Science and the craft norms of science journalism, Part 2: Making craft norms evidence based - Cultural Cognition of Health

This is the second in a series that will be between 3 and 14,321 posts on the connection between science and the craft norms of science journalism.

The point of the series, actually, is that there isn’t—ironically—the sort of connection there should be.

I myself revere science journalists. To me, they perform a kind of magic, making it possible for me, as someone of ordinary science intelligence to catch a glimpse of, and be filled with the genuine wonder and awe inspired by, seeing what we have come to know about the workings of the universe by use of science.

This isn’t really magic, of course, because there’s no such thing as magic, and it would insult anyone who accepts science’s way of knowing as the best—the only valid—way of knowing to say that what he or she is doing amounts to “magic” if the person saying this weren’t being ironic or whimsical (I could imagine describing something as “magic” in a tone of rebuke or contempt: e.g., “Freudian psychoanalysis is a form of magic .”).

But what science journalists do is amazing and hard to fathom. They perform an astonishing task of translation, achieving a practical, workable commensurability between the system of rational apprehension that ordinary people use to make sense of the phenomena that they must recognize and handle appropriately in the domain of everyday life and the system of rational apprehension that scientists in a particular field must use to make sense of the phenomena in their professional domain.

Both systems are stocked with prototypes finely turned to enable the sort of recognition that negotiating the respective domains requires.

But those prototypes are vastly different; or in any case, the ones the experts use are absent and very distinct from anything that exists in the inventory of patterns and templates of the ordinary, intelligent person.

These special-purpose expert prototypes (acquired through training and professionalization and experience) are what allow the expert to see reliably what others in his or her field see , and thus to participate in the sharing and advancement of knowledge in that expert domain.

But enabling the ordinary nonexpert to see the things that science comes to know as experts use their specialized professional judgment is the whole point of science journalism!

Necessarily science journalists must find some means of bridging the gap between the prototypes of the expert scientist and the everyday ones of the curious nonexpert so that the latter can form a meaningful apprehension of the amazing, and awe-inspiring insights that the former glean through science’s methods of knowing.

It is craft. Of the most impressive and admirable sort.

It comprises norms that reliably populate the mind of the science journalist with prototypes and patterns of communication practices that achieve the amazing commensurability I’m talking about.

Science journalists generate these craft norms through their collective activity, and acquire them through experience.

But they aren’t static.  They evolve.

Moreover, they aren’t invisible.  They are matters that science journalists, like any other professionals, become keenly and acutely aware of as they do their jobs, and do them in concert with others with whom they discuss, and from whom they learn, their craft.

And like other professionals, science journalists are keenly interested in whether their craft norms are in order .

In the account I’m giving, craft norms are the medium by which professional judgment is formed and through which it operates.

Like a method of scientific measurement, professional judgments need to be reliable: they must enable consistent, replicable, shared apprehension of the phenomena that are of consequence to members of the profession.

But like methods of scientific measurement they must also be valid .  The thing they are enabling those who possess them reliably, collectively, to apprehend and form judgments about must genuinely be the thing that those in the profession are trying to see .

In the case of the science journalist, that thing that must be seen—not just reliably but accurately—is how to make it possible for the nonexpert of ordinary science intelligence to form the most meaningful, authentic, true picture of the awesome things that are genuinely known to science.