Bridging languages for the constructed realities of different scholarly domains

Michael A. Arbib

doi:10.4396/06202301

Michael A. Arbib

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4396/06202301

Keywords: Bridging Language, Conversation, Domain Language, Metaphorical Language, Philosophy of Science, Pragmatic Criterion, Satisfaction Criterion, Schema Theory, Social Schema

Abstract

The search for a single interdisciplinary language for science, philosophy and religious studies is doomed to failure. Rather than the coarse granularity of these three fields, we focus on scholarly domains and demonstrate that even translation between a pair of domain languages may be impossible. Each domain language must support description of observations and theory, and provide satisfaction criteria for results asserted within the domain. Crucially, interaction between domains is based on human interaction, whether directly or through documents or artefacts. Thus we explore the relation between the mind of the individual scholar and the emerging consensuses that define a domain. The framework is based on Hesse and Arbib’s The Construction of Reality (CoR), extending a theory of “schemas in the head” to address the “social schemas” of a community. Members of a specific community -- such as a group of scholars within the same domain – may in some cases reach near agreement on the usage of terminology, but much scholarship is centered on disagreements, and these are magnified across different domains. Conversations between scholars in two domains requires a bridging language in which scholars may reach shared understandings of the terms each uses and thus reach shared conclusions, or agree to disagree. Developing bridging languages across domains of scholarly study may make new research questions arise and hence new domains of scholarly study may emerge – as exemplified by a case study bringing together linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience in the cognitive neuroscience of linguistics.

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