Language intertwines descriptive and normative claims about the world

Evidence

Languages embed sets of beliefs, collective understandings and experiences, institutional expressions. They reflect and shape prevailing socio-cultural and institutionalizing narratives, overriding – even overdetermining – though not necessarily totalizing or even finalizing accounts of historical memory, social arrangement, how things are and are to be done. Languages, in short, entwine the descriptive with the normative in social life. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 956

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets out the claim that language is never merely descriptive but always already normative, entwining ‘how things are’ with ‘how things are to be done.’
• XREF: connects to: Taken-for-granted language reproduces value hierarchies and centric thinking — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 124; Modern scientific language still encodes the sexualized coercion of nature — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 682; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”