A parody of Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation”, and a speculation of the future of linguistics as a Weberian science.
I accepted the offer from the University of Toronto during an academic conference. The day after my acceptance, the conference hosted a social event at the Planet Word Museum in DC, a museum promoting linguistic diversity and communicating fun linguistic concepts to the general public. It brought back memories from early 2020, when I was a first-year in college with an emerging interest in linguistics. The museum was just opening up back then, and I inquired about volunteering opportunities for my first-year summer. The volunteering was put on hold indefinitely due to COVID. The pandemic drew a deep line of division in my perception of time, so this memory felt particularly distant. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about this social event during the conference - almost an invitation to complete an unfinished business from five years ago, to reconnect with my pre-COVID self. The museum was enjoyable. Later I learned that, on that same day in the afternoon about 4km south of the museum, a Delta A319 taking off from Washington DC Airport narrowly avoided colliding with a military plane a few hundred feet below, seconds away from repeating the tragedy two months ago at the exact same airport which took 67 lives.
Time is such a magical thing. And 2025 is certainly a strange time to start a linguistics PhD. When I was writing emails to accept or decline my offers, my phone was playing a video of the arrest by ICE in plain clothes of a Tufts student who wrote an op-ed for Palestine. It was clear to me that Toronto was not only a great academic institution but also the politically sensible choice.
Yet what followed my choice in the next days was not pride but rather unease and discontent. It felt like an evasion. Evasion is no stranger to the academia, taking shelter in the US during World War II. Now it may be time to look for another shelter, perhaps in Canada or Europe. But for how long? Any sense of long-term security in Canada would be an illusion, as science and democracy are in crisis on a global scale. When any research including keywords like “diversity” or “bias” is under attack, should linguists hide behind political neutrality and pray to be unnoticed? Or is this an opportunity to rethink the social relevance of our field and take up our political duty?
Such conditions led me to reread Weber’s “Science as a Vocation”. While his writing (intentionally) did not provide a definitive answer, I hope mine would persuade some to join me in thinking about these problems. The current state of the world has some alarming similarities to Weber’s fin-de-siecle Europe. Developments in technoscience and the supremacy of rationalism have created fragmentation in our moral values, without the capacity to provide alternatives. The result is the chaos of “warring deities”, competing metanarratives that unfortunately often include fascism. Time calls for a reexamination of the relationship between science and our moral values.
Weber, following many epistemologists, classifies science into two parts - natural science and historical/cultural science. They differ in the involvement of subjective values in their aims, scopes, and methods. Where does linguistics sit in this classification? Weber’s discussions of social science seem exclusively designed for sociology and history. Applying his concepts to linguistics feels like shoehorning. But let’s give it a go anyway. The development of cognitive sciences seem to have stirred up this neat classification. For example, individual moral values may have a neurological foundation, and therefore can be analyzed in terms of universal laws of causality. Linguistics, as a cognitive science, shares this on-the-fence status. Language can certainly be studied as measurable behavior (by which I do not mean behaviorism). Decades of psycholinguistics have developed beautiful mechanistic models of language processing, and related language to broader cognitive systems such as memory. This is where my academic experiences have been, and I hope to produce some fruitful research along these lines in the future (and get a job).
But what about language as social action? Linguistic behavior as a means to the end of some subjective motives and affecting others’ actions? This is not a new idea at all - speech act theory has been around for decades too. Locutionary content can be the basis for assertions, requests, promises, and many other illocutionary forces. It fits pretty neatly into Weber’s terms - the locutionary content is the observable behavior, the illocution is the subjective motive, and the motive is largely social by nature as one’s speech affects others’ beliefs and actions. The question then becomes: does our linguistics behavior effectively deliver our subjective motives, and how? What unintended consequences might these actions have? I have just learned that this question is thriving outside of the field of linguistics. A particularly striking example is sexual consent, where the locutionary content “No” often fails to communicate the intended rejection. The effectiveness of language as a means-and-end relationship varies to different groups of people. That “no means no”, while clearly relevant to how language works, is not something frequently discussed in linguistic theory.
Beyond speech act theory (or if we take it in a very liberal sense), language is pervasive in our social landscape. Many legal cases involve linguistics. For example, everyone has the right to counsel when questioned by the police, but it’s unclear what counts as invoking one’s right to counsel. Vague sentences such as “I think I might need a lawyer” or “an attorney may be a good option right now” were often not ruled as valid requests. Essentially, this is about the speech act of requests, as well as the semantics of attitude verbs, modality, and politeness. Another example is the scope of logical terms “not” and “and”. When a legal conditional goes in the form of “if the defendant was not served notice A and notice B, …”, it’s ambiguous whether one or both conjuncts need to be false for the condition to be true. In the medical field, some linguists have been collaborating with doctors to study word meaning in medical communication. The same word could mean different things to different people. The word “cancer” could be just a technical umbrella term for a doctor but may sound like the end of the world to a patient. Misunderstandings of these words could lead the patient to make sub-optimal decisions on their treatments. That’s why linguistic insights on communication could be useful for medical sciences. As for non-cooperative settings, linguistic framing is a common tool for misleading construals of events, and vague presuppositions are strong persuasion devices for political propaganda. The list goes on and on. It’s clear that language is doing a lot of heavy lifting in our modern society, our attempt to carve up the world as legal/illegal, healthy/diseased, desirable/undesirable, right/wrong, us/them, … Collectively, these linguistic behaviors serve certain subjective values and motives. The effects of such linguistic behaviors should be carefully studied.
But first, there are some things that I think (in agreement with Weber) that linguistics, and science in general, should not do. Most importantly, linguistics should not provide guidance on which subjective values to adopt - there are no objective principles of how some values are superior to others. This notion is similar to the descriptivism vs normativism distinction in linguistics. We study grammar without judging them. The same approach should be adopted when we study language as social action. Let’s come back to the example of media bias and linguistic framing of news events. Linguistics cannot and should not answer what is the “correct” construal of the event - that depends on the subjective perspective. Linguistics also cannot and should not argue for any “correct” linguistic framings. It would be totally absurd to say active sentences are better than passives because passives are vague in their agent. The true insight of linguistic analysis sits in the complex relationship between the linguistic framing as the means and the event contrual as the end. This is where the existing linguistic theories of active/passive sentences comes in and makes an impact - they explain the syntax, event semantics, and processing of these sentences, beyond the rudimentary notion of the absence of the agent. Such a comprehensive understanding of language as a means-and-end relationship provides guidance on how we should act given our subjective values and motives, whatever they may be.
At this point, we encounter a paradox that Weber outlined for all scientists. Science, ideally, should be based on value-free empirical observations. But the scientist always has their own subjective values. As we study social actions as means-and-end relationships, the interpretation of the ends necessarily depends on the interpreters’ subjective perspective. In this case, Weber called for the scientist to be self-aware of the involvement of their own values, but also embrace and commit to those values. I have absolutely no idea how that works in practice. However, Weber argued that this self-aware subjectivity is what brings together one’s scholarly vocation and one’s moral and political responsibilities. That’s the whole point of this essay, so we have to think a bit more about this puzzling position.
A particularly obvious part of a linguist’s subjective perspective is: what language(s) do they speak? It’s uncontroversial that our native language affects how we think of language in general. Had Chomsky be a Chinese speaker, his generative grammar must have looked somewhat different. The language we speak makes us more sensitive to some features than others in linguistic theory. And it’s easy to imagine what “committing to one’s subjectivity” means in this sense - we should embrace our native languages and the perspectives they provide us with. However, this part of subjectivity does not seem to concern with how linguists subjectively interpret the ends of linguistic behavior. So it doesn’t really align with Weber’s characterization of self-aware value commitments. If not our native language, then what else? I have no idea and this would have to be developed further.
The discussion of linguistic diversity does bring us to another important distinction of natural sciences and historical/cultural sciences - their scope of study. Natural sciences study the general, searching for universal laws. Historical sciences study the particular, trying to understand human actions as contingent on the social circumstances. The two are not mutually exclusive, as the same topic can be viewed from both perspectives. Where has linguistics been sitting in this spectrum? Universal grammar literally has the word “universal” in it, but is used primarily as evidence for the innateness of a linguistic faculty in human. While “universal” is not intended as an epistemological stance, the principles-and-parameters model of universal grammar implies a generalized perspective. The work of linguistics, especially syntax, constructs the grammar of grammars, and the actual grammars of natural languages are just specific realizations of this general system. Meanwhile, plenty of linguistic phenomena can be studied as contingent and could have been otherwise. Language change being one of them, owing to social conditions and sometimes just pure randomness. If we further study language as social action, then obviously they are determined by social circumstances too. The importance of this discussion is to decide what kind of knowledge do linguists produce - general or particular knowledge? Or perhaps this is an opportunity to explore linguistics as situated knowledge following Donna Haraway and her feminist model of science? Sadly again, my thought process ends here and has to restart after I gain a better understanding of Haraway.
If we want to study linguistics as particulars, then the problem is how to select among the ocean of linguistic phenomena which ones are worth our attention. (What a tough question! Probably the most important question for me personally as I start my PhD.) On one hand, we still usually study particulars in the hope of gaining insight on universal principles. In this case, the significant particulars are the ones that can challenge our current understanding of universals and lead to innovations. Psycholinguistic studies generally fall into this category. Whatever phenomenon we choose for our experiments, they usually reflect something about our general language processing mechanism. An extreme example in theoretical linguistics would be the study of Piraha and its alleged lack of recursion. On the other hand, not every linguistics paper is written with the universal principles in mind. At least not explicitly. We see value in describing a small self-contained problem in a specific language and deriving a careful analysis for it. The basis for this kind of research would be shared interest stemming from the researchers’ subjective value-judgments. We assign value to these discoveries and linguistic research itself becomes a meaning-making activity.
Again, we are brought back to the relationship between linguistics and the linguists, how the linguists’ subjective values guide their empirical investigations. Plural “values” are reflected by divergence in what’s worthy of linguistic inquiry. Even studies that shed light on universal principles rely on the presupposition that universal principles are the final goal of linguistics, a presupposition that’s not necessarily in the common ground. One thing I learned in the tiring process of PhD applications is that within psycholinguistics there are still numerous characterizations of the key problems of our field and where to proceed in the future. How should linguists handle such divergence? Weber rejected the notion of treating different values as political compromise. He argued that to passively acknowledge all values and to look for middleground is not only detrimental to academic progress but also unethical. It is the scientist’s duty to stand by their ideals and take leadership to advocate for them, while being fully aware there is no objective justification for some superiority of their ideals over others. In this way, we are coming back to the idea of self-aware value commitments. In fact, I think the current field of linguistics fits into this picture pretty well.
At this point, we have discussed two kinds of social actions. Language use is a kind of social action affecting others’ beliefs and actions, and is the object of linguistic studies. Meanwhile, linguistic research itself is also a kind of social action, producing potential social impacts. We are going a little meta here. Does the scientific study of language as social action somehow inform us about the role of linguistic research as social action, and therefore enlighten us on the fundamental questions - what should we do? How should we live? In other words, can we construct any coherence between the linguistic methodology and the linguists’ conduct? I believe and I certainly hope so. In very few vocations do we see such a tight connection between one’s work and one’s life. I would like to speculate that the answer lies in the careful examination of the means-and-end network. The empirical study of linguistic behaviors and how they serve (or fail to serve) subjective motives allows linguists to engage with their own use of language more effectively. When we want to be clear, we know how to avoid scope ambiguities of “not” and “and”. When we intend to be vague, we know how to use vague terms. When we want to construe events in a certain fashion, we know how to construct an event description. When we want to help our listeners process our sentences, we know how to use fillers. When we want to criticize political speech, we know how to spot its presuppositions. When we want to express our identity, we know the role of our language, accent, and word choices. For any kind of subjective values, linguistics provides knowledge of the means that may achieve such ends. This is where linguistics is truly relevant to everyone as it provides insight on the effectiveness of our actions. Linguistics research becomes a tool that we can use to better advocate for our values and ideals. In this way, a linguist is both a specialist in knowledge and a leader in moral actions.
In the end, we are arriving at a similar point as Weber - we have outlined the problems facing modern science, but we find little concrete solution other than some general encouragements. Science as a rational process cannot inform us of our moral values, which have to be artificially constructed. The result is the detachment between the scientists’ vocation and their subjective values. All I’m trying to argue is that, by studying language as social action, language science might help us understand the relationship between our actions and our values, and therefore more effectively perform our political duty of value-commitments. This may be a path for linguists to maintain a little bit of moral agency in our work, in an increasingly instrumental-rationalist world.
As I’m writing this blog post, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button won the best new musical award at the Oliviers. I wholeheartedly loved the show when I watched it. Somehow the story of a man born old and dies an infant deeply touches me. It’s a story about time and belonging, about circumstances. Good times and right circumstances are rare and precious. The time for science and academics, that I am just getting familiar with, may be ending, as the social circumstances are drastically changing. Where are we going next? What kind of work does time call for? I hope this blog is a starting point for myself to keep thinking about these issues. And maybe a few people would read this and join me in this pursuit.
04/10/2025
Disclaimer: I am not an expert on Weber, or sociology in general. My understanding of Weber must be rudimentary, and I welcome any criticism. While this post follows Weber’s thoughts, a lot of epistemological and ethical assumptions are actually from Kant and Windelband (and their influence on Weber). I did not mention them for the simple reason that I have not read their first-hand writings at all. Similarly, I have not mentioned sociolinguistics in my discussion of language as social actions, because my academic experiences are limited to psycholinguistics. These are all important extensions to be made in the future. In any case, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on psycholinguistics either, having only completed a few toy research projects of little significance. Despite being an amateur on everything I’m talking about, I believe this post is justified by the fact that I’m devoting at least the next five years, and hopefully my entire life, to the study of language. The stakes are high, and the thought has to start somewhere, no matter how crude.