Embodied realism also has important things to say about the epistemological power of science, which, with the rise of the historical/descriptive approach to scientific change and the hermeneutic philosophy of science (see Halverson 1997:219-220), has occasionally been fundamentally called into question. The issue at stake can again be traced back to the fundamental objectivism-subjectivism dichotomy. Scientific objectivism claims that there is “only one fully correct way in which reality can be correctly divided up into objects, properties, and relations” (Lakoff 1987:265) and that it is the task of science to uncover this absolutely true categorization of the world. From this objectivist perspective, we possess scientific knowledge “when our scientific theories fit the objective facts of the world” (ibid.:297). On the other hand, postmodern accounts strive to undermine science’s claim of objectivity and instead emphasize its social, cultural and historical contingency. It was especially Kuhn’s (1962) influential work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
which made a convincing claim that scientific theories – at least those that have existed till now – are not exact mirrors of objectively given things in the world, that scientific progress is not linear but undergoes times of crisis and revolution and that these revolutions bring about a change of theories and a reconceptualization of entire disciplines (see Chalmers
31999:108). Postmodern accounts of science accept the idea of indeterminacy (see Pym’s
vagueness, ambiguity, etc., while for modernist science, such vagueness and ambiguity are obstacles on the way to adjusting scientific theories to the objective facts of the world (Budin 2007:66-67). At different times in human history, scientific objectivism seemed to have attained its goal to provide an absolutely stable and correct description of “the way the world is”. For example, the American physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Abraham Michelson claimed at the turn of the twentieth century that “[o]ur future discoveries [in physics] must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals” (see Störig 32007:492). He
referred to the immense success of Newtonian mechanics, which seemed to be capable of explaining all processes of movement found in nature. Once evidence of the existence of the famous “light-bearing ether” was found, the Newtonian explanations would be applicable to optical (as well as magnetic and electric) phenomena as well, thus providing an encompassing physical theory of the way the world is (see Isaacson 2008:92). However, Michelson’s quote came only shortly before Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis, which brought about a fundamental reconceptualization of Newtonian physics, or a scientific revolution in Kuhnian terms. However, while Kuhn nonetheless acknowledged the success of science in establishing highly structured and stable conceptual systems with an equally high explanatory power with regard to phenomena in the material world (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:92), more radical approaches in the post-Kuhnian tradition of philosophy of science have relegated the scientific enterprise to “just one more philosophical narrative with no privileged status to any other philosophical narrative” (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:88-89). It seems, however, that accepting this radical rejection of the epistemological power of science would mean throwing out the baby with the bath water. For even if scientific objectivism may not be tenable, there is no denying the extraordinary success of the natural sciences and the scientific method since the seventeenth century (see Chalmers 31999:xx) and the already mentioned conceptual stability brought about by the scientific endeavour, even if this conceptual stability must always be regarded as preliminary and not as absolute. The epistemological challenge raised by objectivist and subjectivist accounts of science is stated quite clearly by Laudan (1990:166, quoted from Halverson 1999:18):
[W]e find ourselves in a situation where our only contact with the world is mediated by our concepts. We posit certain beliefs or theories to make sense of that mediated world. If those beliefs or theories were entirely free-floating (as [the relativist] believes them to be) and reflected nothing whatsoever about the world itself, then it would be unthinkable that they would enable us to manipulate the world as effectively as we can [...] the explanation of the success of science is going to have to be told in terms of the ways in which our interaction with nature puts strong constraints on our systems of belief.
Especially the last sentence of Laudan’s quote should sound familiar from the discussion so far. It seems then that “the success of science” can – at least partly – be explained within the embodied realist account.
The philosophical stance of embodied realism toward science is as follows: Firstly, by rejecting the overall objectivist paradigm, embodied realism also rejects any form of scientific objectivism and the search for absolute truths from a God’s Eye perspective. However, it endorses scientific realism, which is not to be equated with scientific objectivism (Lakoff 1987:176). Scientific realism “merely” claims that there is a real physical world and that scientific knowledge of this physical world is possible “within appropriate standards set by communities of scientists” (ibid.).18
18 This characterization of scientific realism seems to be at odds with Chalmers’ (31999:238) understanding
of the term. According to Chalmers, scientific realism “aims at true statements about what there is in the world and how it behaves at all levels […]”. This description seems to fit Lakoff’s characterization of scientific objectivism.
Scientific realism assumes that “the world is the way it is” but it acknowledges that there may be different scientifically correct ways of describing or conceptualizing reality based on different conceptual schemes (ibid.:265). This is reminiscent of the discussion of internal realism above and in line with the inescapable perspectivation of human – and therefore also scientific – access to the world as posited by embodied realism. What embodied realism brings to scientific realism is an epistemologically plausible explanation of the high stability of scientific knowledge, by linking it to basic-level structure as one of the two preconceptual structures tying human conceptual systems to the world. Of course, human interaction with the world in the context of science takes place not in the form of internal subjective experience but in the form of imagistic experience, which is directly derived from and related to the external world (see the discussion in 3.2.3). Recall now the embodied realist claim that human interaction with their imagistically experienced environment is characterized by a high stability at the basic-level due to the cognitive saliency of this level in terms of gestalt perception, mental imagery, motor programmes, and knowledge organization. It is also claimed that this cognitive saliency of the basic level and the high stability of the corresponding basic-level concepts is universally valid for all humans. Human basic-level knowledge is derived from basic-level interaction with the immediate physical environment, for example through perceiving, touching or manipulating (Lakoff 1987:297). This stable knowledge, which is organized in the form of
basic-level concepts, is taken to be “true”, unless there is a very good reason to believe otherwise (ibid.:299). Embodied realism now claims that scientific instruments extend human basic-level abilities for perceiving, observing, manipulating, etc. (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:29).19
As we technologically extend our basic-level abilities to perceive and to manipulate, our understanding of organisms as being made up of cells remains unchallenged. It is stable and remains so because of the large number of observations of cell structure made through microscopes and the large number of manipulations of cell structure brought about through various technological extensions of our basic-level capabilities. Our knowledge of the existence of cells seems secure, as secure as any knowledge is likely to be.
For example, basic-level perception in the visual domain is extended by instruments like telescopes and microscopes, which consistently “turn things that previously couldn’t be seen into basic-level percepts” (Lakoff 1987:298). Telescopes and microscopes thus move phenomena which previously lay outside the realm of human perception (such as the rings of Saturn or the structure of cells, ibid.:298-299) to the basic level and thus allow a privileged interaction with these phenomena from a human point of view. The same is true for various delicate probing instruments, such as lasers, that allow a basic-level manipulation of objects that would not normally be accessible to humans (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:29). In embodied realist terms, this technologically extended basic- level structure which becomes available for human interaction within the context of science is one of the crucial factors for the success of science since it imports the stability found at the basic level into the scientific enterprise and eventually into scientific knowledge. This is underlined by the following quote from Lakoff (1987:299) on our knowledge about cells:
It is important to point out in this context that the embodied realist claim concerning the technological extension of human basic-level abilities can be directly linked to the much- praised scientific method since, with the extended abilities of observation and manipulation, embodied realism covers two important cornerstones of this method. Of course, there are other aspects of the scientific method which are not covered by embodied realism, such as the tight control of observation and manipulation processes by means of experiments, scientific standards requiring the reproducibility of such experiments and the call for extensive and converging evidence for some theory prior to this theory’s acceptance by the scientific community as codifying any stable knowledge about the world. However, the account of scientific embodied realism (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:90)
sketched above provides a coherent link between a cognitively plausible and intuitively appealing philosophical account of ontology and human epistemology and the success and conceptual stability of the scientific enterprise without requiring any privileged God’s Eye perspective on the way the world is. We must bear in mind, however, that science is an inherently human endeavour and will therefore always be constrained by the perspective that humans can have on certain phenomena – as technologically extended as this perspective may be. As Lakoff (1987:265) concludes, “that is the best we can do – and it’s pretty good. Good enough to provide us with reasonable standards for stable scientific knowledge.”
For scientific and technical translation, this means that, at a general philosophical level, we may indeed have an epistemologically secured justification to fall back on stable frames of reference underlying scientific and technical discourse and are thus safeguarded, to a reasonable extent, against subjectivist/postmodernist advances with their claims of relativism, indeterminacy, etc. However, the universality of human basic-level experience and cognition does not automatically entail the universality of the resulting conceptual systems. It is well-known from contrastive terminology work and from practical scientific and technical translation that conceptual systems in science and technology are generally not fully congruent between different cultures but exhibit several types of asymmetry. This is due to the fact that universal human basic-level abilities are of course only one factor contributing to the emergence of conceptual systems, which will also be subject to more worldly influences such as social, cultural, linguistic and even economic factors.20 How translators deal with such asymmetries and whether stable conceptualizations in the SL culture that have a symmetric pendant in the TL culture will, in every case, be recreated or held invariant in the target text21
20 See, for example, Arntz et al. (62009:180). This issue will be discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
will also be subject to much more situation-bound and practical concerns, which cannot be accounted for in high-level philosophical theorizing. Thus, it seems that what we can realistically expect as a contribution of embodied realism to STT is a coherent high-level explanation for a relatively stable epistemological basis of the scientific enterprise from a human point of view and a sound philosophical basis for explaining aspects of STT in the cognitive linguistic framework to be discussed in the next chapter. The actual emergence of scientific and technical conceptual systems and the specific actions of translators in actual ST translation contexts will, however, exhibit a less
straightforward and more “untidy” character, which lacks the philosophical elegance illustrated above.
3.4 Chapter summary
This chapter discussed embodied realism as a philosophical grounding for scientific and technical translation and cognitive linguistics. The discussion started from the Cartesian mind-body dualism and the resulting dichotomy of objectivism vs. subjectivism. While objectivism claims that human conceptual systems are subservient to a completely prestructured and objectively given world, subjectivism posits the dominance of human conceptual systems by claiming that it is human cognition which is primarily responsible for the emergence of any structure in the world. Embodied realism was shown to transcend this dichotomy by positing the embodiment of human experience and cognition, which leads to a dialectical relationship between structure in the world and human abilities to perceive this structure and to form corresponding conceptual systems. The functional coupling of humans with the world via human embodiment entails that it is neither the world nor human cognition alone that is responsible for the emergence of conceptual systems but that these systems arise out of the interaction between the two poles. Scientific embodied realism claims that human basic-level abilities for perceiving, observing, manipulating, etc. are technologically extended by scientific instruments such as telescopes, microscopes and lasers. This technological extension of basic-level abilities implies that the conceptual stability found at the basic level is imported into the scientific enterprise and eventually into scientific knowledge. It was claimed that scientific embodied realism provides a coherent high-level link between a cognitively plausible and appealing philosophical account of ontology and epistemology and the stability of the scientific enterprise. While this entails that scientific and technical translation may indeed fall back on stable frames of reference and is thus reasonably safeguarded from criticisms of subjectivist/postmodernist accounts questioning this stability, there is ample evidence that scientific and technical conceptual systems are not fully congruent across different cultures. Embodied realism can therefore be taken to provide a high-level explanation for a relatively stable epistemological basis of science and technology. However, the actual formation of conceptual systems in this field will show a certain degree of variation due to influences that fall outside the scope of high-level philosophical theorizing.
The next chapter will present the framework of cognitive linguistics, which is based on the philosophical account of embodied realism.
4 The framework of cognitive linguistics
Having discussed the philosophy of embodied realism as both a potential philosophical basis for scientific and technical translation and as the specific philosophical underpinnings of cognitive linguistics, I will now give a detailed account of the cognitive linguistic framework. This account will serve as a basis for both the cognitive linguistic perspective on scientific and technical translation established in chapter 5 and for the cognitive linguistic account of explicitation and implicitation and the empirical investigation of the two concepts in chapters 6 and 8 respectively.
Cognitive linguistics stands in the functionalist tradition of linguistics and was developed in the 1970s, primarily as a countermovement to the then predominant formalist approaches in the tradition of Chomskyan Grammar. Its principal aim is to provide a holistic account of language in terms of general human cognitive abilities, such as attention, memory, perception, etc. (see Schwarz 21996:52 ff.; Dirven 22002:76). CL is not
one unified linguistic theory but rather a specific approach to language taken by various researchers who share a common set of perspectives, guiding principles and assumptions. Based on this shared ground, a diverse range of different theories has been developed, often complementary and overlapping, sometimes competing with each other (see Evans/Green 2006:3). The present thesis is primarily based on Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008) Cognitive Grammar, which is arguably the most comprehensible and most influential cognitive linguistic theory to date. Other cognitive linguistic models introduced in this chapter which fall outside Cognitive Grammar, such as Clark’s common ground and Fillmore’s frame semantics, share the same basic principles as the Langackerian approach and can therefore be readily integrated into it.
The chapter is structured as follows: Starting from a top-down perspective, I will first give a brief overview of three major approaches to meaning and the cognitive linguistic stance toward these approaches. This is intended to situate cognitive linguistics within the wider field of general linguistic theories. At the same time, this survey serves to make transparent the basic linguistic commitments made with regard to the account of scientific and technical translation proposed in this thesis. After this general overview, the focus will be shifted to more specific aspects of the CL framework which are relevant to the overall epistemic aims of this thesis. The last part of the chapter then discusses various specific theoretical components of CL that are directly relevant to the proposed account of STT and
the analysis of explicitation and implicitation in the second part of this study. Given the nature of the present topic, the discussion will, at some points, delve deeper into linguistic issues that may not show any readily perceivable connection to translation. I still consider this discussion to be necessary because it illustrates in detail the linguistic basis of this thesis (both at the more general level of scientific and technical translation and at the more specific level of explicitation and implicitation), so that its theoretical framework and empirical findings can be compared with that of translational approaches which are based on different linguistic frameworks. Also, despite the linguistic bias of parts of the following discussion, the overall translational perspective will be preserved throughout the chapter.