and experience is potentially a verbal shortcut, a way for imprecision to enter our concepts and make misunderstanding more likely; to speak of our knowledge and experience, singular, is to speak of mental categories into which we place the reality of individual things known and experience. When you can speak of a single category that encompasses multiple real things, or of the real things directly, choose the latter if you want to be as precise as possible in saying what you mean, and the former if you want to be understood by people in general. The important thing is not that you always speak with precision, but that you think with precision, and that requires attentiveness to the nuances of words and their meanings. For instance, the difference between saying ‘science says this,’ and ‘scientists say this.’ Science says nothing, it is neither an entity that can speak for itself, nor is it singular. It is a category for a method for understanding reality, and the multiple, interconnected fields of study in which this method is used; the method is one created and applied by human beings. The method and the fields in which it is applied are valuable to human beings for the increased accuracy of our understanding of the physical world and universe, but they are inextricable from us. Speaking of them as if they were is to suggest they are singular, monolithic and above human disputes, none of which are accurate.