:Analogies for Sustainable Development/Scientific disciplines and theories as languages

Analogy Map

Principle/function	Disciplines/ theories	Languages
Shared context	Concepts that are represented by all or many disciplines / theories (using different terms)	Concepts that are represented by all or many languages describe (using different words)
Specialization in a specific context on different levels	Research focus / study of specific phenomena	Social and natural environment containing specific phenomena
	Academic fields	Language families
	Subjects within fields	Languages
	Schools of thought	Dialects
Isolation from other groups	Specific language, frameworks, methods, styles	Specific vocabulary, grammar, styles
Need to communicate with other humans in your group	Terms and concepts only develop and survive for phenomena that other scientists in a field see and understand	Words and terms only develop and survive for phenomena that other people in a language community see and understand
Increasing need to communicate with humans outside your groupe	Inter- and transdisciplinarity	Being multilingual, dictionaries, translation of important texts into different languages

Discussion

A word cloud of the 100 words making up the Leipzig-Jakarta-List, with weightings (word size) based roughly on the Swadesh list

Quote Bank

Wilson (2015):

“The examples of accounting methods, perspectives, and languages make it easy to understand how different configurations of thought can be different but worthy of coexistence, and how they can be, but need not be, incommensurate.”

“Each [theory] can be insightful in the same way as multiple accounting systems, perspectives, and languages outside of science. They therefore deserve to coexist, but for this kind of equivalence to be productive, it is essential for users of the theories to be appropriately multilingual. Otherwise, equivalent paradigms will be pitted pointlessly against each other”

References

Analogies for Sustainable Development