Knowledge Held Hostage by No Language

My thanks to Lieke van der Brugge, whose welcome opened the doors of this hall to us and reminded us that the public library, before any other institution, was a place where knowing did not depend on anyone’s permission. We have gathered in The Hague, a city whose name is bound up with law and judgement. Our question, though, concerns a justice that no law has yet named: linguistic justice in knowledge.

I write in Persian, I live and work in a Dutch-speaking city, and most of what I read in my field is in English. Every day I translate myself. Translation is not the problem; it is one of the oldest ways people have of working together. The problem begins when one language becomes the place where knowledge is recorded and the others become places where it is merely reported. A Persian article in the philosophy of science, however rigorous, barely exists as far as indexes and rankings are concerned. If its author wants to be seen, they must either change language or settle for the margins.

Two forces are now changing this situation at once. One is generative AI, which has made text abundant and cheap, so that a text alone no longer tells us whether anyone stands behind it. The other is the rise of political structures that want to decide what may be said and what may be remembered. The old answer to both was that universities, journals and publishers would act as guarantors. But universities are measured by rankings, journals by publication fees, and writing is being handed over to machines. I do not want to mourn these institutions. I want to ask what in them was worth keeping: the tie between a claim and a person who answers for it, the possibility of critique, and the endurance of memory.

Years ago my work began with a simple question: what is the smallest unit of knowledge that can be referenced, translated, criticised and reused on its own? The answer I arrived at was the ‘piece’: a stable body that changes only through new versions, surrounded by a living orbit of translations, references and critiques. Seen this way, a translation is not a copy that slowly drifts away from its original; it is another representation of the same object and remains bound to it. We identify the concept independently of the word, not in order to erase languages, but so that every language can be a full home for knowledge. We have called this framework Language-Agnostic Knowledge.

Lera is built on this foundation, and the programme of this very conference was put together in it: every talk you will see in Persian and English is one piece, not two separate texts. Even so, we have not come here to talk about software. Many of you disagree with parts of this view, and that is precisely why you were invited. We have three days ahead of us: the first on language and power, the second on machines and institutions, the third on the infrastructures of the commons. The conference ends with a draft of the Hague Statement, which we will write together rather than hand to you ready-made.

One more thing. A number of our colleagues from Africa, Asia and Latin America are joining us remotely, because they were refused visas or because the journey was beyond their means. This hall is not the centre of the conference; it is one of its places. I ask our speakers to speak more slowly, I thank our simultaneous interpreters, and I ask all of you to hear the questions of those sitting beyond these walls before your own. Welcome.

References

UNESCO. 2021. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Paris: UNESCO.

Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.