An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

2.3 Source and target
The central debate in applied linguistics has always been about the tension between
the source (linguistics alone or a consortium of disciplines bearing on language
studies) and the target (teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) or
a wider concern with language in the world). What Edinburgh succeeded in doing
was to maintain a steady gaze at both ends, both the source as consortium and the
object as TESOL. A lack of balance at one end can mean that the source becomes
too narrow. Emphasising the source at the expense of the target is likely to divert
applied linguistics towards greater control by linguistics.
Equally, overemphasis on the target can mean a possessive concern with the here-
and-now, with attempting to solve the problems of the local situation and with a
momentum towards practical solutions and away from theoretical underpinnings.
Overemphasis on the target is likely to take applied linguistics into mainstream
academic education.
2.4 The importance of speculation
Balancing source and target is very much in the tradition of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, which was of such importance in the development of academic,
vocational and technical education. The ideas of analysis, of toleration, of openness
to ideas free of the restraints of religious conformity, and of improvement, all
these optimistic and humanist projects are found in the excitements of the En -
lighten ment. It was after all the Age of Revolutions, and yet people retained a sense
of responsibility.
Broadie writes of ‘a concept of the interrelation between the three disciplines
of ethics, economics and engineering. Solutions to engineering problems have
immediate economic consequences which themselves have to be judged in terms of
ethical criteria. The three form a system of thought, a unity of disciplines’ (1997: 19).
And within the ranks of the Enlightenment there raged the age-old battle between
realists and nominalists (or perhaps more accurately conceptualists). For David
Hume ‘nature is in large measure a product of our own imaginative activity. We make
the world we live in’ (Broadie 1997: 19), while Thomas Reid espoused a kind of naive
realism, what came to be called the Philosophy of Common Sense: sensations were
not mere ideas or subjective impressions but carried with them the belief in corre -
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sponding qualities as belonging to external objects. Reid insisted that such beliefs
belong to the common sense and reason of mankind and in matters of common sense
the learned and the unlearned, the philosopher and the day-labourer are upon a level.
Echoes here perhaps of today’s ethnomethodology and perhaps too of the extreme
relativism of some postmodernists, which we consider in some detail in Chapter 7.
Also very much in the Enlightenment tradition was the importance given to
speculation, which is now often contrasted with empiricism. From the 
OED
sense of
‘contemplation, consideration or profound study of some subject’ and ‘conclusion
reached by abstract or hypothetical reasoning’ speculation has come to be used in
somewhat disparaging ways, often preceded by ‘mere’, ‘bare’ or ‘pure’, implying con -
jecture or surmise. This of course quite apart from its more operatic senses of ‘action
or practice of buying and selling goods, lands, stocks and shares etc in order to profit
by the rise or fall in the market value as distinct from regular trading or investment;
engagement in any business enterprise or transaction of a venturesome or risky
nature, but offering the chance of great or unusual gain’. Alas! try as they may no
applied-linguistic speculator has, as far as I am aware, yet reached great or unusual
gain!
It turns out that speculation and empiricism should not in fact be in conflict.
What contradicts empiricism is rationalism. While ‘empiricism’ attracts the com -
ment: ‘reason cannot of its own provide us with knowledge of reality without
reference to sense experience and the use of our sense organs’ (Angeles 1981: 75),
rationalism has this one: ‘reality is knowable … independently of observation,
experi ence and the use of empirical methods; reason is the principal organ of
knowledge and science is basically a rationally conceived deductive system only
indirectly concerned with sense experience’ (ibid: 236).
It would be convenient to agree that speculation combines the two senses of
(random) conjecture and of reasoning attaching to some explanatory theory, while
empiricism means the use of experimental methods to validate a theory. However,
what seems to have happened is that empirical has appropriated to itself the package
of the scientific methods, theory 
plus
controlled enquiry, while speculation has
increasingly been marginalised to the armchair, the haphazard and the guess.
Happily, speculation is not just a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. In the same
definition of speculative philosophy, we read: ‘in the non-pejorative sense: philos -
ophy which constructs a synthesis of knowledge from many fields (the sciences, the
arts, religion, ethics, social sciences) and theorizes (reflects) about such things as its
significance to humankind, and about what it indicates about reality as a whole’
(Angeles 1981: 272). We should remember this noble description next time applied
linguistics is labelled ‘mere’ speculation!