Making connections: some key issues in social theory and applied linguistics
Obiectivity
Perhaps the most obvious of these implications (obvious not only from our account above of the anteriority of social structures, but also from realism as a more general philosophical position) is that realists are able to defend a commitment to objective knowledge. We understand objective knowledge in a dual sense, although these senses are intimately connected. Firstly, following Popper, we would distinguish between subjective knowledge- what any particular individual knows- and objective knowledge- knowledge expressed in theories, propositions, conjectures. The important feature of objective knowledge is that it is 'totally independent of anybody's claim to know; it is also independent of any body's belief, or disposition to assent, or to assert or to act. Knowledge in the objective sense is knowledge without a knower; it is knowledge without a knowing subject' (Popper 1972: 109). The second sense in which we understand objective knowledge is that, precisely because it is 'knowledge without a knower', it is capable of refinement and methodological development. The social practice of knowledge production has this as an aim, albeit one which is often imperfectly and only partially realized. Without objective knowledge it is hard to make any case for improving theoretical understanding or for the epistemic authority of research.
We should perhaps say a word or two about the term objectivity, since it has come to carry some pejorative meanings. Let us dispose of some of these to begin with. Firstly, objectivity must be distinguished from objectivism. This latter term denotes the popular idea that there is one (true) point of view from which reality can be apprehended. Sometimes this view is referred to as a 'God's eye' view or, in Nagel's apt phrase, the 'view from nowhere' (Nagel 1986). It goes without saying that such a view cannot be found; knowledge is always knowledge from a particular place and time and cannot provide us with a 'complete' view of the world.
However, and secondly, this should not lead us to underestimate or dismiss the importance of objectivity (as opposed to objectivism). As Sayer (1992: 83) puts it, '[t]he world can only be understood in terms of available conceptual resources, but the latter do not determine the structure of the world itself'. Knowledge may always be historically specific and socially located, must always be knowledge from somewhere, but it is also knowledge of something. The interesting issue is not that knowledge is always knowledge from somewhere, but rather how, given this commonplace, we come to have knowledge of anything at all. In fact, as Nagel has argued, those who dismiss objectivity as well as those who overrate it share a common error, which stems from their insufficiently robust sense of reality and of its independence of any particular form of human understanding. They both significantly underestimate the difficulties and the possibilities of human know ledge: the one by denying that there is a reality to be known, the other by assuming that it can be known simply by occupying the objective viewpoint. (For a discussion of these issues as applied to socio linguistics, see Sarangi and Candlin 2001.)
It is, of course, central to realist accounts that the world is in an important sense mind-independent. But this, as we have just seen, both limits and justifies objectivity, since 'as small creatures in a big world of which we have only very partial understanding, '" how things seem to us depends both on the world and on our constitution' (Nagel 1986: 5). The structure-agency debate is important precisely because it attempts to capture analytically this distinction between the social world and ourselves. Here also lie the roots of our opposition to the non-realist accounts of the relationship between structure and agency. In making agents the puppets of structures, or structures the creation of agents or, in the case of structuration theory, making them mutually constitutive of each other, these accounts make it difficult to examine the interplay between the world and ourselves. This has implications for our notion of objectivity.
As particular individuals we confront a world that is not directly produced or constructed by us, but is rather the complex, emergent outcome of the interactions between structural contexts (structure) and ourselves (agency). For the realist, therefore, there may be a divergence between how things are and how people take them to be. This follows logically from the temporal priority given to structures. (For example, we learn to speak in a particular language from infancy; the anteriority of the language to us as particular individuals ensures that we have little choice about which language this will be.) Furthermore our grasp of these structures will necessarily be partial (and for many of us in the case of language remains so), partly because their systemic features may become accessible only to theoretical excavation and partly because of their temporal precedence. A crucial feature of structures in our realist account then is 'that they exist and act independently of the knowledge of which they are objects' (Bhaskar 1979).
