Having all science in English means that certain ontological assumptions that the English language makes get taken to be universal truths when they are particular features of the English language. Words like “be”, “feel” or “imagine” are taken as if they map to something that’s ontological basic when different languages slice up the conceptual space differently. The fact that English uses the “is of identity” and doesn’t use a different word then “to be” to speak about identity leads to a lot of confusion.
Given the present climate of caring more about empirics then ontology there’s also little push to get better at ontology in the current scientific community.
Issues around ontology however weren’t my main issue.
“It’s not in English” is basically the same as “it’s not interesting to others”.
This basically means that all high status research is published in English and also that the system doesn’t work in a way where scientific funding is coupled on the necessity that research gets produced that’s interesting to someone.
This needs a language that’s spoken by enough people and at some point people who use the science in other applications.
Thomas Kuhn has a criteria that a is a field of knowledge where progress happens. That means that the way people change their topics of research is not just by listening to what’s in fashion but by building upon previous work in a way that progresses. What kind of progress happens in the “non-English-language-based science” where you live?
DIY,Kiev style is an article the funding situation of Ukrainian science. It seems that after the fall of the Soviet Union research funding from the government was cut drastically and prestigious science started to depend on foreign money.
When the most prestigious science depends on foreign funding the less prestigious science that’s still done in Ukrainian is likely to be lower quality.
It seems like Ukrainian politicians thought that Ukraine can be independent and that fails in various forms.
Chinese science in Chinese would a lot more likely to be successful then Ukrainian science in Ukrainian.
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