The professionalizing of applied linguists
THE GROWTH OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS
The importance of speculation
Balancing source and target is very much in the tradition of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which was of such importance in the development of academic, vocational and technical education. The ideas of analysis, of toleration, of openness to ideas free of the restraints of religious conformity, and of improvement, all these optimistic and humanist projects are found in the excitements of the Enlightenment. It was after all the Age of Revolutions, and yet people retained a sense of responsibility.
Broadie writes of ‘a concept of the interrelation between the three disciplines of ethics, economics and engineering. Solutions to engineering problems have immediate economic consequences which themselves have to be judged in terms of ethical criteria. The three form a system of thought, a unity of disciplines’ (1997: 19).
And within the ranks of the Enlightenment there raged the age-old battle between realists and nominalists (or perhaps more accurately conceptualists). For David Hume ‘nature is in large measure a product of our own imaginative activity. We make the world we live in’ (Broadie 1997: 19), while Thomas Reid espoused a kind of naive realism, what came to be called the Philosophy of Common Sense: sensations were not mere ideas or subjective impressions but carried with them the belief in corresponding qualities as belonging to external objects. Reid insisted that such beliefs belong to the common sense and reason of mankind and in matters of common sense the learned and the unlearned, the philosopher and the day-laborer are upon a level. Echoes here perhaps of today’s ethnomethodology and perhaps too of the extreme relativism of some postmodernists.
Also very much in the Enlightenment tradition was the importance given to speculation, which is now often contrasted with empiricism. From the OED sense of ‘contemplation, consideration or profound study of some subject’ and ‘conclusion reached by abstract or hypothetical reasoning’ speculation has come to be used in somewhat disparaging ways, often preceded by ‘mere’, ‘bare’ or ‘pure’, implying conjecture or surmise. This of course quite apart from its more operatic senses of ‘action or practice of buying and selling goods, lands, stocks and shares etc in order to profit by the rise or fall in the market value as distinct from regular trading or investment; engagement in any business enterprise or transaction of a venturesome or risky nature, but offering the chance of great or unusual gain’. Alas! try as they may no applied-linguistic speculator has, as far as I am aware, yet reached great or unusual gain!
It turns out that speculation and empiricism should not in fact be in conflict. What contradicts empiricism is rationalism. While ‘empiricism’ attracts the comment: ‘reason cannot of its own provide us with knowledge of reality without reference to sense experience and the use of our sense organs’ (Angeles 1981: 75), rationalism has this one: ‘reality is knowable … independently of observation, experience and the use of empirical methods; reason is the principal organ of knowledge and science is basically a rationally conceived deductive system only indirectly concerned with sense experience’ (ibid: 236).
It would be convenient to agree that speculation combines the two senses of (random) conjecture and of reasoning attaching to some explanatory theory, while empiricism means the use of experimental methods to validate a theory. However, what seems to have happened is that empirical has appropriated to itself the package of the scientific methods, theory plus controlled enquiry, while speculation has increasingly been marginalized to the armchair, the haphazard and the guess.
Happily, speculation is not just a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. In the same definition of speculative philosophy, we read: ‘in the non-pejorative sense: philosophy which constructs a synthesis of knowledge from many fields (the sciences, the arts, religion, ethics, social sciences) and theorizes (reflects) about such things as its significance to humankind, and about what it indicates about reality as a whole’ (Angeles 1981: 272). We should remember this noble description next time applied linguistics is labelled ‘mere’ speculation!
