[ Text Version of "The Need for a Language" ]

The Need for a Language

Nothing influences development as much as a well-developed “thought infrastructure". This is why it is always necessary to work on thought patterns, to question their relevance and make them visible and shared. In other words, one has to acquire a functional and revealing language, a shared way of looking at reality.

Much handicap research is done as interdisciplinary studies. There are advantages to this in the short term, but in the long term it is difficult to take further. The most important objection to interdisciplinary studies and projects is financing difficulties and irregular, short term project organization. However, CERTEC believes that there is a far more serious problem: the interdisciplinary approach falls altogether short when it comes to language development.

Let the package in the picture above symbolize a project result. With the participation of capable individuals from various disciplines it is possible to achieve a good result, with new and relevant knowledge. If, however, the new knowledge is abandoned out in the interdisciplinary desert when the project is finished, it is almost certainly lost. It is not suited to being transferred to old disciplines. The project results cannot be kept alive and be developed further without constant, continuous work being done on theories, methods, language, and structuring. This is not detrimental if the field in question is, and is supposed to be, ephemeral (for example a project with the aim of solving a specific problem using a specific type of technology for a specific period of six months). A finished project is supposed to be just that, finished. However, if the field is more eternal (such as rehabilitation engineering, where lifespan of the insights gained from research is far longer than that of a specific generation of technology), it is a waste of human effort to allow interdisciplinary structures to be the only possible ones for a project.

It is not possible to speak an interdisciplinary language. Relevant concepts, structures, strategies and solutions are the result of work and more work in a disciplined setting. Language development will not take place if handicap research is allowed to consist of further development of separate established disciplines on the basis of various handicap perspectives. In that event, the disciplines themselves will define the possible selection and methods, while the handicap perspective decides which ones of these will be chosen. This undoubtedly enriches the original disciplines, but people with disabilities will benefit from only a small part of the research. As demonstrated by Sweden's Parliamentary Auditors in 1996 with respect to research in general, the larger part of the research results will spread no farther than the research community. However, for ethical reasons, that is even more indefensible in this context. People with physical disabilities actually take part in the research process themselves, and their participation, or at least their permission, is an absolute condition to making the research possible in the first place. This makes it unreasonable for them not to receive a lot in return.

Introduction

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