IASS-AIS supports the Stand up for Science movement

In March 2025, The New York Times published a list of more than 200 words and phrases, whose use is now strongly discouraged in the U.S.A’s public policy documents, drawn up by the current US administration. This list serves, among other things, as a guide for ongoing budget cuts and layoffs.

Attack against language is attack against science, and in particular the language sciences. But the language sciences, and semiotics in general, are very adept at analyzing this disturbing strike, scientifically. Let’s be vigil to the outcome of these actions! Because banning today’s words and concepts means cutting off access to the most topical and relevant reality to promote, what we fear is a dystopian version.

The question of the future horizon of this reality has fundamental implications, because behind each banned word or concept there are research programs and scientific publications that will no longer be funded, people who will be dismissed and others who will no longer receiving care. We need to highlight these possibilities of banning scientists. For instance, the use of the words ‘women’, ‘diversity’ or ‘pollution’ in the medical field takes us back to a human index reality that is at least a century behind our own, to the detriment of the health of the most disadvantaged, dominated and discriminated against.

So as to sort out the words and concepts it uses, scientific practice has to its credit, long tested methods and procedures, most importantly discussed amongst a community of equals. And above all, the choices it makes are always provisional, evolving, open to other possible and future choices.

The political practice of eliminating certain words or concepts from languages, and making others compulsory, would be called as a semiotic practice of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not linked to any particular politico-ideological system: it is in fact a semiotic operation that transforms a system of concepts and beliefs, an ideology, into a dogma and a norm, in order to shape at all costs a reality that conforms to this dogma and to reconfigure even the population under its sway.

More than 40 years ago, the Red Guards violated, annihilated a large part of a community of high-level scientists, to absolve the discipline from forbidden expressions such as ‘quantum physics’, ‘theory of evolution’ and ‘general relativity’. The ban on “woke” science is of the same semiotic nature as the hunt for “bourgeois” science. Under very different political banners, the semiotic operation on words, practices, populations and their realities are always an index of the same totalitarianism.

Totalitarianisms of every kind and every era have invented a language cemented by ideology, a ‘concrete language’, a ‘wooden language’. By taking part in the ‘Stand Up for Science’ movement, semiotics is not choosing Trump or Mao Zedong, Bolsonaro or Pol Pot as its adversaries, but rather the naïve and calamitous belief that the political control of languages will make it possible to control populations and realities in the long term.

For if semioticians are committed to the defense of science, it is for a fundamental reason of their own: for us, languages, signs and texts do not cement a definitively fixed meaning, but subject their meanings to variation, evolution, translation and transposition. And they firmly assert, that we will never be able to control languages in the long term, as they endure and transmit visions of the world, translating and transposing themselves generation after generation, much longer than any form of governments. The time and rhythm of languages are not those of decrees and uses, but of the free circuits of translations-transpositions, interpretants, and communities of interpreters. And this position is not in itself a dogmatized ideology, but a working hypothesis, always open to controversy and to the test of facts. If the language sciences, and semiotics in general, are confronted with a future of control, they must show resistance and perseverance.

The case of the Navajo Code is exemplary: Navajo soldiers enlisted in the US Army during World War II contributed to the design of a secret code, based on their unwritten language, transformed several times into a series of semiotic layers. This Navajo Code, which the Japanese were never able to decrypt, contributed to the United States’ victory in the Pacific War. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the reality of this contribution for more than thirty years, until its official recognition by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and then, in 2001, by public tributes paid to veteran “code talkers”. The Trump administration has just decided, in March 2025, to erase all traces of this contribution, destroying archives, revoking the decorations of Navajos “code talkers”, a real purge of history. For today’s American totalitarians, the history of the United States can only be White and English-speaking. It is now up to those who can resume, extend and update the scientific, historical, ethnographic and semiotic work on this contribution to the history of the United States of America, and to that of contemporary democracy, to disseminate it throughout the world, in all languages and on all media available today.

March 25, 2025

Jacques Fontanille                               Tiziana Migliore
IASS-AIS President                               IASS-AIS Secretary General