“My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses,” says Isaac Newton^§MS1.3.1c in the opening sentence of his Opticks, “but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments.”¹⁸⁵ White light, he proceeds to show, is composed of a range of spectral hues, and all colors are formed in combinations of these hues.

In his own terms, Newton makes two kinds of move, the one empirical, the other theoretical. Here is the empirical move in Experiment 9, Book 1:

The Sun shining into a dark Chamber through a little round hole in the Window-shut, and his Light being there refracted by a Prism to cast his coloured image in PT [in Fig. 5] upon the opposite Wall: I held a white Paper V to that Image in such a manner that it might be illuminated by the coloured light reflected from thence … And I found that when it was equally or almost distant from all the Colours, so that it might be equally illuminated by them all it appeared white.¹⁸⁶

And now, here is his other move, Reason:

For it has been proved … that the changes of Colours made by Refractions do not arise from any new Modifications of the Rays impress’d by those Refractions, and by the various Terminations of Light and Shadow … It has been shewed also, that as the Sun’s Light is mix’d of all sorts of Rays, so its whiteness is a mixture of the Colours of all sorts of Rays … [I]t may be concluded, that the white Colour of all refracted Light at its very first Emergence, where it appears as white as before its Incidences is compounded of various Colours.¹⁸⁷

In the terminology we are proposing in this grammar, these are both assertions. They are statements of scientific fact in the form of observed evidence on the one hand, and generalizable, theoretical proposition on the other.

Generalizable proposition is an epistemological marker of modern science. In the history of Western science, Newton is one of the founders of a way of framing conditionality that in this grammar we call assertion. Indeed, on the scale of conditionality, to assert is to state a certain kind of definitive, ostensibly objective (un)conditionality. This is one of the ways Newton does this in his text: to assert with objective effect, he turns actions and processes into abstract things: not “colours change” but “changes of Colours;” not “light refracts” but light’s “Refractions;” not “light terminates” but “Terminations of Light;” not “colours mix” but a “Mixture of Colours;” not “white emerges” but white light’s “Emergence.”

M.A.K. Halliday calls this process “nominalization,” and the replacement of verb with noun he calls “grammatical metaphor,” where one grammatical form (a verb) is substituted by another (a noun). In each case, the verb Halliday considers to be the congruent meaning; the noun is the metaphorical substitution.¹⁸⁸

This is how, to use J.R. Martin’s nice turn of phrase, by framing “life as a noun,” science “arrests the universe.”¹⁸⁹ This way to “construe experience” becomes one of the characteristic textual moves of science, or what Halliday calls “a general drift … towards ‘thinginess’.”¹⁹⁰ Or, in the terms we have been developing in this grammar, the “I” of the experiment has, from the moment of experimental possibility, been transposed into the assertive “it” of science.

We also find that the aura of textual authority in science works its way even into the most ordinary recesses of modern life. The care label Halliday chances upon on an item of clothing does not say, as it might congruently, “I say as its maker, that if you expose this item, it will deteriorate.” Rather it says by way of grammatical metaphor, “Prolonged exposure will result in rapid deterioration of the item.”¹⁹¹ This sounds like a suitably objective assertion. Science speaks, instead of a fallibly interested person.

In the terms we have been developing in our grammar, science characteristically transposes actions into entities, selves into things, possibilities into assertions. Such construal does not simply represent the world objectively, as one might be led to think from the tenor of the texts of science. It is to apply objectivity to the world as an ascribed meaning, fixing entities in order to classify them, measure them, and generalize about them, pretending this objectively to be the case.

This kind of science does not merely describe things in the world. When its texts are transposed back onto objects and bodies, for instance, it does things in the world – it becomes modern technology and medicine. Science is not just a way of seeing; it is a way of making meaning with and for objects and bodies. Notwithstanding the tenor of its assertions, science does not merely state the existence of entities and objectified actions. It re-orients the meanings attributed to objects and bodies.

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¹⁸⁵ Isaac Newton, 1730 [1952], Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and the Colours of Light, New York, NY: Dover Publications, p. 1; Charles Bazerman, 1988, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 119–27.

¹⁸⁶ Isaac Newton, 1730 [1952], Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and the Colours of Light, New York, NY: Dover Publications, p. 117.

¹⁸⁷ Ibid., pp. 138–39, 127.

¹⁸⁸ M.A.K. Halliday, 2004, The Language of Science, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 5, edited by J.J. Webster, London, UK: Continuum, pp. 19–21; M.A.K. Halliday and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, 1999, Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition, London, UK: Continuum, p. 238; M.A.K. Halliday, 1989 [1993], “Some Grammatical Problems in Scientific English,” pp. 69–85 in Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power, edited by M.A.K. Halliday and J.R. Martin, London, UK: Falmer Press, pp. 79–82.

¹⁸⁹ J.R. Martin, 1993. “Life as a Noun: Arresting the Universe in Science and the Humanities,” pp. 221–67 in ibid.

¹⁹⁰ M.A.K. Halliday, 2004, The Language of Science, The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday, Volume 5, edited by J.J. Webster, London, UK: Continuum, p. 77.

¹⁹¹ Ibid., p. 102.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 239–241. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Isaac Newton’s "Opticks" §MS2.3a