"Margaret Mead noted... that scientists at the frontier, where the terminology and imagery are developed, speak mostly to other scientists at or near their own level of understanding. In this way, scientific language has escaped from the realm of "natural language." This is the fate of "any language taught only by adults to adults - or to children as if they were adults. ...It serves in the end primarily to separate those who know it from those who do not." Since then, linguists and anthropologists have been reinforcing the point that the cure cannot come from simple "translation" but may lie in recognizing that a difference in languages reflects a difference in world views. Without making the mutual accommodation of these views a prominent part of the agenda, science teaching probably has to remain superficial. I refer here to the work of R. Horton on African traditional thought and Western science, and of J. Jones in... New Guinea; both... have studied the ways in which the traditional cultures of the new learners differ from the scientific cultures of the teachers, and how and to what limited degree these differences can be decreased."
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Jargon
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