When Should Linguists Disclose a Conflict of Interest?

[Francis Hult]

Via lgpolicy...
 

When Should Linguists Disclose a Conflict?

December 15, 2009 @ 8:23 pm · Filed by Geoff Nunberg under Language and the law



Questions about disclosure of possible conflicts of interest don't
arise very often in our field. I take that as that as a testament to
the economic insignificance of our results. There are plenty of people
who have a financial interest in linguistic research, but they rarely
have a stake in having it come out one way rather than another, the
way a pharmaceutical company does if it can show that drug X is more
effective than drug Y. You don't have to worry about ethical conflicts
when the author can be presumed to have an unequivocal interest in
doing the science right. They only become important when the author
might conceivably have an interest in doing the science wrong.

But these questions can arise when a linguist is engaged to testify as
an expert witness in a legal proceding and decides to revisit the
issue later in a scholarly talk or publication. In fact it was a
disagreement about just such a situation that provided the impetus for
a symposium at last January's LSA meeting on "Ethical Issues in
Forensic Linguistic Consulting."


Full story:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1961



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