On conceptual Anglocentrism

“So what’s your thesis about?”

“I’m writing about this thing English speakers call evidence!”

“Ok, interesting.”

The conversations about my PhD I used to have with my Polish and Czech friends and family were usually not extremely exciting. The main reason was, I think, that I was never sure how to say evidence in Polish or Czech. It is not, of course, impossible to translate the word. One of the most common options would be dowody, or důkazy in Czech. But these words denote something stricter and narrower. They’re appropriate when it comes to evidence in legal proceedings (both are also standardly used, in singular, to translate the word proof). In other contexts though, they don’t work very well. Take the sentence “There is some evidence that philosophy is becoming increasingly Anglocentric”. Rendering evidence as dowody/důkazy here would sound awkward. There are better options to use (like, say, powody by sądzić in Polish). But these options won’t be suitable elsewhere, and so on.

The problem with evidence is by no means unique. For some years I used to write a Polish-language blog mainly about English-language philosophy. Initially I didn’t expect that translating certain passages and explaining certain ideas in my native language would be such a pain. Eventually I wrote a post about my struggles with ten really-hard-to-translate English terms that philosophers pay a lot of attention to. In addition to evidence, I listed authority, belief, commitment, judgment, liberty, proposition, right, sentience and well-being. But I could have added many more: science, folk, nation, legitimate, warrant… On top of that, there are words like to know, which are generally easier to translate, but it doesn’t mean they have one equivalent. For example, in English you say “I know how to drive”, “I know her books” and “I know what time it is”. But in Polish you use three different verbs: umiem, znam and wiem. Overall, it’s hard to find too many one-to-one relations when it comes to English “philosophical” words and their Polish counterparts. And we’re still talking about two Indo-European languages, whose users have historically adhered to one or another form of Western Christianity. I’d be surprised if differences between English and, say, Arabic or Chinese didn’t turn out to be even greater.

Take morality, for example. The English word has fairly straightforward counterparts in other modern European languages: there’s Polish moralność, Czech morálka, German Moralität, and so on. But how about other languages? The word is derived from the Latin mores, which very often refers to norms that are not considered moral by English speakers, like rules of etiquette or fashion or celebration. There’s no category of morality in Classical Latin, it seems to me, the ancient Romans simply didn’t draw lines between different kinds of normativity where contemporary Westerners draw them. Sadly I don’t speak any non-Indo-European language well, but based on what the experts are saying, there are at least similarly substantial semantic gaps between English morality and words like iwa in Yoruba, which serve as usual translations.

So there is clearly a lot of cross-linguistic diversity when it comes to philosophically interesting words. However it looks like this diversity is largely ignored by contemporary analytic philosophy. The dominant approach appears to be: forget that other languages exist and just focus on what’s behind this or that English term. There are exceptions: university curricula often include texts touching on what the Greeks meant by arete, akrasia or eudaimonia. Those who work on non-Western philosophical traditions inevitably address the issue of conceptual differences between English and non-European languages. But by and large, it’s assumed that there is only one language, English, you really need to be fluent in to do philosophy – at least philosophy of the prestigious and internationally recognised kind.

It’s hard not to notice that there’s a huge institutional pressure to use English, irrespective of where you’re from. For example, there are rankings of “the best” philosophy journals where everybody is supposed to publish their work, and as of now none of the titles listed seems to accept submissions in languages other than English. This situation creates two serious problems. First, there is the issue of linguistic injustice: the native speakers of English (less than 5% of the world population) are given an enormous privilege in the field. Secondly, there is the issue of epistemic parochialism. We seem to be losing something important by neglecting the cross-linguistic diversity. What if philosophical questions which naturally come up in English, but not necessarily in other languages (like “What do knowledge-how and knowledge-that have in common?” or “What is this thing called science?”) are not the best philosophical questions to ask? What if some distinctions of English cannot be said to, to use Timothy Williamson’s expression, “cut at the cognitive of epistemological joints”? What if other languages do a better job at describing what’s objectively “out there” (if there is such a thing as objectively “out there”, in this or that domain)? What if there are semantic universals underlying the peculiarities of different natural languages? And what if learning about these universals can tell us a lot about the human mind and its relation to the world? We might never know if English continues to have the status it has.

This is not to say that philosophy shouldn’t have a lingua franca, or that the lingua franca shouldn’t be English. But we need to be careful to distinguish between using English as the metalanguage of the profession and treating English, or whatever English tends to direct one’s attention at, as the profession’s object of study. The distinction might not always be easy – or perhaps even possible – to make. In this case abandoning English even as the language of description might be the way to go. I’m speculating here, I have no idea what the answer it. But as most philosophers don’t seem to spend much time thinking about how the language they philosophise in shapes what they philosophise about, typically the issue doesn’t even arise.

I’ve been trying to find out how much is being done to address the problems I’ve just sketched out, and the research doesn’t look overwhelming. Some publications are just beginning to emerge on linguistic injustice in philosophy. There are some psychologists and linguists who have recently started arguing that over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. This may not not be directly addressing what I outlined above, but it clearly has implications for it. There is the field of Translation Studies, which seems largely disconnected from analytic philosophy, but some notable exceptions can be found. There are experimental philosophers and their Geography of Philosophy Project (I’m very sympathetic to the general idea behind it, but I have doubts about the methodology). There is Anna Wierzbicka’s book Imprisoned in English. The Hazards of English as a Default Language. Here, again, I very much liked the spirit, but I wasn’t entirely convinced about a number of Wierzbicka’s claims (for example about the supposed “rationalist ethics embedded in modern English”). Finally, in the metaphilosophical literature one can come across the odd Anglocentrism-related complaint. For example, like Herman Cappelen points out it’s bizarre that philosophers of language keep publishing papers on how ‘a’ and ‘the’ work in English, while many languages don’t even have articles). Or Mark Steen writes that “the distinction between mass and count is often employed by metaphysicians to make universal conclusions about ‘our’ (i.e., humanity’s) implicit conceptual scheme, usually by merely examining English”. They tend to ignore the fact that what’s countable in English is often uncountable in other languages, and vice versa, or that the distinction doesn’t even seem to exist in a number of languages.

All in all, this doesn’t seem much. Hopefully the situation will soon change. If philosophers’ reliance on English is both ethically and epistemically questionable, it would be good to at the very least acknowledge this fact.