ABSTRACT
There is a third modernist text that informs our discipline. In comparison to the stories of individual knowledge and the materially ordered world, it was of minor significance to modernist thinkers. Yet it is one that will prove critical as we move to the potentials of postmodernism. The emphasis in this case is on the function of language in both science and the culture at large. John Locke captures the Enlightenment view of language. Our words are, according to Locke, “signs of internal conceptions”. They stand as external “marks for the ideas within [the individual’s] mind whereby they might be made known to others and the thoughts to man’s [sic] mind might be conveyed from one to another.” (Locke, 1823/1959, p.132). Thus, if the individual mind acquires knowledge of the world, and language is our means of conveying the content of mind to others, then language becomes the bearer of truth. In the same way today, as scientists we treat language as the chief means by which we inform our colleagues and our culture of the results of our observations and thought. In effect, we use language to report on the nature of the world as we see it, and these reports are then subject to falsification or vindication as others test them against their observations. The results of systematic and collective observation, then, should be an array of words and explanations that match or map the world as it is.
