Interpretive Communities

An idealized treatment of science envisions it as a sphere of activity in which there is no need for interpretation. The specialized terminology and systematic methodology of science creates an environment in which interlocutors understand each other so perfectly that they can dispense with the messy business of untangling each other's utterances. The precision of scientific communication allows the direct transfer of meaning from one mind to another, or so the story goes. The concept of the interpretive community can help to explain how communication within science can be so effective, designed to convey meaning between experts with so little ambiguity and confusion, and why that image of scientific communication does not always match the reality of how scientific texts are encountered.

Literary critic Stanley Fish introduced the idea of the interpretive community to show how a particular meaning for a text is rooted in the shared interests and goals of a particular group of readers. A piece of literature might not have a single, objectively true meaning that is understood by all readers at all times, but a community of readers who share a set of interpretive strategies, and who look at a text from the same frame of reference and with an agreed upon procedure for determining its meaning, can unite in a shared understanding of it. Scientists who share a disciplinary vocabulary and an agreed upon set of goals and research practices constitute one such interpretive community, allowing them to suffer no loss of communicative content and endure no contentious debate over the meaning of their shared texts. Communication in science is thus ideally untainted by the murky depths of hermeneutic encounter.

But even if it were true that scientists within a discipline always make up a community of speakers who understand each other perfectly, there are situations when scientists from one discipline must communicate with scientists from another, with those who are still training to enter the discipline, or with nonscientists. It is in these cases that the concept of multiple interpretive communities becomes especially useful to the activity of describing, analyzing, and evaluating the communication of scientists.