Just how deep the problem goes can be seen if we return to the image of humans as "lumbering robots" that Richard Dawkins uses in his book The Selfich Gene and which we looked at in the previous chapter. Dawkins is one of the great popularizers of the modern age. Not only is he a professor of the public understanding of science, but his numerous books (highly readable, clear and provocative) show him to be a master of the art. Yet he seemed surprised that his image of human robots could be seen differently from the way that he had intended. In a note to the second edition of the book Dawkins tried to explain and justify himself : "This purple passage (a rare - well, fairly rare - indulgence) has been quoted and requoted in gleeful evidence of my rabid "genetic determinism". Part of the problem lies with the popular, but erroneous, associations of the word "robot". " (Dawkins 1989: 270) As Andrew Brown has commented, "Who is he to tell us what the erroneous associations of "robot" are?" (Brown 1999:40). What Dawkins associates with the word "robot" may differ from what the public has in mind, but that does not make the popular associations erroneous. Indeed, it makes Dawkins sound rather like Lewis Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty who tells Alice, "When I say a word it means whatever I want it to mean." Consequently, contra Dawkins, the problem lies not with those popular meanings that have a general currency, but rather with the expectation that a more circumscribed set of associations should be accepted. In other words, the problem lies in the expectation that there can be some measure of control over the meanings of an idea once it is placed in the public domain. Unfortunately, the problem is exacerbated by the very thing that makes communication possible - the use of a common language. As Steven Shapin has pointed out : "To the extent that scientific statements are couched in, or even appear to be couched in, ordinary public language, problems may be endemic. On the one hand, scientists may decide that certain scientific conceptions simply cannot be expressed in the public language. On the other hand, scientists' endeavours to use that public language may involve metaphors and analogies whose resonances they cannot expect to hold in place and control." (Shapin 1990: 997) It is then a question of control. To open up conceptual spaces means to lose control over them. The challenge for scientists is not just whether they are able to do this but wheter they are willing. It is also a challenge that must be faced by democracy.

Faced with the problems of urbanization and industrialization (crime, irreligion, immorality, improvidence and, most importantly, drunkenness) the institutes' organizers felt the need for some form of active control as old certainties seemed tu crumble around them. The end of the Napoleonic wars not only brought an economic slump but also the loss of a sense of solidarity in the face of a foreign threat. At the same time the Church, the traditional source of moral authority, could not keep up with the rapid pace of urbanization. Clearly something new was needed. Mechanics' institutes with their Benthamite emphasis on education seemed to offer a solution. Social stability would be promoted through the transformation of working-class values. The strategy was to target the labour aristocraty of mechanics and artisans so they would affiliate themselves with the higher orders and, in turn, would influence the rest of the working class with their newly acquired middle-class values. Science had a key part to play in the strategy. Examining the public statements of the movement's leaders, Shapin and Barnes show how it was believed that "a regimen of scientific education for certain members of the working class would render them, and their class as a whole, more docile, less troublesome and more accepting of the emerging structure of industrial society" (1977: 32). How was science expected to do that ? "The study of nature would point out laws, relationships and the presence of design of which the worker would otherwise be unaware, and in being thus brought to perceive this rational organisation of nature would perceive (metaphorically or directly) the rational organisation of society also, in its harmonious relationship with the natural world. The effect of this perception would be to render behaviour and values more stable." (Shapin and Barnes 1977:36)

Hyperscience et Pseudoscience?