PROSPECTS FOR IMPROVING THE SCIENTIFIC STYLE OF SPEECH (LINGUOPHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS)

This is an interdisciplinary study. When solving a specific
linguistic task, we rely on the scientific and philosophical thesis
that a person does not have the so-called “free will” (“freedom of
choice”). According to many scientists and philosophers, its
presence would suggest the loss of our actions, thoughts and
emotions from the cause-effect chain, which seems impossible
due to the law of causality, which regards any phenomenon as a
consequence of another phenomenon (cause). The great physicist
Albert Einstein called the doctrine of free will “completely
illogical”, a nonsense, “which must be struggled in every way”.
Common people’s faith in free will can still be justified by the
residual functionality of the illusion: the ability to regulate social
relations. Indeed, most human beings incline to Francis Bacon’s
opinion: what is most useful in action is most true in knowledge.
However, the dominance of such a position in the field of
scientific activity seems unacceptable. The goal of science is the
truth in the classical sense: the correspondence of knowledge to
reality, “an adequate reflection of objective reality by a cognizing
subject, during which a cognized object is reproduced as it exists
outside and independently of consciousness”. This leads to one of
the most important characteristics of the scientific style of speech
– the objectivity of presentation. It should be noted that this
peculiarity contributes not only to the full transfer of information
to the target audience, but also to the consolidation (formation) of
the scientific worldview – both in the reader/listener and in the
author. This is due to the influence of language on thinking.
The linguistic phenomenon that resists the antiscientific idea of
free will is the category of impersonality. The main content of
this concept is “the meaning of grammatical objectlessness in
which language and thinking phenomena interact, reflecting
relations in the world around us” (Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, 1900).
This value allows understanding the reality through language and
is realized primarily in the so-called “impersonal sentences”, the
most important function of which is to indicate an independent
sign not related to the agent (action, condition). They reflect the
basic feature of science – the pursuit of objectivity.
We find it desirable to fight with the illusion of free will at
different levels: legal, pedagogical and so on (having such an
influential supporter as Albert Einstein). However, within this
study we are only interested in its weakening through language
transformations which could potentially affect the Russian
scientific style. As can be seen from the previous section, they
should be based on the category of impersonality. The most
radical and, in our opinion, effective way is to eliminate the
category of person from the scientific style. (We propose
eliminating it only in verbs, but not in personal pronouns. Since
in the latter this category is represented not by a number of
grammatical forms, but by the set of lexemes themselves, here it
has a special “modality” that does not reflect the illusion of “free
will”). At the same time, we consider it necessary to leave the
category of gender as a semantic-grammatical opposition in other
functional styles and the national language as a whole.
We are proposing a number of lexical and grammatical
transformations that do not hinder, but rather contribute to
fulfilling the most important function of the scientific style – the
enrichment of the human mind with objective information about
the world. We are convinced that the improvement of thinking
through language must be precisely this. Distribution of such or
similar grammatical constructions in the scientific style seems
inevitable, since they are more conducive to objectivity,
generalization and abstraction of presentation. This process
should be accelerated whenever possible. Of course, sentences
that do not meet the official lexical and grammatical norms
should not be found in scientific publications, since this would
lead to the marginalization of science. However, the occurrence
of these structures in the literary language can be approximated
by using them as a professional jargon for interpersonal
communication.
Keywords: scientific style, language and thinking, the category
of impersonality, lexical and grammatical transformations, “free
will”, the law of cause and effect