Linguistic Privilege and Justice: What Can We Learn from STEM?

Abstract

The linguistic privilege of native speakers in scientific communication, both oral and written, has been widely reported to influence researchers’ publications and careers in and beyond academia. I examine social structure and communication in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields through the example of big science and attempt to answer the question of why language injustice has a less significant effect on non-native scientists and engineers than on philosophy scholars. I do so by scrutinizing the role of signs and nonlinguistic boundary objects in STEM practice and written communication. I also argue that although high-energy physics is relatively linguistically inclusive, it is marked by linguistic privilege of certain groups that bears a structural character which is not common in STEM and is predominant mainly in megascience. I finally suggest that insofar as rhetoric in STEM is generally modest, its practices can serve as an example for analytic philosophy, which also aims at minimizing rhetoric.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for insightful comments that helped greatly to improve the manuscript.

Notes

1 Signatures are classes of signs (i.e., of numbers and equations) posited by high-level theory descriptions of new particles created in experiments.

2 Only one of JINR’s past directors was an experimentalist, Dezsö Kiss, who served as the JINR director from 1989 to 1991.

3 There may be rare exceptions of L2 speakers who achieve complete mastery of the nuances of new languages. One well-known example is Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness as an L2 speaker of English.

4 In Galison (1997), the devices used by scientists are also classified as languages, pidgins, and creoles. I do not rely on this definition because, on the view I have been arguing for, devices, protons, and so on have different meanings for communities involved in the exchange, making them more like boundary objects than languages.

5 During the early stages of megascience, the so-called proto-megascience of the 1970s, communication between different participants of experiments proceeded in a similar way to the one typical of regular small-scale STEM; roles in experiments were not fully formalized. Hence, participants from different countries often learned each other’s (natural) languages in the course of their research or communicated in a mix of two languages (Pronskikh, 2016b).

6 The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect cosmic gravitational waves.

7 Identifying whether a person is a native speaker can be challenging if one does not know him or her personally, so for present purposes the following criteria were employed: if either the first or last name of a scientist, or both, were identifiably Anglo, such scientists were assumed to be native English speakers.