My researcher’s positionality statement

1 Overview

This is my researcher’s positionality statement (for context, see Darwin Holmes 2020; Jafar 2018).

The term positionality both describes an individual’s world view and the position they adopt about a research task and its social and political context. The individual’s world view or ‘where the researcher is coming from’ concerns ontological assumptions (an individual’s beliefs about the nature of social reality and what is knowable about the world), epistemological assumptions (an individual’s beliefs about the nature of knowledge) and assumptions about human nature and agency (individual’s assumptions about the way we interact with our environment and relate to it).

It is important for new researchers to note here that their positionality not only shapes their work but influences their interpretation, understanding, and, ultimately, their belief in the truthfulness and validity of other’s research that they read or are exposed to.

— Darwin Holmes (2020), p. 1-3.

This is a work in progress, in two senses:

• In one sense, it is not exhaustive and I will be adding content as it occurs to me.
• In the other sense, it is an ever-changing document, since I will frequently change my mind about any part(s) of content herein.

The following sections provide a thought-out description of my ontological and epistemological belief systems. The reader should interpret all of the statements made here as “my personal opinion”. In some cases opinion refers to my expert opinion, in others to my intuitions.¹ With time, I will add references where/if relevant.

1.1 Ontological

1. linguisticality is the human ability to communicate through a language, and a language is a specific communicative system used by a specific group of humans (Haspelmath 2020).
2. If one defines linguisticality as the human ability to communicate through a language, then saying that only humans have linguisticality is a tautology.
3. All living beings are capable of communicating (even plants and fungi, Mancuso & Viola 2015).

1.2 Epistemological

1. There is no agreement as to what science actually is.
2. Science is not the only way to gain knowledge.
3. Science has both objective and subjective components.
4. Statistics and statistical inference have both objective and subjective components (Gelman & Hennig 2017).
5. There is no agreement as to what language, human language, linguistic capacity, linguisticality actually are.
6. There is no agreement as to whether language, human language, linguistic capacity, linguisticality are the same thing or if they in principle refer to different entities.
7. There is no agreement as to which components of the human ability to communicate through a language are innate and which are learned.
8. There is no agreement as to what innate actually means.
9. There is no agreement as to whether the human ability to communicate through a language is entirely domain-specific or entirely domain-general, or if it is a bit of both.
   1. If it is a bit of both, there is no agreement as to which components are domain-specific and which are domain-general.
10. There is no agreement as to what a language is. In fact, in English language is used at times to mean either the human ability/capacity to communicate with a language or to mean a specific language (sometimes written Language and language respectively).

1.2.1 References

Darwin Holmes, Andrew Gary. 2020. Researcher positionality: A consideration of its influence and place in qualitative research—A new researcher guide. Shanlax International Journal of Education 8(4). 1–10. https://doi.org/10.34293/education.v8i4.3232.

Gelman, Andrew & Christian Hennig. 2017. Beyond subjective and objective in statistics. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 180(4). 967–1033. https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12276.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2020. Human linguisticality and the building blocks of languages. Frontiers in Psychology 10. 3056. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03056.

Jafar, Anisa J. N. 2018. What is positionality and should it be expressed in quantitative studies? Emergency Medicine Journal. https://doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2017-207158.

Mancuso, Stefano & Alessandra Viola. 2015. Brilliant green: The surprising history and science of plant intelligence. Island Press.

Footnotes

1. For the use of intuition in science, see the work by physicist Fritjof Capra.