Conventional Medical and Homeopathic Textbooks as a Place of Consolidation and Tradition of Though Styles. A Linguistic Analysis of Usage Patterns as indicators of Though Styles

• Applicant: Dr. Pavla Schäfer
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450146315

Since the homoeopathic approach was invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1810, there have been controversies between conventional medicine and homoeopathy. Nowadays, over 200 years later, homoeopathy and its role at the healthcare market is still a contentious topic in the public discourse. In the proposed project, the communities of conventional medicine and homoeopathy are assumed to be "thought collectives" with different "thought styles", following Ludwik Fleck´s theory of science. Thought styles are assumed to manifest themselves in linguistic styles, i.e. specific patterns of language use. Consequently, these patterns can be interpreted as indicators of thought styles. The project focuses on current textbooks from both thought collectives. Textbooks have the function to introduce the specific thought style to people who should become future experts in the relevant field. A thought collective´s specific knowledge is being consolidated and canonized in textbooks and tested in examinations. In the proposed project, the textbooks will be analyzed by an integrative method combining a hermeneutic text analysis in the first phase and a corpus analysis in the second phase.The analysis concerns different levels, e.g. terminology, metaphors, syntactic constructions, text structure, text layout, collocations or ngrams. The objective is to identify differences and similarities in linguistic patterns between both textbooks. The differences and similarities will then be interpreted based on Fleck´s theory of science.In this way, the project can add a new aspect to the current discussions regarding conventional medicine and homoeopathy and aims to create a basis for a productive dialogue.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants