June 2001 / Vol. 51 No. 6 • BioScience 487ArticlesThe cause and root of nearly all evils in science is this—thatwhile we falsely admire and extol the powers of the humanmind, we neglect to seek for its true helps.Francis Bacon Aphorism IX, Novum OrganumIn the first paragraph of a letter in the “Science’sCompass” section of Science (Bazzaz et al. 1998), a groupof eminent ecologists notes that good science used to involvedoing first-rate research and publishing it in the scientific lit-erature. Now, however, they note a third necessary activity: “in-forming the general public (and especially taxpayers) of therelevance and importance of our work. We are convinced thatthis applies to even the most esoteric of ‘basic’ research, be-cause understanding how the world works is fundamental toboth satisfying natural human curiosity and solving the hu-man predicament” (Bazzaz et al. 1998, p. 87). They concludethat ecologists of the future should be trained in teaching thepublic about losses of biodiversity and ecological services.Several months earlier, in her presidential address to the1997 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad-vancement of Science, Jane Lubchenco issued a call for a newsocial contract for science (Lubchenco 1998). It is striking howmuch her vision involved a new role for scientists in publicdiscussions. Scientific knowledge, she urged,“can help framethe questions to be posed, provide assessments about currentconditions, evaluate the likely consequences of different pol-icy or management options, provide knowledge about theworld, and develop new technologies.... Some of the mostpressing needs include communicating the certainties and un-certainties and seriousness of different environmental or so-cial problems, providing alternatives to address them, and ed-ucating citizens about the issues” (Lubchenco 1998, p. 495).She calls for better communication of scientific informationthan is already available and recommends more scientific as-sessments, such as those on global climate change, to informpolicy and management decisions.“Scientists should be lead-ing the dialogue on scientific priorities, new institutionalarrangements, and improved mechanisms to disseminateand utilize knowledge more quickly” (Lubchenco 1998, p. 496).Clearly, communication, dialogue, dissemination of in-formation, understanding how the world works, weighing ofpublic priorities, evaluation, and teaching are all urgent, andall require scientists to put their expertise into the publicarena for assimilation. Indeed, the eminent speak for manyof the less well known as well in voicing these concerns andJames R. Weber (e-mail: [email protected]) is a senior writer andeditor at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, adjunct profes-sor of communications studies and English at Washington State Uni-versity, and research assistant professor in speech communica-tions at Portland State University. His research work has focused oncommunicating science to the public, group dynamics, informationflows, and environmental ethics. Charlotte Schell Word (e-mail:[email protected]) is assistant professor of speech communicationsat Portland State University. Her research focuses on risk, scientificand health communication, and attempts to communicate expertiseacross domains, such as among areas of technical or scientific ex-pertise or between expert and nonexpert groups. The authors con-tributed equally to this article. © 2001 American Institute of BiologicalSciences.The Communication Processas Evaluative Context: WhatDo Nonscientists Hear WhenScientists Speak?JAMES R. WEBER AND CHARLOTTE SCHELL WORDSCIENTISTS AND NONSCIENTISTS BENEFITBY RECOGNIZING THAT ATTEMPTS ATMUTUAL INFLUENCE, MULTIPLE FRAMES OFREFERENCE, AND “OBJECTIVE” INFORMA-TION IN SCIENCE COMMUNICATION ARENOT NEUTRAL BUT EVALUATED WITHOTHER SOCIAL INFLUENCES488 BioScience • June 2001 / Vol. 51 No. 6Articlessounding a note of urgency. But how is this important com-munication and interaction to be accomplished? Apparentlycompelling scientific information very often runs aground al-most as soon as it is launched into the choppy waters of pub-lic discourse. In statements advocating more and better com-munication, we often hear language that assumes that thepublic, with its various circles of decisionmakers, will some-how assimilate scientific information and thus be influencedin its decisions. However, if personal reports are any indica-tion, the experience of many scientists in trying to raise pub-lic consciousness about scientific issues has been a mixture ofmodest success, temptations to overstate, and, in many of themost urgent cases, the sense of one step forward, two stepsback.As communication scholars, we have been interested inboth the successes and the missteps in the public fate of sci-entific information. We sympathize with scientists whowonder what happened to the “objectivity” of their work andquestion whether it is useful to enter the public fray armedwith only their careful methods and modest claims. Is it pos-sible, we have asked, for scientific information to makesense in similar ways for nonscientists and for scientists? Werecognize that this question is naive in some respects. It isnot at all clear, for one thing, that nonscientists as a groupdiffer very much from scientists as a group in their meth-ods of understanding various sorts of information. More-over, what does it really mean to gauge intelligibility or un-derstanding “as a group” or to compare such traits to thoseof other groups? We will leave these questions to others forthe time being, but we will address the question posedabove in the context of the creation and co-creation ofmeaning in public discourse.In answering our question, our lines of reasoning haveled us to three conclusions. First, scientists and nonscientistsalike would benefit by seeing science communication as aprocess as well as a product. The communication processinevitably bears two marks of human beings: (1) attempts atmutual influence and (2) a weighing or casting of informa-tion as either positive or negative (whether ethically good orbad, useful or not useful, or interesting or not interesting). Sec-ond, information is understood through both general and lo-cal contexts. Knowledge may be generalizable or universal inits implications, but it is framed through specific contexts thatcan include such things as regulatory guidelines, media cov-erage, individual