Paul Standish

My presentation will begin by considering the way in which human beings come into the world, a world  that is social and cultural. It will draw attention to the central place of language in this. Human language (and sign-use) differs in important ways from the kinds of communication found amongst the higher animals, and this casts light on the nature of culture. Attention will be drawn to the relation between language and difference, raising questions about translation at interlingual and intralingual levels. These are factors of far-reaching significance for human lives and education, and they extend more specifically, for present purposes, into the ways that educational research is understood. I believe there are serious problems here, and I shall try to show why this is so.

It is commonly understood that culture has two senses – an anthropological one, which relates to differences between cultures, and an idea of “high culture” or of the “cultured person”, which relates to achievement and sophistication, particularly in the arts and to intellectual sophistication acquired through education. The  distinction between these two senses of culture is not always quite as clear as I am suggesting here. For the purposes of this lecture, however, I shall be concerned primarily with the former “anthropological” sense.