Introduction

This chapter discusses of how research on language might empower its subjects raised general theoretical questions in two main areas: one was the status of academic knowledge itself and the other concerned the relation between researcher and researched in the making of knowledge. Dale Spender cites a good example of how language plays a part in linking scientific theories with social assumptions. Relativism in the social sciences particularly addresses the role of language in shaping an actor's social reality, as opposed to merely reflecting or expressing some pre-existent, non-linguistic order. The challenges to positivism we have just considered have implications for the study of social reality. For if the experience of social actors is language and culture dependent, and if we grant that there are many languages and cultures, a number of problems for social science present themselves at once.