Systematic and
Applied Linguistics
The most urgent reform needed in
humanities is to establish the division of labours common in natural
sciences. In their realm there is no professional hierarchy between
systematic science (comparative literary history), applied technology
(applied linguistics), cultural ideology (jubilee journalism), school
education (language teaching), handicrafts (practical criticism) and occult
sciences (hermeneutics). This is an explosive social situation when
professors of systematic zoology, veterinary doctors, horse-breeders and
milkmaids have to compete at university for one professorial chair. Without a
functional division of labours these specialities cannot fulfil their
appropriate social roles. When analysing different application
levels inside a science we have to clearly distinguish two theoretical
boundaries: (1) one between science and technology and (2) that between
theoretical research and everyday practice (politology vs. politics,
religionistics vs. religion, literary theory vs. practical criticism). The
goals of academic science and applied technology are principally different,
the former tries to develop trustworthy knowledge of existing reality whereas
the latter aims to create some new reality for human needs. The former
endeavours to trace the evolutionary laws of nature while the latter
considers only their use for human society in order to apply them for
devising new facilities. Their essential differences are summed up in Table 6.
Table 1 The opposition between academic science and applied technology In social sciences advances of the 19th
century brought a great predominance of comparative, evolutionary and
typological methods while the 20th century shifted the focus on
formal, structural or functionalist techniques. The clash between external
and internal approaches shows a great misunderstanding as to disciplinary
boundaries dividing academic and applied research. Humanities cannot develop
their professional applications because their confusing makes them deny one
another’s specific rights and suppress their social functioning. To abolish
external methods in natural sciences means to abolish science as such and to
replace systematic biology by applied technology, by animal husbandry or
agronomy. Confusing application levels distorts academic studies and disables
humanities to such an extent as if the curricula of the Faculty of Natural
Sciences were replaced by those of a
Table 2 The division
of labours and application levels in linguistics The rational layout of
basic application levels with their respective methods, school institutions
and varieties in linguistics is outlined on Table 7. Besides there is a
number of other false substitutes that distort academic studies into cultural
ideology, entertainment, creative essay writing and popular journalism.
Religion, ideology, education, entertainment, technology and craft do not
pursue any cognitive purpose, they provide spiritual
or material technology for improving and prettifying man’s world. Only facultative sciences may enjoy
academic status because they deal with information processing, with
collecting, archiving, storing, retrieving, diagnosing, measuring and
examining data. They concern data processing where applied technology specialises in ‘reality-processing’ activities. Table 8
gives a brief survey of constructive and remedial applied sciences in
comparison with two types of facultative sciences in the right two columns. Extract from P. Bělíček: Ad reformandum universitatem. Towards a Reform of |