This article takes ‘measurement’ as a will to determine or fix space and time, which allows for a comparison of ontological models of space and time from Western and Māori traditions. The spirit of ‘measurement’ is concomitantly one of fixing meaning, which is suggested as the essence of the growth of the scientific genre of language that has taken place alongside the growth of science itself, since the European Enlightenment. ‘Measurement’ and ‘metaphor’ are posited as an original binary for classifying thinking and language, updating classical educational models of thought by drawing on recent results in brain and cognitive science, and recognising that basic cognitive resources, such as logic and rationality, power all forms of thinking. The article suggests that the notion of ‘cultural worldview’ may involve different balances of left and right brain thinking, embedded in the discourses, lexicons and grammars of each language, and that Western domination of left brain thinking (through the influence of science on the European languages, particularly English) may be a useful viewpoint on the philosophical dead end of the West.
A favourite story from science is that of Mendeleyev in 1869, working through a mid-winter’s night in rural Russia (Strathern, 2000). His dream-inspired Periodic Table became the central concept marking the coming-of-age of chemistry as a discipline: an example of literacy of the highest order that allowed him to ‘read’ the very blueprint of matter, inaugurating the modern understanding of atomic structure. Mendeleyev’s genius demonstrates the closely intertwined nature of literacy and science, a connection obscured by recent educational trends to separate ‘literacy’ from ‘language’ in the notion of ‘literacies’. The Periodic Table is an exemplar of the manifestation in science discourse of what might be termed the ‘deterministic philosophy of measurement’, a delineation of the contemporary concept of ‘measurement’, understood as exact determinations of some aspect of material reality, or space and time, which can be numerically or categorically represented.
Mendeleyev’s dream is part of the story of the language of science, which is key within the overall development of modern science to its position today as the most powerful form of knowledge available to humanity, and a global network of complex social and technological systems and structures (Halliday, 2004). Over time, the interrelated development of science and modernity in post-Enlightenment Europe embedded this deterministic philosophy of measurement within language, especially English, which, for historically contingent reasons, has become globally dominant both as a world language (Crystal, 2003) and as a language of science (Ammon, 2001).
The language of science has been influential in all spheres, including the development of systematic approaches to education, and its subdisciplines of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment (Pinar, 2007). These recent fields are emerging at a time when educational discourses are dominated by a cluster of related concepts including evidence, standards, outcomes and accountability. These concepts share this underlying deterministic notion of ‘measurement’ as a fixing or specifying of some aspect of the phenomenon in question. The facile assumption that standardised testing is an objective way to ‘measure’ education reflects the influence of neoliberalism on education policy (Taubman, 2009). Thirty years of neoliberal reshaping of public policy and institutions have entrenched a culture of managerialism and technocratic approaches towards quality assurance, amongst other basic functions, in education systems (Pinar, 2012, Chapter 1: School Deform). Given the totalising nature of this neoliberal discourse, non-Western traditions such as Māori offer alternative visions and philosophies of what education, literacy, quality and equity might entail.
A bipolar debate concerning ‘indigenous science’ and related questions features in the literatures on which educational research draws for its base of philosophy and theory. For example, the classical anthropological debate about ‘rationality’ posited science against indigenous knowledge, in efforts to clarify what science actually is, and how it works (Wilson, 1970). Second, the ongoing ‘science wars’ centre on the ‘two cultures’ in the academy, represented by the question of the status of social science, including education, as science (Sokal, 1996). Third, in work influential on educational theory, Bruner (1986) posited two basic modes of thought: ‘narrative’ and ‘logico-scientific’.
Many such models of thinking have assigned logic to one side of the binary, thereby leaving it out of the other. Anthropology suggests logical coherence is characteristic of all cultural knowledge bases, Western and non-Western (e.g. Māori, see Salmond, 1985). But although Eurocentrism has been expelled from the academy, the association of science with modern Western culture as ‘proof’ that Euro-Americans are more ‘advanced’ than ‘primitive races’ remains a powerful ‘subterranean’ message in social discourse, retaining influence even within academia (Wetherell & Potter, 1992). It makes little sense to assign logic to ‘scientific’ thought, since narrative power also depends upon logical coherence.
The two modes of thought are perhaps better known today as ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ thinking (Lamb, 2004). As part of the biological heritage common to all human beings, the left brain/right brain model of thinking is more useful than Bruner’s in domains such as science education, where Bruner’s influence, one step from Eurocentric, is still evident in the dominant pedagogical metaphor that ‘science is a special way of thinking’. Cognitive science and brain medicine have established that left brain thinking is typically analytical in nature, whilst right brain thinking is holistic. These two modes of thought are reflected in the two basic modes of language, here termed ‘measurement’ and ‘metaphor’. This view sees logic as inherent in both modes of thinking and therefore in both modes of language. Not involving logic in the criteria by which to categorise modes of thought eases the longstanding debates about rationality, including multicultural science education research, epistemological diversity and incommensurability (Siegel, 2006).
Scientific English is a form of language that reflects the development of the modernist, deterministic philosophy of science. Science discourse requires that words and sentences have unambiguous meanings. Thus, though rich, messy stories from the history of science are preserved within science words, such as the names of the elements, in operation science language is profoundly nonmetaphorical: nouns, verbs and adjectives have stable, precisely defined meanings; and statements are intended to be understood literally, not metaphorically. Scientific English sacrifices richness of meaning in favour of precision: words and statements have single-layered meanings (not to be confused with the idea of simple vs. complex meanings). Importantly, this discussion refers to school textbook expositions of science knowledge, not the language of the world of ‘working science’ in practice. It is the textbook kind of science discourse that forms a sturdy ‘gate’ enacted in secondary science classrooms, which keeps most students, including almost all Māori, outside of that world of participation in science-related industries and professions.
Speakers of Māori will immediately recognise that the above language descriptions are foreign, if not antithetical to the workings of te reo Māori. In contrast to scientific English, te reo Māori can be characterised as a language in which even very small words carry many levels and nuances of meaning, within an overall worldview built from the large tropes and metaphors of traditional Māori culture. The term ‘worldview’ is understood as a personal–cultural ontological, epistemological and ethical paradigm. Using in-depth investigations of both traditions and language features, Anne Salmond characterised the traditional Māori worldview as structured by a series of large interlocking bipolar opposites at many levels, from psychological to cosmic (e.g. ao/pM, ora/mate, tapu/noa, etc.).
Not only are Māori words and phrases multileveled in meaning, but a great deal of the meaning of Māori words and statements rests in exactly how they are said by the speaker. Thus oratory is far more important in Māori culture than in modern Western culture. Sacrificing precision for richness of meaning is associated with this performativity aspect of language in te reo Māori, which is absent from modern scientific English. The need to modernise te reo Māori for its survival has led to many arbitrary decisions in recent decades, ‘fixing’ the meaning of certain traditional Māori words by aligning them to English words, in ways that reflect dominant contemporary understandings, sometimes obscuring the original richness of imprecision (Mika, 2012). One way this ‘richness of imprecision’ works is when a Māori word takes two meanings seen in English as opposites, such as the example commonly cited in education: the word ‘ako’ can mean either ‘to teach’ or ‘to learn’. The context (including nonlinguistic features such as performativity) determined which meaning was being invoked in any speech act. These differences and richness in meaning are not conveyed by the written words alone.
Perhaps traditional Māori language reflects a culture operating as much by metaphorical right brain thinking as the precise measurement left brain mode. Modern English is influenced by the scientific genre, reflecting the dominance of analytical left brain thinking, using precise, stable, literal meanings, which can be represented in written form without loss of content. In traditional Māori language, however, lexical words play a far lesser role in carrying meaning, which has more to do with how lexical words are arranged between many other small words. Over and above the words themselves, much of the meaning of a Māori utterance rests in the pacing and emphasis of each word, along with facial expression, gesture, and the use of other language devices, such as repetition, or extra nonlexical words added in for emphasis.
It is widely accepted that Western and Indigenous worldviews tend to be characterised by opposing binaries, but this does not make these ways of thinking mutually exclusive, in the sense of unable to be understood by someone brought up within the other culture or way of thinking. From the perspective of the modern scientific world-view, Māori knowledge has no explanatory power about the natural world. The scientific view is that Māori knowledge does exist in some scientific domains such as astronomy and taxonomy, arising from detailed observations of nature, but that this knowledge is a mere shadow of modern science knowledge in those areas. Science considers Māori knowledge to be underpinned not by working models of reality, but by ‘stories’. The question of whether or not Māori knowledge is science (or a science, or antiscience) is really a question about how the word ‘science’ is being understood. Following the above argument, however, the value of Māori knowledge lies in it being different from science. My interest for some time has been in how to understand this undeniable difference, which is routinely experienced by Māori people, including myself, though denied by many scholars.
Might the concept of worldview, and the claims about epistemological diversity, be explainable in terms of (amongst other things) relative balance between these two modes of measurement (left brain) and metaphor (right brain) thinking? This idea follows Sydney Lamb (2004), who maps ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ thinking to ‘philosophical differences’ he terms ‘splitter-thinking’ (associated with absolutism, universalism and reductionism) and ‘lumper-thinking’ (associated with relativism and holism), respectively. AkeyMāori concept, namely ‘whakapapa’, may be used to explore this distinction. The dictionary translation of this important Māori word is ‘genealogy’ or ‘family tree’, but whakapapa is far more: it is a central trope in Māori cosmology, thought and knowledge, termed a ‘cognitive gestalt’ (Roberts et al., 2004); a ‘way of thinking’ (Barton, 1993, p. 59), ‘both a noun and a verb’ (McKinley, 2003, p. 21).
Amongst other uses, the whakapapa concept is also a record of the passage of time, based on the imprecise unit of a generation. In a society organised along communal kinship lines, knowledge of whakapapa was of both social and economic value. Whakapapa is usually portrayed diagrammatically using ‘descending vertical lines’, but Salmond’s research showed that in traditional Māori thought, whakapapa was graphically represented in carvings ‘as a double spiral marked by chevrons to show successive epochs’ (1985, p. 247). If whakapapa measured time, the spiral representation of whakapapa reflects a Māori notion of time as cyclic, rather than the Western concept of linear time. A cyclic concept of time (such as the Mayan wheel of time) is a well-established characteristic distinguishing indigenous from Western thought. In Māori notions of space-time, the cosmic dualities (referred to above) are like the spokes of time’s wheel.
Like whakapapa, the Periodic Table is also conventionally represented in linear form, with the elements arrayed in rows and columns. Yet before Mendeleyev’s dream, in 1862, the French geologist Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois proposed the Telluric Helix model, with the elements arranged on a spiral line around a cylinder. Today, spiral representations of the Periodic Table abound, though not in science education. These two pairs of linear/spiral forms are possible examples of left brain/right brain representations. There is also a link with Robert ‘Kaplan’s Contrastive Rhetoric Doodles’, a diagram first published in 1966, ‘intended to demonstrate a variety of paragraph movements that exist in writing in different languages’ in a article titled ‘Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education’ (Kaplan, 2005, p. 387). The Doodles diagram shows the patterns of English as a straight line, ‘Oriental’ as a spiral.
To think about recording whakapapa or the Periodic Table in spiral rather than linear form is like a thought experiment for better understanding the difference between left and right brain ways of conceptualising complex arrays of information. We can ‘understand’ how either representational form works; but few would independently think of transforming the conventional form of the Periodic Table, or common written forms of whakapapa, into a spiral-form representation. Lamb (2004) mapped each brain hemisphere to the various language functions taken care of by each side. This article applies Lamb’s idea to the question of how left and right brain modes of thinking may work together, or in opposition, in representations of science—both in the characteristics of scientific English, and in ‘school science’. The development of scientific English in the period of the European Enlightenment reflected an increasing relative importance of left brain or ‘measurement’ thinking, with burgeoning new technologies to observe nature to previously unimagined levels of precision, and concomitant relative decrease in language performativity, and other oral language functions aligned with right brain or ‘metaphor’ thinking.
In practice, of course, working science is highly diverse and multilingual; science relies on reciprocal relationships between metaphor and measurement, and on the engagement of all available cognitive resources. Scientific thinking cannot therefore be equated with left brain thinking, but this article suggests that science discourse, especially as presented in the school curriculum, may reflect a different relative balance, with more emphasis on left brain and less on right brain thinking, by comparison with the indigenous discourse of a non-Western culture such as Māori. It seems reasonable to suggest that this difference may contribute to the documented alienating effect of secondary science education on Māori and other indigenous or nonelite students, to a greater extent than for all students (Halliday, 1993).
In school science education and beyond, the characteristics of left brain thinking (as described by Lamb, above) have invalidly come to be identified with the nature of science, in a way that supports certain forms of scientism (i.e. ideological distortions of science) including the claims made by neoliberal economics to include ‘scientific’ approaches to social policy. The imbalance between ‘measurement’ and ‘metaphor’ modes of thinking and language seems characteristic of neoliberal discourse—lots of information but no wisdom; a checklist approach that misses the ‘bigger picture’. The discourses, worldviews and epistemologies associated with indigenous cultural cosmologies, and the languages in which they are expressed, may differ most importantly from those of modern Western science in terms of this balance between the two great psychological modes of operation. This model supports the assertion of a coherent form of epistemological difference between ‘Māori knowledge’ and traditional curricular knowledge, whilst also clearly showing continuity between the two, and a way of explaining how the differences are not able to be captured in language by single words, but require exposition at the level of the paragraph, central metaphor, or discourse. The ideas brought together in this article suggest new approaches to future investigations into the role of language in science education for indigenous students, multicultural education, and intercultural studies more generally.
Ammon, U. (Ed.). (2001). The dominance of English as a language of science. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyer.
Barton, B. (1993). Ethnomathematics and its place in the classroom. In E. McKinley & P. Waiti (Eds.), SAMEpapers 1993 (Vol. 1993, pp. 46–68). Hamilton: CSMER.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Crystal, D. (2003). English as a Global Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1993). Some grammatical problems in scientific English. In M. A. K. Halliday & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Writing science: Literacy & discursive power (pp. 69–85). London: Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K. (2004). The language of science. London: Continuum.
Kaplan, R. B. (2005). Contrastive rhetorics. In E. Hinkel (Ed.), Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp. 375–391). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lamb, S. (2004). Philosophical differences and cognitive styles. In S. Lamb (Ed.), Language and reality (pp. 496–502). London: Continuum.
McKinley, E. (2003). Brown bodies, white coats: Postcolonialism, Ma¯ori women and science (Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy thesis). Hamilton: University of Waikato.
Mika, C. T. H. (2012). Overcoming ‘being’ in favour of knowledge: The fixing effect of ‘ma¯tauranga’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44, 1080–1092. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00771.x
Pinar, W. (Ed.). (2007). Intellectual advancement through disciplinarity: Verticality and horizontality in curriculum studies. Rotterdam: Sense.
Pinar, W. (2012). What is curriculum theory? New York, NY: Routledge.
Roberts, M., Haami, B. J. T. M., Benton, R., Satterfield, T., Finucane, M. L., Henare, M., & Henare, M. (2004). Whakapapa as a Ma¯ori mental construct: Some implications for the debate over genetic modification of organisms. The Contemporary Pacific, 16(1), 1–28.
Salmond, A. (1985). Ma¯ori epistemologies. In J. Overing (Ed.), Reason and morality (pp. 237–260). London: Tavistock Publications.
Siegel, H. (2006). Epistemological diversity and education research: Much ado about nothing much? Educational Researcher, 35, 3–12.
Sokal, A. D. (1996). Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. Social Text, 14, 217–252.
Strathern, P. (2000). Mendeleyev’s dream: The quest for the elements. New York, NY: St Martin’s Press.
Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Wetherell, M., & Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the language of racism: Discourse and the legitimation of exploitation. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Wilson, B. R. (Ed.). (1970). Rationality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.