Back when I was in school, one of my English teachers would mention that, when writing, we should be careful about connotation – the meaning implied by a word or phrase – versus denotation – the direct meaning of the word or phrase. When we talk about science, we’re usually aware of communication problems caused by jargon (hardly unique to science), but we sometimes forget about connotation and denotation. This causes confusion, and nowhere is it more apparent than the debate over biological evolution.
Now I teach chemistry and not biology. But I do teach the scientific method and basic scientific language at the beginning of my intro chem course. One of the things I do is to simply ask students what they think that a scientific theory and a scientific law are, and how they’re similar and different. This is probably a pretty good approximation of what Joe Average thinks when he hears all this talk in the media about theories of evolution.
Let’s hear from some students! (Ignore some of the questionable English – some of these students are nontraditional students who may also be taking remedial English courses at the same time as this class.)
Theory is what need to be known from the past and law is the way of order that experiments should go.
A law is truthful and a theory is untruth.
A scientific theory is just an observation whereas a scientific law has already been proven to accurate.
Theory is when you have no proof of, but you feel that your theory is feasible. Law is proven, theory isn’t proven, an explanation to try to explain.
A theory is an idea without explanation.
A law has been worked out a lot of times and is true, a theory is not. A theory is a guess.
Now we science folks are thinking of a rather specific meaning when we talk about a theory – an explanation of a set of facts that is agreed upon by most scientists and that has been supported and tested by many experiments. But when we talk to people with no science knowledge, our audience thinks something else entirely. So the moment a well-meaning biologist begins to talk about the theory of evolution to a non-science crowd, the crowd immediately begins thinking “this isn’t really true – otherwise he’d have called it a law”. The word “theory” has a pretty bad connotation outside of the scientific community.
What to do? Other than making darned sure that the audience knows what you mean by using the word “theory”, I’m not sure. Perhaps “scientific explanation” might be a better term for a public talk. It gets the point across without using a loaded term.
In the meantime, I’m trying to do my part. Hopefully, my intro chem students come out of the class knowing what a scientific theory is. And maybe they learn some chemistry, too. 🙂