I am a bit hesitant to post David J. Lobina’s lengthy 3 Quarks Daily takedown of Inclusion in Linguistics because it could be seen as anti-diversity and anti-inclusion and, well, just plain reactionary, but that kind of thinking leads to intellectual sterility, and it seems to me (not having seen the actual book, mind you) that Lobina’s bile is justified. In any case, it is highly entertaining, and I think that is enough of a basis to present these excerpts to you; he introduces it by saying “this is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my career,” so you have been warned:
The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40 authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. […] The volume itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part 3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public engagement in the field. […]
What to make of it?
Well, it is hard to believe this book exists at all; or rather, it is hard to believe that Oxford University Press has published this volume under its Oxford Academy section. Inclusion in Linguistics is mostly a product of political advocacy, not of scholarship, and whilst this is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, the problem here is that both the politics and the advocacy on display are incredibly tendentious. The book is populated by myriad claims and denunciations, and even though most of these are rather contentious in nature, they all go largely unargued for (in addition, some material is close to mockery and even slander, and one has to wonder what OUP were thinking; more about this below).
The book is also rather parochial in outlook; most of the arguments and claims can only be understood within the context of certain social and political undercurrents in North America, some of which the contributors happen to exemplify quite neatly, and there is furthermore a fair amount of preaching to the already converted, this more clearly in evidence when it comes to the significant amount of jargon the reader encounters, which is rarely defined let alone explained – it is instead simply assumed to be common currency, and moreover correct. As a case in point, much of the material in this volume will be largely incomprehensible to most readers in Italy, Spain, and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, the three countries I know well, and partly because of the language (also, the book alludes to social conditions that don’t really translate to those three countries). […]
Moving on to the scholarship, the editors start off the volume by explicitly rejecting some of what many would regard as basic tenets of Wissenschaft – a German term that is more expansive than the English word “science”, thus involving the human sciences, and meant to refer to scientific fields that ‘involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters’ (Leiter, 2024). In the Introduction to the volume, then, the editors denounce and moreover reject the notion that ‘research discovery and scholarly knowledge must be personally distant or seemingly objective for the author to have authority and expertise’, a position they claim constitutes a case of colonialism and white supremacy (pp. 15-6), though no explanation or justification is given for the sweeping statement. Similar sentiments are expressed in many of the contributions, again with little to no elaboration, and usually presented as simple statements of fact. Readers who might view the editors’ position on science and the systematic pursue of knowledge as not a little preposterous will be excused for quickly skimming through the book, or giving it a pass altogether. More importantly, perhaps, such views can have the unfortunate effect of antagonising those of us who might otherwise be sympathetic to some issues from the volume, and who would have welcomed more detail – and some argumentation. […]
I should add that I find the kind of talk on inclusion and diversity in the book surprisingly divisive, and furthermore surprising coming from linguistics; divisive because the language around diversity is often couched as if people of different characteristics lived in different realities as somewhat “closed groups” – or trapped in cultural enclosures, as Jürgen Habermas has put it (see here); and surprising coming from the field given that linguists have often emphasised the theoretical validity of any of the world’s languages to the enterprise of studying universal properties of the language capacity (I have discussed universality, diversity, and language in here and here; the former argues that diversity needs to be understood within the concept of universality; the latter revisits the work of the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker and in so doing includes discussion of national languages and standards, topics touched upon in the volume too). […]
All in all, it seems to me that the situation in this volume is as follows: many of the authors do not seem to believe that their subject matter or field of study is scientific or involves systematic knowledge as these concepts are customarily understood (as Wissenschaft), whilst some of the authors seem to confuse (or indeed conflate) scientific study with political advocacy. If the former is the case, then one needs to ignore the talk about positionality and identities and instead just judge whether the knowledge on offer adds to Wissenschaft or not, regardless of where it comes from. If the latter is the case, though, one needs to recognise that political advocacy is not Wissenschaft and advocacy need not always be the concern of scholarship. […]
I earlier alluded to lost opportunities. There was plenty of useful information in the book as well as a number of interesting surveys and interviews (though the samples were far too small for the conclusions that are drawn from them), but most issues of relevance were treated far too briefly and far too superficially. Some topics deserved more thorough and sustained discussion – the history and current status of Historically Black Colleges is a case in point – and a wide readership would have been found for a more judicious book (and perhaps even an international readership if the approach had not been so insular). What we have instead is a book displaying incredibly tendentious and parochial politics, poor scholarship, and an angry and divisive tone throughout, resulting in an exhausting to read list of claims, denunciations, grievances, and disqualifications. Most contributors had, quite simply, an axe to grind here, but what they described in their chapters was often more a case of how they would like the world to be instead of what the world really is like.
The reader could have been spared some of the mockery and slander too if the editors had not been so inflexible. In the preface, we are told that the project decided against a regular reviewing process for each contribution because, of course, this is susceptible to colonisation (p. xviii), opting instead for group workshops and revisions. It is not unreasonable to believe that a regular reviewing process could at least have avoided the worst excesses typical of political group thinking. No doubt the editors view such a reviewing process as an example of the gatekeeping ideologies they denounce in various places in the book, ideologies that ‘rely upon assimilatory replication models of academia that are grounded in and designed to maintain white-supremacist, colonial, normatively embodied, abled, and cis male-hegemonic views…[continues ad nauseum]’ (p. 444).
The volume could at least have been printed on recycled paper, but alas, this was not to be.
Obviously he’s cherry-picked the worst examples for our edification, but I’m sure he didn’t invent them, and the whole picture is all too plausible given recent trends in academia. I’m all for diversity and inclusion myself, but I’m also for science and, yes, objectivity (Wissenschaft, if you will) and I can’t abide scholarship that turns its back on such things. Thanks, Peter!
designed to maintain white-supremacist, colonial, normatively embodied, abled, and cis male-hegemonic views…
“…normatively embodied” ?
Did somebody win a contest for most abstruse gobbledygook?
If there is such a contest, that’s certainly a contender. Such rote verbiage sends me running in the opposite direction.
Speaking for myself only, I promise not to denounce hat to The Authorities for propagating such crimethink. I will FWIW say that my undergraduate teachers in linguistics classes some considerable number of decades ago, even if “disproportionately” (compared to some hypothetical benchmark) white and male, did not seem especially competent or confident in wielding their objectively-undeserved demographic hegemony.
and re “cis,” Jesus F***ing Christ, but my superficially female teachers* as an undergraduate linguistics major were not necessarily super-girly-girls but it would have seemed both impolite and undignified to interrogate them about their subjective senses of gender identity and presentation and insist they be more (or less, I suppose) such-and-such than they were.
*I think a grand total of two** over eight semesters back in those unenlightened days: hat’s old grad-school contemporary Stephanie Jamison + Donka Farkas, who gave me a totally-deserved shitty grade in that formal semantics class before she fled New Haven for the more professionally propitious context of the UC-Santa Cruz faculty.
ETA: **I think i may have also counted as credit-toward-the-linguistics-major a class on “artificial intelligence” (as it stood circa 1986) that was technically offered in the Computer Science department and taught by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Angluin, who, I am reliably informed by a friend and classmate who grew up to be a cishet-female tenured Computer Science professor at another university, was the most awesome female-computer-science-professor role model one could have hoped for back in that era.
**
I was a hegemonic cissy male.
Bah. Falsification and parsimony – and there’s really a lot of parsimony hidden in falsification.
This, however, is something I’ve encountered a few times – not necessarily in linguistics, but always in English. Evidently, some practitioners of “the humanities” really believe their fields aren’t and shouldn’t be using “the scientific method” because they aren’t “science” after all.
aaaaargh
Like Lobina (I think), I am personally not particularly hostile to some of the points that the contributors to this volume are apparently trying to make, but feel that wiith friends like this, who needs enemies? This sort of thing merely gives aid and comfort to the bad guys, and seriously undermines efforts to actually address those points in the real world.
More particularly, the reference to “Jewish Physics” seems very much on point. I doubt if many Africans (as opposed to Americans fantasising about African cultures) would be thrilled at the implication that scientific method is not for them, but only for colonialists. I would not like to have tell the many African linguists referenced in my own works that they have betrayed their heritage by the admirable scientific rigour of their endeavours …
Meinhof was an actual Nazi. That does not make Comparative Bantu a Nazi plot.
“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it.”
“Great bosh.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try to criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”
as opposed to Black Americans
Let’s not speak for black Americans either.
there’s really a lot of parsimony hidden in falsification
Sure. Just Say No.
“A lot of parsimony” is a nice oxymoron.
All parsimony is One.
(This is a great mystery.)
As the Americans are currently realising under the wise tutelage of their soon-to-be-anointed Leader, science, far from being an imperialist colonialist construct, is actually an Extreme Radical Socialist conspiracy.
one needs to recognize that political advocacy is not Wissenschaft and advocacy need not always be the concern of scholarship
does one? Historically, many esteemed lines of groundbreaking science clashed with traditional beliefs and power structures which sustained them, and had no choice but to partake in political advocacy. Galileo or Darwin didn’t separate scholarship from politics all that well. Today, public health, criminology, and climate research are very much continuing this tradition. But even when no high-flying politics is involved, but the area of science is applied, furthering well-being of the humankind is (or should be) as much in its sights as is pure scholarship.
Well, X, the problem is not that sometimes science clashes with some political beliefs, but that activism is used instead of science. Eugenics was based on the best science of it’s time. In the areas you’ve mentioned, criminology shows that locking people up and throwing the key does reduce crime. Never heard political proponents of this method to use any science. Climate activism led to a situation where instead of scientific findings becoming a common ground for political decisions, the other side became hostile to science. And I am not sure what political advocacy you mean for public health, but the most politically active people in this area are anti-vaxxers. Should we count them as scientists as well?
I haven’t looked inside the book, but it purports to be an evidence-based (sic) practical guide for linguists and teachers. I recognize a few of the authors as good, accomplished people. Could there be something in there among all the ridiculousness? Not that I’m excusing the editors.
Yes, one gets the impression from the review that the book is well-crafted to repel sympathetic readers who might otherwise find much to agree with.
Neither Galileo nor Darwin set out to challenge contemporary beliefs. Both came to feel that it was the evidence of the science itself that put them in the position of needing to challenge it. They did not import existing heretical viewpoints into their scientific work: if they had, it would have undermined the plausibility of their work.
Science should inform healthy politics; politics should never dictate the conclusions of science (it’s bad enough that powerful vested interests already dictate what lines of research get funded and what withers on the vine.)
Careful, those North American scholars can bristle at any suggestion that North American social-justice priorities are not universal, and that in other parts of the world injustices may involve different groups, take on different forms, and require different ways of talking about them.
I have thought about this often, as someone running a business providing English language revision of grant applications for non-native English speakers in linguistics and adjacent fields of the humanities. I have seen a fair amount of applications for areal studies in other regions of the world adopt North American terminology and political stances, believing that these are the magic words what one needs to say to get funding. However, my gut feeling is that that wave of imitation broke two or three years ago, and the academia in the countries that I interact with is going back to a more reasonable order of things.
I actually felt the review was a little vague, and as a result, I have trouble knowing how I’d feel about the actual book, as opposed to how I feel about the things that the Lobina is worked up about.
At one point, he writes about a section of the book that “We are thankfully spared the tiresome prospect of going through the actual contents of the email and are offered paraphrases instead.” He seems to be showing his hand here.
To the contrary, I think it’s tough to judge emails, or books, if you aren’t provided a goodly lump of the actual stew, and are instead fed paraphrases by partisans. Lobina is clearly partisan, and he doesn’t give many full quotes or even detailed long-form paraphrases of individual claims in the book. It’s possible that the book is mostly written at that level, so airy that there are no individual claims to pursue and test.
But Lobina does offer one point of contact, and I tried to dig in on that one. Lobina criticizes one of the authors for smug treatment of Geoff Pullum, related to a Language Log post on singular they in 2017. Pullum misgendered someone, and quickly retracted it, by writing “he is, sorry they are.” It would probably have been best if he’d just said “I previously wrote he, but became aware that the person goes by they.”
Lobina suggests that the reaction to Pullum from socially committed readers was utterly intemperate and implies it drove Pullum out of blogging. So I went to track the post down. The comments on that post are disabled and erased. But there was an interplay of front-page posts after that, and in particular, I note this reply post from a guest writer.
It was apparently sponsored by one of the LLog contributors. But another LLog contributor added an editor’s note up front angrily criticizing the piece and the audacity of his blog partner in posting it rather than calming the author down and smoothing things over for Pullum.
Yet I didn’t read the response to Pullum as being particularly unfair. It was sharp. But also provided some off-ramps. Like Pullum, I find singular they for a definite referent awkward. But I appreciated the respondent’s suggestions that avoidance is a reasonable method of dealing with it. I use singular they sometimes, but feel like I’m misspeaking, and am apt to rename someone instead (not wrong-name them, but just re-use their name). I appreciated the recognition that in doing so, I’m trying to avoid giving offense, while still feeling like I’m speaking my dialect. That surely does make me unhip, as the respondent characterized Pullum. But I don’t feel all that slurred by unhip.
But the main point isn’t that this response provided an off-ramp that I myself appreciate. It just wasn’t that harsh, wasn’t unfair. I disagree with aspects of it, but I can’t imagine being outraged by it.
If this response, which prompted such an angry editor’s note on behalf of Pullum, in any way reflects the tenor of the material that Lobina describes as so horrible that it supposedly drove Pullum into an intellectual version of hiding, then I can’t trust Lobina’s characterization of the rest of the book. He is the one who seems unwilling to engage with the arguments of his opponents, instead just asserting that they’re absurd.
Beyond that, the whole thing just seems like mush. Near the end, he writes that “the history and current status of Historically Black Colleges deserved a more thorough and sustained discussion.” Certainly it’s a worthy topic. But in a book on linguistics? Or does he mean the history and current status of the study of linguistics at these institutions deserves more thorough discussion? Probably. But he should have said so. He’s so hell-bent on criticizing wokeness that he can’t stop to detail exactly what the problems are, nor, when he pretends to pause and find value, to pause long enough to let us know what the value might actually be.
I don’t have any plans to read this book; the reviewer sounds like he has a few axes to grind, but even allowing for that it sounds awful. If I ever come across it, though, I’ll want to have a skim through the references. Do they seriously engage with a wide range of works across Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Russian, etc over the centuries? Or are they playing the sadly much more usual game of talking passionately about “inclusion” and “decolonisation” while only reading works published in English over the past few decades, and even among those selecting heavily for a particular perspective?
See, a sentence like “so he just gon’ act like Greek scholars ain’ learn from KmT?!” is a great opportunity to demonstrate the real value of inclusion; all you have to do is follow it up with a few pages on Egyptian influence on Greek thought about language, necessarily replete with citations of obscure works in multiple languages, and preferably adorned with a few quotes in hieratic and in ancient Greek. But it’s a lot easier – though a lot less interesting – to gesture vaguely towards the idea of influence than to do the hard work of arguing for it.
If I ever come across it, though, I’ll want to have a skim through the references
The pdf is free from the publisher in the reviewer’s link.
I should have looked – I just assumed if it’s from OUP it’s bound to be paywalled. Looking through it now, I get the impression that the review is indeed selective and unfair, but that the book is… well, the kindest way to put it might be “overly online”, but the problem goes deeper really. The Thornton chapter, for instance, is much better than the review might lead you to think, but it still commits to a rather self-defeating position that cedes “science” to the enemy in advance:
I get vibes of Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Can we be sure that this isn’t another Sokal Affair hoax?
@Ryan
I remember the LL altercation you mention. I thought at the time that the exchange on the blog was civil, and I could see both sides of the issue.
What I was dismayed at was the exchange between the guest poster and several other linguists on social media, and the way they talked about the whole thing off the blog.
Had more of a look…
Chapter 8, Towards Greater Inclusion in Practice and Among Practitioners: The Case for an Experience-Based Linguistics in India, is an interesting and informative examination of the ways in which casteism and colonialism have shaped the priorities of Indian university linguistics. I don’t have any sympathy for its call to follow the example of the Caribbean, where, apparently, “theoretical concerns without immediate social consequences are explicitly treated as secondary”; but a lot of their specific recommendations look sensible. However, despite having been written by two Indian scholars both based in India, it cites not a single publication in any language other than English (and the oldest publication cited is from 1953.) Like I said, this tends to be a blind spot for (even|especially) the most prominent advocates of inclusion in linguistics.
I have no interest in going back and rereading the substance of the LL altercation in question, although I remember thinking at the time that Pullum had been treated shabbily. But at a higher level of generality, I think it might be fair to summarize what happened as:
1. Pullum’s critics, who had never contributed much substance to the site, succeeded in driving away Pullum, who had by contrast contributed much substance to the site.
2. Having done so, Pullum’s critics did not begin to contribute more substance to the site than they previously had to fill the gap thus created.
3. Nor did the gap thus created attract new contributors to fill it, whether or not younger or more diverse. (Although *attract* may be the wrong verb because perhaps the site’s proprietor did not wish to draw in new contributors whom he did not know very well on a personal basis because he couldn’t be sure whether or not they would create future conflict and headaches.)
And this is true whether or not you think Pullum overreacted, and it can be useful to remember that people who provide valuable contributions to somewhat informal social institutions on a volunteer and uncompensated basis may have variable-to-unpredictable levels of how much crap they’re willing to put up with and that it is often easier to drive them away than to actually replace their prior contributions.
The seminal works on the comparative study of Gur languages are by Gabriel Manessy, and all of them are in French. They are seriously outdated (vastly more data on these languages is now available than when Manessy lost interest in comparative work forty years ago) but they are still cited as state-of-the-art in the English-language literature. I strongly suspect that this would not have been the case if Manessy had published in English.
State-of-the-art in African historical linguistics is often forty years old, tbh. Vossen’s The Eastern Nilotes, Rottland’s Die Südnilotischen Sprachen, Thelwall’s The Daju Language Group… none of them have been superseded yet as far as I know, sadly, despite significantly more data being available on each of these families.
Yet I didn’t read the response to Pullum as being particularly unfair.
I agree, which is why I left that part out when excerpting it. I was fairly confident the book was better than Lobina made it sound (and I thank Lameen for checking it out!), and it will probably be useful for those at whom it was aimed, but I think DE is on the mark: “the book is well-crafted to repel sympathetic readers who might otherwise find much to agree with.”
And I hope Christopher’s gut feeling is correct: “that wave of imitation broke two or three years ago, and the academia in the countries that I interact with is going back to a more reasonable order of things.”
@languagehat: The time frame mentioned there made me immediately wonder whether the change Christopher Culver has observed was due to much heavier use of LLMs by non-native speakers producing English-language texts.
Separately, Christopher Culver’s observation made me reflect on how prestige academic publishing often moves at a glacial pace, such that a 2024-published volume may reflect a high-level decision at the press to greenlight the project made well over two or three years previously – especially for a multi-author collection if the individual pieces largely got commissioned and written only after the publisher had signed on to the project. So there’s a possible time lag affecting what the theme and tone of this volume does or doesn’t say about current academic priorities and fashions.
There’s a separate irony about the alleged distinctiveness of “North American” college-town progressive/radical rhetoric, since that is often largely confected from prior European-origin trends and ideologies (although they may of course evolve/mutate in the North American ecological niche). Perhaps the “decolonization” trend has not yet gotten there.
@J.W. Brewer: I noticed Lobina mentioned Rudolf Rocker in his review. A lot of Rocker’s work toward the end of his life was focused on making the case that radicalism was native to American culture and politics—not just a European import. I don’t have any particular opinions about the quality of Rocker’s work, having read very little of it, but Hat might have a much better informed opinion.
By “immediate” they must mean “immediately imaginable” – not the same thing.
The review had me wondering whether Sokal might have been at work here.
@Brett: I wasn’t trying to suggest that radicalism-as-such was an import, just particular fashions in vocabulary and conceptual apparatus.
I looked into one of the papers, which Lobina decided not to criticize, just to get a taste. Amy Plackowski Disrupting English Class: Linguistics and Social Justice for All High School Students.
As you may imagine it is not about some deep linguistic issues, but the most mundane teaching in high school and directed mostly to not college-bound students. And the author is mostly self-taught in linguistic matters. Interestingly enough, among many personal details she (they?) fails to mention whether she speaks or at least knows, any language other than English and any variety of English other than her own. In that regard she is on par with academic linguists who get very touchy about number of languages they speak.
The paper is full of buzzwords and presents an attitude that teaching in HS should be a way to teach social justice by whatever means (and very bad conservatives do not allow it, which impinges on academic freedom). But if you can ignore this attitude, the idea to dispense with “theoretical” approach of introducing usual elements of linguistic analysis (morphology, phonology, syntax) first and focus on big picture discussions of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, linguistic standard vs. varieties, social use of language etc. doesn’t strike me as unreasonable. Unfortunately, because its all ideologically driven, it’s not clear whether the students absorbed any points about how language functions or it was all buried beneath some “critical” heap.
As usual, failures are most fun and I will quote them here. From the after class reflections (which, I guess, replace tests):
…when [a] student reflected on the documentary We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, about the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project, he wrote, “there is not really a point to learning a language that nobody uses. . . . What is the point of learning [Wampanoag] when they all speak English.”
Another white student, when asked what variety of English should hypothetically be sent into space to represent English to aliens, said, “Definitely not Southern because we wouldn’t want aliens to think we’re dumb.”
In a discussion of the possibility of using “y’all” as a gender-neutral second-person plural pronoun, one Black student said, “My ‘y’all’ is fine, but not the redneck ‘y’all.’ ”
*sighs deeply*
Distinguishing the good sort of y’all from the bad sort of y’all might be an excellent example of the continuing relevance of the кто кого? worldview helpfully introduced by that notably practical thinker V.I. Lenin.
To Brett’s point about R. Rocker, this wikibio of one of the 19th-century American radicals Rocker profiled admiringly is barely longer than a squib/stub, but it’s entertaining and one must certainly agree that this colorful fellow was a very homegrown style of reformist/pamphleteer/crackpot who did not depend on any influence from dodgy-seeming German-or-Yiddish-speaking immigrants, much less on French theorists of post-modernism. But I don’t think New England is really cranking out radicals of this genre anymore, certainly not on its college campuses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Heywood (NB that due to bad editing it links to the lengthy separate wiki article on presidential pardons w/o actually noting in text that Heywood only served about a quarter of his sentence for violating the Comstock Act before Pres. Hayes exercised his powers of clemency in Heywood’s favor.)
the idea to dispense with “theoretical” approach of introducing usual elements of linguistic analysis (morphology, phonology, syntax) first and focus on big picture discussions of prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, linguistic standard vs. varieties, social use of language etc. doesn’t strike me as unreasonable
Nor me (though I think they are hardly mutually exclusive.) But even if you couch your teaching in the form of pointing out that non-standard speech is not defective, formless or erroneous but has its own internal logic and regular grammar, the fact that you are pointing out this objective truth to schoolchildren at all is a political act, whether you like it or not.
The far right are quite correct in their fear that reality itself is biased against them; increasingly, pointing to reality is in itself becoming a political act.
They did not import existing heretical viewpoints into their scientific work: if they had, it would have undermined the plausibility of their work.
That’s why Bruno, or rather attitudes toward him, did so much damage. The Church associated Galileo with him.
The far right are quite correct in their fear that reality itself is biased against them; increasingly, pointing to reality is in itself becoming a political act.
I have never read anything said by someone (self-)identified as adhering to the “far right”, that I would interpret as evidence of such a fear.
Reality is not something that can be pointed at, or out. It’s a very abstract notion used, among other purposes, to distinguish friend and foe. To that extent, “pointing to reality” is always a polemical act. You simply don’t see it that way when you talk only with your friends.
Polemics are not the same thing as politics, however. The latter is a continuation of the former by other means, as the man didn’t say. Other means.
the fact that you are pointing out this objective truth to schoolchildren at all is a political act
I happen to disagree.
Neither the social justice position (everyone is free and even encouraged to speak a non-standard language variety in all situations) nor a conservative position (everyone should speak standard dialect, otherwise people are right to consider such a person as stupid and lazy) is justified by linguistic facts. It’s a pure tag-of-war where facts are useful insomuch as they support one’s own position. I would suggest that my own position, that people should have some flexibility in the language they use and accommodate to each situation they are in, and also be open to other people not speaking the way they do, is amply supported by science, but I am afraid, that’s not true either. Science is not interested in questions of should and shouldn’t.
For those who want to steelman the book, the best chapter I’ve come across so far is the one on NLP, which shows a level-headed and evidence-bases awareness of the myriad ways this tech is deliberately used against people’s interests or imposes unintended negative externalities on others. I’m not particularly taken with its talk of “shifting power to communities” and “Indigenous data sovereignty”, which seems to presuppose a kind of communal unity that rarely exists. But the diagnosis of the problems is valuable whatever solutions you may prefer.
(The reviewer describes this as “Emily M. Bender and Alvin Grissom II, in chapter 9, claim that large data sets as employed in contemporary language models preserve systems of oppression, including racism and misogyny, and thus are skewed towards hegemonic views (p. 206), a reflection of the coloniser’s mentality in the field of Natural Language Processing (p. 212).” Decide for yourself if that is a fair summary or just a quick inventory of statements that happened to trigger him.)
Unlike Lameen, I found that chapter unenlightening. It seems that the authors consider “corporations” and “government” as boogie-men, but I don’t, and mentioning that something is done because it is profitable doesn’t cause an automatic adverse reaction. Other than that, it is a grab bag of various deficiencies of NLP and anecdotes of failures. There is no statistics or analysis. There is even no serious narrative. If it were an op-ed or a blog post, it would be pretty weak.
On the other hand, the less said about the Filipinx chapter the better. Lockdown did bad things to everyone’s sense of perspective, but most of us were fortunate enough to get through it without publishing any confessionals.
This is disturbing. Not the first part – I’m very keen on making the line between advocacy and scientific inquiry intended to be objective as clear as possible. For example, I agree with D.O. that any position on what people should speak involves more than science, but I note that DE didn’t say anything to the contrary – just said that it is a fact that non-standard forms of speech have their own logic rather than being formless or defective, and that even pointing that fact out is political.
What bothers me in the quote from the review is the implication that scholarship should ever be unconcerned with or isolated from any political advocacy. Yes, you could read the quote itself more narrowly than that, but not when connected with the next paragraph. There, the example given is Pullum’s post, and the issues raised in the chapter largely are not responding to “actual theoretical points regarding the internalised and systematic knowledge of language of a person”, but on the way Pullum used pronouns when making those points, and the resulting discussion on how language should or shouldn’t be expected, where neither side were interested in scientific inquiry separated from advocacy. And why should they be? The fact that the topic is a scholarly one, even a linguistic one, doesn’t mean that a work should be immune from criticism regarding how it is written or even the choice of focus, or that the criticism should be answered in purely scholarly terms.
More broadly, the comments here have also discussed the quote in terms of things like climate research, with one comment saying “Climate activism led to a situation where instead of scientific findings becoming a common ground for political decisions, the other side became hostile to science.” It seems to me that claim is fairly described as an argument that people engaged in science should be careful to distinguish scholarship from advocacy for the sake of both science and advocacy, not that advocacy is not a concern for them.
For what it’s worth, in the Pullum chapter, Mile-Hercules does conflate scholarly competence with commitment to fighting oppression, a conflation which is not logically correct although the counterexamples are at least morally uncomfortable when framed that way. I guess that’s part of why Lobina gives the response he does. But implying that scholarship should ever be walled off from advocacy about how it is conducted, communicated, initiated or taught seems to me a major cop out.
But implying that scholarship should ever be walled off from advocacy about how it is conducted, communicated, initiated or taught seems to me a major cop out
I agree: this would only be a responsible attitude if all parties were acting in good faith, and only trying to get at the facts. We do not live in such a world. We live in a world in which fascists assert that polio vaccines are more dangerous than polio epidemics, and threaten scientists who tell the truth.
Nevertheless, it’s important that we oppose (for example) “race science” on the grounds that it is crap science, disfigured by shameless cherry-picking, misuse of statistics, and outright fraud, and not on the grounds that its supposed findings are appealing to fascists and repellent to liberals. Attacking it on the latter grounds simply bolsters their lie that we are unwilling to face facts when we find them politically inconvenient.
The reviewer describes this as “Emily M. Bender and Alvin Grissom II, in chapter 9, claim that large data sets as employed in contemporary language models preserve systems of oppression, including racism and misogyny, and thus are skewed towards hegemonic views (p. 206), a reflection of the coloniser’s mentality in the field of Natural Language Processing (p. 212).”
Seems to me that there is ample evidence that this claim is perfectly justified. In fact, this has proved sufficiently embarrassing to LLM-pushers that they have been driven to installing kludges into their golems in the hope of avoiding this very thing (with mixed success.)
Admittedly, “hegemonic” may be a word more familiar to us Extreme Radical Socialist Cultural Marxists than to some linguists, but in this context what it’s referring to is really pretty uncontroversial. Even the “AI” PR people acknowledge that’s it’s a genuine problem.
Lameen wrote:
>I don’t have any plans to read this book;
Lameen wrote:
>The Thornton chapter, for instance, is much better than the review might lead you to think,
and:
>Had more of a look. Chapter 8…
and then:
>the best chapter I’ve come across so far is the one on NLP,
and finally:
>On the other hand, the less said about the Filipinx chapter the better.
There will be undergrads who claim to have read the whole book who turn far fewer pages than you who say you have no plans to. 🙂
Yes… once I realised it was online, I started worrying that I had let myself be misled by a particularly nasty review. I think I’ve read enough now to say that, while the review does tendentiously exaggerate the problem, the book is still bad nevertheless, in basically the ways that its title would lead you to expect. Some of the authors are good linguists; I’ve encountered and appreciated Rikker Dokkum’s work elsewhere. And their project’s most vocal enemies are obviously far more dangerous. But I really can’t endorse or even understand a movement that elevates “inclusion” to the skies like this. The value of an academic discipline depends on its having effective ways to select for good work and marginalise bad work, a process that necessarily involves exclusion as well as inclusion. Discrimination based on irrelevant traits like race, gender, nationality, finances, etc is bad because it excludes people for the wrong reasons – and includes them for the wrong reasons – not because it involves exclusion per se. The point is to get closer to the truth; who you’re doing that with (if anyone) is a secondary issue.
(Not to mention, Lameen, that coming from an actual ex-colony, you’re technically one of the people they are presuming to be advocating for…)
Eh, plenty of political movements claim to be advocating for me (and you, and everyone else) in some capacity or other; doesn’t mean I’m going to agree with them. But I must admit I am particularly allergic to the idea of being positioned as the victim that others need to speak up for. Anticolonialism should be about standing up for your rights, not asking management for favours.
plenty of political movements claim to be advocating for me (and you, and everyone else)
The review implies that even I fall into one of the categories for whom Justice Has Yet To Be Done.
I once attended a compulsory DEI session (as Americans call it) in the course of which I discovered that I myself could tick no less than three legislative categories for being protected from oppression. (It was actually a very well conducted affair, run by a lady who was very sharp and very adroit at getting bunches of highly privileged army volunteers onside. After all, it’s not as though the issues involved are unreal or unimportant, even if one disagrees about how best to deal with them.)