Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis

[G]o back to the expression of thoughts through characters, this is my opinion: it will hardly be possible to end controversies and impose silence on sects, unless we recall complex arguments to simple calculations, [and] terms of vague and uncertain significance to determine characters… Once this has been done, when controversies will arise, there will be no need of a disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. It will in fact suffice to take pen in hand, to sit at the abacus, and—having summoned, if one wishes, a friend—to say to another, ‘let us calculate’ (quoted in Antognazza 2009, p. 244).

The academic language game

Modern biological taxonomy orders life according to each lifeform’s evolutionary relationship to a predecessor. Species are groups of biological individuals that have evolved from a common ancestral group and which, over time, have separated from other groups that have also evolved from this ancestor. In the taxonomic hierarchy established by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, a species (for instance, ‘sapiens’) is a member of a genus (homo—hence the formal, Latin naming scheme creates the term ‘homo sapiens’), a family (hominids), an order (primates), a class (mammals), a phylum (vertebrates) and a kingdom (animals). Living things are classified in this system in ways which, after careful application of definitional principle, are often contrary to commonsense. The everyday concept of ‘fish’ no longer works, since the systematic analysis of evolutionary variations in recent decades has shown that lungfish, salmon and cows all share a common ancestor, but lungfish and cows share a more recent common ancestor than lungfish and salmon (Yoon 2009, pp. 255–58). Commonsense semantics suggests that fish are more alike because they look alike and live in water. Careful semantic work, based on disciplinary definitions and principles, tells us something remarkably and revealingly different.

Creating systematic order is an old practice, as old at least as Aristotle’s categories and logic (Aristotle 350 BCE). Markus, however, points out an enormous difference between modern disciplinary knowledge and earlier forms of philosophical wisdom, integrally related as they were to the persona or habitus of the thinker. Modern knowledge becomes objectified and made widely accessible in the form of disciplinary schemata:

In this view, the creation of disciplinary knowledge as an autonomous discursive space is a peculiar accomplishment of modernity which requires the development of shared schematic and discursive understandings.

In the founding moments of philosophical modernity, Kant speaks of an ‘architectonic’ or an ‘art of constructing systems’. On the one hand, this is an a priori way of seeing: ‘the idea requires for its realisation a schema, that is, a constituent manifold and an order of its parts’. On the other hand the process of construction of schemata is at times circuitous:

In this tradition, the early Wittgenstein attributes these schematic qualities to language itself, positing the world as an assemblage of facts nameable in language, alongside a propositional facility which ties those facts together (Wittgenstein [1922] 1981). In other words, he attributes to natural language an intrinsic logic of categories and schematic architectonics. The later Wittgenstein claims that natural language works in much more slippery, equivocal ways.

Schematic conceptualisation becomes the stuff of ‘ontology’ in the world of the semantic web, as if such representations are unmediated or true expressions of empirical ‘being’. As Bowker and Starr point out using as their case studies the disease classifications used on death certificates and the system of racial classification that was apartheid in South Africa, schemata do not unproblematically represent the world ‘out there’. They also reflect ‘the organizational context of their application and the political and social roots of that context’ (Bowker and Star 2000, p. 61). How objective are the categories when much their definitional purport is contestable? And despite their promised regularities, they are fraught with irregularities in data entry—what ‘goes’ in which category? How does the context of application affect their meanings in practice? ‘We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and processual nature of information ecologies’, they conclude (Bowker and Star 2000, p. 293).

The later Wittgenstein developed perspectives on language which were very different in their emphases from his earlier work. Meanings do not simply fit into categories. Apples and tomatoes are both fruit, but apples are more typically regarded as fruit than tomatoes. To this semantic phenomenon, Wittgenstein attached the concept ‘family resemblance’ as an alternative instead of strict definitional categorisation, a graded view of meanings where some things more or less conform to a meaning expressed in language. And instead of a world of relatively unmediated representational meanings, Wittgenstein proposed a world of ‘language games… to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958, pp. 2–16). Something that means one thing in one text or context may—subtly or unsubtly—mean something quite different in another. As meanings are infinitely variable, we can do no better than pin specific meanings to situation-specific contexts.

Recently, Gunther Kress has argued—and we have argued similarly in the work on ‘multiliteracies’ we have undertaken with him and others (Cope and Kalantzis 2000, 2009)—that language is not a set of fixed, stable and replicable meanings. Rather, it is a dynamic process of ‘design’. We have available to us ‘resources for representation’—the Designed. These resources

This is the stuff of Designing. And the consequence is a trace left in the universe of meaning in the form of the Designed, something that in turn becomes an Available Design in a new cycle of representational work. These, then, are Kress’s principles of sign making: ‘(1) that signs are motivated conjunctions of form and meaning; (2) that conjunction is based on the interest of the sign-maker; (3) using culturally available resources’. The design process is contextually specific, dynamic and no two signs mean precisely the same thing:

These things are true to the slipperiness of all language, and particularly so in the case of vernacular, natural language. In disciplinary work, however, we create a strategically unnatural semantics to reduce the contextual equivocations and representational fluidity of natural language. Disciplinary work argues about meanings in order to sharpen semantics—in discussions of what we are really observing, to define where one category of thing ends and other begins, to clarify meanings by inference and reasoning. These are peculiar kinds of semantic work, directing focused semantic attention to provisionally agreed meanings in a certain discipline. The peculiar insightfulness and efficacy of this semantic work is that it helps us do medicine, law, philosophy or geography in some relevant respects better than we could with mere commonsense expressed in natural language.

Of course, semantic slipperiness and fluid representational design is true of academic work, and even productively so when it becomes a source of generative dissonance and innovation. Our point here is the strategic semantic de-naturalisation in disciplinary work, the relative ‘automomy’ (to use Markus’) word of disciplines from individual voice, and the comparative ‘objectivity’ of disciplinary discourses as communally constructed artefacts.

However, the prevailing temper of our times does not sit well with formal semantic systems. The postmodern language turn follows the later Wittgenstein into a realm of meanings which trend towards ineffability, and infinitely varied meanings depending for their semantics on the play of the identity of the communicator in relation to the ‘role of the reader’ (Barthes 1981; Eco 1981).

Disciplinarity, or the reason why strategically unnatural language is sometimes powerfully perceptive

The semantic web in the formal sense is the system of web markup practices that constitute RDF/OWL. This system, however, may prove just as disappointing as the results produced thus far by computer scientists working on artificial intelligence. It may bear as little fruit as earlier modern aspirations to create systems of calculable meaning on the basis of formal logic. The reason lies in part in the infinitely extensible complexity of human meaning, into which natural language analyses provide just one insight.

This book has suggested an approach to meaning which has the modest objective of doing a somewhat better job than search algorithms based on character collocations. Where the semantic web has thus far failed to work, we want to suggest a less ambitious agenda for ‘semantic publishing’. By this, we mean the active construction of texts with two layers of meaning, the meaning in the text (the conventional stuff of representation in written words, pictures and sound) and, layered over that, a markup framework designed for the computability of the text whose effect is to afford more intelligent machine-mediated readings of those texts.

Academic knowledge is an ideal place to start to develop such an agenda. From here, the agenda may spread into other spaces in the web, in the same way that the idea of backward linking which weights search results in the Google algorithm derives from the idea invented half a century earlier by Eugene Garfield, the idea that citation counts could serve as a measure of intellectual impact.

Natural language is not readily computable because of its messy ambiguities, its context-variable meanings, and the vagaries of interest in which often dissonant nuances of meaning are loaded into the roles of meaning-makers and the different kinds of people in their audience. If language is itself semantically and syntactically endless in its complexity, then on top of that the infinite variety in contexts of expression and reception multiplies infinite complexity with infinite complexity. None of this complexity goes away in academic work. However, such work at times sets out to reduce—at least in part—the contextual slipperiness and semantic ambiguities of natural language. This is the one aspect of the practice of intellectual ‘discipline’.

To define our terms and reflect on our context, an academic discipline is a distinctive way of making knowledge a field of deep and detailed content information, a community of professional practice, a form of discourse (of fine semantic distinction and precise technicality), an area of work (such as an academic department or a research field), a domain of publication and public communication, a site of learning where apprentices are inducted into a disciplinary mode, a method of reading and analysing the world, an epistemic frame or way of thinking, and even a way of acting and type of person. ‘Discipline’ delineates the boundaries of intellectual community, the distinctive practices and methodologies of a particular area of rigorous and concentrated intellectual effort, and a frame of reference with which to interpret the world.

Wherever disciplinary practices are to be found, they involve a kind of knowing that is different from the immersive, contextually embedded knowing that happens pervasively and informally in everyday life. Discplinarity deploys a kind of systematicity that does not exist in casual experience. Husserl draws the distinction between ‘lifeworld’ experience and what is in ‘transcendental’ about ‘science’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Husserl 1970). The ‘lifeworld’ is everyday lived experience. It is a place where one’s commonsense understandings and actions seem to work instinctively—not too much conscious or reflective thought is required. It is a place where the ambiguities of and ineffable complexities of natural language at once enlighten insiders and confound strangers. Knowledge in and of the lifeworld is amorphous, haphazard and tacit. It is relatively unorganised, acquired by accretion in incidental, accidental and roundabout ways. It is endogenous, embedded in the lifeworld to the extent at times that its premises and implications are often all but invisible. It is organic, contextual, situational.

The ‘transcendental’ of disciplinary knowledge is, by comparison, a place above and beyond the commonsense assumptions of the lifeworld. In counterdistinction to the relative unconscious, unreflexive knowledge in and of the lifeworld, science sets out to comprehend and create epistemic designs which are beyond and beneath the everyday, amorphous pragmatics of the lifeworld. Disciplinary knowledge work is focused, systematic, premeditated, reflective, purposeful, disciplined and open to scrutiny by a community of experts. It is deliberate and deliberative—conscious, systematic and the subject of explicit discussion. It is structured and goal oriented, and so relatively efficient in its knowledge work. It is exophoric—for and about the ‘outside world’. It is analytical—abstracting and generalising to create supra-contextual, transferable knowledge. It is sufficiently explicit to be able to speak above and beyond the situation of its initial use, to learners and to other disciplinarians, perhaps in distant places or adjacent disciplines. All in all, disciplinary practice is more work and harder work than the knowing in and of the lifeworld.

The disciplinary artefacts of academic work are the result of deliberate knowledge design work, special efforts put into knowing. This work entails a peculiar intensity of focus and specific knowledge-making techniques, working at the interface of everyday life and specially designed efforts to elicit deeper knowledge. Disciplinary work consists of things people do that make their understanding more reliable than casual lifeworld experience. To become critically knowledgeable about phenomena of the embodied lifeworld, and in ways of knowing beyond taken-for-granted experience, requires systematic observation; the application of strategies for checking, questioning and verification; immersion in the culture of the way of knowing under examination; and the use of multiple sources of information.

More rigorous knowledge-making strategies include corroborating perceptions with others who have seen the same thing and which can be further tested and verified by others; applying insight and awareness based on broad experience that moderates emotions and feelings; justifying opinions and beliefs to oneself and others, including those whose judgement is to be respected based on their expertise; taking into account ideologies which represent interests broader than one’s own and with a longer view than immediate gratification; taking into account statements whose logical consistency can be demonstrated; developing perspectives based on long, deep and broad experience and which are broadly applicable; grounding principles in critical reflection by oneself and others; and forming intelligence in the light of wary scepticism and an honest recognition of one’s own motives. The knowledge that is founded on these kinds of knowledge-making practices and purposeful designs for engagement in and with the world help form a person who may be regarded as knowledgeable, a person who has puts a particularly focused effort into some aspects of their knowing.

Knowledge worthy of its name consists of a number of different kinds of action, which produce deeper, broader, more trustworthy, more insightful and more useful results. We have to concentrate on our ways of knowing to achieve this greater depth or expertise. We have to work purposefully, systematically and more imaginatively at it. What, then, do we do which means that our knowledge transcends the everyday understandings of the lifeworld?

Experiential knowledge processes

Disciplinary practice has a basis in lived experience. Some of this may be bound up in the peculiar disciplinary and discursive practices of a field of endeavour (Cetina 1999; Latour and Woolgar 1986). In other respects it is bound up in personal experience, social background and socio-ethical commitments. In other words, the personal and professional profile of the person informs a certain kind of rhetorical stance (Bazerman 1988). In a work of academic representation this is noted explicitly in credits attributing institutional location and role, and biographical notation that sits alongside the text. The knowledge does not simply speak for itself. Its interlocutor needs to be trusted. And, more subtly, the experiential identity aspect of an authorial agenda is also to be found in the rhetorical structure of the text.

Disciplinary work may also have an empirical basis, either directly in the reporting of observations, facts and data or indirectly reporting on already published empirical material. Empirical work involves the experience of moving into new and potentially strange terrains, deploying the processes of methodical observation, carefully regulated experimentation and systematic reading of experience. This involves refined processes of testing, recording, measurement, quantification and description. In the documentation of empirical data, clear coding and markup according to established and agreed disciplinary categories will facilitate more effective data mining. In some disciplines, the test of veracity is replicability, which requires clear documentation of empirical methods.

Conceptual knowledge processes

Academic disciplines use categorical frames of reference based on higher levels of semantic distinction, consistency and agreement within a community of expert practice more than is commonly the case in natural language. Here, we may make knowledge by grouping like and unlike on the basis of underlying attributes, and we may abstract, classify and build taxonomies (Vygotsky 1962). This kind of knowledge work includes defining terms, refining semantic distinctions and classifying empirical facts. This is what makes the language of the disciplines unnatural by comparison with the casual ambiguity of vernacular natural language. In the domain of digital text making, this is the space where specialist tags, dictionaries and glossaries are made.

Disciplines put concepts to work in theories that model the world and build explanatory paradigms. Theoretical work builds conceptual schemas capable of generalising from the particular, abstracting from the concrete and explaining processes whose workings may not be immediately obvious. Theory making involves building conceptual schemes, developing mental models, and conceiving and representing systems. It becomes the basis for the interpretative frames that constitute paradigms, and a reference point for confirmation or distinction of new work in relation to the generalisations that have hitherto been agreed. In the world of digital markup, this is the stuff of taxonomic and other concept-to-concept relationships.

Analytical knowledge processes

Disciplinary work involves developing frames of reasoning and explanation: logic, inference, prediction, hypothesis, induction and deduction. As a knowledge process, this involves making sense of patterns, analysing conceptual relations, and developing rules or laws which reflect regularities and systematic reasoning. In the world of markup, this is the stuff of conceptual dependency relations.

Disciplinary work also often analyses the world through the always cautious eye of critique, interrogating interests, motives and ethics that may motivate knowledge claims. It promotes, in other words, an ever-vigilant process of meta-cognitive reflection. This is represented in documentation via discussion of points of empirical, theoretical and ethical distinction of new work from earlier works.

Applied knowledge processes

Disciplinary work is also application-oriented, either directly or indirectly in the case of basic research. It is pragmatic, designing and implementing practical solutions within larger frames of reference and achieving technical and instrumental outcomes. What purpose knowing, after all, other than to have an effect on the world, directly or in the case of basic research, indirectly? This kind of knowledge process involves practical forms of understanding and knowledge application in a predictable way in an appropriate setting. In terms of markup practices, its referrents of application might include time, place, industry or social sector—in which case it might be possible to come back at various times after initial publication to review the intellectual work against the measure of the text at the sites of its application.

In its most transformative moments applied disciplinary work is inventive and innovative—redesigning paradigms, and transforming social being and the conditions of the natural world. This kind of knowledge process may be manifest as creativity, innovation, knowledge transfer into a distant setting, risk taking, self-enablement, and the attempt to translate emancipatory and utopian agendas into practical realities. Among the measures of the impact of the work may be markup by other users of the sources of ideas, schemas and practices.

Some disciplines may prioritise one or more of these acts of knowing, these disciplinary moves, over others. In any event, these are the kinds of things we do in order to know in the out of the ordinary way of academic disciplines. Each step of the way, disciplinary work involves kinds of semantic precision which constitute a phenomenon we would like to call ‘strategically unnatural language’. The dimensions of this unnaturalness become an agenda for semantic publishing.

Towards a new agenda for semantic publishing

The ‘semantic web’ conceived as a series of formalisms at the intersections of XML, RDF and OWL has not thus far worked, and postmodern sensibility may have forewarned the inevitability of its failure. However, if the semantic web has failed to realise its promise, rudimentary semantic publishing practices are in evidence everywhere.

For instance, semantic tagging has notably sprung to prominence in the world of the digital media. Soon after the appearance of the social bookmarking website Del.icio.us in 2004, the tagging practices of users came to be observed and commented on. Thomas Vander Wal called this practice ‘folk taxonomy’ or ‘folksonomy’—in the case of Del.icio.us, tagging was designed to assist classification and discovery of bookmarks. David Weiberger characterised the difference between taxonomy and folksonomy as akin to the difference between trees and fallen leaves: ‘The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together’ (Wichowski 2009).

If there is anything particularly semantic about the web today (beyond the text itself), it is this unstructured self-tagging practice. However, this practice has severely limited value as a support for online knowledge ecologies. At best, folksonomy is a flat world of semantic ‘family resemblances’. Tags are quirkily personal. They mix terms which have semantic precision in disciplines with vague terms from natural language. They give no preference to disciplinary expertise over commonsense impressions. They have no dictionary or thesauri to specify what a person tagging really means by the tag they have applied. Tags are not related to tags. And to the extent that tag clouds add some grading of emphasis to the tags they represent, they simply provide a measure of lowest common denominator tag popularity, mostly highlighting the tediously obvious. Might folksonomy be just another moment of postmodern epistemic and discursive angst? Must we succumb to the anti-schematic zeitgeist?

We need schematic form, but with the rigidities of traditional taxonomy and logical formalism tempered by flexible and necessarily infinitely extensible social dialogue about meanings. We have attempted to create this in the infrastructure we described in Chapter 13, ‘Creating an interlanguage of the social web’. Here, for now and by way of conclusion to this book, are our guiding principles, each of which corresponds to the ‘knowledge process’ ideas we introduced in the previous section of this chapter.

References