Globalized Parochialism: Consequences of English as Lingua Franca in Philosophy of Science

International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (2):189-200 (2015)
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Abstract

In recent decades, English has become the uncontestable lingua franca of philosophy of science and of most other areas of philosophy and of the humanities. To have a lingua franca produces enormous benefits for the entire scientific community. The price for those benefits, however, is paid almost exclusively by non-native speakers of English. Section 1 identifies three asymmetries that individual NoNES researchers encounter: ‘publication asymmetry’, ‘resources asymmetry’, and ‘team asymmetry’. Section 2 deals with ‘globalized parochialism asymmetry’: thanks to English being a lingua franca, a special perspective, mostly US and British, is being globalized and is replacing European topics and approaches. This has serious consequences for history of philosophy as well as for philosophical theory: thinkers of the past tend to be dealt with on the global level at best only if and insofar they are translated into English. Similarly, the theoretical agenda of globalized philosophy of scien...

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Gereon Wolters
Universität Konstanz

References found in this work

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.Robert Audi (ed.) - 1995 - New York City: Cambridge University Press.
Truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto & David Pearce - 1990 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41 (2):281-290.
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.Robert Audi (ed.) - 1995 - New York City: Cambridge University Press.
Truthlikeness.Ilkka Niiniluoto - 1987 - Dordrecht: Reidel.

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