Interdisciplinary Language Barriers and Space Ethics
Reaching across the great divide between astronomy and philosophy
Last week, I was fortunate to be able to attend a joint meeting of the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology and the European Astrobiology Institute in Kiruna, Sweden. The conference was titled “Social and Ethical Frontiers in Space Exploration,” and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the term “frontiers” was interrogated in more than one talk.
I was invited to deliver one of the keynote talks, despite being neither an astrobiologist nor a philosopher by training. I have spent plenty of time with both, however, so when I considered what topic to choose for my talk, I remembered my recent observations about interdisciplinary language barriers during the Environmental Justice in Space workshop I hosted earlier this year. The talk I ended up delivering in Sweden was called “The Search for Interdisciplinary Intelligence: Overcoming Language Barriers in Space Studies.”
The Problem: Interdisciplinary Language Barriers
Language learning is a lifelong hobby of mine, and my own exploration of space ethics— including forays into astronomy-adjacent and much more distant fields of study— often feels very much like trying to get my head around a new language via immersion as I stumble through conversations in a foreign country. I’ve also witnessed enough conversations about space ethics between people in very, very different fields to have at least 45 minutes worth of examples of how experts can end up talking past each other even when they’re all doing their best and acting in good faith.
For example, someone learning a new language usually starts by gathering and memorizing vocabulary words: the basic nouns and verbs needed to describe common objects and actions. Anyone venturing into a new field of study— either as a student or a researcher poking their head over the interdisciplinary wall— similarly has to wrestle with jargon, the field-specific terms for the most common and basic concepts. The Kiruna conference was dominated by philosophers, so I had a tab open to Wikipedia to make sure I understood references to “ontologies,” “Kantian ethics,” “deontology,” etc. Jargon in the form of acronyms is one of the most impenetrable types of interdisciplinary vocabulary, so speakers at the conference made an effort to spell out references to “COPUOS”, the “OST”, and the “UNCLOS,” although acronyms like “SETI,” “METI,” and “AGI,” tended to slip through undefined, leading to occasional confusion.
The most dangerous type of jargon for interdisciplinary work, I pointed out during my talk, is false cognates, also known as “false friends.” Cognates, words in different languages that have the same linguistic derivation and therefore share both form and definition, are a language learner’s best friend. An English speaker learning Spanish can easily learn and recall that “el planeta” is “the planet.” But false cognates only coincidentally share a form, and their definitions can be quite different, creating hidden pitfalls. Our poor hypothetical English speaker, feeling embarrassed about something, might refer to herself as “embarazada,” not realizing that this word actually means “pregnant” in Spanish.
In the overlapping fields comprising space ethics, false cognates can be hidden in ordinary words that have been turned into technical terms with very specific definitions in certain fields. I would claim that social scientists are particularly guilty of this— they love to use “imaginary” as a noun as one of their more irritating (to me) pieces of jargon, and philosophers and lawyers will throw around benign-sounding everyday words like “rights,” “duties,” and “values” that actually have extremely significant and often distinct definitions. But this is my own bias; at the Kiruna conference, I got an earful from the chemists and biologists in the crowd about astronomers’ insistence on calling every element on the periodic table heavier than hydrogen and helium a “metal.” (It’s true; I apologize on behalf of all astronomers.)
These false cognates get worse when interdisciplinary conversations go beyond researchers to include people in industry, policy, and activism. I’ve heard entrepreneurs in the private space industry talk about wanting to “democratize” space to make it more “accessible,” only to realize as I listened to their conversations that they mean lowering launch costs to get smaller businesses into their customer base. This is not what “democratization” or “accessibility” means to, say, disability rights activists. And well-meaning space advocates use words like “exploitation,” “colonization,” and yes, even “frontiers” without acknowledging or perhaps even being aware of the relevant historical context and enormous emotional baggage that they’re unintentionally communicating.
Language learning goes beyond vocabulary, of course, and so do the challenges of interdisciplinary communication. Just as language learners must grasp different rules for grammar and word order, interdisciplinary researchers have to recognize that different fields structure and deliver their arguments in different ways. This includes how researchers in these fields write their papers, present their data, lead their audience from one point to the next, publish their results (papers, books, etc.), and even whether they deliver talks at conferences by reading a paper aloud to the audience or extemporaneously following bullet points on well-illustrated slides. None of these different techniques are “wrong,” but if you grew up in a field based on the presentation of very visual, image-heavy data (like me), it can be difficult to follow a philosophical argument read from a paper without pretty pictures to look at.
All of this combines to add a kind of mental drag when you’re trying to follow a presentation or paper created by a researcher in a distant field. This lost time and effort can also lead to lost opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, if a researcher decides that it’s too much trouble to try to slog through all these communication minefields, and remains sealed in their own silo instead. Research language barriers also hurt our ability to communicate with people outside of space studies, including policymakers, funding agencies, and the public. And just as language privilege excludes people around the world who don’t speak a major global language like English, biases between fields— and against potential students or collaborators who don’t “speak” the dominant research language of a field— pose a challenge for equity and inclusion in our work.
Solutions…?
In my talk, I walked the audience through a few examples of other fields and industries who have really had to grapple with interdisciplinary communication challenges of their own.
Clinical medicine, for example, recognizes that communication between fields is crucial when specialists are consulted for a critically ill patient. But research indicates that they can struggle with interdisciplinary biases, discipline-specific jargon and culture, and the lack of a “shared mental model” about what is wrong with the patient.
Public emergency services (police, fire, emergency medical services, etc.) in the U.S. encounter significant communication barriers at large-scale incidents; post-incident analysis of the response to the 9/11 attacks revealed technological and systematic communication barriers and lead to the National Incident Management System, established in 2004, which is still used today. The NIMS Communication Standard requires the use of common terminology, plain language, and data interoperability.
Back in the realm of space studies, human spaceflight has to deal with actual language barriers (U.S. astronauts are required to learn Russian so they can operate the Soyuz and its Russian-labeled control panels) as well as “technological” language barriers that can be countered with more deliberate design and/or compatibility regulations (like the spacesuit compatibility issues I discussed last month).
Space ethics has something to learn from examples like these— we should be working to reduce interdisciplinary biases, developing common terminology, and spending the time and effort to learn each other’s languages. More interdisciplinary conferences will help, of course, by putting researchers from different fields in the same room for days at a time. And more diversity at these conferences is even more important. I also suggested to the crowd that as a field, we could spend time building tools like terminology glossaries (like this Guide to Space Law Terms or NASA’s list of acronyms) and bridge classes for multidisciplinary students or curious interdisciplinary researchers.
A lot of this work has to be done by each of us as individuals, though. We must actively identify potential areas of miscommunication, counter our own biases about other fields, and work to not only define field-specific terms in our own presentations to interdisciplinary audiences, but also explain our field-specific approaches to addressing our research questions.
Other News
I don’t have any talks or publications coming up this month, so here’s a picture of the fabulous aurora that we were lucky to see in Kiruna (which is inside the Arctic Circle):
