The common language of ideas

Is this a positive outcome of globalisation? Yes and no. There are, of course, advantages to adopting a common language, such as facilitating exchange, reducing ambiguity and broadening discussions beyond national borders in a transnational or global framework. The cost of interpretation during a conference or congress is high – it requires more time, and there is a higher risk of creating misunderstandings, not to mention errors in transmission.

But don't we lose something when we adopt a sole language for the circulation of ideas? We certainly do. First of all, we are not all equal in front of the English language: some are native speakers, others are not, and most non-native speakers will never reach the linguistic skills and comfort of native speakers. For them, communication is not facilitated by adopting English.

But let’s imagine we were all able to attain such linguistic skills. Is there no other disadvantage to communicating orally and in written form only in English?

Since knowledge often needs to be conquered against common sense – as Francis Bacon, Émile Durkheim and Gaston Bachelard argued – translating notions and concepts may be a good technique to challenge ideas and representations that are taken for granted. Concepts have a social origin and are embedded in cultural traditions. They may have circulated across cultures and taken new significations along the way.

Moreover, thinking in different languages would enrich our epistemology; it does not necessarily imply relativism. Why would the English language have privileged access to truth? Natural languages convey common representations, and we need to use abstract concepts to take some distance from our ordinary world view. Translation has a similar effect of making the things we take for granted in our own language seem less evident.

Multilingualism in science could, of course, threaten to fragment transnational communities of knowledge – but to oppose multilingualism is a mistake. Many researchers work in more than one language. Multilingualism also pleads in favour of translation not only as a tool but as a scholarly practice, which requires training.

One can also question, as the German philosophers did by the end of the 19th century, the validity of the natural sciences model for the social and human sciences. How can signification, which is so crucial in human societies, be captured by determinist causal models? In the natural sciences, there are also theoretical struggles and methodological conflicts, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out.

Thus, there are cleavages not only across cultures but also across disciplines and different domains of knowledge. The language of knowledge is often clearer within a discipline, even in transcultural settings, than between disciplines. This is because disciplines share concepts and agree, more or less, on methods.

Disciplines may be divided into sub-disciplines with different theoretical and methodological approaches – for instance, historical sociology opposes the mainstream of presentism in the social sciences.

The interdisciplinary discussion is therefore just as necessary as the intercultural one. As we know, the importation of models and paradigms from one discipline to another is often a source of innovation and renewal.