Dr. Pavla Schäfer

Field of work: German Linguistics

"Conventional medicine and homeopathic textbooks as a place for consolidation and transmission of thinking styles. A linguistic analysis of patterns of language use as indicators of thinking styles"

  • Funded by the DFG, project start in spring 2022
  • Student assistants in the project: Mirjam Weiß and Helge Kupz
  • Released from her position in primary education to carry out the project

Ever since homeopathy was founded by Samuel Hahnemann in 1810, there have always been disputes between conventional medicine and homeopathy. Even today - more than 200 years after it was founded - homeopathy and its role in the healthcare sector are the subject of heated debate. The project conceptualises conventional medicine and homeopathy as two ‘thought collectives’ with different ‘thinking styles’ pursuant to Ludwik Fleck's theory of science. The project is based on the central assumption that thinking styles manifest themselves in language styles. Language styles are understood as specific inventories of patterns of language use. Consequently, patterns of language use - defined in the broader sense - serve as contextualisation cues and can be interpreted as indicators of thinking styles. The project focuses on current textbooks from both thought collectives. Textbooks have the function of introducing the respective thinking style and training future experts. The specific knowledge of a thinking collective is consolidated and canonised in textbooks and verified by examinations. The textbooks are analysed using an integrative method that combines a hermeneutic text analysis in the first phase with a corpus linguistic analysis in the second phase. The categories of analysis are located at different levels. The analysis will look at e.g. terminology, metaphors, syntactic constructions, text structure, text layout, collocations, and n-grams. The aim of the project is to identify differences and similarities in patterns of language use and to interpret these on the basis of Ludwik Fleck's theory of thinking styles. In this way, the project can add a new aspect to the current discussion and create a basis for reflection for a productive dialogue.

Links:

https://germanistik.uni-greifswald.de/schaefer/ [de]

https://phil.uni-greifswald.de/en/research/interfaculty-centres/medical-humanities/