Scientific Language and Common Language

Every discipline of science have its own language, its own vocabulary to describe its subject.

Usually, this language is based on a natural language and - depending on how abstract the given topic is - it can be quite similar with the ordinary language or totally different from it.

For example, the language used in linguistics or anthropology is more understandable than the language used in mathematics, especial mathematical logic, or a programming language. Generally we can say that the languages of the social sciences are closer to the general language then the languages of the natural sciences. The social sciences are usually describing processes that can be easily observed in the daily life too, the difference is that the scientific research requires a deeper and wide-ranged perspective. The research can expose different relationships between events and object to an extent, when it is already not part of our normal understanding of the world at all. As the object of description gets far away from the common situations of daily life, it will be more abstract. This new information can seem to be irrelevant or even non-comprehensible to people not experts of the given subject. But even if the language is very abstract, it is still a language in the sense that it is communicating something, it can contain information. We can say that, with language the speaker is encoding the information and the receiver is decoding it. The language becomes the holder of information, but only in relation with a person, because only a person is capable of understanding. The understanding belongs to the human nature, so the quality of meaning is a part of it too. The language as an 'information container' makes sense only if there is someone who is capable to 'decode' it.

In a general scientific description we will meet at least some technical terms. Without understanding the meaning of these technical terms the real message of the description is unintelligible, or an incorrect understanding of the terms will lead to misunderstanding. The danger of misinterpretation is much more severe when the language used in the scientific research is very similar to the language used in the daily life, and some of the technical terms are not exclusively used in that given field. To avoid this situation the need for the precise definition of the basic terms

arise. A common word gets its own position in a created language through the process of definition by stating what meaning or which qualities are rendered to the word in this special use of language.

The word's new meaning can remain close to or it can diverge from the meaning in the ordinary language.

For example the the word 'idealist' in a philosophical discourse means a person who accepts any system of philosophical idealism, but in a daily situation it usually names a person who was influenced by noble ideas or it often means unpractical, romantic or visionary attitude. Furthermore the word 'idealism' has different meanings in art, Christian eschatology or in the American study of international relations etc. Merely by having an assertion, like “he is an idealist”, without the understanding of the context or language system where it has been used, there is no hope for correct understanding.

Or the word 'degradation' in the daily use of language means degeneration, moral or intellectual decadence. But it means erosion in physical geography, chemical decomposition in chemistry and a person's ritual dismissal from a military or church position in sociology⁴⁸ etc.

The necessity to separate the created language from the daily language comes from the difference between the world we are facing in the daily life and the world we are facing during the scientific research. By facing a world we mean grasping a world through language. The language and narrative used to describe the situation will effect the perception of the reality of that moment.

The difference is not merely linguistic: besides the different ideas in the two systems, there are differences between the inner relations of the ideas in a given system and in the goals the system is used for.

We would like to emphasize that the difference is not only during the narrative's manifestation in spoken language but during the process of understanding. The description of an experience is effected by the language, we can express something as far as the language let us to express. If there are no proper words for a description then it is impossible to express the meaning. But besides of the descriptive process of the language there is a creative process too. First it appears during the perception when the sensation becomes intelligible based on linguistic categories. The world will be perceived as it is recreated in language, based on the words and structure of the language and on the given narrative. Because there are many different languages, and there are many possible kind of

48 Degradation Ceremony. Harold Garfinkel: 'Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies' in American Journal of Sociology; 1956

narratives in one language, the world that one describes, or the world one lives in, is already one specific version of the numerous possible worlds. We refer to the 'world' as a lived world that manifests itself with all its components: the self, the physical world, feelings, goals, future and past etc., and treat every kind of explanation of it as a separate narrative.

The worlds described by different narratives are not necessarily corresponding with each other.

The words and categories are always rendered to some specific kind of human action. The discriminative categories that are useful to understand a common situation (for example shopping) are not useful in physics, mathematics or literature and vice versa. The reason of this lies in the difference of the intention or the goal one has in that situation. To get the desired result in these activities we don't need categories of the other, we can say: in these activities the categories of the other are non-comprehensible or even non-existent. What use can have of the derivation, syllogism or the relativism in the success of cooking or to travel from our home to our workplace? It is evident that focusing on a daily activity does not require any other interpretation of its corresponding objects beyond their level of usability for the given task. In this sense the world is manifesting during these activities are nor more illustrious, nor less true than any other. Even a scientific description can not claim to hold higher truth value because in this sense only those descriptions have significances that correspond with the goal of the activity. Therefore, a scientific description can be right only in a scientific research, but there are numerous other kind of human activities which are all irrelevant to scientific descriptions. On the other hand, the scientific research in its own field has to use the corresponding scientific language and scientific categories, irrespectively how different it is from the daily descriptions.

For example, to drive our car from one place to an other, distant place we do not need any sophisticated understanding of ourselves, the car's function or the world. We simply need the ability to drive car, the knowledge about the rules of the road and directions. If we have all these we can reach the destination. Our categories of thinking and description of reality has nothing to do with the success of accomplishing our task, as far as we have the former mentioned abilities. We could collect much more detailed information about this activity, the car or the surrounding world. We could examine our ability to drive with the methods of biology or psychology, we could analyze the car and its ability to run by the laws of physics, mechanics or chemistry. We could describe the surrounding world by the ways of geology, meteorology and physics. And finally we could examine

the situation in regard of the categories of philosophy or metaphysics to check if there is any movement at all or the whole driving happens in the mind only or by a special correspondence of mind and matter. There is a possible point of view and a corresponding category system for each of these descriptions. And they are giving a more detailed description of their topic then the description of one's while focusing on the driving. The difference is that the person's goal or intention is different. In the first case the goal is to arrive to a place, there is no need to observe the situation in any other way. The description - or in other words the narrative - of the situation in this case is sufficient and all the other elements are irrelevant no matter of their truthfulness. And if we describe truthfulness in relation with a given goal then every other descriptions without a corresponding goal will not reach any truth value.

The importance of this introduction is, besides to understand the unlimited number of possible narratives, to realize the difference between two fundamentally different kind of activities and their various descriptions, viz. the daily life and the scientific research. Regarding to this, on the one hand I do not deny the right to use the category 'religion' and the religious-secular distinction or their role in the daily language. It has been interwoven with the common language and the common experience of life, even though it belongs to the vocabulary of a specific socio-cultural medium.

But, on the other hand I will give arguments against its usefulness to keep using it in the academical world, at least in a similar way as in the common language. I will point out the word's inconsistent nature as an objectively recognizable category, and its culture related existence, therefore it should be treated critically in the scientific world.

Moreover, even I hold that the traditional way of categorization in religious studies could be totally deconstructed, and it is possible to create a new scientific language, but I doubt that the widespread use of the language and categories in daily life are easily alterable. Hence an actual change in the scientific language would distantiate it from the common language. This separation of the two kind of languages and the tension between them can make reluctance even within the field of scientific research.

Those fields of scientific researches that has a long history and had time to elaborate their categories, already separated their terms from the daily descriptions. In a new field, like the religious studies and some other social sciences, this kind of separation and precise definition of every category has not been made yet, as it appears in the religious-secular distinction.

2. Ideology

In order to understand the problematic nature of a description that separates the religious phenomena from the secular we have to examine the nature of the human understanding. By examining it we will get an insight about the position of the researcher himself. Through this understanding we will know which conditions are effecting the ways of experiencing and describing the phenomena. For the explanation we will use two important concepts: the 'ideology' and the 'narrative'. In this chapter we will focus on the ideology. Understanding the meaning of ideology has two benefit for us in the religious studies. The first is that every complex set of ideas in every cultures are formulating an ideology that can be characterized by the same standards. In this sense it is not possible to find difference between religious and non-religious ideologies. The second is that through the understanding of the effect of the ideologies on a person, we can know that within the framework of certain ideologies it is impossible to make a self reflection, and it is possible to maintain irrational statements and judgments. This is true even for scientific ideologies.

The general descriptions of ideology has a lot to do with the descriptions of religion. Lots of people consider religion as a kind of ideology in itself. Deeply influenced by Marxism, there is a pejorative reading of the word 'ideology' referring only to some social classes, especially to the ruling classes. The word itself has a short history and originally it was used as the 'science of ideas' by Destutt de Tracy⁴⁹. In less then fifty years its meaning changed to the pejorative sense⁵⁰. The word has a wide range of use, therefore we have to specify in what sense we are using it in this paper.

What we are more interested in is the description of the general characteristics of ideologies and, after comparison, the recognition of the field of religious studies as one of them. We will use the word in a wider sense here, based on the ideas of Ricoeur, the ideology as the basic and general character of the human thinking. In this sense there is no any non-ideological position, as it is stands for the framework of the system of thinking. Its active side, as a descriptive function based on the conceptual framework of ideology, is the narrative. The narrative too, we are going to use it in a

49 Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754 – 1836) was a French Enlightenment philosopher.

50 Kennedy (1979) pp. 353-368

much wider sense than in the daily language. We use it to describe all human activities of understanding, interpretation and description. The narrative is the expressive function of the ideology, but not only expressive toward others but toward the self as well: during the process of understanding through the selection of some data by organizing them.

The difficulty is that the ideology of oneself, is being the frame of the thinking, can hardly be reflected on, the interpretative character of the narrative does not let it to manifest. It is only possible by a dramatical shift in the point of view that gives place to a new frame of thinking. This would require a significant change in the former point of view, giving chance to a self reflection. We have to mention that being outside of a given ideology does not mean an objective point of observation, but to be placed in an other framework of ideology, that merely gives us an other way of thinking, but in no way an interpretation-free or ideology-free standpoint. This concept has an accented importance when we examine the point of view that emphasizes a clear separation between the 'religious' and 'secular' world.

The understanding of other cultures' customs always happens in the light of one's own culture.

This position is not objective, it is not a standpoint that is freed from prejudice, but deeply interwoven with one's own categories of thinking and language. Thus the explanation of an object could be completely different for one who is inside of the given culture from one who is outside of it. And the insider-outsider separation does not mean a position of subjective-objective standpoints, because there is no one global outsider standing point. The very moment when we are started to form some ideas we are already placed inside an ideology. Moreover there are numerous different descriptions within the 'insiders' and this prevents them to form a homogeneous medium. A description that characterizes a religion, culture or country in a circumscribed way is a mere generalization.

The person who makes the research or the observation is effected not only by one factor, but by many: the education, social class, interest, country, personal attitude, language etc. Thus the narrative will always express the view from a position of a particular social-historical point. The elements of the narrative are always depend on this subjective situation and this could cause significant differences in different narratives, some categories would be existent for one and non-existent for the other. We can see this, for example, in different languages, where the vocabulary shows a different division of experience. In our case the modern meaning of the word 'religion' that

came out from a specific culture and language, it does not necessarily has an equivalent in other languages.