JPB Gerald was recently interviewed by Anna Roderick (editor in-chief at Multilingual Matters) about his book “Antisocial Language Teaching” in the “Ask the Author” series. About 19 minutes in, talking about different reactions to his book, Gerald says he wasn’t surprised that a lot of people really liked his book, but that he wasn’t surprised either that some people “were just mad” because “they were always going to be mad”. Then he referred to me.
The “I’ve told the story so often I now believe it’s true” Version
“There was one guy who followed me round the internet to talk about how bad my work was, mostly because I called him a racist once before this and then he was mad for two years. And I’m like “You’re proving my point, man, you’re proving my point”, although he weirdly said one day “I won’t do this anymore”. I don’t know,… I don’t know, maybe he had a change of heart although I don’t think he had a change of heart, I think he just decided to shut up. Wierd.
The Facts
During an exchange of emails last December, at 12.38 am on 24/12/2022, Gerald sent me an email which ended:
I will stop mentioning you on twitter if you stop writing about me. A fair truce.
At at 1.11 am on 24/12/2022, I sent Gerald an email which ended:
from today I won’t mention your name on Twitter or any other social media channel again, and I won’t make any further comments on your published work.
The social sciences (social anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics are the main players) have had an uneven record when in comes to assessments of their academic achievements, and those within its ranks who regard the label as an oxymoron have contributed particularly loud and disruptive dents to its reputation. The recent enormous growth of the “anti-science” faction in the social sciences worries many, including me, and here I take a look at how we’ve arrived at this sorry state in my particular neck of the woods.
The development of modern sociology, including sociolinguistics, raciolinguistics, and Critical theories.
The Strong Programme
In 1976 the sociologist David Bloor argued that all systems of belief are equivalent, and that “knowledge is whatever men take to be knowledge.” (Bloor, 1976, 1). Bloor distinguished between knowledge and belief by reserving the word “knowledge” for “what is collectively endorsed, leaving the individual and idiosyncratic to count as mere belief” (Bloor, 1976, 2-3). If we follow Bloor, then the knowledge found in scientific theories is socially determined and thus unable, like all attempts to understand the world, to make any claims to objective truth.
Quantum mechanics is often given as an example of a “socially-determined belief”. Forman (1971, in Gross and Levitt, 1998) suggested that quantum mechanics was the result of the social conditions in Germany after their defeat in World War I, which led German public opinion to an anti-intellectual, anti-science stance. Since the principle of causality was an archetypical example of pre-war attitudes of scientists, Forman claimed, apparently in all seriousness, that quantum mechanics was enthusistically taken up as a field of investigation by German physicists interested in the behaviour of matter and light on the atomic and subatomic scale not because of its ability to contribute to the science of physics but because it did not require all physical events to be caused and therefore chimed with the glooomy post war Zeitgeist.
Even more outrageous is sociologist Ferguson’s explanation of the paradigm shift in physics which followed Einstein’s publication of his work on relativity.
The inner collapse of the bourgeois ego signalled an end to the fixity and systematic structure of the bourgeois cosmos. One privileged point of observation was replaced by a complex interaction of viewpoints.
The new relativistic viewpoint was not itself a product of scientific “advances”, but was part, rather, of a general cultural and social transformation which expressed itself in a variety of modern movements. It was no longer conceivable that nature could be reconstructed as a logical whole. The incompleteness, indeterminacy, and arbitrariness of the subject now reappeared in the natural world. Nature, that is, like personal existence, makes itself known only in fragmented images. (Ferguson, cited in Gross and Levitt, 1998: 46)
Thus, rather than see Einstein’s relativity theory as a more powerful theory of physics offering an improved explanation of the phenomena in question, Fergason sees it as a representation of the evolution of “bourgeois consciousness”.
A third example is Latour and Woolgar’s 1979 paper, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, (discussed in Gross and Levitt, 1998) which described the work of the scientists at Latour’s laboratory as the “collective construction” by a group of scientists of a theory which used “conventions” agreed among themselves. Latour and Woolgar claimed to have “unmasked” what the deluded scientists regarded as disinterested attempts to explain phenomena by appealing to empirical data collected by controlled experiments, by describing them as being no more than the joint invention of a myth. Latour (1985, 1988) went on to argue that scientists use language to construct a particular kind of discourse: the use of particular kinds of concepts taken as uncontroversial by the scientific community, the use of references, quotations and footnotes, the structuring of scientific articles, all play their part in legitimising the output of scientists and disguising their subjective nature. In short, science is an arrogant bogey-man, the methodology it recommends takes us away from a proper “understanding” and “appreciation” of ourselves and traps us inside an arid alienated framework.
The basic argument of all the examples above is that scientific knowledge is not powerful because it is true; it is true because it is powerful. The question should not be “What is true?”, but rather “How did this version of what is believed to be true come to dominate in these particular social and historical circumstances?” Truth and knowledge are culturally specific. Acepting this argument brings us to the end of the modern project, and situates us in a “post-modern” world. As Lois Shawver, the influential postmodernist figure, puts it, “Postmodernism begins with a loss of faith in the dreams of modernism.” She continues: “In place of the lost dream of modernism, postmodernism gives us a new vocabulary, a new language game, for helping us notice dimensions of experience that were obscured by the modernist vision. It’s a dynamic language game, with meanings evolving and changing” (Shawver, 1997, 372).
Constructivism
The next step was social constructivism. While differences among them exist, what the constructivists seem to have in common is their opposition to the idea of objective truth. Denzin and Lincoln (1998) explain:
Knowledge and truth are created, not discovered by mind. Constructivists emphasise the pluralistic and plastic character of reality – pluralistic in the sense that reality is expressible in a variety of symbol and language systems; plastic in the sense that reality is stretched and shaped to fit purposeful acts of intentional human agents. They endorse the view that “contrary to common sense, there is no unique “real world” that pre-exists and is independent of human mental activity and human symbolic language” (Bruner, 1986). In place of a realist view of theories and knowledge, constructivists emphasise the instrumental and practical function of theory construction and knowing. (Denzin and Lincoln, 1998: 7)
Lincoln and Guba’s constructivist philosophy is idealist (they assume that “what is real is a construction in the minds of individuals”), pluralist and relativist: “There are multiple, often conflicting, constructions and all (at least potentially) are meaningful. The question of which or whether constructions are true is sociohistorically relative” (Lincoln and Guba, 1985: 85).
Brinner (1999) developed her idea of constructivism from an educational perspective. She rejected the accepted realist view of epistemology because it sees knowledge as a passive reflection of a putative external, objective reality. Realists take the naive view that our senses work like a camera that projects an image of how the world is onto our brain, and use that image as a map of the objective structure “out there”, but this view ignores “the infinite complexity of the world”. Detailed observation reveals that “the subject is actively generating plenty of potential models, and that the role of the outside world is merely limited to reinforcing some of these models while eliminating others”.
The final step is the development of “critical” theories, including Critical Social Justice theories (CSJ), which I briefly discussed in the previous post. CSJ aims to vanquish the prejudice and discrimination people suffer based on characteristics like race, sex, sexuality, gender identity, dis/ability and body size. Like the constructivists, CSJ theorists and activists see all knowledge as socially constructed, but they take an additional step by asserting that the culturally constructed knowledge which pervades today’s world serves to maintain oppressive power systems. This is achieved by dominant groups in society legitimising certain kinds of knowledge which are perpetuated by ways of talking about things – discourses. While all knowledge is socially constructed, CSJ theorists and activists believe that they can see beyond the ideologically tainted discourses which powerful groups (white, male heterosexuals, for example) engage in because of their active engagement in the fight to liberate the undervalued groups whose identities are systematically repressed and denied by the oppressors.
Discussion
My argument is that sociolinguists working in the field of applied linguistics who adopt a relativist epistemology of the type described above are fundamentally mistaken, and, furthermore, their work has a detrimental effect both on education and on progressive attempts to fight neoliberal capitalism.
I define relativism as the view that there is no objective reality; that the way we perceive the world depends on who and what we are, and where and when we live; and that there is no rational standard of judgement that can be used to decide between opposing theories which attempt to explain the same phenomena.
Rationalism
First, let me state my own position. I think the best way to improve our understanding of the world is to adopt a realist epistemology and rely on logic, rational argument and empirical observation to construct and evaluate theories. To quote from my 2004 book on theories of SLA.
A. Assumptions
An external world exists independently of our perceptions of it. It is possible to study different phenomena in this world, to make meaningful statements about them, and to improve our knowledge of them. This amounts to a realist epistemology.
Research is inseparable from theory. We cannot just observe the world: all observation involves theorising.
Theories attempt to explain phenomena. Observational data are used to support and test those theories.
Research is fundamentally concerned with problem-solving. Research in SLA should be seen as attempted explanations. Theories are explanations and are the final goal of research.
We cannot formalise “the scientific method”. There is no strict demarcation line between “science” and “non-science”: there is no small set of rules, adherence to which defines the scientific method.
B. Methodology
We start with hypotheses that explain the phenomena in question. We test the hypothesis trying as hard as we can to falsify it. To the extent that our attempts fail, we can accept the hypotheses as tentatively true.
C. Criteria for the evaluation of SLA theories
Research, hypotheses, and theories should be coherent, cohesive, expressed in the clearest possible terms, and consistent
Theories should have empirical content. Propositions should be capable of being subjected to an empirical test so that hypotheses can be supported or refuted..
Theories should be fruitful. They should make daring and surprising predictions, and solve persistent problems in their domain.
Theories should be broad in scope.Ceteris paribus, the wider the scope of a theory, the better it is.
Theories should be simple. Following the Occam’s Razor principle, ceteris paribus, the theory with the simplest formula, and the fewest number of basic types of entity postulated, is to be preferred for reasons of economy.
I should add Popper’s defence of objective knowledge. Whatever motives scientists had for doing what they did, and taking the decisions they did, they gave us theories, and this is the basis of objective knowledge, what Popper (1972) refers to as “World Three”:
We may distinguish the following three worlds or universes: first the world of physical objects or of physical states; secondly the world of states of consciousness, or of mental states, or perhaps of behavioural dispositions to act; and thirdly, the world of objective contents of thought, especially of scientific and poetic thoughts and of works of art. (Popper, 1972: 106)
Developing this idea, Popper says:
In our attempts to solve problems we may invent new theories. These theories, again, are produced by us; they are the product of our critical and creative thinking, in which we are greatly helped by other existing third-world theories. Yet the moment we have produced these theories, they create new, unintended and unexpected problems, autonomous problems, problems to be discovered.
This explains why the third world which, in its origin, is our product, is autonomous in what may be called its ontological status. It explains why we can act upon it, and add to it or help its growth, even though there is no man who can master even a small corner of this world (Popper, 1972: 161).
Relativism
As opposed to rationalists, there are those in the sociolinguistic domain who adopt a relativist, social constructivist position. As we have seen, this involves denying the possibility of knowing any objective reality external to the observer, and claiming that there is a multiplicity of realities, all of them social constructs. The adoption of the view that the construction of reality is a social process means that there can be no one “best” theory of anything: there are simply different ways of looking at, seeing, and talking about things, each with its own perspective, each with its own set of explicit or implicit rules which members of the social group construct for themselves. Science is just one specific type of social construction, a particular kind of language game which has no more claim to objective truth than any other. Let’s look at a few short examples of this point of view.
Schumann (1983) suggests that SLA research should be viewed as both art and science. As an example of the artistic perspective Schumann suggests viewing the opposing accounts of Krashen and McLaughlin of conscious and unconscious learning as
two different paintings of the language learning experience – as reality symbolised in two different ways… Viewers can choose between the two on an aesthetic basis, favouring the painting which they find to be phenomenologically true to their experience (Schumann, 1983, 74).
Lantolf (1996) suggests that scientific theories are metaphors, that the acceptance of “standard scientific language” within a discipline “diminishes the productivity of the scientific endeavour” and that “to keep a field fresh and vibrant, one must create new metaphors” (Lantolf, 1996, 756).
Firth and Wagner (1997) argue that SLA research should be “reconceptualiized” so as to “enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field”. They continue:
We claim that methodologies, theories and foci within SLA reflect an imbalance between cognitive and mentalistic orientations, and social and contextual orientations to language, the former orientation being unquestionably in the ascendancy (Firth and Wagner, 1997, 143).
At the end of their paper, they say:
although SLA has the potential to make significant contributions to a wide range of research issues, that potential is not being realised while the field in general perpetuates the theoretical imbalances and skewed perspectives on discourse and communication (Firth and Wagner, 1997, 285).
Block (1996) argues that the field of SLA is under the sway of a ruling ideology, and in the course of a plea for a wider view of SLA research, Block challenges some central assumptions held by what he sees as the ruling clique. The assumptions that Block objects to include that there is any such thing as “normal science”, that a multiplicity of theories is problematic, that replication studies are helpful, and that there is an “ample body” of “accepted findings” within SLA research. Finally Block argues that one problem for the SLA community, which stems from its being under the sway of such misleading assumptions, is that those who attempt to challenge them do not get a fair opportunity to voice and promote their alternative views.
Discussion
When Firth and Wagner (1997) argue for “a reconceptualization of SLA research that would enlarge the ontological and empirical parameters of the field”, they would seem to be making a plea for more attention to be paid to sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, and for SLA research to be liberated from the domination of “Chomskian thinking.” But there is another argument in the Firth and Wagner paper, namely that those working in psycholinguistics are dominated by the views of a small group of researchers who insist that SLA research be carried out according to “established” and “normal” scientific standards. Firth and Wagner argue that there is something deeply wrong with such a position, and they go on to suggest that SLA research should throw off the assumptions of scientific enquiry and adopt a relativist epistemology which holds that there is not one reality, that all science is political, that all statements are theory-laden, that theories are a kind of story-telling, and so on. Here the two separate issues mentioned above have become tangled up. As Long puts it: “Firth and Wagner attempt to bolster their “social context” case by an unfortunate appeal to epistemological relativism thereby conflating what are two separate issues” (Long, 1999: 3).
Block (1996) makes exactly the same mistake as Firth and Wagner. Block claims that those who attempt to challenge the ruling clique in SLA do not get a fair opportunity to voice and promote their alternative views, and at the same time he claims that the field of SLA is dominated by a certain methodological orthodoxy which should be replaced by a more relativistic alternative. Again, we must separate the issues.
To argue for a shift in focus for SLA research is one thing. To argue that there is no rational way to decide that Theory X is better than Theory Y is another, separate thing. The first issue is a political question about priorities in the distribution of limited research resources, the second issue is about the fundamental questions of what we can know, and of how we should do research. The relativists have every right to argue for more resources to be devoted to their kind of research, and to argue the merits of their kind of approach to theory construction and assessment. But they should clearly separate what are, I repeat, two different issues.
Regarding the epistemological issue, as an example we can take the suggestion that scientific theories are metaphors, that the acceptance of “standard scientific language” within a discipline “diminishes the productivity of the scientific endeavour” and that “to keep a field fresh and vibrant, one must create new metaphors.” Nobody, I suppose, would question that terms like “input” “processing” and “output” are metaphors, and it is certainly worth reminding oneself that they are metaphors. But, from my side of the fence, scientific theories are not just metaphors, they are attempted explanations of events that take place in a real world and they must be open to empirical tests which support or falsify them so as to enable us to choose rationally between them. I have no particular objection to looking at Krashen’s and McLaughlin’s theories as “paintings”, as reality symbolised in two different ways, but sooner or later we will need to scrutinise the two opposing theories in order to check their validity, and to subject them to empirical tests. On the basis of such scrutiny, by uncovering ill-defined terms, contradictions, etc., and by seeing how they stand up to empirical tests, we will be able to evaluate the two accounts and make some tentative choice between them. First, they cannot both be correct: McLaughlin suggests that conscious learning affects language production, while Krashen denies this. Second, they suggest different ways of continuing the search for answers to the question of interlanguage development, and different pedagogical applications, and researchers have to have some reasons to choose between them. Krashen’s account is seriously flawed since, first, its terms are almost circular, and second, there is very little empirical content in it These, to the rationalist, are extremely serious defects. Schumann suggests that: “Neither position is correct; they are simply alternative representations of reality” (Schumann, 1983: 75). It may well turn out that neither position is correct, and they are certainly alternative representations of reality, but if the implication is that there is no way, other than an appeal to our own subjective aesthetic sense, to decide between them, then here lies the fundamental disagreement between rationalists and extreme relativists.
Where those discussed above who adopt a relativist epistemology are mistaken is in their assumption that their political analysis has necessary implications for the veracity or otherwise of any particular theory. And where they fail miserably is in the alternative they offer to a rationalist research programme. When one looks at the world from their perspective, what are the results in terms of their explanations? No causal explanations are allowed: all attempts to explain, refute, establish, confirm, etc., are deconstructed and exposed as the logocentric-serving myths that they are. The task is to undermine, and overcome not just science but language and common sense. To what end? Culler, a committed postmodernist, claims that “The effect of deconstructive analyses, as numerous readers can attest, is one of knowledge and feelings of mastery” (Culler, 1992, cited in Searle 1993: 179). Searle comments: “The trouble with this claim is that it requires us to have some way of distinguishing genuine knowledge from its counterfeits, and justified feelings of mastery from mere enthusiasms generated by a lot of pretentious verbosity” (Searle, 1993: 179).
Science is certainly a social institution, and scientists’ goals, their criteria, their decisions and achievements are historically and socially influenced. But this does not make the results of social interaction (in this case, a scientific theory) an arbitrary consequence of it. Popper defends the idea of objective knowledge by arguing that it is precisely through the process of mutual criticism incorporated into the institution of science that the individual short-comings of its members are largely cancelled out.
As Bunge (1996) points out “The only genuine social constructions are the exceedingly uncommon scientific forgeries committed by a team” (Bunge, 1996: 104). Bunge gives the example of the Piltdown man that was “discovered” by two pranksters in 1912, authenticated by many experts, and unmasked as a fake in 1950. “According to the existence criterion of constructivism-relativism we should admit that the Piltdown man did exist – at least between 1912 and 1950 – just because the scientific community believed in it” (Bunge, 1996: 105). Here is the heart of the confusion for all those who take a radically relativist position: the deliberate confusion of two separate issues: claims about the existence or non-existence of particular things, facts and events, and claims about how one arrives at beliefs and opinions. Whether or not the Piltdown man is a million years old is a question of fact. What the scientific community thought about the skull it examined in 1912 is also a question of fact. When we ask what led that community to believe in the hoax, we are looking for an explanation of a social phenomenon, which is a completely separate issue. Just because for forty years the Piltdown man was supposed to be a million years old does not make him so, however interesting the fact that lots of people believed it might be.
Paul Boghossian remarks that the class of things that can be labelled social constructions is enormous: nation states, the dollar, university education and the BBC are random examples. Anything that could not have existed without societies defines the class, and likewise, anything that actually does or did exist independently of societies cannot be a social construction, dinosaurs, giraffes and proteins are examples. “How could they have been socially constructed, if they existed before societies did?” (Boghossian, 2001: 7). Yet it is precisely this obvious distinction that is ignored by those who claim that our beliefs are all we have, and that we can have no knowledge of anything that exists independently of them. Latour and Woolgar’s study (1979) referred to above is a good example. While it might very well be the case that we believe that dinosaurs existed and that DNA exists today because the scientists tell us so, it remains, for those who want to take a realist, rationalist view of the world at least, an independent question of fact as to whether or not such things exist, i.e., whether or not our beliefs are true or false.
It is when constructivists insist on a radically relativist epistemology, when they rule out the possibility of data collection, of empirical tests, of any rational criterion for judging between rival explanations that I believe we should part company with them. Solipsism and science, like solipsism and anything else of course, do not go well together. If constructivists argue that no theory is more correct than any other and that “we can never really know anything” then I think they should continue their “game”, as they call it, in their own way, and let those who prefer to work with more rationalist assumptions get on with scientific research.
Postscript on Critical Social Justice
In Part 1, I discussed CSJ in general and mentioned Raciolinguistics in particular. I described the central belief of CSJ, viz.: society is made up of specific identity-based systems of power and privilege that construct knowledge via different forms of discourse. Language is obviously at the heart of CSJ. Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) say near the end of their book that this central belief is now considered by social justice scholars and activists “to be an objectively true statement about the organizing principle of society”, i.e., it has become reified: what was once a quasi-philosophical theoretical stance has now become an established, unquestioned (and unquestionable!) reality, comprised of identity groups and their associated discourses. Despite the insistence on a relativist epistemology, those committed to CSJ take their beliefs to be the unassailable truth.
The premise that society works through systems of power and privilege maintained in language, and that these create knowledge from the perspectives of the privileged and deny the experiences of the marginalized leads to “Standpoint Theory”, which operates on two assumptions. “One is that people occupying the same social positions, that is, identities—race, gender, sex, sexuality, ability status, and so on—will have the same experiences of dominance and oppression and will, assuming they understand their own experiences correctly, interpret them in the same ways”. The other assumption is that one’s relative position within a social power dynamic dictates what one can and cannot know: “the privileged are blinded by their privilege and the oppressed possess a kind of double sight, in that they understand both the dominant position and the experience of being oppressed by it” (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020, 194).
So Standpoint theory says that members of dominant groups experience a world organized by and for dominant groups, while members of oppressed groups experience the world as members of oppressed groups in a world organized by and for dominant groups. “Thus, members of oppressed groups understand the dominant perspective and the perspective of those who are oppressed, while members of dominant groups only understand the dominant perspective. Standpoint theory can be understood by analogy to a kind of color blindness, in which the more privileged a person is, the fewer colors she can see. A straight white male—being triply dominant—might thus see only in shades of gray” (Pluckrose and Lindsay, 2020, 195).
The culmination of all this alarming stuff is the discussion of whiteness and white supremacy. In Part 1, I mentioned Gerald’s Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness, a contribution to the raciolinguistics literature which argues that “the centering of whiteness in ELT renders the industry callous, corrupt and cruel; or, antisocial”and which was shortlisted for the 2023 BAAL book prize. On page 205 of their book, Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) discuss another contribution to this literature: Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book White Fragility: Why It Is So Hard To Talk To White People about Race. Below is a small extract from that discussion.
“White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation” (DiAngelo, 2018). If a white person expresses negative feelings about being “racially profiled” and held responsible for a racist society, they are assumed to be displaying signs of “fragility”, which is taken as evidence of complicity in racism. DiAngelo states unequivocally that white people are complicit beneficiaries of racism and white supremacy and she is quite explicit in proscribing disagreement. Disagreeing, remaining silent, and going away are all evidence of fragility, and the only way to avoid being fragile is to refrain from showing any negative emotions, to agree with The Truth, and to then actively participate in discovering The Truth, that is, learning how to deconstruct whiteness and white privilege.
Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020, 205 comment “This is quite staggering. DiAngelo, a white woman, contends that all white people are racist and that it is impossible not to be, because of the systems of powerful racist discourses we were born into. She insists that we are complicit by default and are therefore responsible for addressing these systems. Like Applebaum, she argues that it does not matter if individual white people are good people who despise racism and are not aware of having any racist biases: “Being good or bad is not relevant. Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided” (DeAngelo, 2018).
That it should come to this! Not content with throwing out the construction of theories on the basis of a realist epistemology and a methodology based on the testing of hypotheses by appeal to logic, coherent reasoning and appeal to empirical evidence, raciolinguists combine the belief that knowledge is socially constructed with the belief that they are in possession of The Truth. Denying the obvious contradiction involved, they tolerate no dissent, and expect everyone to agree or be “cancelled.” It surely behoves all those who find this approach intellectually incoherent, academically ludicrous and plain scary to speak out against it and to defend that most liberal of liberal values: freedom of speech.
References
Block, D. 1996: Not so fast: some thoughts on theory culling, relativism, accepted findings and the heart and soul of SLA. Applied Linguistics 17,1, 63-83.
Bloor, D. 1976: Science and Social Imagery. Routeledge and Kegan Hall.
Bunge, M. 1996: In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia. In Gross, R, Levitt, N., and Lewis, M. The Flight From Science and Reason. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 777, 96-116.
Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds.) 1998: Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage.
Firth, A., and Wagner, J. 1997: On discourse, communication, and (some) fundamental concepts in SLA research. Modem Language Journal, 81,3, 285-300.
Gross, P. and Levitt, N. 1998: Higher Superstition.John Hopkins University Press.
Lincoln, Y. S. and Guba, E.G. 1985: Naturalistic Enquiry. Sage.
Jordan, G. 2004: Theory Construction in SLA. Benjamins.
Lantolf, J. P. 1996: SLA Building: Letting all the flowers bloom. Language Learning 46, 4, 713-749.
Long, M. H. 1997: Construct validity in SLA research: A response to Firth and Wagner. Modem Language Journal 81, 3, 318-323.
Pluckrose, H. and Lindsay, J. (2020) Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing.
Popper, K. R. 1972: Objective Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
Schumann, J. 1978: The pidginization process: A model for SLA. Newbury House.
Searle, J.R. 1993: The World Turned Upside Down. In Madison, G. (ed.) Working Through Derrida. Northwestern University Press.
Shawver, L. 1996: What Postmodernism Can Do for Psychoanalysis: A Guide to the Postmodern Vision. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 56(4), pp.371-394.
Twenty years ago, I wrote this, the first paragraph of a book about theories of SLA:
There is a “Science and Culture War” currently raging in academia, and it has spilled over into the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). When TESOL Quarterly devoted a special issue to research methods in SLA in 1990, and when Applied Linguistics followed with a special issue on theory construction in SLA in 1993, almost all of the articles in both journals assumed a rationalist approach to theory construction, based on logical reasoning and empirical research. But subsequently, and increasingly in the past few years, a growing number of researchers in SLA have adopted relativist positions of one sort or another, most frequently following the constructivist position of Lincoln (1990) and Guba (1990), or sometimes appealing directly to the work of such post-modernists as Derrida (1973, 1976) and Foucault (1980). Whatever their inspiration, what unites the rebels is their rejection of the methods, assumptions, and authority of the rationalist/empiricist approach to research and theory construction.
Today, it seems that the bad guys have won, and that those who continue to be guided in their academic work by a realist epistemology, a rationalist approach to research, and a humanistic, libertarian approach to education find themselves the targets of increasingly aggressive attacks from “the new puritans” as Doyle (2022) calls them.
Critical Social Justice
The “science and culture War” of the late nineties has morphed into what Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) refers to as the crusade of the “Critical Social Justice” (CSJ) believers against those who cling to the obsolete values of “Liberal Social Justice”. In their 2012 work, Sensoy and DiAngelo explain CSJ:
A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e., divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e., as structural), and actively seeks to change this.
The definition we apply is rooted in a critical theoretical approach. While this approach refers to a broad range of fields, there are some important shared principles:
All people are individuals, but they are also members of social groups.
These social groups are valued unequally in society.
Social groups that are valued more highly have greater access to the resources of a society.
Social injustice is real, exists today, and results in unequal access to resources between groups of people.
Those who claim to be for social justice must be engaged in self-reflection about their own socialization into these groups (their “positionality”) and must strategically act from that awareness in ways that challenge social injustice.
This action requires a commitment to an ongoing and lifelong process. (p. xviii)
Clearly, the “social groups” referred to are identity groups. CSJ sees society as made up of people divided by their race, sex, class sexuality and ability and then ranked and allocated certain resources depending on their identity. Despite all the empirical evidence which falsifies such a simplistic picture of society, CSJ insists on portraying society as a white supremacist, patriarchal, homophobic, ableist system in which people can plot their “positionality” by their identity and predict consistent results from it. This crude framework is claimed to provide the key to understanding society and to unlocking revolutionary change. As Pluckrose (2020) points out, the assumption that all people are socialised into certain beliefs due to their identity leads to the conclusion that society is the result of people’s immutable characteristics. Critical Theory thus “disempowers the people it seeks to empower”. Pluckrose goes on: “Liberals generally reject this reductionist worldview and seek to overcome racism, sexism and homophobia by consistently objecting to anybody’s worth being evaluated by their race, sex or sexuality and seeking empirical evidence of discrimination and effective ways to overcome it”.
Despite all the weaknesses in their simplistic framework, CSJ claims that society is best seen as made up of undervalued groups who are discriminated against by oppressive power systems who control the way everything is talked about, i.e., discourse. These oppressive power systems permeate everything and are identified as white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism and fatphobia. Those who don’t recognize these systems and fail to see what’s going on are complicit in the oppressive discourses and systems, while the marginalised are in a much better position to see them and thus more competent to identify and define them. Knowledge is thus tied to identity and to one’s perceived position in society in relation to power – often referred to as “positionality.”
CSJ theorists use this peculiar “critical” methodology to “uncover” the oppressive power systems and set the scene for a revolutionary shift to social justice, which crucially depends on everybody in society accepting the CSJ theorists’ interpretations. Those who reject these interpretations are judged to be stubbornly trying to preserve their own privilege, or suffering from false consciousness, or both.
CSJ theorists and activists adopt a relativist epistemology which denies our ability to obtain objective knowledge. As opposed to scientists and rationalists who adopt a realist epistemology (objective truth exists and can be approximated to through the use of logic, empirical observation and the asymetery between truth and falshood), CSJ adopts a social constructivism view which sees all claims to truth as no more than value-laden constructs of culture. There’s no such thing as objective knowledge, no way we can talk about things and events which corresponds with reality as determined by evidence. Thus, the scientific method has no more legitimacy than any other way of producing “knowledge” – it’s just one cultural approach among many, as corrupted and biased as any other “narrative”. The pursuit of objective knowledge is abandoned in favour of the active pursuit of social justice, and we are caljoled into accepting the CSJ views on no more than their say so. Doyle (2022) gives the example of how CSJ theorists in the field of “Fat Studies” argue that there are no health risks to obesity, claiming that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the result of the bigotry of “the scientific method”. Similarly, as I argued in a recent post about Adrian Holliday’s work, it is asserted – by Holliday – that the scientists’ “positivist ideology” leads them to seeing people from China as being “essentially different”, which results in the further assertion that all scientists are “inherently” racists.
CSJ has nothing to do with critical thinking, i.e., examining an argument or claim in the light of reason and evidence rather than accepting it uncritically. As Baily (2017) makes clear: “Critical pedagogy regards the claims that students make in response to social-justice issues not as propositions to be assessed for their truth value, but as expressions of power that function to re-inscribe and perpetuate social inequalities” (emphasis added). Forget objective knowledge, “critical research is not out to create truth”. The critical research process involves “an active identification of and engagement with power, with the social systems and structures, ideologies and paradigms that uphold the status quo”. It follows that a person engaged in critical social justice practice must be able to recognize that “relations of unequal social power are constantly being enacted at both the micro (individual) and macro (structural) levels.”
Such “logic” is enertgetically rejected by Pluckrose (2022), who questions the CSJ assertion that identity-based power dynamics are constantly in play in every interaction and every system in society. Pluckrose suggests that things are actually “a bit more complicated than this”, and that most people’s lived experience involves seeing others as individuals “rather than as identity-based pawns positioned on a power grid”. What reasoning validates the assertion that identity-based relations of unequal power govern social life? Why, asks Pluckrose, should she “understand” that every time she interacts with a man, he has more power than her and is exercising it against her? Why, every time she interacts with a non-white person, should she “understand” that she has more power than them and that she is exercising that power against them? “Is it that most people fail to “understand” this or is it that most humans who regularly interact with a variety of other humans don’t find it to be true?”
Sensor and DiAngelo urge everybody to “think critically about knowledge; what we know and how we know it”, and go on to warn that disagreeing with the CSJ conception of the world is a symptom of “white fragility”, which occurs whenever white people disagree with and object to the claim that they are inherently racist. Pluckrose (2022) rejoins that fighting for a more socially just society requires acting against Critical Social Justice, not bowing to its dictates. People’s arguments can and should be separated from their identities, “allowing anybody to subscribe to any viewpoint and challenge any viewpoint and not be confined to the one presumptuously deemed to be appropriate for their race, sex or sexuality. It was liberalism that convinced society that women and racial and sexual minorities were individuals with their own minds and voices and in possession of exactly the same moral right to access everything society had to offer (including the full range of ideas). It is this liberal concept of social justice, with its extraordinary record of achievement, that we must defend and further”.
Finally, it’s instructive to look at the short-list competing for the 2023 British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize.
Gender Diversity and Sexuality in English Language Education: New Transnational Voices edited by Darío Luis Banegas and Navan Govender, Bloomsbury. “Informed by critical theories, critical literacy, post-structuralism, queer theory, and indigeneity/(de)coloniality, the critical perspectives in this volume consider gender and sexuality as dimensions of human life and aim to promote sexual, gender, emotional and relational wellbeing together with the construction of cultural horizons and citizenship”.
Mobile-Assisted Language Learning: Concepts, Contexts and Challenges by Glenn Stockwell, Cambridge University Press. This book provides a resource for present and future language teachers, and for graduate students of applied linguistics and TESOL, to understand how mobile devices can best be used for language teaching. How, one wonders, did such a sensible book make the list!
Antisocial Language Teaching: English and the Pervasive Pathology of Whiteness by JPB Gerald, Multilingual Matters. “The centering of whiteness in English Language Teaching (ELT) renders the industry callous, corrupt and cruel; or, antisocial. This book examines major issues with the ideologies and institutions behind the discipline of ELT and diagnoses the industry as in dire need of treatment, with the solution being a full decentering of whiteness.”.
Standards, Stigma, Surveillance by Ian Cushing, Palgrave Macmillan. “This book traces raciolinguistic ideologies in England’s schools, focusing on post- 2010 policy reforms which frame the language practices of low-income, racialised speakers as limited and deficient….. It draws on fields including critical language policy, educational sociolinguistics, genealogy, raciolinguistics and critical language awareness”.
The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication edited by Pejman Habibie and Anna Kristina Hultgren, Palgrave Macmillan. “A collection of reflective narratives and autoethnographic accounts by a wide range of journal editors and experienced reviewers who shed light on the often mysterious processes of peer review and editing while taking care to locate these within the pressures of neoliberal academia”.
Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes by Robert M. McKenzie, Andrew McNeill, Routledge. This book “details the findings of a large-scale study, incorporating cutting-edge implicit and self-report instruments adapted from social psychology, investigating the evaluations of over 300 English nationals of the status and social attractiveness of Northern English and Southern English speech in England”.
Cushing, with his “Standards, Stigma, Surveillance” was the lucky winner.
Pluckrose, H. and Lindsay, J. (2020) Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Pitchstone Publishing.
What do you think you're doing? 