The prevailing view of scientific popularization, both within academic
circles and beyond, affirms that its objectives and procedures are
unrelated to tasks of cognitive development and that its pertinence is
by and large restricted to the lay public. Consistent with this view,
popularization is frequently portrayed as a logical and hence
inescapable consequence of a culture dominated by science-based products
and procedures and by a scientistic ideology. On another level, it is
depicted as a quasi-political device for chan- nelling the energies of
the general public along predetermined paths; examples of this are the
nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution and the U. S. -Soviet space
race. Alternatively, scientific popularization is described as a
carefully contrived plan which enables scientists or their spokesmen to
allege that scientific learn- ing is equitably shared by scientists and
non-scientists alike. This manoeuvre is intended to weaken the claims of
anti-scientific protesters that scientists monopolize knowledge as a
means of sustaining their social privileges. Pop- ularization is also
sometimes presented as a psychological crutch. This, in an era of
increasing scientific specialisation, permits the researchers involved
to believe that by transcending the boundaries of their narrow fields,
their endeavours assume a degree of general cognitive importance and
even extra- scientific relevance. Regardless of the particular thrust of
these different analyses it is important to point out that all are
predicated on the tacit presupposition that scientific popularization
belongs essentially to the realm of non-science, or only concerns the
periphery of scientific activity.
