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In both scientific visualization and text, we see the same representational transposition at work that we saw before in the case of other two-dimensional imaging,^§MS2.2c including photography.^§MS2.2.2a Entities are represented at the expense of actions. Image and text are complementary ways by means of which actions are thingified. Diagram and text in Newton’s Opticks equally become media of objectified assertion. Such objectivity works for its intricate, abstract density – too intricate, in fact, to be spoken, indicating once more the substantial differences between the affordances of text and speech.¹⁹³ But it also comes at the cost of the kinds of delicate attention to nuances of action reflected in the finely modulated transactivity of first languages.^§MS2.1.2d

As powerful as science has proven to be, the affordances of its characteristic forms of meaning occlude as well as reveal. As well as opening meaning, science constrains meaning. More than a neutral craft, science is by transposition a way to remake the world, at the same time opening out and limiting the scope of our meanings, for better and at times for worse.

The most consistently objectifying of modern science has no “I.” Nevertheless, agency there must always be. While in his experimental mode, Newton’s “I” does things and observes things.^§MS2.3a “I held a white paper … ” But then when he moves into the theoretical mode, the patterning of agency changes: “It has been proved … It has been shewed … It may be concluded,” says Newton, transposing his experimental experience into theory.

If the action has been removed from nature, it is replaced by the epistemic actions of the scientist, and by the time scientific reason is applied, it is hidden by an “it.” Something or someone must be able to act for clauses to be grammatical. The actor who remains is the reasoning scientist, though Newton and the scientists who have followed in his vocation habitually try to cover the tracks of their own agency with things that act and the passive voice of abstracted acting.

On the cusp of the revolution in human consciousness that is modernity, Newton still in places expresses a conditionally experimental “I.” He tells of the things he did on his path to objectivity. Much modern science will try even to erase these tracks.

Then, to the modern reader, there comes a jarring show of subjectivity: “By this way of arguing I invented almost all the Phænomena described in these Books, beside some others less necessary to the Argument; and by the successes I met with in the Trials, I dare promise, that to him who shall argue truly, and then try all things with good Glasses and sufficient Circumspection, the expected Event will not be wanting.”¹⁹⁴

As if Newton invented colors! Now his “I” jarringly goes too far, at least from the perspective of a later scientific modernity.^§MS1.3.2d Though of course, in a sense he did invent something, along with the other “giants” on whose shoulders he recognized he stood, and that is a characteristically modern way of transposing text, image, and object, applying this in the science of light and color. And to the particular point of the Opticks, as a consequence of his (and others’) “invention” we now do things with colors that otherwise may not have been.

The assertive function of science has taken us to new places, not just in text and image, but by dint of the transpositions of its textual and visual insights backwards and forwards into space, object, and body. Science not only has us conceive in new ways. It also has us act in new ways. Its distinctive modes of assertion have opened us to new meanings in the natural and social worlds. However, by “thingifying” the world, our modes of textuality, visioning, and embodied presence have also constrained our meanings to narrowly instrumental forms of reason.

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¹⁹² Bruno Latour, 1988, “Drawing Things Together,” pp. 19–68 in Representation in Scientific Practice, edited by M. Lynch and S. Woolgar, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 22.

¹⁹³ James Paul Gee, 2004, “Language in the Science Classroom: Academic Social Languages as the Heart of School-Based Literacy,” pp. 13–32 in Crossing Borders in Literacy and Science Instruction, edited by E.W. Saul, Arlington, VA: NSTA Press; Jay L. Lemke, 1990, Talking Science: Language, Learning and Values, Westport, CN: Ablex.

¹⁹⁴ Isaac Newton, 1730 [1952], Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and the Colours of Light, New York, NY: Dover Publications, p. 115.

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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. 241–243. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Assertion §MS2.3.1