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The Dialogist in a Positivist World: Theory in the Social Sciences and theHumanities at the End of the Twentieth CenturyRon Scollon

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2003

To cite this Article Scollon, Ron(2003)'The Dialogist in a Positivist World: Theory in the Social Sciences and the Humanities at the Endof the Twentieth Century',Social Semiotics,13:1,71 88To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/1035033032000133517URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1035033032000133517

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Social Semiotics, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2003

The Dialogist in a Positivist World:Theory in the Social Sciences and theHumanities at the End of the TwentiethCenturyRON SCOLLON

While theory in the social sciences and the humanities in our period has come to bedominated by what might be called a dialogist perspective, following on the thinking ofphilosophers such as Wittgenstein and Bhaskar, and sociologists and critics from Foucaultto Bakhtin, the understanding of all knowledge as discursively produced remains at aconsiderable distance from the classical hypothetico-deductive discourse of many practi-tioners of science as well as from the commonsense view of how knowledge is produced, heldin general by an international public discourse of commerce and government. Thus, theproblems faced by practitioners within the two broad discourses of dialogism and positivismare rather different, and these differences underlie numerous difficulties in communicationbetween members of these discourses. For the positivist, the most urgent problem is toestablish and maintain the authority structures of academic, government, and commercialworlds that have historically produced the ascendant position of positivist discourse. For thedialogist, the most urgent problem is to produce a working ontology and epistemology thatwill underpin the dialogists wish to undertake social action. This paper proposes thatBhaskars critical realism provides a philosophical basis for the resolution of at least someof these difficulties and a basis for developing a socially engaged social science that is notundermined by its own deconstructive relativism.

An Uneasy Dominance

It could be argued that theory in the social sciences and the humanities in our periodhas come to be dominated by what might be called a dialogist or constructionistperspective, following on the thinking of philosophers such as Wittgenstein andBhaskar, and sociologists and critics from Foucault to Bakhtin. This is at best anuneasy dominance, however. While perhaps the majority of academic papers andbooks in the traditional disciplines of literature and history, in the somewhat newerdisciplines of sociology, anthropology, and discourse analysis, and in the mosttrendy postmodernist disciplines of cultural studies and media studies positionthemselves within a constructivist discourse, this discourse remains at a considerabledistance from the classical hypothetico-deductive discourse of many practitioners of

ISSN 1035-0330 print; 1470-1219 online/03/010071-18 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1035033032000133517

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72 R. Scollon

science as well as from the commonsense view of how knowledge is produced, whichis held in general by an international public discourse of commerce and government.

From the ironic frame-breaking narrative that Cervantes first explored in hisQuixote to the extremely popular Muppet Movie of the 1980s or the stories and essaysof Borges, we have had 300 years of development, first in art and then in thephilosophy/sociology of knowledge. Alongside this, developing understanding thatall discourses are fundamentally constructed upon the shifting sands of priordiscursive framings has developed a utilitarianist (Scollon & Scollon 2001) discoursesystem with its epistemological roots in the Kantian Enlightenment, in which theunderlying ideology asserts a direct language-to-world relationship. In our ownperiod, then, we find that these two ontologicalepistemological positions stand inan uneasy relationship both within the specialized discourses of the academy and inthe broad public discourses of entertainment, news, government, and commerce. Aviewer of a radically destabilized narrative film such as the Muppet Movie (to take anexample from the world of childrens entertainment) or Chungking Express (to takean example from the somewhat more rarified domain of international postmodernistart) might easily be heard to turn around and ask for firm figures on the box officevalues of either of these films. Thus, postmodernist interdiscursivity runs side-by-side, often in the same person, with the positivist, realist notion that somehow thereis a solid, non-discursive world about which we can speak the truth without doubt.

The philosophical and theoretico-methodological chasm between these discourseshas been widely analyzed, but mostly within the safe confines of the separate warringencampments. Like the Japanese and American patrol boats that passed each otherin misty silence at 2 meters distance off the Aleutians in the 1940s, there is anunspoken agreement not to whisper or to make eye contact, and thus avoid directlyengaging in a widening of the conflict between enemy camps. My purpose here isnot to speak directly across the foggy mist, if I might extend the metaphor a bit, butto argue that this theoretical and methodological division, because it is not normallybrought to the point of serious philosophical engagement, leaves members of eachcamp with troublesome problems that militate against either intellectual develop-ment or social engagement.

I will develop my argument by first looking at a specific text that arose in a recentresearch project and by commenting on the readings of that text which we developedin our project. I will then develop my own interpretive summary of some of the workby Roy Bhaskar in what he calls the philosophy of critical realism. This will lead meto discuss two examples of the problem faced by a dialogical or constructivistanalysis when engaged in the ordinary-language positivist discourses of daily life,which will lead in conclusion to summarizing the different problematics faced bypositivist and by dialogist analyses in working toward developing a socially engagedsocial science.

An Electronics Shop in Mongkok

A dialogic or Bakhtinian (Bakhtin 1981) analysis of Figure 1, and for the momentit is useful to blur the distinction between the photograph itself as the text being read

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Figure 1. An electronics shop.

and the street scene represented in the photograph, would see in this text apolyphony of voices. One would read here, for example, the voice or the discourseof a globalizing world economy of mobile phones and other electronic communica-tions. One can see in these electronics stores a world communications economy, andextrapolate from this text to concerns articulated in a social sciences researchliterature about dialectical tensions between this globalizing economy and localsocio-political culture.

One could also read other voices here. The geographer Pierce (1996), forexample, who found in the street signage in Belfast that Protestant and Catholicterritories were marked on the surface of the city in its images of British or Irishflags, in writing styles used in signs and in color combinations. From this he was ableto read safety for Protestants at one end of a street, the other end of which onecould read safety for Catholics. Here, if we choose, we can read a colonial historyin the naming of the street, perhaps not visible in the reproduced photograph, as SaiYeung Choi or, in at least one interpretation, Portuguese vegetable. We might alsowant to read a history of vegetable growing or selling here.

A close analysis based on Kress & Van Leeuwen (1996) might argue that there isalso the voice of social relationships between the British colonists and the Chineseof Hong Kong in the placement of English in the upper or ideal region of the streetsignas in all Hong Kong street signageand Chinese in the lower real portion,

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in contrast to street signs in, say, Guangzhou where Chinese holds the upper idealposition and Putonghua realized in hanyu pinyin is positioned in the lower, realposition. One would, of course, want to note that it is the Cantonese voicerepresented here, not the national language. In the sign above the two electronicsstores one sees an advert for English classes that further resonates with the colonialreading a geographer or visual semiotician might make of this text where the FREETALK that purports to be in English jars the native English reader with its rathercrude idiomaticity.

Our own reading, while fully acknowledging the potential for these readings, setsthem into peripheral vision as our attention was turned to the use of simplifiedChinese characters in the upper part of the TE QU DIAN XUN shop sign and tothe hanyu pinyin romanization of Putonghua rather than Cantonese in the centralportion of the sign. This reading was developed in the context of research on theDiscourses of Transition.1 Following upon Gus (1996) research in China, wherehe observed a shift from what he called the Discourse of Revolution to a Discourseof Reform, we were interested in seeing to what extent we might see crossing overof simplified characters for the writing of Chinese from the Mainland to Hong Kongafter the political change of sovereignty in July 1997, as we had already observedmassive use of traditional Chinese writing in the Mainland as a way of symbolizingthe new or the foreign.

Within the framework of this research, then, what we read in this text isthat simplified Chinese writing had entered Hong Kong not in the van of PLA orofficial governmental publications but, in fact, in the signage of global commercialenterprise. This sign was, in fact, the first instance we were able to document of boththe use of simplified writing and of hanyu pinyin to represent Putonghua in HongKong outside of central government buildings after that change of sovereignty.Within that research framework we then were able to read this as, on the one hand,confirming Chinese official claims that the central government policy would be tomaintain a strict separation of jurisdictionsthe use of traditional writing is legallyrequired in all of Chinaand, on the other hand, confirming that the Hong Konggovernment would maintain its laissez-faire approach to private, commercial enter-prises.

Of course, this reading was not developed on the basis of this one text alone andI am using it here only to illustrate how, within a Bakhtinian dialogic analysis, thereading of any text is a double project of seeing the complex dialogicality within thetextrecognizing wherever possible the many voices represented in a textand atthe same time bringing up the light on some of the voices and peripheralizing othervoices within that same text. As I have argued elsewhere (Scollon 2000),the hiddendialogicalities, to use Bakhtins term, in any text are multitudinous and ultimatelyindeterminable. The intent of research within this paradigm is not to identify all ofthe voices as these are ultimately only recognizable from the perspective of aconcrete observer, the analyst or a participant in the production or the reproductionof a text. The goal is to establish some reading and to establish within what discoursethat reading is able to say something meaningful.

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Theory in a Post-Bakhtinian World

It is never easy to say what the use of the word theory might mean as it varies ina range from casual statements in ordinary language use to highly formal procedureswithin tightly framed and highly semiotized analytical sublanguage discourses. Formy purposes here, it is possibly safe to say that across a relatively broad range ofcontemporary disciplines there is a meaning of theory within a discourse of hypo-thetico-deductive science. Within this discourse, or set of discourses, a theory wouldmean that one was making a statement about some extra-discursive natural and realphenomenon. It would mean that making this statement was guided by a set ofprocedures, rules on how statements can be made, and a set of principles by whichevidence would be gathered and tested. The organizing statements are the hypoth-esisthe statement about which truth is being testedand the findings or conclu-sionsthe statements that are then held to be true because rules of evidence havebeen followed.

The organization of this discourse of hypothetico-deductive science is predicatedon various ontological and epistemological premises that have been carefully devel-oped and articulated over several centuries, although it must be said that themajority of practitioners, like the majority of practitioners in all fields of enquiry,may be rather vague about how these premises have developed or, in fact, abouttheir ontological and epistemological status. As Shils (1981) or Swales (1990), in arather different environment, and a number of others have argued, while anepistemology of scientific experimentation is put forward as the privileged system forthe testing of truth, on the whole the bulk of such statements are advanced andaccepted on authority. While I may well be able to cite Kelvins Law or may fullybelieve that the molecules of a gas distribute themselves evenly throughout avolume, I myself have never derived this understanding from a procedure ofhypothesis and experimental testing. I learned this like I have learned a lot of whatI claim to know through accepting it on the authority of those to whom it has beensaid to be worth paying attention.

Theory in a hypothetico-deductive discourse, then, rests on several premises andupon discursive rules of procedure. As these premises have been elaborately devel-oped elsewhere, here it is, perhaps, only necessary to point out that key aspects ofhypothetico-deductive theory are an epistemology that asserts that knowledge con-sists of the truth testing of statements through a set of agreed rules of discursiveprocedure and an ontology that asserts that knowledge is about something that isitself outside of the discursive system of hypothetico-deductive procedures. That is,hypothetico-deductive discourse is fundamentally realist in its assertion that there isa world that is independent of our discourses about it, and rationalist in its assertionthat through following rules of procedure in our discourses about the world we cancome to know it in a way that is both reliable and valid; reliable in the sense thatrepeated attempts to know it will discover the same world if and when rules arefollowed, and valid in the sense that what is said corresponds in a regular andpredictable way to an extra-discursive world.

Contemporary constructivist or dialogical theory begins with the problems posed

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by the realization, articulated philosophically by Wittgenstein, mathematicallyI amtoldby Godel, and in reference to subatomic particles by Heisenberg, but certainlyforeshadowed in art as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century byCervantes, that any statement is meaningful only within a discursive structure out ofwhich it derives not only its interpretation, but also its relationship to a worldoutside of that particular discourse. That is, because all languages, including thehighly formalized languages of mathematics and science, are both limited in theirscope and applicability, on the one hand, and historically and culturally positionedin reference to social groups, on the other, any statements made, including scientifichypotheses, carry with them the specific positions and histories of the languages inwhich they are made. This specificity and historical concreteness means that theideal of formal detachment from the socio-cultural conditions of the utterance is atheoretical impossibility, not just a methodological difficulty.

In such a view, the goal of theory then becomes that of ferreting out the historiesand socio-cultural positions of statements about the world. Hypotheses are seen asnot just testable for truth about the world through evidence, but also as socio-cultur-ally positioned utterances. Evidence that is brought to bear to test hypotheses is seennot as found evidence or discovered evidence, but as evidence that is discursivelyconstructed through social interactions. Therefore, theory within a constructivistperspective is transmuted from the noun theory to the nominalization theorizingor theorization. The task of theorization is twofold in most work in the paradigm.The first task is the process of concretizing and historicizing the world that ispresented as given. This task, sometimes called deconstructing, is focused onfinding and clarifying the historical and socio-cultural antecedents of discourses thatare taken for granted. In this we can see that the first task in constructivist theorizingmoves in just the opposite direction from that of classical hypothetico-deductivescience. Where the latter seeks to clear away all concretizing contexts so thatabstracted statements can be made about a theoretical world, the first move ofconstructivist theorizing is to destabilize, concretize, and particularize the world asgiven, the world as taken-for-granted.

The second move, then, continues in this direction away from the hoped forcertainty of the true (or, to be fair, the not-yet-proved-false) statement of hypo-thetico-deductive science. The second move is to recontextualize or to reposition thediscourse under study in a highly self-conscious way that normally includes thearticulation of the socio-cultural positioning of the researcher.

Theory in constructivist discourse, then, is often spoken of as reading and writing;it is readinga kind of reading between the linesto the extent it is working in thefirst position of seeking to discover the historical and socio-cultural positioning ofdiscursive worlds; it is writing when it becomes a new narrativization of the worldthat contests and recontextualizes the world as given or the world as taken forgranted. In constructivist or dialogical theory, then, there is an ontologymoreoften pre-supposed than arguedthat asserts discourse as primary. That is, dialog-ical theory takes a semiotized world as primary, and all other worlds as discursivelyderived. The epistemology of dialogical theory follows from this ontology in that ittakes knowledge as discursively constructed and remains fundamentally agnostic in

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its view of whether or not there is anything that can be known outside of thesediscourses. The discursive psychologists (Harre 1994, 1998, Harre & Gillett 1994),for example, assert that there is no human self outside of our discursive narrativiza-tions.

Of course, while constructivist theory has flowered in art, art criticism, literatureand literary theory, media studies, cultural studies and, of course, in psychology,sociology, linguistics and discourse analysis, now that the original flush of excite-ment has passed there has emerged a certain uneasiness that has its source in twoplaces. In the first place, constructivists who would assert that all is discursive intheir critical writing continue to use a largely positivist and realist language in theirday-to-day affairs. One continues to talk about the sun rising in the East in themorning or about a cup of tea being too hot. The commonsense positivism ofday-to-day discourse challenges the constructivist theorist, particularly when he/shewishes to talk in common terms about his/her theoretical activities. This is aproblem, but not really a serious one. The most positivist neurophysiologist isdiscursively disabled in trying to convey his/her professional work in commonordinary language. The problem is not one of fundamentally different ontologicaland epistemological positions; it is just a simple matter of ordinary people notknowing the terms, and so forth.

The second, and more important, source of uneasiness lies in the fact that manyconstructivist theorists come to this position with a concern for taking social action.Critical discourse analysts, for example, explicitly state that a central goal of theirwork is to take action to bring about emancipatory and progressive social change(Fairclough 1992, Fairclough & Wodak 1997). Rosenau (1992) articulates this asthe crucial postmodernist dilemma. As constructivist theorizing begins to dissolvethe modernist subject, when the person becomesas in discursive psychologyadiscursive construct of his/her own narrative histories, where is the oppressed personand the oppressing one? Is there nothing remaining but competing and conflictingdiscourses? What is the theoretical foundation for taking social action if actions aswell as agents are dissolved into confluences of historical developments? In somesources, which I will not cite here, one finds a curious and radical constructivism inthe approach to oppressing or negative social powers (from the view of the analyst,of course) but a rather positivist and objectively constituted subject that bears thebrunt of these oppressive forces.

Critical Realism

Beginning in the 1970s, Roy Bhaskar (1989, 1991, 1997) has opened up a new fieldof philosophical study that has come to be called critical realism. His concern iswith finding a reasonable and philosophically rigorous position that can movetoward a resolution of the two major fallacies upon which these dilemmas are based,what he calls the ontological fallacythe idea that the world is the same as ourdescription of itand the epistemological fallacythe notion that the world isnothing but our descriptions of it. He argues that we must accept that there is, infact, a world that exists independently of our descriptions of it. This is the realist

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Figure 2. The map is not the territory.

aspect of his philosophy. But he also argues that our knowledge of this world isinevitably discursively produced. That is to say, in a few words, that critical realismtakes the position of a realist ontology coupled with a constructivist epistemology.

I would like to recall Korzybskis once famous but perhaps now forgotten phrase,the map is not the territory, which is illustrated in Figure 2.

Borrowing from Bhaskar and from Korzybski, I would like to argue that we haveconstructed a rather large number of what I would like to call human epistemolog-ical constructs (HECs)maps for short. These HECs or maps, such as languages,mathematical characterizations, photographs, road maps, cultures, semiotic codesand the rest, can be thought of as relatively weak or relatively strong. The naturallanguages, human cultures, and scientific languages and descriptions I would thinkof as relatively strong by comparison with road maps, schematic drawings, graphs,photographs and paintings. The problematical issue in these terms is in the relation-ship between these maps, particularly the strong ones, and the territories (realities)they map.

The radical constructivist position is that the territory is nothing but the map;change the map and you have changed the territory. The strongest positivist positionis that there is nothing you can do in manipulating your map that ultimately willaffect the territory it maps. I would argue that when these theoretical ships pass inthe night, they are doing so through the articulation of these strongest possiblepositions. Bhaskar, I believe, would argue for a considerably less radical position.

A few examples that are, I believe, more than just analogies might be useful. SirJohn Mandeville wrote his travels in the thirteenth century. While many claimed thatthe longest trip Mandeville ever took was to his closest library, the descriptions hemaps out there were nevertheless not without consequences. When Columbus setout for the new world, one of the human epistemological constructs he carried withhim was Mandevilles travels, in which Mandeville argued that the world was, infact, navigable as a circle route. To a modern eye the map Mandeville providedColumbus was ludicrous. The Nile stood dead center in the world, Asia rose aboveit as the upper half of the circle, and the fallen worlds of Europe and Africa dividedthe lower hemisphere of his circle. This map, however, provided Columbus with areality by which he guided his ships. Frobisher after him used Mandeville again in

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his search for a Northern Passage to Asia. It would be hard to assert in a direct waythat Mandevilles map changed the world in the drawing of the map but by bringingthat map into existence, and through successive recontextualizations, that map didbecome a force in the development of new human epistemological constructs (theWest, Indians, etc.), which over a very long period did, in fact, bring aboutchanges in the material and real world.

Pirsig (1975), in his once very popular Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,put forward a similar argument. His argument was that scientific experimentationand theorizing resulted in the production of steel, a substance with all the positivistreality any realist could want. This, he argued, was a clear case of what I would calla human epistemological constructin other words, a discoursebringing about achange in the physical, material world of reality. Of course in a more contemporaryvein we could talk about canola oil and the host of newly invented (and patented!)substances in the material world that were not even possible objects of realistknowledge when Carnap (as philosopher) and I (as undergraduate) were at theUniversity of Michigan in the late 1950s.

It is examples such as these that lead me to argue that it is impossible to takeeither a radical positivist or a radical constructivist position but that, with Bhaskar,we have to agree that our human discourses do, indeed, work to some extent and,in some cases, in a dialectical relationship with the real world but, on the other hand,that reality puts up rather steady resistance to our discursive constructions of it. Iwould argue that the realist world and our human epistemological constructs havea dialogical or dialectical relationship to each otherthat is, the world exertspressure on what we can say about it and at the same time our constructs can bringabout changes in reality. This mutual construction of world and discourse, like manyother phenomena, is subject to severe limitations, particularly the limitations of timeand of the strength of mapping.

Our strong mapsour scientific languages, our human natural languages, ourculturescan, in fact, bring about changes in reality. But in the vast majority ofcases I would guess these changes occur extremely slowly and in conjunction withother non-discursive forces at play.

Maps of Maps

In what I have written thus far I have not made it at all clear just what sort of worldI was speaking of in speaking of mapping worlds or realities. Now I would like toclarify how I see social scientific and humanities research in light of the ideas I haveput forward to this point. I have suggested that one of the maps (HECS) that we useto map reality is language. I have also suggested human culture or scientificdescriptions are such HECs. What I would want to argue now is that our analysesin the social sciences and in the humanities are not at all maps of the world in anydirect sense, but, in fact, they are maps of maps, human epistemological constructsabout or of other human epistemological constructs, not about the world in anydirect sense, as suggested in Figure 3.

I believe that the so-called human sciences have rather easily fallen into the

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Figure 3. A map of a map.

ontological fallacy of taking our descriptions of the world (languages, discourses,cultures, semiotic codes) as the world itself, and therefore have fallen rather easilyinto the idea that anything whatever can be constructed.

To try to keep ourselves clear on this matter, I think we need to continually recallthat our human sciences are ways of knowing ways of knowing the world. We use ourhuman languages as epistemological constructs of reality. Linguistics, on the whole,studies an epistemological construct, not a world. I say on the whole to leave openthe notion that at least some linguistic research (perhaps in phonetics or neurolin-guistics) might well be thought of as a more direct mapping of physical reality muchin the way I would be willing to think that the science of physiology is a mapping ofthe human body as a physical and very realist entity. Social scientists in a numberof disciplines, in our rush to prove ourselves scientific, have reified this set ofepistemological constructsour discourses of language, society, or the psychology ofselfas real world and then first tried to apply a positivist analysis to this reifiedentity and, failing the success of that enterprise, have come to see the very powerfulvalue of a historicist or constructivist understanding of these human discursiveconstructs. Unfortunately, in our enthusiasm for constructivism, we have fallen preyto a second fallacy, which is to apply our constructivist analysis to the world that isindependent of our discourses.

The position for which I would argue now is a moderated onemoderated bothin respect to a positivist/realist understanding of theory and in respect to theapplicability of constructivism. I would argue that our excess of enthusiasm forseeing the discursively constructed historical positioning of all knowledge has led toan understanding, like that of Pirsig, that our human epistemological constructs do,in fact, have the power in some cases and in some ways (and perhaps over considerabletime) to alter the realities they describe. On the contrary, such an analysis is morefruitfully used when focused more directly upon human discourses themselves. Toput it in a few words, the history of science is not science itself. On the other sideof the coin, I would argue that the excess of the positivistic reification of humandiscourses provided us with the very productive tools of structuralist analysis andwith the sometimes very useful quantitative statistical analyses of human social

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phenomena, although, on the whole, the hypothetico-deductive research strategy ismore useful in direct (or technologically enhanced) observation and analysis of thephysical/material world in which we live.

Teaching History: An Example

On 31 October 1998, Professor Leonard Smith of Oberlin College gave a lecture atthe National Press Club in Washington, DC, USA. The audience was made up ofOberlin college alumni in the Washington area and their invited guests. Thequestion he wanted to raise was the one I am trying to approach here: How mayacademics who work within a social constructionist theoretical framework deal withthe inherent gap between what he called history and memory. As an historian ofEurope who specialized in the modern period, he said he had been confronted by thedisjunction between history as the narrative of the past and memory as the livedexperience of participants in that past.

While it cannot do justice to a carefully reasoned lecture of normal academiclength, it might be useful to summarize the problem as he developed it. ProfessorSmith began by commenting that history, as it is taught pretty much throughout thediscipline, and certainly as he teaches it at Oberlin, is based on the understandingthat any history is a discursive construction of the past from a specific and sociallypositioned point of view. As a theoretical discipline it takes it as its responsibility toshow that such events as the Second World War are outcomes of discursivepositions, and that while he himself challenges any relativism that would seek tojustify or support the atrocities of the holocaust or of the Stalinist gulag, he feels itis his responsibility as a teacher of history that he bring students to an understandingof the complexity of the histories and discourses out of which such phenomenaarose. He also went on to say that he feels it is his responsibility to ensure thatstudents understand that this sense of discursively constructed historicity is itself anhistorical and discursive construction.

In contrast to this constructivist history, Smith articulated what he means bymemory. This is the lived personal experience of concrete individualsthe peoplewho were involved in the war, in the holocaust or in the gulags, or in the Alliedforces fighting against the Axis or Stalinist powers. This experience, he argues, is realand admits of no relativism. He argued that for the participants in these events theworld is governed by grand and unquestioned narratives such as the fight forfreedom or the advancement of world socialism. These meta-narratives are taken bythose who live them as real, as unquestioned, indeed, as unquestionable. How elsemight humans endure the claims made upon them by their governments, and sufferthe loss of loved ones and valued possessions?

Smith then gave several examples of the conflict between history and memory,one of which was particularly interesting to that audience. The National Air andSpace Museum in Washington, DC had planned an exhibit of the plane, the EnolaGay, that had been used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the interest ofa fully historicized, constructivist display, the museum had planned to producephotographs and other materials which that show the Allied position in making the

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82 R. Scollon

decision to drop the bomb, and to include photographs indicating the horriblehuman cost of that decision. They also planned to include materials in the displaythat would show the same event from a point of view that would make the Japaneseposition in the war intelligible. That is, they had planned to outline the grandnarrative within which the Japanese saw themselves as defending Asia againstencroachment by foreign and Western powers.

While the Japanese showed considerable sympathy for this plan, perhaps evensurprise that an attempt was made to comprehend the narrative reality within whichthey had come to the summer of 1945, such a furor broke out in Washington, DCfrom those who had lived and whose friends and families had died in the PacificTheatre of the war that, ultimately, the historian who had planned the exhibit, anOberlin graduate, was forced to resign. The display that was offered in the endconsists of the plane itself and a very small plaque that says that this plane was usedto drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with no further elaboration of either historyor memory.

Professor Smith gave a number of other examples of this tension between aconstructivist social scientific perspective and lived memory. What was perhapsmore striking than his lecture, which had, I thought, so carefully presented thedilemma to his audience, was the response of one senior alumni who rose immedi-ately to his feet in the question period and began to excoriate Smith as one of thesenew young people who do not know what war is, how people suffer, and howimportant it was to keep the world free. In spite of Smiths having, I thought,carefully articulated his dilemma, for this questioner there was no dilemma; therewas his memory of the grand narrative and of his role in it and that was the end ofthe story. To punctuate his verbal attack he stood, feet wide apart and braced, andmade pistol shooting gestures at Smith, alternating hands, while he spoke.

It would be a cruel parody of the constructivist position to seek then to decon-struct this mans lived and painful experience as simply one more example of afailure to understand the historicity of his position and of his experience. I wouldargue that it is the problem faced by the dialogist in this soldiers world to find ameans of engaging in dialog not just with history, but with memory as well.

American Anthropology and the Study of Race

To give just one other fairly brief example of the problem that I am trying to addresshere, we can look at the history of the study of race by anthropologists in America.Boasian anthropology took as one of its most urgent goals the deconstruction of theconcept of race. Franz Boas, partly in response to the rising anti-Semitism inEurope, took this on as perhaps the central social issue with which he was con-cerned. To a considerable extent one could argue that anthropology in Americafrom the turn of the century was focused on destabilizing and ultimately doing awaywith social categories based on physical characteristics. And to a considerable extentone could say that within anthropological circles this campaign was a success.Virtually every introductory anthropology class, at least for many years, consideredit a primary duty to inculcate the idea that there was no basis in human physiology

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Figure 4. A map that is of neither a map nor a territory.

for determining groups, or worse, for attributing to members of those falselyproduced groups any characteristics of intelligence, culture or other human capacity.

A few years ago the American Anthropological Association found itself, then, inthe rather awkward position of realizing that, while as a group of professionals theyhad rather thoroughly eradicated the social reifications produced through conceptsof race within their professional discourses, outside their doors racism raged as oneof the most serious of Americas social ills. As a professional strategy the associationdevoted the annual meetings to re-opening the discussion of race among anthropol-ogists on the grounds that, if anyone could, it should be anthropologists who couldbring some useful ideas to help solve the racial problems of the nation.

If I might try one more figure to indicate what I would say had happened, I woulddescribe this as having simply removing the mapping activity from any concern withother worlds (Figure 4).

This non-engaged or non-dialogical form of constructionism fails either to engageitself in a positivist attempt to map reality or to engage itself in a dialogical attemptto map, and thereby alter, the discourses of racism. I would argue that what isneeded is not only the dissolution of the concept of race among social scientists, buta dialogical engagement with the discourses of racism in society. These latterdiscourses are, indeed, having the effect of alteringand there is no doubt in mymind altering negativelythe structures of human reality.

A Shop in Mongkok

I opened my line of discussion with the photograph (Figure 1) of an electronics shopin Mongkok, Hong Kong. While I commented that several readings of that textcould be made, in our own research the reading we were interested in was anchoredin an analysis of the discourses of revolution and reform (Gu 1996), and the spreador development of these discourses in Hong Kong as the territory returned toChinese sovereignty. While I have not developed that argument here, the centralclaim being made is that such broad socio-political discourses can be read in theliterate design of such discourses in public as shop signs. Based on that claim, which

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84 R. Scollon

had been developed in an earlier research project (Scollon & Scollon 1998), weclaimed that the presence of simplified Chinese writing and the use of hanyu pinyinwriting of a Putonghua pronunciation of the shop nameas well as the absence ofsuch writing elsewhere in Hong Kong at that timecould be read as indicating firstthat the Central government was keeping to its word, at least in respect to languagepolicy, about the separate treatment of Hong Kong. Furthermore, we read in thatsign, and, of course, in our other data, that both the Central government and thegovernment of the HKSAR were holding to a largely laissez-faire treatment of the useof language in private, commercial enterprises.

In contrast to this shop sign in Mongkok, for example, were several places aboutHong Kong, where on 1 July 1997 official banners did appear in which simplifiedwriting was used. One of these was placed on the Prince of Wales Barracks saying,in simplified characters, Celebrating Hong Kongs return to the Motherland. Weinferred from the presence of simplified writing in banners placed on centralgovernment property and its absence in all other contexts that the central govern-ment was maintaining a one-country, two-orthographies policy. Other evidence, forexample, included the new postage stamps that used traditional Chinese characterswithin the stamp and yet in the writing around the border of a sheet of stamps,which identified the place of production, simplified writing was used.

Further study 1 year later in the period of the first anniversary of the return toChina indicated to us that our findings, which were based in the period immediatelyfollowing the transfer of sovereignty, were well supported as we had found no furtherchanges in Hong Kong. In writing 2 years later in July 1999, I continued to maintainthe finding that the central government had made no attempt to introduce a changein HKSAR orthographic practice, on the one hand, and that the HKSAR had leftit entirely up to the commercial sector to use whatever writing they might choose.

One anomaly was been found, however. At the Prince of Wales Barracks there hadbeen two changes made. The first was not surprising, of course. That is, the wordsPrince of Wales had been removed from the face of the building, although theshadow of the letters remained legible in the stone surface as a ghostly reminder ofthe British past. The second change was somewhat surprising. High up on thebuilding were red letters in the same position as the banner on 1 July 1997 sayingCelebrating the Second Anniversary of Hong Kongs Return to the Motherlandbut then, 2 years after the event, this congratulatory slogan was written in traditionalcharacters, not simplified ones. This was the first instance we were able to attest oftraditional Chinese characters being used in such public discourse by the CentralMainland Chinese government.

From the point of view of my argument, here I would want to say that our literatedesign research to this point, while it had had an interest in reading broad socio-pol-itical discourses in the public discourses of banners and signs, and while it hadappropriated in many cases the language of constructivist theoretical discourse, hadbeen based largely within a hypothetico-deductive theoretical framework. Neverthe-less, concurrent research placed brackets around that project, which called intoquestion the findings for which we had argued.

Scollon & Pan (1997) conducted focus groups in Hong Kong and China to seek

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Theory in Social Sciences and Humanities 85

to determine how such signs as the one in Figure 1, which I have discussed here(and many others), are read, not by analysts, but by members of various communi-ties of practice. They found that the reading I have put forward here and for whichwe had argued elsewhere (i.e. the socio-political reading) was only supported withina specific socio-cultural and generational group. Within an older generation of focusgroup participants, responses to differences in the use of simplified and traditionalcharacters were based in esthetic judgments, not socio-political readings. That is,they read the choice of one or the other orthography/typography as a question ofaesthetics. Traditional writing is judged as more beautiful and they said whoeverused it would do so for aesthetic reasons.

A middle group, what Scollon & Pan (1997) call the cultural revolution groupPans own generational cohortread the choice of traditional or simplified writingas a politically motivated choice. One would use simplified writing to remain in tunewith national policy or to display support of language reforms. In their view, onewould use traditional writing (in China) as a form of resistance or a form of openingup to the foreign or non-Chinese. That is, for them it was most clearly not anaesthetic issue, but one grounded in socio-political analysis. In this, their analysiscame closest to the analysis we put forward as the result of our research.

A third group, the youngest people, saw the choice of orthography/typography asa pragmatic or commercial matter. They argued that one would use the system thatserved the purpose most immediately. Thus, they argued, a karaoke lounge (inChina) would use traditional writing for its shock and attention-getting value in thesame way that the electronic shop in Mongkok used simplified writing, again, for itsattention-getting value. It stands out, it is distinctive. This is the same motive forusing English, Italian or, more and more, Japanese. In this they see no politicalmotivation or interest or interpretation.

The results of these focus groups then placed our central research project into abroader frame. While we had argued for a particular socio-political reading of thetypographical choices in shop signs and official banners, the focus group researchsuggested that our research was, in fact, narrowly positioned within a framework ofsocio-political analysis that was shared by only one group of people in the generalpublic. It seems clear, at least to us, that the reading we had developed was itselfgrounded in a broader socio-political history shared widely in the social sciences, inwhich socio-political understandings are privileged over aesthetic ones or commer-cial/pragmatic ones. Had we done our research in a Business School, for example,it seems quite probable that we would have developed findings much more in tunewith those of the younger group in the sample.

An Engaged, Dialogical Social Science

I have suggested that theory in the social sciences and the humanities in our periodis in crisis. It was clear by the mid-1970s, when the American Council of LearnedSocieties set the study of phenomenology as its central theme, that a chasm hadopened up in the academic world between realist, positivist scientific philosophiesand the rapidly rising phenomenological or constructivist philosophies of knowledge.

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And this was before the writings of Bakhtin broke upon Anglophone consciousness.In the rush to abandon realist philosophies of knowledge as incapable of addressingthe socio-political issues of the times, a large number of researchers heartily em-braced the positioned and self-reflective philosophies of a relativist ontology and athoroughgoing discursive epistemology.

As a first response to this crisis, a gap opened up between camps. The positivistrealist response has in many cases been to seek to establish and to fortify theauthority structures within academic institutions through which this position hadcome to hold a hegemonic position, at least within the discourses of science. Thismove has been bolstered by the enormous popular successes of technology in ourperiod that positivist science has been quick to claim as the fruit of its ownendeavors. Thus, one sees discursive psychologists having to build their arguments,not against the equally discursive psychology of the fields origins in psychoanalysis,but against the positivist realism of experimental and psychopharmaceutical psy-chology. Sociologists who base their research in the phenomenology of the NewSchool of Social Research or of the Chicago School find themselves having to arguecompetitively for funding within the discourses of quantitative macro-sociologicalresearch. Linguists who derive their work from Wittgenstein or Bakhtin find them-selves having to argue against the positivist scientism of Chomskian rationalism.

As constructivist/dialogist discourse rises to prominence and spreads in influence,however, cracks in the philosophical foundations of the edifice have appeared tothreaten the entire superstructure. While excoriating positivist rationality, construc-tivists have been getting the queasy feeling that all is not well within their own camp.While finding the discourse of intertextuality now trips easily off the lips of moviereviewers and television entertainment reporters, those within the camp whoseprimary concern is with socio-political action find that the radical analysis of alldiscourses as positioned discourses undercuts the possibility of certaintya funda-mental prerequisite for taking meaningful social action.

For the positivist, who listens with sympathy to the arguments of dialogistdiscursive philosophy, there is a growing feeling, as there was in our own study ofliterate design, that we have left unexamined the principles by which we can relatethe results of realist research to the socially positioned knowledge and needs ofsociety. For the dialogist, who listens with sympathy to the realist commonsense ofthe public on whose behalf he/she would like to take social action, there is a growingfeeling that we have left unstudied the basis for locating a position from which totake social action.

While a brief excursion into this crisis of theory cannot hope to resolve these deepconcerns, what I would like to argue in concluding is that it is of crucial concern topositivist and dialogist social scientific and humanities theory alike to stay engagedin dialogue with the lived experience of members of the communities of practice thatwe study. Perhaps we are finding that the unexamined life is our only true test ofhuman reality.

Georgetown University

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the participants in the Workshop on CriticalDiscourse Analysis, Birmingham University, 6 April 1999, for their comments bothin the session and afterwards, which have substantially assisted in revising this paper.The author have also benefited from comments and discussion at City University ofHong Kongs English Department and Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciencesin further revision. Of course, none of these people and institutions is to be thoughtresponsible for the infelicities that remain.

Notes

[1] The research on which this study is based has been supported by several research grants,which include City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant Discourses ofTransition: Authoritative History in the Making, Ron Scollon (PI) with associate investiga-tors David Li, Wai King Tsang, Vicki Yung, and Rodney Jones), and City UniversityStrategic Research Grant Literate Design and the Implied Reader: Hong Kong,Guangzhou, Kunming, Ron Scollon (PI) and associate investigators Suzanne Scollon,Yuling Pan, and Rachel Scollon.

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