Writing Climate Change Assessments: Scientific Author Challenges and Rhetorical Negotiations

The rhetorical challenges and deliberations of scientific authors writing climate change assessment reports have received scant scholarly attention. As our interviews with 21 authors reveal, authors engage with multiple stakeholders who bring diverse scientific, political, economic, and cultural interests and perspectives. They must remain aware of politically motivated climate change denial and scientific illiteracy while remaining committed to producing policy relevant rather than policy prescriptive statements. These challenges lead to intense rhetorical negotiations over the lexical and visual features of a document they hope will deflect denial and contribute to meaningful policy solutions.

El español como lengua de las comunicaciones científicas. Consideraciones de Santiago Ramón y Cajal y de Bernardo Houssay / Spanish as a Language of Scientific Communications: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Bernardo Houssay’s Considerations

ABSTRACTOver the course of a wide range of written work, the Argentine physician Bernardo Houssay (1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology) vindicated the contributions of the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine) and the way his research contributed to dismiss prejudices against Spanish scientific activity. The object of this article is to inquire into Cajal and Houssay’s considerations about scientific communications (conferences, articles, university lectures) in Spanish and about Spanish as the language of science. In a corpus of documents written by both figures, there have been analyzed representations and linguistic ideologies, namely, representations that refer and evaluate linguistic objects (in our case, “Spanish language” and “scientific discourse”) and their articulations with specific cultural, political or social formations (Arnoux and Del Valle 2010). Thus, inquiries are made on descriptive and prescriptive statements that define characteristics and style of scientific communications and ideologemes (Angenot 2010) on which argumentations are supported. The analysis notices criticism to the Spanish-speaking articulation characterized by hyperbolic rhetoric, alien to the criteria of precision and strictness typical of scientific discourse; as well as it reveals gestures or interventions that, in different degrees, tried to vindicate or encourage the use of Spanish in scientific activity.RESUMENA lo largo de una extensa obra escrita, el médico argentino Bernardo Houssay (Premio Nobel de Fisiología en 1947) reivindicó los aportes del anatomista español Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Premio Nobel de Medicina en 1906) y el modo en que sus investigaciones colaboraron para desterrar prejuicios acerca de la actividad científica española. El objetivo de este trabajo es indagar las consideraciones de Cajal y de Houssay sobre las comunicaciones científicas (conferencias, artículos, clases universitarias) en español y sobre el español como lengua de la ciencia. En un corpus de documentos formulados por ambas figuras, se analizan las representaciones e ideologías lingüísticas, es decir, las representaciones que refieren y evalúan objetos lingüísticos (en nuestro caso, “lengua española” y “discurso científico”) y de sus articulaciones con formaciones culturales, políticas o sociales específicas (Arnoux y Del Valle, 2010). De este modo, se indagan los enunciados descriptivos y prescriptivos que definen los atributos y el estilo de las comunicaciones científicas, y los ideologemas (Angenot, 2010) en que se apoyan las argumentaciones. El análisis advierte una crítica a la enunciación hispanoparlante caracterizada por una retórica hiperbólica, ajena a los criterios de precisión y rigurosidad propios del discurso científico; así como da cuenta de gestos e intervenciones que, en distintos grados, intentaron reivindicar o potenciar el uso del español en la actividad científica.