All the World’s a Trading Zone, and All the Languages Merely Pidgins – Everything Studies

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In my last post I wrote:

People are different. We obviously act differently, but differences don’t start with the decision to act. We act differently because we perceive, parse, think, feel, want, need, react and judge differently. There is a substantial core of humanity in us all, but the older I get the more convinced I get that we seriously underestimate how different the inside of other people’s heads are to our own.

There was a footnote attached that grew long enough to overpower the main post, so I split it off into a new one.

Thinking about the differences between people’s inner lives and how they manifest outwardly brings to mind an article from my time studying history of science that I decided to re-read. Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief[1][2], by Peter Galison discusses how physicists with different specialties live in different (social) realities and what happens when they interact.

Experimentalists, theorists and instrument makers are all physicists but since they do different things and have different priorities they tend to develop their own separate vocabularies and value systems. They do have to interact sometimes for physics to progress — experiments must be run, technological systems must be built.

For this they need to establish common ground, a shared understanding of how the things they do together are to be done and what the words they use with each other mean. This, says Galison, is not trivial.

The logical positivists tried to define science as the accumulation of observations towards complete knowledge, and they failed in the end because they couldn’t construct a perfectly objective and unambiguous language in which to encode observations without tarring them with interpretation. That just isn’t how language works. The meaning of words and actions vary by context and is always in flux, so we can’t assume communicating across contexts is straightforward.

Galison calls the borderlands where the various brands of physicist interact "trading zones". The concept is lifted from anthropology and means a place where cultures come together for the purposes of exchange and new intercultural practices and terms emerge. He says:

I intend the term trading zone to be taken seriously, as a social and intellectual mortar binding together the disunified traditions of experimenting, theorizing, and instrument building. Anthropologists are familiar with different cultures encountering one another through trade, even when the significance of the objects traded — and of the trade itself — may be utterly different for the two sides.

Practices and terms are assigned different meanings by each specialty and their meanings inside the trading zone are simplified local versions[3], While these "skeleton concepts" are different from the ones used internally by the participating cultures, it all works out as long as everyone understands that the trading zone is a special place with special rules.

Sometimes the chasm is even greater. It happens (in history often as a result of unsavory imperial practices) that people with no language at all in common are thrown together. Over time they learn to understand each other and a combined, simplified proto-language emerges from the interaction — a pidgin language. Pidgins are not ”full" languages with maximal expressive power, and they’re no one’s mother tongue (if they develop to that point they’re called creoles).

Trading zones and pidgin languages both describe peculiar special cases in human communication: when symbols cross a boundary from one system of meaning to another, losing complexity and nuance on the way. Only a rugged, bare-bones version survives the trip and only its hardy descendants can live on the frontier[4].

But hang on just a minute. How special are these special cases? Maybe trading zones and their pidginoid vocabularies are not that special. Pidgins’ function is to facilitate coordination, and they are low-complexity representations of what has rich meaning in the original languages. Ordinary languages’ function is also to facilitate coordination, and they are also low-complexity representations of what has rich meaning in the speaker’s head[5].

Ok, but so what? There is a major difference between communicating across cultures and within a single culture, right?

I’m not so sure that difference is as big as it used to be. In modern pluralistic societies we’re all franken-humans, built from cultural and subcultural fragments. Unlike a hunter-gatherer tribe or old-timey farming village where everyone shares virtually all of their culture, modern western societies are experiencing unprecedented cultural fragmentation and constant recombination of symbols and meaning[6].

Take me for example. I’ve read an enormous number of books and articles, I’ve seen an enormous number of movies and tv shows and I’ve listened to an...