Critical Realism and Composition Theory (Routledge Studies in Critical Realism, 7)

Critical Realism and Composition Theory

The field of composition theory has emerged as part of the intellectual turmoil and set of pedagogical debates which have beset higher education for the last four decades and is now revolutionizing the theory and praxis of higher education. As part of that program of scholarly self-examination, composition theorists have sought to establish the proper role of written composition in the overall goals of liberal education, as well as the best methods and means by which composition practices can promote the intellectual development and the expressive capacities of students. This volume examines three of the dominant pedagogical theories within composition theory: expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist. It builds its critique on the fact that much of modern composition theory has focused on epistemological concerns while neglecting the ontological foundations of that which is being discussed. Critical Realism and Composition Theory offers an alternative approach to teaching composition. This problem-oriented alternative is designed to lead students beyond the abstract, contemplative description of a problem to an expanded understanding that shows that concerns for justice cannot be addressed intellectually without at the same time confronting the practical constraints that limiting powers of social institutions play in both defining a problem and its social solution. Donald Judd is an Assistant Professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where he teaches courses on writing, literature, and composition theory. He has published articles on assignment design and Marxism, and sustainable development, and is a member of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Routledge studies in critical realism Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie

Critical realism is one of the most influential new developments in the philosophy of science and in the social sciences, providing a powerful alternative to positivism and postmodernism. This series will explore the critical realist position in philosophy and across the social sciences. 1. Marxism and Realism A materialistic application of realism in the social sciences Sean Creaven 2. Beyond Relativism Raymond Boudon, cognitive rationality and critical realism Cynthia Lins Hamlin 3. Education Policy and Realist Social Theory Primary teachers, child-centred philosophy and the new managerialism Robert Wilmott 4. Hegemony A realist analysis Jonathan Joseph 5. Realism and Sociology Anti-foundationalism, ontology and social research Justin Cruickshank 6. Critical Realism The difference it makes Edited by Justin Cruickshank 7. Critical Realism and Composition Theory Donald Judd

8. On Christian Belief A defence of a cognitive conception of religious belief in a Christian context Andrew Collier 9. In Defence of Objectivity and Other Essays Andrew Collier 10. Realism Discourse and Deconstruction Edited by Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts Also published by Routledge

Critical realism: interventions Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie Critical Realism Essential readings Edited by Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie The Possibility of Naturalism 3rd edition A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences Roy Bhaskar Being & Worth Andrew Collier Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism Philosophical responses to quantum mechanics Christopher Norris From East to West Odyssey of a soul Roy Bhaskar Realism and Racism Concepts of race in sociological research Bob Carter Rational Choice Theory Resisting colonisation Edited by Margaret Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter

Explaining Society Critical realism in the social sciences Berth Danermark, Mats Ekström, Jan Ch Karlsson and Liselotte Jakobsen Critical Realism and Marxism Edited by Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Michael Roberts Critical Realism in Economics Edited by Steve Fleetwood Realist Perspectives on Management and Organisations Edited by Stephen Ackroyd and Steve Fleetwood After International Relations Critical realism and the (re)construction of world politics Heikki Patomaki Capitalism and Citizenship The impossible partnership Kathryn Dean

Critical Realism and Composition Theory

Donald Judd

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 Donald Judd All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Judd, Donald, 1954– Critical realism and composition theory / Donald Judd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language––Rhetoric––Study and teaching––Social aspects. 2 English language––Rhetoric––Study and teaching. 3 Report writing––Study and teaching (Higher) I. Title PE1404.J83 2003 808’.042’0711––dc21 2002036934 ISBN 0-203-98670-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–28049–4 (Print Edition)

To my daughters, Heather and Sarah May we find the wisdom to act responsibly and leave our children a world worth living in

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

1

Theory/practice inconsistencies and composition studies

1

2

Critical realism and philosophies of science

19

3

Expressivist rhetoric and voluntarism

60

4

Cognitivist rhetoric and positivism

79

5

Social-constructivist rhetoric and super-idealism

101

6

A rhetoric of praxis: toward a critical realist theory of composition

122

References Index

149 155

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their help and support with this project. David L. Harvey not only devoted countless hours to my intellectual development, especially in my understanding of critical realism, but he gave me valuable feedback on multiple drafts of this work. Without David’s generosity this book would not have been possible. Mark Waldo also played a major role in my understanding of composition theory as well as providing me with important feedback on early drafts. Paul (Skip) Morris and Scott (Andy) Mueller were both instrumental in helping me design writing assignments based on expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist theories. Scott was also kind enough to use some of these assignments in his classes, providing me with student writing samples. Thanks also to the students who gave me permission to use their papers here. A special thanks to my graduate students who not only gave me important feedback on Chapter 2, but worked their way meticulously through my argument and gave me much to ponder. And finally I want to thank Wendy Long, my best friend, wife, and tireless proof-reader. Without her understanding and support, none of this would have been possible. For any errors or mistakes in this work I take full responsibility. I would like to thank: Routledge, for permission to quote and use four figures from Roy Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (1979). Verso, for permission to quote and use one figure and one table from Roy Bhaskar’s Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and their Resolution (1994) and A Realist Theory of Science (1997).

1

Theory/practice inconsistencies and composition studies

In this study I will examine three schools of rhetoric in contemporary composition studies as demarcated by Lester Faigley (1986) and James Berlin (1988)––expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist––and their claims about knowledge production, pedagogical goals, and the presuppositions undergirding each. The focus of this inquiry is to establish the model of reality each school presupposes. I use “presupposes” because every epistemology implies a particular ontology and vice versa. Thus, these schools’ claims about practice and pedagogy will be contrasted to their presupposed models of reality in order to locate their respective theory/practice inconsistencies. I will be interested in discovering which pedagogical claims, if any, are apparently denied by the ontology used to support the epistemology of each rhetoric. My goal here is not to blast holes in other people’s work. Rather, in the long run, I hope to achieve a reconciliation among these different rhetorics, a reconciliation requiring some dramatic changes in our notions of epistemology and ontology. This project stems, in some part, from my own exploratory adventures in composition theory both in and out of the classroom. I have found all of these theories useful in my own writing and in teaching composition courses. They have each contributed to my understanding of what is involved in the writing process. But as I have become more acutely aware of the different theoretical grounds of each rhetoric, I have encountered a set of paradoxes. If I reject a particular theory’s model of reality, must I reject that theory’s pedagogical practices? And if I do not, how am I to know if my eclectic approach to teaching succeeds or fails? And, finally, is the practice theoretically untenable because the theory itself was faulty, or because its realizations in the classroom are not fully possible? As a teacher of composition courses, I must constantly remind myself to make sure that I understand why I am doing what I do in the classroom––in other words, to make sure that my classroom practice is consistent with my own theory of teaching writing. Otherwise, I have nothing against which to check my successes and failures and would be approaching my job of teaching in a serendipitous manner. The consequence of confronting these paradoxes in the everyday life of the classroom has resulted in my attempt to research, salvage, and subsume various elements of these three pedagogical approaches under a different model of

2

Theory/practice inconsistencies

reality that can accommodate them without resulting in theory/practice inconsistencies. But I cannot claim any originality regarding this “different model of reality” developed here, for this study is informed by the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and his work in critical realism. Bhaskar’s critiques of competing philosophies of the natural sciences and the human sciences also shape my own critiques of composition theories, as one might expect. The possibility of such a critical venture, situated as it is in a critical philosophy of science, is in the first place grounded in the fact that composition studies have borrowed widely from various disciplines, each with its own philosophy of science and presupposed ontology. That is, composition theorists have borrowed philosophies of science and their implicit models of reality from the very paradigms Bhaskar has so painstakingly and effectively critiqued. It was my growing awareness of these borrowed philosophies of science and their models of reality that first suggested to me how Bhaskar’s work could be fruitfully applied to composition studies. Beginning this study with a claim to the importance of theory/practice inconsistency is a little like sneaking in the back door in order to get a tour of the house. The legitimacy of theory/practice inconsistency, as I am using it, is predicated upon an understanding of critical realism, a philosophical project developed by Bhaskar. But rather than beginning with a thorough explanation of critical realism and then justifying the importance of theory/practice inconsistency, I will begin by claiming that identification of theory/practice inconsistency is important to any intellectual endeavor. So while I will be starting off in the pantry, so to speak, I will eventually get around to a tour of the whole house, or as much as is necessary in order to appreciate the function and placement of the pantry. As a result, I may make comments on and observations about theory/practice inconsistency in this chapter that may seem inadequately supported. I can only beg the reader’s patience with the assurance I will adequately explain critical realism and justify the importance of theory/practice inconsistency in subsequent chapters. Theory/practice inconsistency Is it important that one’s practice and theory are consistent? Or should theory be jettisoned in favor of a pragmatism whose foundations lie within the consensus of a particular discourse community? In “Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographic Essay” (1986), Kenneth A. Bruffee examined theory and the relationship between theory and practice as embodied in modern cognitivist work in composition. He writes: The tendency to classify our knowledge into “theory” and “practice” has its source in the cognitive understanding of knowledge. Cognitive thought assumes a vertical, hierarchical relation between theory and practice. It regards theory or concept making, products of the mind’s

Theory/practice inconsistencies

3

“inner eye,” as the more privileged, more powerful level of thought. And it regards practical application, a function of the “mirror of nature,” as less privileged and less powerful. Theory is said to “ground” and sanction practice. Practice is said merely to be ways of behaving or methods of doing things that are grounded and sanctioned by––that is, are the “consequence” of––theory. (1986: 781) The implications of such a notion of theory are that theory is somehow arrived at prior to practice and must necessarily be achieved through some form of idealism such as the Platonic forms or through a form of rationalism, where contemplation guided by the rules of formal logic is capable of delineating the foundations of knowledge. Citing W.J.T. Mitchell’s book Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, Bruffee goes on to point out that the categories of “theory” and “practice” express what Stanley Fish calls “theory hope.” In a nice summing up of the problems associated with this notion of theory, Bruffee goes on to explain “theory hope” as “the belief that whatever a theory sanctions us to do is surely correct, whatever we learn under its aegis surely true, and whatever results we get using its methods are surely valid” (Ibid. 782). “Theory,” under this description, is the sole master over “practice” such that any inconsistency arising between “theory” and “practice” is the fault of “practice” alone. In a similar vein, Eric H. Hobson, in his article “Writing Center Practice Often Counters Its Theory. So What?” (1994), traces the primacy of theory over practice back to the Enlightenment. Drawing on Thomas Hemmeter’s article “The ‘Smack of Difference’: The Language of Writing Center Discourse,” wherein Hemmeter argues that either ignoring or explaining away theory/practice inconsistencies “is to fall into the structuralist trap of dualities,” Hobson goes on to note that [s]uch is the dualistic nature of Enlightenment thought that holds hegemonic sway over the academy and requires us to discount as invalid any theory or practice demonstrated to be contradictory––that is, if we try to play by the rules of conventional theory building. (7) But Hobson goes on to explain that such a dualistic trap is fictional and can ensnare us only if we accept the philosophical rule of non-contradiction. Instead of accepting the Enlightenment project of rationalism and philosophical foundations of knowledge, Hobson contends that “a pragmatic perspective toward writing center knowledge accepts contradiction between theory and practice; we reject the ‘logic’ of dialectics” (Ibid. 8). Both Bruffee and Hobson are not advocating a wholesale rejection of theory; rather, they are rejecting that particular version of theory reeking of an obdurate idealism and ignoring the social and, as such, interpretive character

4 Theory/practice inconsistencies of knowledge and knowledge-making. Moreover, both Bruffee and Hobson have articulated to greater or lesser degrees the importance of theory being informed by practice. Theory with a capital “T” is rejected in favor of a reflective and self-critiquing practice, and while neither writer offers a clearer explanation of an acceptable form of theory, a friendly reading of both writers can discern movement toward a new conception of theory. So what is to be made of theory/practice inconsistency for the purposes of this study? While Bruffee and Hobson are correct in rejecting a Procrustean notion of theory, they are wrong in rejecting theory/practice inconsistencies as a means to refining our knowledge. For most postmodern philosophies the problem with the issue of theory/practice inconsistency stems from their focus on epistemology and their neglect of ontology. While practice is seen to have a workaday or procedural quality, theory or philosophy is seen as preoccupied with grand, abstract epistemologies or ways of knowing. But philosophy does not have to operate solely in such grand, abstract isolation––for itself, so to speak. It can serve other forms of knowledge, acting as an under-laborer for the sciences––both natural and human––as it did for Locke and as it does for Bhaskar (1997: 10). Bhaskar sees philosophy operating at a transcendental level as Kant employed the term. Kant asked “what must the mind be like for knowledge to be possible,” and his answer was that the universal categories of understanding impose the mind’s own order on the phenomena experienced. Rather than asking what must the mind be like in order for it to know an object, Bhaskar asks instead what must the world be like in order for the practice of science to make sense. In other words, while Kant made the “Copernican” epistemological turn, from which most philosophy has not escaped, Bhaskar has made the ontological turn in order to resolve some of the problems brought about by present-day philosophy. With a restoration of ontology, philosophy and theory cannot only be vindicated, but can serve as existential under-laborers to the sciences. Philosophy, using a form of transcendental critique, can tell us, for example, that the world must be structured or layered and that some entities must have emergent powers––otherwise, the practice of science can make no sense whatsoever. Philosophy cannot tell us, however, exactly how reality is structured or exactly what emergent powers certain entities possess. In short, a transcendental critique of scientific practice can lay out the broad contours of valid scientific knowledge, but it cannot in and of itself deduce the details of the world itself. That is the work of science, and here is where theory comes in. Typically in the natural sciences, the scientist, through the physical intervention of the experiment, identifies a phenomenon which serves as the empirical grounds for an unobserved mechanism which generated that very phenomenon. Theory is then used to propose possible models of the generative mechanisms, but it is only through the careful work of science that we can establish a particular theory as the truth or a particular mechanism as real. Bhaskar explains the issue thus:

Theory/practice inconsistencies

5

in a continuing dialectic, science identifies a phenomenon (or range of phenomena), constructing explanations for it and empirically tests its explanations, leading to the identification of the generative mechanism at work, which then becomes the phenomenon to be explained; and so on. (1989: 20) So while there is no foreseeable end to the work of science, as each new identification of a generative mechanism sets the ground for the next thing to be explained, science must differentiate between competing theories and select the theory that, at the present time, has the greatest explanatory power or best approximates the truth. But let me be quick to point out that my use of “truth” here is not the foundational “truth” sought by Enlightenment thinkers or classical idealists. “Truth” is acknowledged as the product of social endeavor, subject to its historical specificity and material conditions of construction. Science, in this sense, always carries the mark of human labor and its material praxis. As such, scientific truth is always situated vis à vis human needs and the historical bracketing of those needs. Hence, “truth” exists in what Bhaskar calls the transitive dimension of science “in which experiences and conjunctions of events are seen as socially produced” because “truth” is always open to verification, falsification, or modification as new methods and new sense-extending technology are created (1997: 242). The transitive dimension of science is, in short, located in the historical parade of epistemologies which have guided human inquiry in its quest of understanding the world. By introducing the transitive dimension, Bhaskar is acknowledging that humans cannot have foundational knowledge, whether spun from the work of rationalism or constructed from the agnostic presuppositions of positivist science. But such does not mean that truth can be done away with or that one truth is as good as another because ultimately we must decide which version of the truth is better to act upon, and such judgments are laden with vested interests and idiosyncratic needs. We must judge competing truths. And judgment embodies a “theoretico-practical duality or function” in that theory/practice consistency “concerns consistency in a praxis in a process” (Bhaskar 1994: 65). Bhaskar means, among other things, that humans are always moving between theory and practice in a dialectical fashion, using each to help inform and advance the other. And embedded in theory/practice consistency are both theoretical and practical reason. “Theoretical reason,” Bhaskar writes, “is concerned to adjust our beliefs to conform to the world” because if our beliefs are to have any value to us, they must have a practical adequacy; they must function as a kind of owner’s manual for negotiating and guiding us through the material world. And practical reason “is concerned to adjust the world to our will,” for if we are to survive, we must work with nature in order to procure the things we need, not just for survival, but for our social development as human beings (Ibid. 66). So when we are faced with competing theories, we do not choose one theory over another simply because it is popular, but because, ultimately, knowledge is not just

6

Theory/practice inconsistencies

about defining, but about doing. Because reality is impervious to our descriptions of it, the description that more closely fits reality is the better description. In short, we choose one theory T1 over another theory T2 because theory T1 is able to explain most of what theory T2 can explain, plus something significant that theory T2 is not able to explain. The reintroduction of ontology into philosophy is key to Bhaskar’s project, which he calls transcendental realism, critical realism, or dialectical critical realism. While there are differences between these various designations, I will refer to Bhaskar’s work as critical realism and will treat critical realism as a totality of Bhaskar’s philosophical development. To balance the transitive dimension of epistemology, Bhaskar (1997) introduces the intransitive dimension of ontology, “in which the objects of scientific thought are seen as generative mechanisms and structures which exist and act independently of men” (242). Accordingly, while our ideas about reality may change over time, reality itself does not change with our changing thoughts. In other words, the ontological realm of the real is not reducible to the epistemological realm of knowing. The object of scientific thought is impervious to our definitions of and discourses about it. If this were not so, we would be hard pressed to explain why reality has a way of surprising us or why our senses sometimes deceive us. If reality were not impervious to our definitions of reality, there would be little point in scientific investigation––whether in the natural sciences or in the human sciences––for reality would always be in phase with or conform to our conceptions of it. Just as any epistemology or theory of knowledge presupposes an ontology or theory of reality, whether or not the latter is acknowledged and articulated, any stable set of practices we employ sooner or later presupposes a theory. When we engage in any activity, from hammering a nail to constructing a research project, a particular conception of reality is at work, guiding us in our action and giving us some kind of justification for assuming that we will be successful in our endeavor. If we are unaware of the model of reality our activity and knowledge-making claims presuppose, we run the risk of not fully understanding why we have been successful when we are, nor why we have failed when we do. As Andrew Collier points out, “the alternative to philosophy is not no philosophy, but bad philosophy” (1994: 16). Philosophy’s job is to make explicit what is implicit in our practice, and the same can be said of theory. If we fail to articulate a more adequate conception of theory, we may find ourselves on dubious ground for knowledge-making. Theory, under critical realism, does not claim to be lord and master over practice, nor is a theory produced in a social vacuum. Rather, a theory is constructed out of previous practices and conceptions of reality that have worked up to a certain point but which have reached a place where anomalies have accrued that can no longer be ignored. But anomalies do not spring full grown from theory, as Athena did from Zeus’s head. They come about, as Thomas Kuhn explains in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), because a particular, historically situated practice causes them to occur. And when enough of these “anomalies” accrue

Theory/practice inconsistencies

7

over time, the discourse community studying the phenomenon begins to construct new theories to replace the old one. Eventually through the empirical and hermeneutical work of the community, one theory will be chosen as the best replacement of the previous theory. This function of theory will be explained in further detail later, but the point I want to make here is that theory is informed by practice just as practice is informed by theory, and both theory and practice are historically circumscribed. At any given time, theory is the mediator between epistemology and ontology; it is the third term in the dialectic of knowledge-making. While Hobson rejects the self-canceling logic of dialectics in order to avoid worrying about theory/practice inconsistency, he could just as easily accept the logic of dialectics and, thereby, move beyond theory/practice inconsistencies. It should be noted that in rescuing practice from the tyranny of theory, Bhaskar is not reversing roles and placing theory under the opportunistic primacy of practice. Thus, Andrew Collier (1994) asks: “is it practically desirable that theories should be accepted or rejected on practical rather than theoretical grounds?” Collier then goes on to explain: This kind of “primacy of practice” undermines the possibility of subjecting a practical orientation to a certain kind of critique. It prevents us from saying that a given practice rests on certain false or contradictory beliefs. Practical attitudes become immune to theoretical critique, and, by the same token, are reduced to mere attitudes, which may certainly clash with other such attitudes, but not be argued about rationally. (15) This passage relates back to the “theoretico-practical duality” of judgment formation. One of the values of theory is its ability to transform a practice by identifying and correcting “cognitive errors implicit in that practice” (Ibid. 15). For example, the theory that the earth is round, based on careful observation and theoretical speculation, helped cartographers move beyond the Ptolemaic construction of maps, despite our everyday common sense and experience that the world appears flat. Three rhetorics: a brief historical sketch My point in this foray is not to present a thorough or concise history of composition studies over the last thirty-five years, for I have done neither. What I hope to do in this brief introduction is to present three schools of thought in composition theory: expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist. This taxonomy is not my invention, for both Lester Faigley in “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (1986) and James Berlin in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class” (1988) have focused on these three theories of composition. Moreover, Berlin has commented that these “three rhetorics … have emerged as most conspicuous in classroom practices” (477). The point

8

Theory/practice inconsistencies

I wish to make is that, whether from within or from without, calls have been made to raise composition studies from the “ghetto” to “the status of a respectable intellectual discipline” (Lauer 1970: 396). And here I wish now to contribute to this ongoing dialogue. More specifically, I will use these three rhetorics or schools of composition theory to frame or limit my study. I am not suggesting that all composition theories can be reduced to these categories or that this taxonomy exhausts current composition theory. Clearly, the field of composition studies is more complex than is reflected by these three schools––even more so today than when Faigley and Berlin wrote their articles. Feminist, post-process, current-traditional, and “growth through English” models are just some of the theories of composition that are still being used today. Moreover, it should be pointed out that Faigley and Berlin have a decided agenda in demonstrating the superiority of social-constructivist rhetoric, raising the possibility that their treatments of expressivist and cognitivist rhetorics are unfair. Yet, despite the simplicity of this tripartite taxonomy and the possible unfair treatment of expressivists and cognitivists at the hands of Faigley and Berlin, these three rhetorics are useful for the purposes of this study due to the range of their theory/practice inconsistencies, inconsistencies which may be shared by other rhetorics. Because of this broad range of theory/practice inconsistencies and the likelihood that these inconsistencies are shared by other rhetorics, I feel justified in limiting my study to these three. Over the last three and a half decades or so, we have seen many changes (or perceived changes) as well as calls for change in the field of composition studies. Expressivists, operating out of a romantic conception of the self and confronted by the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s, sought to fight against oppressive social forces by preparing students to find their own voice and their own sense of self, freeing them from the coercion of exploitive institutions. For example, Peter Elbow explains that his purpose in writing his book Writing without Teachers (1973) was to help students “to become less helpless, both personally and politically” (vii). Expressivists, the most pervasive of what James Berlin calls subjective rhetorics, also made use of cognitive psychology, but not for the purpose of understanding problem-solving strategies or levels of cognitive development. Rather the concern was to bolster the argument that writing can lead to discovery, and particularly self-discovery (Berlin 1987:145–6). Stephen M. North, in his book The Making of Knowledge in Composition (1987), calls this group practitioners and identifies the type of knowledge they produce as “lore.” While not all expressivists are clearly linked to North’s practitioners, nor are all the theorists he cites expressivists, he does cite many theorists commonly associated with expressivist rhetoric in his discussion of practitioners, more so than in any other group represented in his study. North uses the designation “lore” because this group usually does not produce quantifiable research and their concern is more often with what to do in the classroom as opposed to scientific or theoretical justifications for what they do. Because of this, North writes regarding practitioners that

Theory/practice inconsistencies

9

they need to be more methodologically self-conscious than any of the other communities: to know the limits of the authority the other modes of inquiry can claim, on the one hand; but to know the limits of their own, as well, and work within them. In that direction, and not in any sort of methodological masquerade, lies the basis for a genuine credibility. (55) We have also received challenges by cognitivists to become more rigorous or scientific in our studies if we hope to achieve the status of a serious discipline. As Janice Lauer (1970) contended: “Freshman English will never reach the status of a respectable intellectual discipline unless both its theorizers and its practitioners break out of the ghetto” (396). For many people, scientific knowledge grounded in the physical sciences represents the apex of human achievement, and the hallmark of scientific knowledge for them is prediction. As a result, some believe that any discipline which lacks the certainty of such scientific knowledge––that is, any discipline that is incapable of prediction––is in such a state because the practitioners in that discipline have not yet learned to differentiate adequately the various components or moments that constitute their object of study along with an accurate description of its initial conditions. Influenced by the methodology of the physical sciences and work in cognitive psychology, many took up the challenge to make composition studies “scientific.” Some constructed experimental research projects to generate quantifiable knowledge about writing and the writing process. Others subjected writers (both experienced and inexperienced) to writing protocols, wherein writers attempt to convey verbally the thoughts that stream through their minds while they produce text, rewrite, and edit in a recursive manner. And still others, availing themselves of models of the mind borrowed from cybernetics, sought to explain the writing process in terms of problem-solving strategies based on such models. During this same period, literary theorists were becoming increasingly aware of postmodern theories of language and meaning, and composition instructors, many of whom were originally trained in literary studies, brought into the matrix of composition studies a postmodern skepticism toward claims of authority or claims of foundational knowledge. With an understanding that all experience must be individually interpreted, many saw the claims of “scientific” knowledge and the “scientific” method as questionable at best. This third group, the social-constructivists, found themselves grappling with the same problem Kant faced: if physical bodies are subject to the laws of nature, wherein all action is ultimately determined, how can agency or moral responsibility be sustained? Following Richard Rorty (1980), some sought freedom or agency in the hermeneutic act: “Man is always free to choose new descriptions (for, among other things, himself)” (362). While not rejecting science and the scientific method outright, an understanding of human agency and power struggles was sought in hermeneutics and the study of discourse, and science was seen for many as

10 Theory/practice inconsistencies inappropriate for composition studies and/or as constituting oppressive hegemonic power relations. As a result, language and the power exercised through language became a central concern for this group. If all experience was interpreted by the individual and that interpretation was accomplished by one’s language and cognitive tools inherited from one’s culture, then a person’s language and culture were seen as a (if not the) strategic place to confront the powers that be. Rather than letting uncaring politicians or profit-hungry corporate bureaucrats define them, students were armed with the knowledge that they too had a stake in how language was used and how people were defined, and armed with such knowledge, composition instructors hoped to help liberate their students from what they saw as oppressive forces. Method: ideal types, emmanent critique, and transcendental arguments In order to go about critiquing different rhetorics, an adequate description of those rhetorics must be constructed. Within any school of thought in composition studies, one is, however, likely to find serious disagreements between many of that school’s constituents, and I am not suggesting that such disagreements are superficial. But if one hopes to avoid an infinite regress, wherein every composition theory is unique to every theorist and completely devoid of any commonality shared by other theories, disagreements must be put aside for a moment in order to focus on the commonalities that are shared. And the use of ideal types as advanced by Max Weber is an appropriate tool for such a task. If I may allow myself a short digression, I would like to acknowledge that the theorists I draw on in constructing my ideal types are not static, closed beings. Many have clearly moved beyond the positions laid out in the articles and books I cite, and quite likely those who have not made such moves in publication have done so in their thinking. Constructing ideal types from published works was also difficult for me because I found myself wanting to read these works sympathetically, filling in gaps or qualifying in my own terms the various words and ideas used by these writers. I had to continually remind myself of my task, which was to construct ideal types, not gloss other people’s work. So I have located what appeared to me to be pivotal statements around which these theories of composition turn and have taken them at face value. Have I misinterpreted what these writers mean? Possibly. But part of my hope here is to force others to articulate more clearly their ideas and positions. If they have not done so, I am not the one to be blamed. It is now time to move on to ideal types. An ideal type is a description that focuses on or highlights particular elements of a cultural phenomenon that are of interest to the investigator (Ashley and Orenstein 1995: 283). But what is to keep a description from becoming a gratuitous collection of issues for the purpose of creating a straw man argument? In Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and

Theory/practice inconsistencies

11

Social Sciences (1997), Fritz Ringer argues that such a view is a misjudgment of Weber’s methodology and that “Weber’s concept of the ideal type just cannot be rightly understood apart from his broader strategies of singular and interpretive causal analysis” (119). By singular causal analysis, Weber did not contend that all cultural effects are the result of a singular linear sequence of antecedents such as the constant conjunction of events that constitute Humean causal laws. On the contrary, Weber writes: To begin with, we ask … how the attribution of a concrete ‘result’ to a single ‘cause’ is … feasible … in principle, given that in reality it is always an infinity of causal factors that brought about the single ‘event,’ and that strictly all of these … causal factors were indispensable for the achievement of the result. (quoted in Ringer 1997: 67) Weber clearly sees causal factors as a totality of concrete conditions that would be impossible to reproduce in any description since there is potentially an infinite number of causal factors involved. What the investigator must do is isolate a complex of prior conditions that most likely contribute to the resulting phenomenon under examination. For example, an automobile accident might be explained by an icy patch on the road if the speed of the vehicle, direction traveled, condition of the tires, etc. would not have caused the accident had the icy patch not been there. Certainly, all of these factors and more played a part in the accident, but if we are left to sort through the numerous factors that could contribute to the accident, we will never be able to explain why the accident occurred (because we will never finish our analysis) or give advice on how to avoid a similar accident in the future. But by selecting and focusing on potential causes of the accident, one can sort through the various possibilities and compare the potentiality of other possible outcomes. The point is not to establish that the icy patch caused the accident, but rather to show that had the icy patch not been there, the accident would not have happened. Thus, by working backwards from the result to the previous conditions and the possible causes, the investigator interprets and explains why it is that the result in question occurred. For Weber, the explanation that results from the use of singular causal analysis will deal in probabilities rather than “scientific” certainty and prediction, and the function of explanation via interpretation, as opposed to pure description, is then seen as central to Weber’s method. The procedure of sorting and ranking possible causes is accomplished through counterfactual reasoning or reflection on other possible outcomes given a different set of antecedent conditions. By way of a thought experiment, one could examine the objective possibilities of another set of conditions and reasonably extrapolate the probability of their outcomes. In other words, one could reason, counter to the facts, that given the condition of the tires, the speed of the vehicle, the direction of travel, etc., the accident

12 Theory/practice inconsistencies would not have occurred had the road been dry. But how does one select from the infinite possibilities of prior conditions a particular factor or set of factors for analysis? “Weber begins by focusing upon the singular phenomenon to be explained. This explanandum is selected for analysis because it is culturally significant––or seems significant to the investigator––in its distinctive contemporary form” (Ringer 1997: 72–3). One of the strengths of Weber’s method is that it places in the forefront the cultural influences and interests of the investigator. No pretense is made toward absolute objectivity in the selection of what is studied, yet it should be noted that Weber does not abandon objectivity. But more to the point, the explanandum is selected because faced with a large number of possible factors, the one(s) that initially makes sense given our everyday experience is likely a better place to start than choosing the explanandum or factor according to alphabetical order or some other serendipitous method. And often times, the scientific (or otherwise) community, with its paradigms, assumptions, techniques, and so on, plays a role in emphasizing one explanandum over another. The point of this departure from ideal types to Weber’s singular causal analysis was to establish why ideal types are not a gratuitous way of erecting straw man arguments. But before I go on, I would like to quote Ringer (1997) at length by way of a summary of Weber’s method: to interpret a text or an action, according to Weber, we begin by assuming that it is (or was) rational in the light of our own relevant criteria (‘rightly rational’). We then check whether the actual sequence of sentences in the text––or of observed behaviors––is (or was) consistent with this initial assumption. To the extent that we observe inconsistencies, we introduce supplementary hypotheses; perhaps an understandable error was made; or assumptions were involved that are interpretably ‘meaningful’ but not rational in our sense. Alternately, we may be dealing with unreflected ‘beliefs’ or ‘traditional’ actions which must be traced to inherited institutions or practices. Or irrational attitudes may be involved that are best deduced from empirical ‘rules’ of common sense ‘psychology.’ (119) Weber’s ideal types, like his singular causal analysis, are based on the selection of traits (or possible causal factors in the case of causal analysis) that are not just of interest to the investigator but are also pertinent to the study at hand. While the possible forces and particulars of the antecedent conditions of a cause may be infinite, singular causal analysis focuses on specific factors that seem culturally relevant or interesting for the purpose of understanding how those factors contribute to the examined result. In the same way, in the construction of an ideal type certain aspects are highlighted, creating a one-sided abstraction from something that is admittedly more complex for the purpose of understanding how those aspects relate to and function within the concrete totality of the thing being typed. And like Weber’s singular causal analysis,

Theory/practice inconsistencies

13

ideal types can be used to detect “inconsistencies” resulting from deviations from “rightly rational” thinking. In this particular study, these deviations or theory/practice inconsistencies are interpreted, in keeping with the strategy of causal analysis, as not just being out of phase with my “own relevant criteria” but also as being in phase with another set of beliefs. And, as I will show, these other sets of beliefs are either assumptions “that are interpretably ‘meaningful’ but not rational in [my] sense” or are “unreflected ‘beliefs’ … which must be traced to inherited institutions or practices” (Ibid. 119). Weber points out that ideal types are “one-sidedly exaggerated,” but they are made so for a reason. They are, Ringer (1997) tells us: “pure constructs of relationships” that we conceive as “sufficiently motivated,” “objectively probable” and thus causally “adequate” in the light of our “nomological knowledge.” They are valuable as cognitive means, to the extent that they lead to knowledge of “concrete cultural phenomena in their interconnections, their causes, and their significance.” (111–12) As in any field or discipline, what individuals believe and practice may not be completely consistent with an abstract definition of the particular school of thought with which they might identify. Given the state of postmodern philosophies and their influence on composition studies, the application of ideal types will, however, be useful in understanding the “concrete cultural phenomena” of current composition studies. For my purposes, my ideal types will be constructed from within the argot and interests of the three rhetorics––i.e. from their ontological, epistemological, and pedagogical claims. And in conjunction with ideal types, I will use immanent critique to expose theory/practice inconsistencies, which, according to Bhaskar (1993), turn on “an agent or community rejecting in its practice what it affirms in its theory and/or expressing in its practice what it denies in its theory” (66). Immanent critique consists of accepting theoretical and practical claims at face value and then extending them until contradictions are exposed. The theory/practice inconsistencies that I will examine consist of the implicit and explicit claims about the nature of reality that deny the possibility of certain practical claims expressed in pedagogical goals. On that basis, ontological claims are important for constructing ideal types because they embody explicit claims about the nature of reality. Epistemological claims are important because every epistemology implies a certain ontology, whether implicit or explicit; when theorists fail to articulate a clear notion of reality, the presupposed notion of reality can be reconstructed from epistemological claims. So both ontological and epistemological claims are used to flesh out the theory side of theory/practice inconsistencies. And finally, pedagogical goals are important because they reveal the practice side of theory/practice inconsistencies. They tell us what theorists think is possible in practical terms.

14 Theory/practice inconsistencies Once I have completed my critiques of the expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist rhetorics, I will propose that certain valuable insights typifying each of these rhetorics can be salvaged by placing them within the critical realist ontology Bhaskar has developed, a move justified by use of transcendental argument. As we have noted, Kant used transcendental argument, asking what the mind must be like in order for one to apprehend and understand the phenomena of the world. In Kant’s epistemological turn, he placed reality inside the head, so to speak. Bhaskar has also made use of transcendental argument in critical realism when he asked what the world must be like in order for science to be possible, making an ontological turn. Following Bhaskar, I will use a transcendental argument by asking what the world must be like for communication to be possible, and, of course, that world, I will argue, must be like Bhaskar’s critical realist ontology. As James Moffett (1983) correctly points out, “[t]o abstract is to trade a loss of reality for a gain in control” (23). And while I am certainly losing a degree of reality in my abstractions in order to gain some control over my subject matter, my point here is not to use such “control” to attack or gain argumentative leverage. Rather, I am employing the abstraction of “ideal types” to present a critique that has broader application. As with any abstraction, it must be brought back into the concrete particular if it is to yield useful knowledge. In this instance, the concrete particular lives with the individual instructor of composition and her own theory of composition. Practitioners are continually on the move in terms of their theoretical beliefs and pedagogical practices, and this is undoubtedly a sign of any healthy intellectual/academic field. So while many composition instructors might not completely identify with these theories as I present them, there is the possibility that they are aware of or grappling with the same theory/practice inconsistencies. My hope is that this study will sharpen the general level of awareness in the field of composition studies regarding the importance of our theories of reality and how they relate to our practices in the classroom. Why critical realism? Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism has been borrowed by such academic disciplines as sociology, economics, and psychology. All of these disciplines fall under the heading human sciences as qualified by Bhaskar’s Possibility of Naturalism (1979). Composition studies clearly qualifies as part of the human sciences because it operates in open systems, does not have access to predictive experimentation, and utilizes explanatory justifications in its production of knowledge. Because others have productively applied critical realism to their disciplines, I have every expectation that critical realism can also be applied productively to composition studies. To my knowledge, only one book and one article, both by the same author, have been written which make use of Bhaskar’s critical realism in conjunction with composition studies; the book is Michael Bernard-Donals’s The Practice

Theory/practice inconsistencies

15

of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy (1998b). BernardDonals’s interest has been in connecting the human and natural sciences through rhetoric, drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between natural philosophy and rhetoric. While Bernard-Donals does make limited use of Bhaskar’s work, his goal is not to examine theory/practice inconsistencies, but rather to argue that rhetoric can serve as a mediation between competing theories of anti-foundationalism, knowledge, and pedagogy. His work will be useful in situating my own study, but there is relatively little overlap. Bernard-Donals has also co-edited a book with Richard R. Glejzer entitled Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy (1998). In this collection, Bernard-Donals has contributed a concluding chapter: “Composition in an Antifoundational World: A Critique and a Proposal” (1998a). After examining the work of a number of people, ranging from Patricia Bizzell and James Berlin to Kenneth Bruffee and Kurt Spellmeyer, all of whom have addressed the issue of anti-foundationalism and their various proposals for avoiding different forms of relativism, Bernard-Donals writes: I have already suggested that even the “stronger” versions of antifoundational composition pedagogy and theory, despite their claims to the contrary, stop short of a dialectical relationship of hermeneutics and science, one that recognizes a role for description and systematic scientific (and social scientific) investigation of phenomena, and social structures, and cultural artifacts. One version that does––and suggests a program for pedagogy that imbricates the material and the interpretive––is implied by Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. (445–6) He goes on to point out that Bhaskar’s work is consistent with social theory of science explored by such writers as Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Donna Haraway, suggesting that such a social theory of science “sees science as objective from the vantage point of various distinct and identifiable social positions, positions that at once guide scientific research and are subject to natural and scientific investigation themselves” (Ibid. 446). Bernard-Donals then concludes that composition theorists might find useful four principles that he has gleaned from Bhaskar. First, despite the fact that the work of science is a social activity and operates under social conventions which affect our view of the world, “science is able to tell us, with some success, how ‘the world’ operates” (Ibid. 447). Second, social structures are relatively enduring forms that play a significant role in causing “events” and impacting the material world. That is, social activity presupposes social structures which not only coerce and limit our activities, but also enable certain activities. Third, because we must cope not only with people but also with objectively real social structures, we must engage in explanatory critique in order to “disentangle the webs of relations in social life” (Bhaskar 1989: 175). And fourth, while hermeneutic interpretation is vital to our production of knowledge, there is a non-discursive element

16 Theory/practice inconsistencies which is not reducible to our descriptions of it. In other words, our experience of the phenomenal world is not identical to our descriptions of the phenomenal world. His main thrust in this critique and proposal is that we must not only participate in describing the world, but we should be about the business of changing the world. This essay touches on many key issues Bhaskar has developed to which I will return in the second chapter. In the same collection, Michael Sprinker’s “The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science” (1998) examines Bhaskar’s critical realism in its relationship to the works of Richard Rorty, Louis Althusser, Stanley Aronowitz, and Paul Feyerabend. Apart from Aronowitz, Bhaskar has critiqued these writers in his book Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (1989). Sprinker defends Althusser against part of Bhaskar’s critique, offers his own critique of Aronowitz based on Bhaskar’s critical realism, and basically summarizes Bhaskar’s critiques of Rorty and Feyerabend. While Sprinker clearly identifies himself with critical realism and argues against the various forms of anti-realism promoted by these writers, with the exception of Althusser, he says nothing about composition or how these issues might relate to composition studies. His article is, nevertheless, instructive in understanding how these various philosophies of science differ from Bhaskar’s. Others, however, have used Bhaskar’s critical realism in other disciplines. Trevor Pateman, in Language in Mind and Language in Society: Studies in Linguistic Reproduction (1987), has applied Bhaskar’s work to an examination of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories. As Andrew Collier explains Pateman’s work, “The main explicit references to critical realism in Language in Mind and Language in Society … are in defense of Chomsky’s practice of science against the attacks of positivism on the one hand, and hermeneutically oriented philosophies, on the other” (1994: 209). In “Psychoanalysis as a Human Science,” (1980) David Will has used critical realism to defend psychoanalysis against the attacks of Popperian positivists who claim psychoanalysis is not scientific by arguing that falsification is only possible in closed systems and humans are not closed systems (202–05). He then goes on to demonstrate how Bhaskar’s notion of scientific practice is consistent with Freud’s use of psychoanalysis, and that critical realism’s stratified reality is consistent with psychoanalysis’s search for successively deeper layers of explanation (Ibid. 207–8). In “Social Theory and Naturalism: An Introduction,” (1996) Elias L. Khalil grapples with the issue of naturalism––namely, can humans be studied in the same way scientists study nature? In so doing, he addresses the issue of antifoundationalism, arguing that without some way to mediate between different claims, we run the risk of committing the “naturalist fallacy”: “the deduction of what ought to be from what is conceived to be a matter of natural propensity or natural tendency” (8). This fallacy, which becomes a justification for maintaining the status quo, can be avoided by what Khalil calls soft foundationalism, which is similar to Bhaskar’s treatment of the transitive and

Theory/practice inconsistencies

17

intransitive dimensions. “Soft foundationalism or the inability to provide solid, timeless policy recommendations,” Khalil contends, “should not be considered a shortcoming. On the contrary, it should be regarded as a sign of strength because it provides the hope that theoretical pursuits could account for the complexity of organization and conflicting historical processes” (Ibid. 7–8). While Khalil does not credit Bhaskar for his notion of soft foundationalism, he is aware of Bhaskar’s work and draws on it in developing his position. Andrew Sayer, in Method in Social Science (1992), applies critical realism to sociology, elaborating on Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (1979). Sayer explores common misconceptions about knowledge and language and examines the production and function of theory in scientific work. He also attacks positivism and in particular Popper’s theory of falsification from a critical realist position. Sayer’s work is clearly indebted to Bhaskar’s critical realism, especially as extended into critical naturalism, and his book is the most accessible interpretation of Bhaskar’s philosophy that I have read. Zohreh Emami and Timothy Riordan (1998) explore the pedagogical implications of critical realism in their respective disciplines, while Tony Lawson (1994) uses critical realism to attack the positivist understanding of cause and effect in economics (224–33). And others, such as Margaret Archer (1998), William Outhwaite (1998), Peter Manicas (1998), Hugh Lacey (1998), and Alan Norrie (1998), have availed themselves of Bhaskar’s critical realism to vindicate the social sciences and to argue for the importance of explanatory critique. And, of course, these forays into the social sciences justify my appropriation of critical realism into the discipline of composition, for I would argue composition fits under the umbrella of social science as understood from Bhaskar’s explanation of critical naturalism. Conclusion As any work is historically situated, my work here is built upon the important work of other composition theorists. It is only because others have laid the groundwork by fleshing out their respective theories of composition that my work is possible. And while I am proposing that there are serious problems inherent in each of these rhetorics, my work would not be possible without the good work others have done. By exposing theory/practice inconsistencies in these rhetorics, I am hoping to further clarify the theoretical assumptions that will assist future studies. As such, theory/practice inconsistencies are important anomalies which can be used to expose inadequate notions of reality incapable of coherently sustaining the practical activities of a particular community. These inconsistencies can be exposed by reconstructing the presupposed ontology implicit in the epistemology of a discipline and then comparing this notion of reality with the epistemological claims and/or pedagogical goals of that discipline. When we have discovered that a theory of reality denies the possibility of or makes incoherent an epistemological

18 Theory/practice inconsistencies claim and/or a pedagogical goal or practice, we have identified a theory/practice inconsistency. And these theory/practice inconsistencies should serve as a warning to us that we are operating on undertheorized assumptions. But the various models of reality which underpin the different rhetorics examined here are not unique to these rhetorics themselves. Rather these models have been borrowed from previous philosophies of science––perhaps intentionally and perhaps unintentionally––which Bhaskar has already critiqued. He has demonstrated how each model of reality is incapable of sustaining a coherent notion of science, i.e. he has exposed the theory/practice inconsistencies of each model of reality. And it is upon Bhaskar’s work that the following critiques are situated. Therefore, in order to appreciate fully the critiques of composition theory offered in this book, we must first turn our attention to Bhaskar’s work, which is the focus of Chapter 2. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will focus on expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist rhetorics respectively, offering critiques demonstrating the theory/practice inconsistencies of each rhetoric. In these central chapters I will also examine student writing samples written in response to assignments grounded in the three rhetorics being critiqued. The assignments were co-designed by myself and other colleagues, with the explicit intention of crafting assignments consistent with each respective theory of composition. Moreover, all the assignments deal with the same topic––homelessness in America––which allows for obvious comparisons between the various composition theories. The writing samples come from courses taught by myself and others. It occurs to me that I could be accused of setting up straw men to knock down by making writing assignments designed to fail in the ways I have argued they might based on my critiques. In anticipation of such accusations, I want to make clear that the writing assignments used to generate the student writing samples appearing in this book were constructed with the help of other specialists in composition as a counter to any unconscious temptation on my part to undermine the legitimacy of the assignments. In other words, I endeavored to share responsibility for making assignments representative of their corresponding theories. Yet any failure to safeguard appropriately the design of those assignments rests with me alone. The final chapter concludes with a proposal for a critical realist rhetoric or theory of composition able to sustain some of the important insights gained from the rhetorics critiqued in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 without falling into theory/practice inconsistencies. I will suggest strategies for designing assignments, share some of the assignments I have used, and examine student writing samples written in response to some of these assignments.

2

Critical realism and philosophies of science

To understand more clearly the critiques of the particular theories of composition presented here, an adequate understanding of Bhaskar’s critiques of competing theories of natural science and their implications for the human sciences is needed. Bhaskar begins his project of critical realism with a twopronged approach: the first is to present immanent critiques of the current theories of natural science; the second is to propose, based on the problems exposed through these immanent critiques, what the world must be like in order for science and scientific practice to be valid. Before I present a positive account of critical realism, I will examine some of the competing philosophies of science, fleshing out their underlying assumptions. Then I will discuss the weaknesses in these philosophies of science that Bhaskar’s immanent critiques exposed, thus setting the grounds for discussing critical realism. Hume and empirical realism Classical empiricism dates back at least to David Hume. It presupposes what Bhaskar calls an empirical realist ontology. In this context, the term realist means that the material world is taken to exist and operate independently of our knowing it. Empirical, in this sense, means that what we know of the world comes to us through our senses being impinged upon by phenomena. Hume contended that when we experience events, we do so serially––i.e. the occurrence of A is followed temporally by B. When we can replicate this temporal sequence over and over again, we obtain what Bhaskar calls a constant conjunction of events. When the conjunction of A followed by B is established, the empirical realist draws the conclusion that such a constant conjunction is both a necessary and sufficient condition for discovering a scientific law. In other words, Hume’s law of causality is based on a constant conjunction of events. If the empirical realist model and its causal accounts are to make sense, reality must, however, be constituted in certain ways. Thus, for example, the figure A→B visually illustrates how Humean causal laws do not allow for any vertical or depth explanation. That is, no room is made for the possibility that an, as yet, unseen mechanism which is triggered by the occurrence of

20 Philosophies of science A produces the effect B. Under these conditions, causal agency resides in the atomistic things or events being observed in the scientific experiment. In other words, when the workings of reality are reduced to a constant conjunction of empirical events––i.e. A followed by B––all that is allowed is the external interaction of atomistic, discrete objects, A and B in this case, much like billiard balls colliding with one another. Moreover, if nature consists of only atomistic things or events, then all causal action must be mechanistic. Under a mechanistic conception of action, no room is left for things possessing emergent powers, powers resulting from the internal complexity of a thing, powers irreducible to the interaction of other forces outside the thing. Another aspect of the reality presupposed by the Humean conception of causal laws is the closed system. Since the benchmark of empirical realist science is prediction, the same sequence of events, A followed by B, must occur every time B occurs. That is, laws are literally dependent upon a constant conjunction of events. But in order to identify this constant conjunction of events, which for the Humean empiricist constitutes natural laws (i.e. universal laws) carefully managed laboratory experiments must be manipulated in order to bring about such a constant conjunction. Now the laboratory experiment is a closed system to the extent it assures there is no interference from unexpected or uncontrolled variables. But if causal laws are constituted by this precisely controlled conjunction of events as observed in the controlled laboratory experiment, then what are we to say about the same laws as they operate outside the experimental setting? That is, if laws of nature are what the Humean empiricist claims, i.e. a constant conjunction of events, they should operate with the same constancy in open natural settings as they do in the closed experimental setting. Hence, empirical realists are caught in a bind: they must either claim the world is a closed system, such that the constant conjunction of events (Humean laws) identified through scientific experiments work with the same constancy in the world outside the laboratory, or they must acknowledge that science so far has not been able to give us any scientific laws. As Bhaskar shows, the former is not empirically demonstrable, while the latter ends in the absurdity of denying the well-established efficacy of scientific knowledge. Such are the results of Bhaskar’s critique of the Humean account of universal laws. In the Humean account of causal laws, we come to know the world solely via some outside force impinging upon the senses. In this description no distinction is made between our experience of A followed by B and the event of A followed by B; rather, the event as such is collapsed into our experience of the event. Because of this collapsing of ordered or perceived events into experience, the empirical realist model implies that we apprehend reality immediately, with our minds acting as a sort of tabula rasa. This, in turn, leads to further complications for empirical realism: knowledge, we are told, can be acquired immediately by the isolated individual through observation and contemplation. No language is needed to provide the cognitive tools that would enable one to discern the difference between an event and the

Philosophies of science

21

experience of the event, nor is the intervention of prior knowledge, such as concepts, models, paradigms, or previously discovered laws of nature, necessary to generate new knowledge. In other words, the conception of the knowledge-producer is individualistic and passive, and the social history of knowledge-production and its evolution becomes irrelevant. Once the social aspects of the human are ignored, knowledge becomes a reified something “out there,” waiting to be discovered, rather than something that is actively produced from human interaction with nature. It should be noted that Bhaskar’s task is not to deny the scientific experiment, but to save it from the demonstrably incoherent account Humean empiricism gives of the experiment itself. Once this account is straightened out, made coherent, then the ontological reduction of realism can proceed. Also, it should be clear by now that the ontology presupposed by empirical realism consists of atomistic things lacking internal necessity, essence, and emergent powers and interacting in a purely mechanistic manner in a closed world; humans are individualistic, passive recipients of knowledge apprehended immediately in their interaction with nature. Implications of the empirical realist ontology What are some of the implications of the empirical realist ontology for composition theory? As mentioned earlier, Humean empiricists make no distinction between their experience of the event and the event itself. In short, it presupposes we apprehend reality immediately with our minds as a tabula rasa. This naïve objectivist view ignores the part language and culture play in our ability to think. This one-dimensional conflation of subject and object resonates with the stance taken by social-constructivists. The socialconstructivists argue that language is not simply the tool by which we express our thoughts; it is, to a significant extent, the sine qua non of thinking itself––so much so that the two are analytically inseparable. Since language is peculiar to a culture, our thinking is subject to cultural influences as well. We do not need a language in order to have experiences, but perceptions are another issue. First, an object is needed that reflects or emits energy. Then we must have certain senses that are able to register this energy as a sensation. Lastly, in order for that sensation to become a perception, we need to conceptualize it, requiring the intervention of cognitive abilities that come from a learned social language. So rather than the mind being a tabula rasa, we approach the project of science (and everyday experience for that matter) with a whole set of conceptual tools inherited from the past through our language and culture which enable us to turn experiences into perceptions. This observation, of course, counters the notion that the isolated individual, who has never been socialized into a language community, is able to acquire this kind of knowledge; rather, science is a social endeavor. The empirical realist model also presupposes that the observer is passive rather than active. Simply through observation and contemplation, according

22 Philosophies of science to this model, we are able to deduce the nature of reality. But this model ignores the fact that the scientist physically intervenes in nature to set up an experiment. If we were able to apprehend the workings of nature immediately, not only would language and the social dimension be unnecessary, but so would experiments. But nature is capable of surprising us. Scientific experiments do not always produce the expected results, as any chemistry or biology student can tell us. So not only is science a social endeavor; science is labor. Moreover, if we were able to apprehend the workings of nature immediately, generating a conception of those workings, then our knowledge of nature should be like a mirror of nature itself. Bhaskar explains the matter thus: Knowledge and the world may be viewed as surfaces whose points are in isomorphic correspondence or, in the case of phenomenalism, actually fused. On this conception, science is conceived as a kind of automatic or behavioural response to the stimulus of given facts and their conjunctions. (1997: 24–5) Under an empirical realist ontology, simply by being in the world and observing it, scientific knowledge would be the natural result. Another implication of an atomistic, mechanistic model of reality, as the empirical realist model presupposes, is that once we apprehended the workings of nature, our knowledge would exhaust the object of inquiry. There would be nothing more to learn from it. Once we had observed and identified the constant conjunction of events which constitute a particular law, our knowledge would be complete. Given that Humean causal laws only afford a surface or horizontal explanation, the empirical realist is left with no explanation as to why our present knowledge might be challenged and corrected by future knowledge. Again, the figure A→B illustrates visually how Humean causal laws do not allow for any vertical or depth explanation. All the empiricist is able to allow is an “ontologically flattened” constant conjunction of events, A followed by the occurrence of B. Without the possibility of a deeper layer of reality wherein an, as yet, unseen mechanism causes B to occur when it is triggered by the occurrence of A, the empirical realist model must assume that the object of inquiry has been completely understood (in atomistic and mechanistic terms). Moreover, if things are atomistic, having no internal necessity or essence, and only interacting mechanically, all knowledge would be reductive, meaning that once we understood the workings of a thing’s smallest components, we would know how that thing will act, or better react, under any condition. Under the model of reality necessary for maintaining Humean accounts of causal laws, i.e. atomistic, mechanistic, and closed, a symmetry exists between science’s ability to explain the phenomenon under investigation and science’s ability to predict the phenomenon. In other words, “events are

Philosophies of science

23

explained by subsuming them under one or more universal laws; i.e. by deducing them from a set of one or more universal laws, together with a statement of their initial conditions” (Bhaskar 1997: 129–30). Events, thus, are predicted by deducing them from a set of universal laws in conjunction with a description of their initial conditions. As a result, all that should be necessary for prediction is an understanding of the universal laws pertaining to the object and an adequate knowledge of the initial conditions under which the object moves. When prediction fails, the reason given for failure is usually that an adequate knowledge of the initial conditions was not obtained. Had the observer adequately known the initial conditions, prediction would have been possible (Bhaskar 1997: 137). The final implication of the empirical realist ontology pertains to the world being a closed system. As mentioned earlier, empirical realists must maintain that the world is a closed system, wherein Humean casual laws obtain. By a closed system, I mean an environment free of unexpected or unexplained variables. Anything capable of acting in an unexpected manner, such as humans, would be an open system. That is, humans and open systems alike are not reducible to the additive workings of their smallest parts, just as humans are not reducible to the laws of chemistry or physics. (Humans are subject to the laws of chemistry and physics, but they are not reducible to them.) And Bhaskar will claim that nature is an open system, but more on that later. Causal laws, for Hume, are founded on a sequence of events— when we see A occur, it is immediately followed by B. What Hume forgets or takes for granted is the labor of the scientist who intervenes in the workings of nature by setting up the carefully controlled experiment. Careful observation and rational contemplation will not bring about the same sequence of events that the scientist observes in the laboratory experiment (apart from astronomy where heavenly bodies are so large that the universe constitutes a qualified closed system). And why must the scientist set up the experiment in order to identify causal laws? It is because these constant conjunctions of events are not readily available in nature. The scientist, through the experiment, creates the conditions that allow her/him to identify the workings of a causal mechanism manifested in the event of A followed by B. But if the laws of nature, under the Humean description of causal laws, are to be at work outside the laboratory in the chaotic flux of the world, then the world must be a closed system like the laboratory experiment. In other words, if the constant conjunction of events produced in the closed system of the laboratory experiment is to constitute casual laws, then the world must also be a closed system so that those laws can exist outside experimental conditions. And the Humean empiricist must admit to this or admit that science so far has not given us any laws of nature. If reality is atomistic and mechanistic and operates in a closed system, then human agency is, however, denied. If humans are not capable of self-directed interaction with one another and with nature, then we are left with a Panglossian world, for no other world is possible, humans are only automatons, and science becomes a predetermined activity.

24 Philosophies of science Now before we turn our attention to transcendental idealism, we should consider what Bhaskar calls actualism. Actualism is the idea that laws are relations between events or states of affairs (which are thought to constitute the objects of actual or possible experiences). Behind this idea of course lies the notion that only the actual (identified as the determinate object of the empirical) is real. (Bhaskar 1997: 64) The central characteristic of actualism is the acceptance of Humean causal laws such that causal laws are constituted by a constant conjunction of events. But actualism is not committed to the position that only events we experience have occurred. In fact, as Jonathan Joseph (1998) explains it, actualism “recognizes that events occur whether we experience them or not. However, this version of explanation is still tied to a Humean conception which reduces causal laws to an identification of constant conjunctions of events” (78). But there are two forms of actualism that must be considered: weak actualism and strong actualism. Weak actualism admits to open systems: in order to make sense of Humean causal laws, laws are qualified with a ceteris paribus clause. In other words, laws are qualified by the conditions of the experiment allowing one access to the empirical realization of an experiment’s consequent. So the constant conjunction of A followed by B is maintained, but it is done so at the cost of causal laws becoming universal. In short, causal laws, for the weak actualist, are limited to closed systems, leaving the weak actualist with the embarrassing question of what causes phenomena in open systems. But what happens when the consequent, B in this case, of an experiment is not forthcoming and yet the antecedent, A, of the law is verified? When a scientist postulates a law and sets up an experiment to verify that law, how can the scientist know whether it is the conception of the law that is faulty or that the ceteris paribus clause has not been met? For the weak actualist there is no way to determine between these two alternatives. Bhaskar explains that “although the law-like statement may be inapplicable, viz. if the CP [ceteris paribus] condition was not satisfied, rather than false, viz. if it was satisfied, there is no way on actualist lines that he can decide between these alternatives” (1997: 93). So the weak actualist, with an adherence to Humean causal laws, undermines the possibility of science. For when an experiment fails, if the scientist is not able to decide whether the failure is because the law s/he was trying to demonstrate is faulty or because the conditions of the experiment have been compromised, then there is no way for experimental science to be coherent. And scientific progress, in terms of increasing our understanding of how the world works, becomes the luck of the draw. Strong actualism, on the other hand, rejects the notion of open systems. So when faced with failure in a scientific experiment, the strong actualist would say that what was being tested, what was thought to constitute a law, is not a

Philosophies of science

25

law at all. “Strong actualism,” writes Bhaskar, “regards the appearance of open systems as a mark of ignorance and initiates interactionist and reductivist regresses in an attempt to overcome it” (Ibid. 95). What appears to be an open system, according to strong actualists, is merely a failure on the scientist’s part to break down adequately the complete state-description into appropriately atomized units. Once that is accomplished, it is believed the system can be shown to be closed. Under such a description, science so far has, however, not been able to give us any universal laws, for causal laws are typically only verifiable (or falsifiable) within experimentally closed conditions. As a result, two regresses are often attempted, according to Bhaskar. The interactionist regress consists of expanding the complete state-description to the point at which it includes everything, or, as Bhaskar puts it, “a full causal statement would seem to entail a complete state-description (or a complete history) of the world” (Ibid. 77). A paradox emerges here: confronted with a description of the entire world or history of the world being an integral part of any law-like statement, we become incapable of distinguishing between causes and conditions. The reductivist regress attempts to break everything down to its smallest, atomistic parts. In other words, “there can be no conditions intrinsic to the thing [because] a causal statement entails a complete reduction of things into their presumed atomistic components (or their original condition)” (Ibid. 77). Another paradox emerges: once all things are broken down into their smallest, atomistic parts, we have no way of distinguishing “between individuals and variables or between a thing and its circumstances” (Ibid. 77). Moreover, with both cases of actualism, the key concept of agency is impossible to sustain. And without agency, experimental science becomes incoherent. Let us now look at a specific form of actualism: transcendental idealism. Kant and transcendental idealism Another important philosophy of science is based upon transcendental idealist philosophy. Transcendental idealists, following Kant, move a step beyond the classical empiricists in that 1) they acknowledge a distinction between an event and the experience of the event and 2) they acknowledge the importance of model-building as a hypothetical way of explaining the workings of causal laws. With Kant’s development of the categories of understanding and his distinction between noumena and phenomena, all we can know indubitably when we experience an event is what goes on in the mind. That is, when we are confronted by a sensible object, the senses are impinged upon by some kind of stimuli (the phenomenon), and the senses send this information to the mind where it is interpreted or shaped by the universal categories of understanding. Such notions as quantity, quality, or relation are imposed by the universal categories of understanding upon the phenomenon we experience. From these categories, an “object of knowledge” is synthesized, and its representation is presented to our understanding for inspection. Hence, objects of sensitive

26 Philosophies of science knowledge are able to affect “the sensibility … of the subject, which is affected by the presence of an object so as to produce a representation of it” (Copleston 1964: 197). And this sensible knowledge has two conditions: matter and form. Matter is the inchoate manifold of sensations given off by the object, while the “form is that which co-ordinates the matter; it is contributed, as it were, by the knowing subject and is the condition of sensitive knowledge” (Ibid. 197). In other words, form is impressed upon matter by the categories of understanding, which are a necessary prerequisite for sensate knowledge. It is only after the understanding has formed matter into a sensible object that we are able to reflect upon this thought-object. In our first awareness of the thoughtobject, we apprehend matter and form as a union, but with philosophical thought, or “the logical use of the intellect,” we are able to make distinctions between form and matter (Ibid. 198). By use of the form/matter distinction, Kant avoids the collapsing of event into experience. Moreover, he differs from empirical realists by maintaining that a mere stream of representations in and of itself does not constitute knowledge. Rather, the understanding synthesizes the experience of the event with the categories of understanding, and in this way knowledge is produced. The object of knowledge, that is, the conceptual object that the understanding produces in conjunction with or in reaction to the phenomenon is given to the understanding. In other words, we produce our experience of the phenomenon, shaping it as a conceptual object of knowledge through the categories of the understanding. The stimulus or phenomenon caused by the noumenon or the thing-in-itself is considered scientifically unknowable as it is beyond our sense experience, but the thing-in-itself is not dependent upon the mind. As Copleston observes, “the human mind does not, on Kant’s view, constitute or create the object in its totality” (Ibid. 210). Because transcendental idealists do not collapse events into experiences of the events, formal model-building becomes important for understanding the workings of nature. Transcendental idealists are willing to postulate a formal mechanism beneath A→B which, when triggered by the occurrence of A, produces the effect B. These postulated mechanisms are, however, not taken to have an autonomous existential reality. They are like the thing-in-itself: unknowable. Imaginative model-building of possible mechanisms producing the stimuli in the first place is only a helpful fiction to aid the understanding. The world of phenomena for the transcendental idealist thus presupposes the constant conjunction of events as a sine qua non for natural necessity. Thus, the classic cause/effect model employed in the empirical realist ontology is also at work in the transcendental idealist’s phenomenal world. The difference is that knowledge of cause and effect for the transcendental idealist is a structure of the understanding; whereas for the classical empiricist, knowledge is vested in an actual sequence of atomistic events. For the transcendental idealist, the mind creates knowledge from the experience of the event, but for the classical empiricist the mind is passive, the knowledge of the world of events

Philosophies of science

27

being imprinted upon it. At the phenomenal level, because the empirical realist ontology––characterized as atomistic, mechanistic, and ultimately deterministic––is still accepted, freedom or agency is not scientifically demonstrable or supportable. For Hume, objectivity was embodied in the object itself because the subject which apprehended the object did so passively; that is, the material world would impinge upon the senses which immediately impressed a knowledge of the object upon the mind. Because of the passive nature of the subject and the immediate transmission of experience to the mind, objectivity was a simple, universal aspect of our being in the world. For Kant, however, “objects conform to the mind rather than the other way around” (Copleston 1964: 207). So the possibility of objectivity is moved from the material world or the object to the structured interior of the human mind, and the “structure of human sensibility and of the human mind is constant” (Ibid. 207). In other words, for knowledge to exist and be the subject of human discourse, the a priori laws of sensibility at work in one person’s mind must be identical to the workings of another person’s mind. Hence, the universality of the categories of understanding insure that we will all cause objects to conform to the same categories of the understanding in the same way. Objectivity is maintained, therefore, by the universal character of the categories of human understanding for Kant, while for Hume objectivity is maintained by the immediateness of the material world to the mind. While the transcendental idealist distinguishes between event and experience of the event, the transcendental idealist makes the same mistake as the empirical realist: a conflation of ontology into epistemology. Bhaskar, calling this the epistemic fallacy, explains this conflation as consist[ing] in the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms. The idea that being can always be analysed in terms of our knowledge of being, that it is sufficient for philosophy to ‘treat only of the network, and not what the network describes’, results in the systematic dissolution of the idea of a world … independent of but investigated by science. (1997: 36–7) Since the causal structures and things investigated by science are given their ordered qualities by the activity of the mind, the actual object of study is collapsed into our knowledge of the object. Another way to say this is that the transcendental idealist position ultimately cannot sustain the notion of an intransitive object of study existing independently of humans and human perception. And from here it is a short step, as the neo-Kantians have taken, to the position that objects of study are the creation of the human mind.

28 Philosophies of science Neo-Kantians and super idealism Neo-Kantians, or what Bhaskar calls “super idealists,” such as Thomas S. Kuhn and Richard Rorty, follow the Kantian school of thought in that the thing-in-itself is off limits to our knowing it, but they go beyond Kant in doing away with the thing-in-itself. The result of this form of radical skepticism is that reality itself is believed to be socially constructed. In other words, while Kant might say that our perception of reality is socially constructed, super idealists claim that reality itself is socially constructed. Some might argue that Kuhn should not be classified with the super idealists, and he is usually very careful in his explanation of the scientific paradigm shift to avoid such a classification; however, when he makes ambiguous statements that blur the edges between epistemology and ontology, the label of super idealist is justified. For example, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) Kuhn writes, “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world” (121). Kuhn is at best ambiguous here, and one might argue that this is simply a failure to articulate more clearly that a “different world” should really be read a “differently perceived world.” But Kuhn cannot be let off the hook so easily. For him, the work of science progresses normally via a scientific community continuously accumulating knowledge under a particular paradigm; however, as anomalies begin to accrue under the old paradigm, the community falls into crisis. The paradigm that has informed all the scientific work and production of knowledge becomes incapable of accounting for the growing body of anomalies. Eventually, the old paradigm is rejected in favor of a new one capable of dealing with said anomalies. Those who have worked most of their lives under the old paradigm likely will not make the change, but a new cohort entering the profession will rally around the new one, superseding the old paradigm as older members die off and are replaced by those who have been trained under the new paradigm. At the center of his description of revolutionary scientific change is the belief that competing paradigms are or can be incommensurable. For this reason, the change usually requires the older members of the scientific community dying off to be replaced by a new group of “Young Turks.” The problem with this model lies in its nominalism, for if there is a conflict between two paradigms or two theories, there must be a common something over which they clash. In other words, if we have two conflicting theories of reality, those theories are in conflict over the same reality; both theories are describing and explaining the same reality in different ways. The world does not change with the changing of theories; only our understanding of reality changes. No one would claim that a theory of biological evolution is in conflict with a theory of automotive diagnostics because the theories are not about the same thing, and while a theory of biological evolution may be incommensurable with a theory of automotive diagnostics, no one cares

Philosophies of science

29

because it is of no importance. It is only when the theories share elements of the same referent that the possibility of a clash can occur. As Andrew Collier (1994) points out, “if incommensurability is a kind of clash, there must be something to clash about; two theories that are not about the same thing can’t clash” (93). But even when theories are about the same referent, incommensurability is difficult to maintain, for, as Kuhn acknowledges, paradigms are not traded in wholesale. One paradigm is only abandoned after a new paradigm has been constructed, and the new paradigm is usually constructed from a position within the old paradigm, making use of the cognitive tools developed therein and inherited from the past. Even when a paradigm shift occurs under the influence of another discipline, the people promoting the shift from that other discipline (or those from the same discipline borrowing from the other discipline) have a shared knowledge of the discipline as it is described under the old paradigm. It is not uncommon to hear people say, “What you might call x, I would call y.” Moreover, Kuhn maintains that anomalies appear when trying to apply the old paradigm to the phenomena being explained. If the object of study is unaffected by how we think about it or if how we think about the object does not change the object, then nature itself gives us feedback to help guide us in how we describe and explain the object. Then we can understand how the old paradigm could have been useful up to a certain point but failed because at some level it did not conform to the object of study. But if the object always conformed to our thinking about it, the need for a new paradigm would never arise. We would be able to keep the old paradigm afloat indefinitely. And it is only if reality remains intransitive in relation to how we describe it or think about it, that we can sustain the process of rationally choosing between competing theories. If reality shifts with our shifting theories, then one theory would be as good as another. However, if reality does not change with our thinking, then we can choose one theory over another based on which theory has the greater explanatory power. If theory B is able to explain most of what theory A can explain plus something significantly more than theory A, then theory B is the preferable theory––for the time being. Richard Rorty, another super idealist, borrows from Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and revolutionary or abnormal science to develop his own notion of normal and abnormal discourse. Rorty’s concern is to cognitively establish a context in which humans can be free agents, and that context is discourse or language. As Rorty (1980) explains, “Man is always free to choose new descriptions (for, among other things, himself)” (362). But Rorty’s notion of “freedom” is worth examining. Collier (1994) explains that Rorty’s freedom, in contrast to Bhaskar’s sense of in-gear freedom, is what he calls an out-of-gear freedom: This metaphor, I hope, is clear enough: in-gear freedom is a matter of interacting causally with the world in order to realize our intentions; it is

30 Philosophies of science threatened by any view which denies the efficacy of our intentions in bringing about changes in the real world; out-of-gear freedom is precisely a matter of disengaging our choices from causal interaction with the world, to ward off the threat that the nature of that world might limit or determine them. (98) Rorty’s freedom is that we can resort to abnormal discourse in redescribing ourselves and the material conditions in which we live. We can even use incommensurable descriptions in the exercise of our freedom because the nature of the world (both social and natural) holds no constraints on us in the activity of describing. Bhaskar’s freedom under critical realism is a freedom of intentional causal efficacy; in other words, we can choose to work toward effecting change in both the natural and social world, but our work must necessarily be subject to the laws of nature. We cannot simply suspend the laws of gravity, for instance, because it hampers our work in building a bridge or in flying an airplane. Rorty does not assume that we can suspend the laws of nature either, but rather than working to bring about a change in our material conditions and social structures, Rorty would have us redescribe the world in different ways. But why does Rorty limit our freedom to a linguistic realm? One reason Rorty limits our freedom to a linguistic realm is because he has accepted the Humean account of science and its accompanying atomistic, mechanistic, closed-system ontology. Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), writes, “Physicalism is probably right in saying that we shall some day be able, ‘in principle,’ to predict every movement of a person’s body (including those of his larynx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body” (34). This model of knowledge-making, which Rorty explicitly asserts here, implicitly presupposes the ontology of the empirical realist, as physicalist, reductionist, and, in principle, determinant. Referring not only to Rorty but also to Winch and Habermas, Collier (1994) argues that: Science is seen as being much as the positivists describe it – actualist, predictive, likely to arrive at a one-level determinist account of everything in terms of Humean laws governing physical processes. A good deal of the desire to keep science at bay stems from assuming that this misdescription of it is true, and recognizing how devastating the consequences would be of reducing our account of the human world to such terms. (97–8) Because Rorty has unquestioningly accepted the empirical realist model of reality along with everything that it implies, he is forced to seek another avenue for freedom since intentional causal interaction with the natural and social world is not considered possible. As Bhaskar observes, “[t]he problem

Philosophies of science

31

for Kant [and for Rorty] is how we can be held responsible for the things we do, involving as they do bodily movements (including those of our larynxes and our writing hands), if all our physical movements are fully determined by antecedent phenomenal causes” (1989: 164). And Rorty’s answer to this problem is that our freedom consists of the freedom to redescribe. So we are to create new vocabularies, even incommensurable vocabularies, in order to overcome ourselves, the past, and our fellow human beings. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty holds forth the hope that a new vocabulary will usher in a paradigm shift, as Kuhn explains it, by which we will one day wake up in a new world. He writes: “The final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel with philosophy––the final victory of metaphors of self-creation over metaphors of discovery––would consist in our becoming reconciled to the thought that this is the only sort of power over the world that we can hope to have” (40). Now it would be wrong, as Collier points out, to accuse Rorty of failing to recognize that the material world, by way of needs or failure to meet those needs, or by way of interference by others in our lives, can threaten our freedom. Scarcity of food or an oppressive police state can interfere with our pursuit of freedom, but the way these things interfere, for Rorty, is that they limit our leisure time and/or educational opportunities to participate in creating new vocabularies. Rorty fails to distinguish between particular activities (acquiring food or police oppression) and social structures (market mechanisms that provide goods on the basis of profit, not human need, or a state that authorizes certain police activities) that both enable and limit those activities. But this should be no surprise since Rorty has already accepted the empirical realist ontology, which only allows for a one-level, atomistic, mechanistic interaction and denies the possibility of structures or mechanisms that produce the empirical phenomena that constitute Humean causal laws. Social practices and individuals become the equivalent of the constant conjunction of events in empirical realist science. Since the empirical realist assumes that the world operates in an atomistic, mechanistic fashion, a structure or generative mechanism producing the empirical grounds of the constant conjunction of events must be denied. And once we have denied the existence of social structures, we have ceded our capacity to judge ideas in terms of such heuristic concepts as false consciousness or unhappy consciousness, wherein people misinterpret or misunderstand the function of those social structures. So Rorty is reduced to making such claims as the following: To see a common social practice as cruel and unjust … is a matter of redescription rather than discovery. It is a matter of changing vocabularies rather than of stripping away the veil of appearances from an objective reality, of experimentation with new ways of speaking rather than of overcoming “false consciousness.” (quoted in Bhaskar 1989: 175)

32 Philosophies of science The notion here is that social problems can be solved by describing them differently, but while redescribing a particular phenomenon can be useful in understanding that phenomenon, such redescription is only useful if it is constrained by the nature of the object or phenomenon being described: what you would call profit, I would call exploitation of the worker. But Rorty rejects such a constraint because this would constitute a limit on the kind of freedom he champions. However, if our description of something is completely unconstrained by the thing being described, and the only constraint that applies to a description is its acceptance or rejection by one’s discourse community, then there should be nothing but ourselves holding us back from redescribing lumps of untreated sewage as fish and solving at once two problems of maritime ecology in one simple act. Rejecting Enlightenment philosophy, which was to give us unshakable foundations for knowledge, Rorty has turned to a philosophy of epistemology. Rather than asking what must the world be like for us to be able to discover aspects of nature through the practice of science, Rorty wants to ask how is it that we can know something. Rorty, along with many other postmodernists, has followed Kant in focusing on epistemology to the neglect of ontology. Now issues of epistemology are important, as will be discussed later, but whenever epistemological questions displace ontological questions, we continually risk conflating ontology with epistemology. In other words, we reduce categories of being into categories of knowing. As noted above, Bhaskar calls this the epistemic fallacy and describes it as “the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analyzed in terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms” (1997: 36). And when it is assumed that our understanding of an object exhausts the object and all there is to know about the object, we are forced into a position that must explain the history of science either as a continuously steady accretion of knowledge with no room for correcting or rejecting previous scientific knowledge, and/or as a series of paradigm shifts, whereby all previous scientific knowledge is scrapped and the scientific community starts over from scratch explaining the world. Clearly, neither one of these positions is acceptable, but we are forced to uphold such ridiculous propositions if we are not careful to avoid the epistemic fallacy. Bhaskar (1989) describes Rorty’s solution to the problem of human agency quite nicely, so I will quote from him at length: The point for Rorty is not an ontological, so much as a linguistic one. Whereas Kant gives us an at least two worlds model, Rorty gives us an at least two language model. The autonomy of the social and other less physicalisitic sciences is rendered consistent with a comprehensive empirical actualism by allowing that physics (or the physical sciences) can describe every bit of the phenomenal world but that some bits of it, for instance the human, can also be truly redescribed in a non-physicalistic way. (164)

Philosophies of science

33

But is there any reason to believe that the process of redescribing does not entail physical activity, subject to the laws of physical things? In other words, if the material world (lower-order) is completely determined, and humans (being part of the material world) are subject to the laws that determine all activity in the material world, how can redescription (a higher-order activity) have an impact on that world? As Bhaskar explains, “[t]he problem for Rorty, as for Kant, is how if the lower-level is completely determined, what is described in higher-order terms can have any effect on it. And of course the answer is that it cannot” (Ibid. 164). Because postmodernists have also accepted the empirical realist ontology and the inclusion of the epistemic fallacy it presupposes, they have been faced with the same problem as Rorty and Kant and have written at length in order to extract themselves from this problem. But the problem of explaining human agency will not be solved by a model of two worlds, much less new vocabularies or the use of irony. The problem of explaining human agency can be solved by correcting Hume’s mistake––the epsitemic fallacy, inherited and unquestioningly accepted by Kant and later Rorty––an intellectual albatross that has hung around our necks since the mid-1700s. But this means a philosophical return to issues of ontology in a balanced relationship with issues of epistemology. Critical realism Critical realism is a philosophy of the natural and human sciences developed by the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar. But to be more precise, it should be acknowledged that Bhaskar’s term for his philosophy of the natural sciences is “transcendental realism” because of the central place occupied by transcendental argument in that project. When Bhaskar turned his attention to the human sciences, the term he coined for that project was “critical naturalism.” Others, making use of his ideas, began, however, eliding these terms, creating the bastard term “critical realism.” Bhaskar (1989) writes: It struck me that there were good reasons not to demure at the mongrel. For a start, Kant had styled his transcendental idealism the ‘critical philosophy’. Transcendental realism had as much right to the title of critical realism. Moreover, on my definition of naturalism it amounted to realism, so to qualify it as critical realism made as much sense as to qualify it as critical naturalism. In either case, the hermeneutics involved in social science (and in the sociology and thence meta-critics of natural science) was a contingently critical one… Moreover the use of the adjective ‘critical’ rather than ‘transcendental’ brought out that the philosophy was critical in the strong sense – not just of other philosophies but potentially of scientific practices, of common beliefs and of the praxis-dependent structures or circumstances that sustain them. (190)

34 Philosophies of science Thus, with Bhaskar’s implicit permission, generally I will refer to both philosophies of the natural and human sciences as critical realism. Bhaskar’s approach in developing his philosophy is two pronged. First, he employs a transcendental argument by asking “what must the world be like in order for the human project of science to be possible?” The function of the transcendental argument in this case is to state in positive terms the conditions necessary for the social activity of science. Second, he offers an immanent critique of the current competing philosophies of science, negatively exposing their weaknesses and inconsistencies. While these two approaches may seem to be at odds with one another, Bhaskar observes that on reflection these two apparently opposed procedures must amount to fundamentally the same thing. For the positive premisses of interesting transcendental arguments will consist in descriptions of just those features of scientific practice which (currently dominant) philosophies of science … give prominence to; so that transcendental arguments of a novel or innovative sort will be in effect transcendental refutations of preexisting accounts of science. In both cases one is engaged in a process of determinate negation. (Ibid. 182) So, in fact, transcendental arguments and immanent critiques are positive and negative processes, respectively, for arriving at the same conclusion: in this case a description and explanation of Bhaskar’s philosophy of science––critical realism. Any adequate account of science, Bhaskar (1997) notes, must come to terms with two sides or aspects of knowledge, which constitute a central paradox of science that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs, or books… This is one side of knowledge. The other is that knowledge is ‘of ’ things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend upon human activity. (21) And in order to account adequately for these two sides of knowledge, Bhaskar elsewhere explains that the program of transcendental realism or critical realism is to account adequately for the sciences in their differences as well as in their unity by elaborating three dimensions: “the intransitive or ontological dimension; the transitive or epistemological dimension; and the metacritical dimension or the domain of critical theory (1989:183).

Philosophies of science

35

Intransitive dimension

The intransitive dimension consists of the real objects of knowledge that science studies, as opposed to the thought-objects we give ourselves. In other words, real objects, even real objects of knowledge, are not dependent upon our knowing them. Of course, if an object becomes an object of knowledge, we necessarily do know it at some level, but its existence is not predicated on our knowing it. For example, early cartographers studied and mapped the same planet as modern cartographers. And while early cartographers believed the world was flat and represented it as such, every schoolchild today knows that the earth is round, not flat. Thus, the world did not change from flat to round with our shift in understanding. This form of realism is entailed in critical realism, namely that the material world exists independently of our knowing it and that it does not change with how we think about it. But how can we make such claims about ontology? On what basis should we believe that the world exists independently of our knowing it? First, we must recognize that such claims are hypothetical, derived from the transcendental argument of what the world must be like for science to be possible. “The status of propositions in ontology,” Bhaskar (1997) explains, may thus be described by the following formula: It is not necessary that science occurs, but given that it does, it is necessary that the world is a certain way. It is contingent that the world is such that science is possible. And, given that it is possible, it is contingent upon the satisfaction of certain social conditions that science in fact occurs. But given that science does or could occur, the world must be a certain way. Thus, the transcendental realist asserts, that the world is structured and differentiated can be established by philosophical argument; though the particular structures it contains and the ways in which it is differentiated are matters for substantive scientific investigation. (29) So while we cannot make philosophical claims which will forever remain true and unquestionable, the kind of foundational knowledge expected from Enlightenment philosophy, we can reasonably assert, based on philosophical transcendental argument, that the world must be structured and differentiated because otherwise science as it is now practised could not exist, and given the inadequacy of other explanations of science presented above, critical realism’s status is merely that of the best account currently available – in so far as it is at present uniquely consistent with the historical emergence, practical presuppositions and substantive contents of the sciences and reflexively self-consistent in that it can situate its own emergence, fallibility and transformability. (Bhaskar 1989: 183–4)

36 Philosophies of science Now if the world is indeed intransitive and impervious to our explanations of it or actions toward it, then there is the ubiquitous possibility that the world can surprise us, that it does not turn out as we think it will all of the time. And if this is true, then what must that world be like? One answer, as we have seen, is that the world and what constitutes scientific laws change all the time along with our changing conceptions of reality; however, this would mean that every time the world changed, we would be starting over at ground zero in terms of our knowledge. The laws of nature that allow airplanes to stay in the air could change at any moment plunging them to the ground; what was safe to eat yesterday might be poisonous tomorrow. Since our experience with the world is not so fickle, this answer is, however, less than desirable. The critical realist answer is, as noted above, the world 1) exists independently of our knowing it, 2) is an open system, 3) is differentiated and stratified, and 4) is by necessity lawfully regulated. Claims have been made for the transcendental necessity of an intransitive world, but I have offered little explanation as to why this is the case. To remedy that, the implications of the experimental method will be examined in order to demonstrate the intransitive dimension as a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for the activity of science. But before we turn to an examination of the scientific experiment as such, a review of the experiment as understood by the empirical realist is in order. In the laboratory experiment, empirical realists tell us, the scientist observes a series of events that are repeatable, given that everything else is equal. This series of conjunctions comes to constitute causal laws in empirical realism. What is under-theorized in this description is that 1) the scientist is not passively observing nature, but intervening in the work of nature; 2) the scientist has gone to great lengths in constructing the experiment because the sequence of events looked for is not readily forthcoming in nature; also, 3) the nature of the experiment is designed to exclude or at least to account for undesirable variables. A causal law is established under an empirical realist ontology as the constant conjunction of events produced in the experiment. The experiment is necessary precisely because the constant conjunction of events would not typically have occurred otherwise. With this added insight of human intervention in nature via the laboratory experiment, the empirical realist must either assume that he or she has created, or at least co-created the laws of nature, or he or she must assume since this constant conjunction of events does not readily appear in nature that the law discovered in the experiment is not universal, but rather confined to the parameters of the experiment. Two important consequences can be drawn here. “First, the real basis of causal laws cannot be sequences of events; there must be an ontological distinction between them” (Bhaskar 1997: 33). And the ontological distinction is that the sequence of events brought about under experimental conditions results from a mechanism as yet unseen. The sequence of events, event A followed by the occurrence of event B, is the empirical grounds for assuming there is a mechanism triggered by A and bringing about B. “Secondly, experimental

Philosophies of science

37

activity can only be given a satisfactory rationale if the causal law it enables us to identify is held to prevail outside the contexts under which the sequence of events is generated” (Ibid. 33). In other words, for experimental results to make sense and sustain their claims to be studying real life sequences, causal laws must be framed in terms of the tendential ways of acting of things; they are not the sequence of events identified in the experiment. I will return to causal laws and generative mechanisms shortly, but the important point to be drawn here is that the experimental activity of science becomes meaningless unless the objects of study are, as Bhaskar maintains, something other than the experimental realities as such. In other words, to reiterate the first critical realist claim supporting the coherence of scientific experiments, “the world exists independently of our knowing it.” By “open system,” the second claim supporting the coherence of scientific experiments, I mean that the world’s state is the product of the interaction of multiple things and complex structures and that this chaotic interaction does not allow us to account reductively for all possible variables in order to predict from the flux and flow of the interacting things. “Any system,” Collier (1994) explains, “including (and that means also affected by) a person, animal or any other being which is complex enough to initiate action not fully determined by its immediate environment will be an open system” (128). The laboratory experiment, as we have seen, is a closed system set up to eliminate extraneous variables and interactions in order to identify the workings of a particular mechanism. Causal laws for the critical realist do not reside in the constant conjunction of events of the empirical realist. Rather they are the ways of acting of things. In open systems, it is better to think of causal laws as tendencies. A particular mechanism, due to its internal nature, its essence, has emergent powers that are not reducible to the mechanism’s smallest components. Moreover, a mechanism also has liabilities; that is, it is susceptible to the powers of other mechanisms. In the laboratory experiment, care is taken to eliminate forces that could interfere with the workings of the mechanism the scientist is trying to observe because, due to its liabilities, other mechanisms could counteract, diminish, or unduly amplify the natural tendency of the mechanism under study. For this reason we rarely see in nature the unfettered operation of causal laws. In the flux and flow of the open system of nature, there is a multitude of other mechanisms that can interfere with the observed mechanism due to its liabilities. As a result, the mechanism in an open system may be exercised, but remain unrealized. As Bhaskar (1997) explains, “causal laws endure and continue to operate in their normal way under conditions, which may be characterized as ‘open’, where no constant conjunction or regular sequence of events is forthcoming” (33). Bhaskar’s account can explain plausibly how we can identify causal laws or scientific laws in the laboratory and still be unable to see them spontaneously occurring in nature all around us, for nature, generally, constitutes an open system. “Reflection on experimental and applied scientific activity,” Bhaskar (1989) maintains, “reveals that science is committed to a non-anthropocentric and

38 Philosophies of science specifically non-Humean ontology – of structures and generative mechanisms irreducible to and often out of phase with the (normally artificially contrived) patterns of events which comprise their empirical grounds” (149). The third claim supporting the coherence of scientific experiments is that the world is “differentiated and stratified.” Here I mean that the world consists not only of events, for which the empirical realist can account, but also of objects and structures capable of generating those events. In the work of science, the scientist seeks to explain a phenomenon by identifying the mechanism that causes the phenomenon. At first, hypotheses are put forth as to what that mechanism might be like. Then these competing hypotheses are tested empirically to see which model best fits, but these models are not the result of pure rationalism, but of rationalism as a result of some interaction of the mind via the senses with the material world. After much testing and sometimes with the development of new equipment to extend our senses, we can come to know those mechanisms as real. These mechanisms, once confirmed, then become the new phenomena to be explained by postulating other mechanisms. For example, Bhaskar uses the schema shown in Table 1 to illustrate the historical development of chemistry. And while the mechanisms at a higher stratum are not reducible to the mechanisms at a lower stratum, they are still subject to the laws of that lower stratum. For example, humans are subject not only to the laws of biology, but also to the laws of physics and chemistry, yet humans are not reducible to the laws of biology any more than to the laws of physics or chemistry. “Necessity,” the fourth claim for the coherence of scientific experiments, means that objects act according to their causal powers and liabilities. If all phenomena were contingent by nature, then nothing could act according to its own internal necessity or way of acting but would act according to external forces acting upon it, much like billiard balls moving around the billiard table due to the direction and force of other balls hitting them and the interaction of all of them with one another and with the cushions. If things, structures, and people are complex, i.e. have layered, internal qualities that allow them to act according to their own internal necessity––in other words, if they have ontological depth––then our knowledge of them would, however, not be reducible to their simplest components. Rather they would have emergent powers that operate according to their own essence. But if things (including people) have no essence, this means that they are only capable of interacting mechanically Table 1 Bhaskar’s (1997: 169) schema illustrating the historical development of chemistry Stratum I Stratum II Stratum III Stratum IV

2Na + 2HCl = 2NaCl + H2 explained by theory of atomic number and valency explained by theory of electrons and atomic structure explained by [competing theories of sub-atomic structure]

Mechanism 1 Mechanism 2 Mechanism 3

Philosophies of science

39

with other things externally because they have no ontological depth. In such a case, all we would need to understand the workings of anything would be to understand how the “smallest components” of that thing work and we would thereby be able to predict all of that thing’s actions as mere additive or aggregate effects of a plurality of basic units. And the result would be that all action, all phenomena, would be predetermined before it happened, and agency would be done away with. As Bhaskar (1997) explains: Underlying the widespread, if tacit, acceptance in philosophy of the idea of the ubiquity of constant conjunctions in nature (an idea which is not confined to the empiricist tradition) and hence of the doctrine of the actuality of causal laws is the notion that the universe is at rock bottom deterministic. (67) In developing his notion of the intransitive dimension, Bhaskar has asserted the importance of ontology for any adequate philosophy of science. In other words, the intransitive dimension deals with the ontological realm. Since we do not have immediate access to the generative mechanisms or causal structures of nature, we must, however, resort to theory and model-building as a mediation between subject and object, and here we must turn to epistemology and the transitive dimension. Transitive dimension

The second side of knowledge consists of what Bhaskar calls the transitive dimension. Here knowledge is recognized in its socio-historical development and is seen as fallible and theory-laden. Bhaskar explains these issues thus: The transitive objects of knowledge are Aristotelian material causes. They are the raw materials of science – the artificial objects fashioned into items of knowledge by the science of the day. They include the antecedently established facts and theories, paradigms and models, methods and techniques of inquiry available to a particular scientific school or worker. (Ibid. 21) In other words, the transitive objects of knowledge are the cognitive tools we have inherited from past scientific and pre-scientific exploration into, and thought about, the material world. So human knowledge is fallible because we do not have access to absolute or incorrigible knowledge. Moreover, because the world is structured or stratified, we can never assume that our knowledge has reached a point of closure where it exhausts the object of inquiry. There is always, it must be assumed, another layer with other mechanisms to discover. Hence, future knowledge may show how previous knowledge was correct, partially correct, or incorrect.

40 Philosophies of science Because knowledge is transitive and historically situated, it is not viewed as a list of facts, a static thing (knowing that); rather, knowledge is “knowing how,” more like an owner’s manual for getting around in the world. In other words, knowledge is not just conceptual; it is also practical. As a result, our knowledge is subject to empirical check, and its practicality is not mere accident nor is it simply social convention. As Andrew Sayer (1992) points out, the practical knowledge behind the sign “DANGER: 240 VOLTS!” will prove itself when a person touches the wires, even if one decides to take that statement as meaning something else (70). But the issues are far more complex. Let me explain by way of an example. There was a time when certain people believed that the Norse god Thor caused milk to sour. When a thunderstorm occurred, indicating the presence of the god in their vicinity, the milk would turn sour. The logic was that Thor is in the area; the milk has turned sour; ergo, Thor turns milk sour. Now this knowledge has a limited practicality to it: when you hear the thunder, you know you will not have fresh milk for dinner. Becoming a devotee to and making sacrifices to the god of thunder will, however, not help you in keeping your milk fresh, despite the fact that everyone in the community may think so. A better theory is one that can explain what the old theory can and yet gives us something significantly more than the old one. Today we would explain this situation differently. When a thunder storm occurs, the temperature and humidity increase. These conditions are conducive to the proliferation of micro-organisms in the milk if it is not refrigerated, and these organisms cause the milk to sour. The practicality of this explanation is demonstrated in our refrigeration (and homogenization) of milk. But this knowledge did not result from accident, but rather from experiments––natural and contrived––that eventually isolated and identified the micro-organisms and their behavior in certain conditions. The importance of a theory’s explanatory power brings up another point about our knowledge. Knowledge’s transitivity does not imply that it is necessarily relative. In other words, while our knowledge is always subject to social forces acting on us, so that correction and further clarification are always required, it does not follow that one theory is just as good as another. The theory that Thor turns milk sour has a certain usefulness, but our new understanding is not just a different understanding, but a better understanding because it can explain the mechanism that causes the milk to sour. So in our development of knowledge we do not just seek to understand other theories; we also critically evaluate them according to their explanatory scope and power because we must decide which is more useful in our daily lives. Another aspect of knowledge is grounded in its historical specificity. Our production of knowledge, historically, is not wholly discontinuous (out with the old and in with the new), nor is it wholly continuous, just a steady accumulation of facts. If our knowledge were wholly continuous, we could never get rid of erroneous ideas we have inherited from the past. If our development of knowledge were wholly discontinuous, we would make sweeping changes in not only what constitutes knowledge for us, but in the concepts with

Philosophies of science

41

which we think every time we make new knowledge. Yet, clearly, we cannot create a new theory except from the position of an earlier theory and the anomalies that have accrued within that theory. We may have to use the old position for the time being until we have elaborated the new. This explanation, of course, does not deny the fact that there are scientific revolutions that cause us to rethink an entire discipline, as the move from Newtonian physics to quantum physics has shown. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) acknowledges that science changes in both ways. Kuhn contends, however, that when there is a revolution in scientific thought, it is because two theories become incommensurable. And, as has already been noted, the problem here is that the focus is only on the two competing theories, and the object over which those theories compete has been subsumed under the theories themselves. One final point regarding the transitive nature of knowledge needs to be made. Some might contend that since knowledge is transitive, there is no way to know that the objects of scientific study exist independently of our descriptions of them. “But it does not follow,” Bhaskar (1989) points out, “from the principle of the historical transitivity of knowledge that we cannot know that what is known (under particular descriptions) exists and acts independently of those descriptions” (152). Yet, to make such an assumption is equivalent to claiming that the sun revolved around the earth until Copernicus proposed that the earth revolved around the sun and Galileo discovered proof to support his hypothesis. So in conjunction with the intransitive dimension, wherein natural objects exist independently of humans and human activity, Bhaskar acknowledges the fallibility of our knowledge and the socio-historical pressures that can influence us during any production of knowledge, i.e. the transitive dimension. With both the intransitive and transitive dimensions, we can sustain the notion of scientific knowledge growing and changing over time, a notion that was unsustainable under previous philosophies of science. But more needs to be said about the transitive dimension and how social/historical forces can influence the work of science and how we deal with those forces. Metacritical dimension

By “metacritical dimension” Bhaskar (1989) means it to “include (a) the substantive as well as the philosophical and sociological presuppositions and commitments; and (b) of the historical practices of the sciences as well as their philosophical reconstructions or deconstructions” (183). In other words, we must remember knowledge is theory-laden in that we produce it with the cognitive tools we have inherited from the past (our language, concepts, and practices). So knowledge consists in the socially produced conditions for the production of knowledge. We do not make knowledge out of whole cloth, however, but out of the conditions we have inherited from the past. As a result, social influences in the construction of theories or explanations must

42 Philosophies of science also be critiqued in the process. In so doing, we avoid the mistake of taking the thought-object for the real object. But one might still argue that we can never escape the social context of knowledge production in that our theories condition our perceptions and cognitive practices. And while it is true that we cannot escape such conditions, it is another matter to claim that theory strictly determines our perceptions. Knowledge is co-determined by the object of knowledge, as well as by the human subject situated within a particular knowledge community. Bhaskar argues: To say that theory conditions our beliefs in epistemically significant perception is not to say that theory determines them. Theory and nature may be co-determinants of beliefs in a notional parallelogram of forces … and we may appeal to either (in propositionalized form) in a justificatory context. (Ibid. 156) In other words, we can use theory as a countercheck to our perceptions, and, conversely, we can use the non-discursive element of empirical nature as a countercheck to our theory. Andrew Sayer (1992) drawing on R. Pawson’s A Measure for Measure: A Manifesto for Empirical Sociology, offers a particularly useful discussion of this problem: The ideas that observation which is theory-laden must therefore be theorydetermined … can easily be refuted. Consider the example of finding out how much money a person has. To do this, I must be in command of a number of concepts, concerning money in its various forms, persons, the operation of counting and so on. But knowing these would not, of course, answer my question. I would still have to go and look, observing in a way which was unavoidably theory-laden but not theory-determined. So although we can only think within particular conceptual systems, these are internally differentiated and what we can think of is not necessarily already contained within these systems. Moreover, precisely because many theories are implicated in any observation, measurement or test, there need be no circularity in which the theory being assessed so governs what we observe that nothing can refute it. Instead, “the theories of expectations which lead us to inquire about the measured [need not be] the theories and principles used in its measurement.” (73–4) To ignore the non-discursive element of being in the world and reducing what can be known to only what can be said is a form of the epistemic fallacy. Children learn a great many things before they acquire a language, even if what is learned cannot be expressed in verbal form. When a child cries because of the discomfort of soiled diapers, it is demonstrating an access to

Philosophies of science

43

the non-discursive. But as Sayer points out, there are material circumstances reinforcing the intellectualist prejudice of privileging the activities of writing and speaking over activities of doing. As academics occupy a special place in the social division of labor where production of knowledge in quiet contemplation holds a special position, it is not surprising that they value discursive knowledge over practical knowledge (Ibid. 15). Concluding remarks on critical realism

In developing critical realism, Bhaskar makes two important shifts or switches from traditional philosophy. The first is “the switch within ontology from events, states of affairs and the like to the structures and mechanisms which generate them” (Bhaskar 1989: 181). Hume’s mistake has been ferreted out and exposed for the fallacy it is. An ontology whose causal laws consist of a constant conjunction of events presupposes an atomistic, mechanistic conception of change and a closed system within which those causal laws operate, and, as argued above, such a conception implies a deterministic universe. As a result of this mistake being unknowingly accepted, much ink has been spilt in many creative but inadequate explanations of human agency. The second switch is “within philosophy from epistemology to ontology, or from implicit to explicit ontology” (Bhaskar 1989: 181). Rather than focusing on how it is possible that we can know something (Kant’s project), Bhaskar has shifted the focus in the philosophy of science to ontology, embodied in the question: What must the world be like for science to be possible? One reason this shift is important is that because philosophy abhors an ontological vacuum, irrealist [idealist] philosophies merely tacitly secrete the (normally inherited) ontology their epistemology presupposes – predicated on the irreducibility of ontology and the isolation of the fundamental category mistake of the ‘epistemological tradition’. This mistake is the epistemic fallacy, the definition of being in terms of knowledge … or, in a displacement of this, in terms of language or discourse, the linguistic fallacy… (Bhaskar 1994: 48) As I have argued earlier, every epistemology presupposes a certain ontology. Since many philosophies (of science and of society) unquestioningly accepted Hume’s account of causal laws, they also tacitly accepted its implied ontology. While philosophies ignored issues of ontology, they were free to commit the epistemic fallacy without realizing it. But by vindicating ontology, the epistemic fallacy has been brought to the fore. By making these shifts in the focus of philosophy, Bhaskar has displaced philosophy as the highest form of knowledge which all other disciplines must emulate; rather, Bhaskar sees philosophy as the hand maiden of science. Philosophy’s job is not to provide us with irrefutable foundations for

44 Philosophies of science knowledge, but to tell us in a general way what the world must be like in order to make sense of science as a practical and rational activity, but it cannot tell us the specifics of the world; that is the job of science. Critical naturalism Building on the insights gained from his work in critical realism or transcendental realism, Bhaskar turned his sights on addressing the issue of naturalism in the human sciences. He asks “to what extent can society be studied in the same way as nature?” (1979: 1). Most versions of naturalism presuppose the Humean account of causal laws with its closed-system universe and a description of action as atomistic and mechanistic. Against these positivist accounts of the social sciences, which lead to a radical behaviorism, some maintain an anti-naturalist position based on the differences of their subject matters with which the physical and human sciences deal. The anti-naturalist position focuses on socially meaningful things and is informed by the hermeneutic method. Hermeneutics, in turn, has its philosophical roots in Kant’s transcendental idealism and those neo-Kantians who came after him. Clearly, both of these positions are unacceptable for Bhaskar since both paradigms are predicated on philosophical inadequacies associated with an essentially positivist account of the natural sciences. So while Bhaskar maintains that society can be scientifically studied, he contends that it cannot be studied in exactly the same way scientists study nature; the study of society must be qualified in specific ways. As a result of the qualification placed on the study of society, Bhaskar calls this project “critical naturalism” because of the differences between society and nature and because of the self-reflexive critical aspect necessary for the study of society to avoid the same philosophical problems discussed in the metacritical dimension above. Methodological individualism and other forms of social inquiry

Methodological individualism “is the doctrine that facts about societies, and social phenomena generally, are to be explained solely in terms of facts about individuals” (Ibid. 34). As Margaret Thatcher says, there is no such thing as society, only people. However, if societies are reducible to people, then there can be no legitimate study of society, for any such study would ultimately be talking about individual behavior, provided that humans were not reducible to a more basic level (as in positivism). The appeal of studying individual phenomena rather than social phenomena is that it is claimed that individual behavior is more observable and/or easier to understand and predict. The problem with such a position is not so much how one could give an “individualistic explanation of social behaviour, but … how one could ever give a non-social (that is strictly individualistic) explanation of individual, at least characteristically human, behaviour” (Ibid. 35). The predicates we can assign to individuals typically require a social context for those predicates to make sense. For example, cashing a check requires a banking system wherein officially recognized notes

Philosophies of science

45

(checks) can function as stand-ins for money, some degree of state regulation, etc.; voting requires a political system grounded on some form of participatory government, a choice of issues or candidates to vote for, as well as some degree of state regulation of the voting process, etc. Moreover, individual phenomena are not always more observable or easier to understand than social phenomena. Consider, for example, “the motives of a criminal with the procedures of a court” (Ibid. 35). The motives of the criminal are not always more observable or easier to understand than the workings of the court system. So if sociology is not concerned with individual behavior as such, what is sociology’s object of study? It is “the persistent relations between individuals (and groups), and with the relations between these relations (and between such relations and nature and the products of such relations)” (Ibid. 36). Radical behaviorism, utilitarianism, liberal political theory, and neo-classical economic theory are more sophisticated forms of methodological individualism, in that they concede that relations may play a part in explanation, yet social problems are still seen as the aggregate of individual problems stemming from the passions being improperly checked (or not checked at all) by reason. These models are based on a dualistic conception of humans: humans consist of a rational nature (which marks them as human) and an animal nature (whether conceived as desires or feelings). Social problems or individual problems arise when people do not subordinate their passions or feelings to reason. If I am to explain economic man, and by extension the capitalist economic system, according to this rational model, I must claim that humans have always engaged in barter and trade and that capitalism, as a logical development of such practice, has always been with us (at least in embryonic form). There are two problems with this. First, it is predicated on an a-historical conception of humans. And second, it presupposes a priori that rationality can fully explain behavior. Yet, if people misunderstand the social structures within which they work, they may, indeed, act irrationally, as witnessed by our present day rampant environmental destruction carried out in the name of “progress.” That sociological methods which remain wedded to positivism often take the individual as its object of study should not come as a surprise, given that the notion of the scientist according to the empirical realist account is atomistic and passive. Bhaskar (1989) observes that: The sociological precondition of the atomistic and uniform ontology of empirical realism is an individualism, comprised of autonomized units, conjoined (if at all) by contract, passive recipients of a given and self-evident world rather than active agents in a complex, structured and changing one. (158) Yet methodological individualism has an element of truth which should not be rejected: “namely the idea that society is made up or consists of and only of people.” But this must be qualified, for otherwise it looks like methodological individualism all over again. So in what way is this true?

46 Philosophies of science In the sense that the material presence of social effects consists only in changes in people and changes brought about by people on other material things – objects of nature, such as land, and artefacts, produced by work on objects of nature. One could express this truth as follows: the material presence of society = persons and the (material) results of their actions. (Bhaskar 1979: 37) In other words, society does not exist apart from the activity of humans, yet at the same time society is not reducible to those activities. Durkheim saw the same thing when he argued that society or social structures stand over against humans as coercive forces that shape the individual. Yet Durkheim, rather than seeing the relational conception or the individualist conception of society, worked from a collectivist conception in which society was seen as being sui generis in nature. Bhaskar states: Thus, for Durkheim, to the extent at least that he is to remain committed to positivism, enduring relationships must be reconstructed from collective phenomena; whereas on the realist and relational view advanced here collective phenomena are seen primarily as the expression of enduring relationships. (Ibid. 38) Durkheim’s commitment to sociological positivism requires that relations, if they are admitted, must be understood as external to the person and constraints of his or her behavior. Thus, à la Hume’s theory of causality, the possibility of internal relations is denied. Finally, Marx, developing a position that would later be called historical materialism, made an attempt to combine a realist ontology, which avoids the pitfalls of positivism, with a relational sociology, which avoids the errors of methodological individualism and reification. Thus, we have four main tendencies in social thought. The utilitarians, who are committed to an empiricist methodology when studying society, hold that the world consists of events, not structures, and they conflate the experience of phenomena or events with the thing-in-itself (negating the possibility of generative mechanisms). Their object of study is the behavior of the atomized individual. Weber, though not a utilitarian, studies society from the perspective of the same atomized individuals. But as a neo-Kantian, he is interested in grasping the meanings and internal motives shaping the conduct of the person. And given his hermeneutic method, he ultimately can only record their meanings––never critique them. His method allows for no realistic Archimedean point by which to judge errors in conduct or definition. In short, the reality of those generative mechanisms producing the intra-subjective meanings upon which institutional life is built can only yield a radically relativist view of the world, devoid of any critical standard for establishing the truth of an action or viewpoint. All we can do is observe

Philosophies of science

47

activities, interpret their action, and move on. Durkheim, on the other hand, maintains an empirical methodology, but his object of study is the group or the collective. Such a collective ontology cannot, however, tap the creative agency of the person. Only in Marx’s dialectical method is this conundrum resolved. Marx’s method is realist in that it allows simultaneously for the exigence of generative mechanisms or social structures with emergent powers and for taking into account the emergent powers of individual agency. And what enables him to cut the Gordian knot of society versus individual is his positing of a third mediating domain of social reality––social relations. Let us see how this plays out in social theory. Models of social theory

There are two main models of social theory: one, expressed by Weber, holds that individuals interpretively create society as a meaningful entity with all its social structures through their activity (see Figure 1). But this model of social theory ignores the historical and social nature of social structures. As we do not create knowledge out of whole cloth, we do not create society anew with each generation. In other words, in this model “there are actions, but no condition” (Bhaskar 1979: 37). But social structures which enable and limit our activities pre-exist the individual. It was this truth that Durkheim glimpsed when he argued that society, being external to the individual, coerces and shapes the individual (see Figure 2). In this model, we have “conditions, but no actions” (Ibid. 37). The individual is passive and acted upon by society. But if this were the case, then our knowledge would not just be theory-laden, but strictly theory-determined, and we would have no need for agency. While Weber commits the error of voluntarism, Durkheim commits the opposite error of reifying social structures. Society

Individual Figure 1 The Weberian stereotype “Voluntarism” (Bhaskar 1979:32)

Society

Individual Figure 2 The Durkheimian stereotype “Reification” (Bhaskar 1979: 32)

48 Philosophies of science A third model has been suggested by Peter Berger, in an attempt to offer a middle ground, wherein the individual and society are dialectically connected––society creating and shaping individuals, and individuals, in turn, creating society (see Figure 3). Yet, this model still embodies Weber’s error of voluntarism, wherein individuals create society, as well as Durheim’s error of reifying society. No distinction is made between actions and the necessary conditions that must pre-exist any action. Bhaskar offers a fourth model (see Figure 4). In this model, individuals experience society as pre-existing them and as external to them, coercing and shaping them, yet at the same time society enables human activity. Moreover, individuals have an impact on society, but not in the way they do in Weber’s or Berger’s model. Rather than humans creating society, they typically reproduce society and occasionally transform society through their activity. But what exactly is meant by society? Society consists of people and social institutions, such as familial, political, and economical institutions. Moreover, these institutions are a complex of social structures as active components by which human agency actually reproduces or transforms society and which historically limit the means available to agency. Social structures are necessary for praxis, yet they also operate as constraints on praxis. Because of this distinction between society and social structures, Bhaskar introduces another model of the society/person connection that draws attention to the function of social structures and human agency (see Figure 5). Creating society implies a degree of freedom in the creative process which ignores the enduring capacity of social structures, as well as their coercive and enabling influences. We do not make society just as we please, for we must Society

Society

Individual Figure 3 The “Dialectical” conception “Illicit Identification” (Bhaskar 1979: 32)

Society Reproduction/ Transformation

Socialization Individuals

Figure 4 The “Transformational Model” of the society/person connection (Bhaskar 1979: 32)

Philosophies of science

49

Social Structures Reproduction/ Transformation

Enablement/ Constraint Human Agency

Figure 5 The “Transformational Model” of social activity (Bhaskar 1994: 92)

deal with the social structures and the social knowledge that we have inherited. As Marx explains in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1982): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (15). It is within this matrix, or out of this matrix, that we recreate society and sometimes transform it, for activity always presupposes prior social forms. As Bhaskar (1979) observes, “[s]peech requires language; making materials; action conditions; agency resources; activity rules” (43). In other words, social forms are necessary for our reproductive activity. For example, a train has freedom to move along any number of tracks, but those same tracks limit that freedom. So societal structures impose limits on our activity, but they do not fully determine our activity. Bhaskar calls this the “transformational model of social activity.” Society, he explains, “is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. And praxis is both work, that is conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, that is society” (Ibid. 43–4). Thus, people can act purposefully or intentionally, yet not necessarily bring about changes in social forms. More often than not people simply reproduce those social forms that facilitate their productive activities. And when changes in social forms do occur, it is not necessarily due to the intentional activity of humans, although such change can come about due to intentional activity. Typically, change occurs piecemeal by changing a particular aspect of a social structure, rather than a wholesale revolutionary change. As such, these changes may accrue over a period of time until a particular change results in a qualitative change in society as a whole. So society cannot exist without people, and people cannot exist without society. As a result, society, Bhaskar (1979) writes, is both the ever-present condition (material cause) and the continually reproduced outcome of human agency. And praxis is both work, that is, conscious production, and (normally unconscious) reproduction of the conditions of production, that is society. One could refer to the former as the duality of structure, and the latter as the duality of praxis. (34–5)

50 Philosophies of science So while we may not be able to differentiate existentially between society and individuals, we must analytically differentiate between them if we are 1) to avoid reifying social structures, 2) to acknowledge real social constraints on agency, and 3) at the same time to retain agency. To summarize this model of the society/person connection, Bhaskar writes that people do not create society. For it always pre-exists them and is a necessary condition for their activity. Rather, society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so. Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But [society] is not the product of [human activity] (the error of voluntarism). Now the processes whereby the stocks of skills, competencies and habits appropriate to given social contexts, and necessary for the reproduction and/or transformation of society, are acquired and maintained could be generically referred to as ‘socialization’. It is important to stress that the reproduction and/or transformation of society, though for the most part unconsciously achieved, is nevertheless still an achievement, a skilled accomplishment of active subjects, not a mechanical consequent of antecedent conditions. (Ibid. 45–6) Social structures and the mediation of position-practices

In critical naturalism social activity, i.e. productive work, is analogous to natural events in classical empiricism, while social structures are analogous to generative mechanism in critical realism. But there are some important differences. The three limits of naturalism dealing with social structures can be stated thus: social structures are 1) activity-dependent, 2) concept-dependent, and 3) time-space-dependent (Ibid. 38). Each of these will be explained in turn. Unlike natural mechanisms, social structures exist only in virtue of the activities they govern and cannot be empirically identified independently of them. Because of this, they must be social products themselves. Thus men in their social activity must perform a double function: they must not only make social products, but make the conditions of their making, that is reproduce (or to a greater or lesser extent transform) the structures governing their substantive activities of production. (Ibid. 48) So unlike natural structures, social structures are activity-dependent, in that they would not exist apart from the human activities they both enable and limit. If people quit using a particular language, that language would cease to

Philosophies of science

51

exist until someone were able to reconstruct it from ancient texts. But while social structures are activity-dependent, the structures themselves are not reducible to the activity they enable and constrain. Even if we could somehow write down all the utterances that have been made in the English language, that would not be the English language, for there is always the possibility that some new utterance could be made. Social structures are also concept-dependent in that they would not exist apart from the concepts the human agents have of their activity. Even if agents are incorrect regarding their concept of what they are doing, they must possess some concept of what it is they do. Otherwise, people’s activities would be determined, and they would simply be automatons, and/or the activity would be meaningless and of little interest. So a social structure is concept-dependent, for it requires that the agents carrying out the activity enabled by the social structure do so for some intentional reason. Yet, the social structure is not reducible to the concepts agents have regarding their activity. I may take a job out of a sense of duty or obligation to my family in order to put food on the table and be completely unaware that at the same time I am reproducing the class system of the capitalist economic system, which may not be my intention. Finally, social structures are space-time-dependent, meaning that social structures, because they are socially produced and sustained, have a particular genesis and development within a particular time and place. Even if we cannot pinpoint that genesis, because it is produced by humans, it cannot have an eternal, ubiquitous character as in Plato’s ideal forms. Society, then, is an articulated ensemble of tendencies and powers which, unlike natural ones, exist only as long as they (or at least some of them) are being exercised; are exercised in the last instance via the intentional activity of men; and are not necessarily space-time invariant. (Ibid. 49) Thus, social structures cannot be reduced to the effects they enable, yet they are only present in those effects. Now the effects of social structures are only possible because individual humans are acting upon and within those structures, and those effects are experienced by individuals. Yet, if we were to use individual experience alone as the system of mediation to understand social structures, or better the relations of social structures with other social structures, with people, and with objects of nature, as well as the relations between all of these, we run the risk of falling back into a solipsistic hermeneutic circle wherein we create the laws of society by our perceptions of them. It is possible that our experience of social relations may be partially inadequate in grasping those relations, and the social structures that generate (i.e. enable and limit) those relations. Our experiences can also mislead us in our understanding of those relations and their generative structures.

52 Philosophies of science So how do we avoid the problems arising from relying purely on personal experience to understand society? We balance personal experience with theory; however, since we cannot make sense out of human activity apart from the preexisting social structures giving them meaning, that theory must be a multi-level, relational theory: one that explores the relations between personal experience and social structures. But if we are to study relatively enduring objects (as opposed to personal biography alone), we should look not only at the people who fill particular functions within social structures, but also at the positions and the activities associated with those positions. And status and roles are the basic positions in social structures at the level of individual articulation. Therefore, the mediating system we should use for understanding society is one that examines the mediating role of the various position-practices making up society. By taking into account the mediating role of these position-practice structures, we find that individual experience can be utilized in developing our understanding of society without falling victim to the reductionist fallacy of methodological individualism. But those individual position-practices will only make sense relationally––that is, any meaningful human activity only makes sense in relation to the social structures that enable and limit that activity. At the same time, the mediation of position-practice systems allows us to talk of the structural context of institutional statuses and roles without forsaking the needed concept of human agency. For example, teachers occupy positions within the university, yet the life of the university as a social structure goes on when an individual teacher retires and is replaced by another. Any qualified person is able to step into the role that has been vacated, and the university functions pretty much as before. She need not parrot the intellectual style of the person she replaced, but must profess or teach within certain role-values. The significance of position-practices is that the individual occupying a particular role is required to perform in a certain manner according to the broad constraints of the social structure of which the position-practice is a part. Even if the person sees something unfair in the social structure in which she operates and even if she wants to change it, she will still be compelled to conduct herself and her business according to the parameters of the social structure or she will be removed. A bank officer may decide to give home loans not on the basis of ability to repay the loan but rather on the basis of need. That bank officer would, however, soon be without a job, or the bank would run the risk of becoming insolvent. “One advantage of the relational conception should be immediately apparent,” Bhaskar (1979) tells us: It allows one to focus on a range of questions, having to do with the distribution of the structural conditions of action, and in particular with differential allocations of: (i) productive resources (of all kinds, including for example cognitive ones) to persons (and groups) and (ii) persons (and groups) to functions and roles (for example in the division of labor). In doing so, it allows one to situate the possibility of different (and

Philosophies of science

53

antagonistic) interests, of conflicts within society, and hence of interestmotivated transformations in social structures. (52–3) Once we avoid the mistakes of (1) reifying social structures and (2) doing away with them altogether through voluntarism, we are in a position to critique social structures. No longer are we forced to view social problems as purely the result of individual choice. As Sartre (1957) explains, the one thing we cannot escape is choice, but we do not all have the same options from which to choose (15–17). And by seeing that conflicts can exist not only between individuals and society, but within society itself, we are no longer required to see social problems as solely the result of humans being maladaptive to social structures. Now if the study of society consists in the study of productive relations, what can be said about those relations? Are relations external as Hume’s theory of causality would have it, where things are what they appear to be with no ontological depth? Clearly, this theory of causality must be rejected, as it makes our knowledge of objects immediate and complete once we apprehend the object. It would be equally disastrous to conclude that all relations are internal. Rather some relations may be internal while some may be external, but there is no way of knowing the difference a priori. Internal relations require that in relation AB, A is only possible if B is related to it in the way that it is. And this internal relation would be symmetrical if the same could be said of B. For example, the capitalist/wage laborer relation is a symmetrical internal relation, for the capitalist without wage laborers ceases to be a capitalist, and the wage laborer without someone besides himself to pay the wages ceases to be a wage laborer. The relation between a police officer and the state is an asymmetrical internal relation, for the police officer could not exist as a representative of state power apart from the state creating such a position and employing a person in that position. But the existence of the state is not predicated on the existence of the police officer. The relation between that police officer and a passing driver is not internal at all under normal circumstances. The point is that “most social phenomena, like most natural events, are conjuncturally determined” (Bhaskar 1979: 54). As a result, such social phenomena must “be explained in terms of a multiplicity of causes” (Ibid. 55). And to do so we must make use of totalities. Now the process of totalization is one that takes place in thought, but that does not make totalities any less real. But given that we are dealing with social structures that can be transformed by human activity, totalities are not eternal, but must change as society changes. Moreover, our understanding of totalities is subject to modification as our production of knowledge continues; thus, we are dealing in open totalities. Finally, it must be understood that certain powers are emergent from within the entity possessing the power, rather than a simple transfer of

54 Philosophies of science power from some external force. From the discussion of a stratified or layered reality in the critical realist section, it will be remembered that scientists work their way through deeper and deeper levels of reality, identifying a phenomenon, constructing possible hypotheses of the causal mechanism responsible for producing the phenomenon, testing those hypotheses and discarding the inadequate ones until a particular conception (hypothesis) of the mechanism can be accepted as provisionally true (or with sense extending tools shown, in fact, to be real), which then becomes the next thing to be explained. But as new strata of reality are discovered, we do not assume that the higher strata are necessarily reducible to the lower. In fact, in most cases higher strata can be said to emerge from lower strata, but they are not directly reducible to that lower strata. For example, humans are both physical creatures and rational creatures, but if we assume that our rationality can be reduced to the laws of physics, then we have done away with agency. For either what we do is interpreted as determined by antecedent forces, or what we do has nothing at all to do with any intentional activity on our part; it just happens serendipitously. And if we do away with human agency, then we must, likewise, assume that either the activity of science was predetermined or it just happens serendipitously with no rationale behind it. The limits of naturalism

There are two primary limits of naturalism when it comes to studying human conduct and its social context. The first is an epistemological limit that comes from the nature of society itself, which is that “social systems are not spontaneously, and cannot be experimentally, closed” (Bhaskar 1979: 57). The impact on our epistemology is that we do not have access to test conditions, and therefore the social sciences cannot be predictive, but rather explanatory. (But this limit does not mean that a well developed social science cannot have a prognostic quality regarding possible outcomes of a particular phenomenon.) Furthermore, due to the historical and irreducible nature of social structures, they must be understood and explained in terms of qualitative change rather than merely quantitative change. Thus, precision in meaning must take the place of accuracy in measurement, for hypotheses about social systems “must be expressed in language, and confirmed in dialogue” (Ibid. 59). The second limit is relational in that the social sciences, being a part of their own object of inquiry (i.e. society) are in principle susceptible to explanation in terms of the concepts and laws of the explanatory theories they employ; so that they are internal with respect to their subject matter in a way in which the natural sciences are not. Now this necessitates a precision in the sense in which their objects of knowledge can be said to be ‘intransitive.’ (Ibid. 59–60)

Philosophies of science

55

Bhaskar’s theory does not reduce the objects being studied into a result of the study itself. While there may be a causal interdependency between the social sciences and the social systems they study, the existential intransitivity of those systems is not diminished. Once the object exists, however it has been produced, it is a legitimate object for scientific investigation, “even though such an investigation, once initiated, may radically modify it” (Ibid. 60). And since social systems are open and historical in nature, and therefore subject to transformation, social science cannot be expected to anticipate qualitatively new developments. Due, therefore, to the ontological nature of social systems, social scientific theory must always be incomplete. Natural scientific theory must also always be incomplete, but its incompleteness is due to epistemological reasons, not the ontological nature of natural objects. Now if social structures exist only in their effects, i.e. they are activitydependent, the task of social science is to explain the laws or tendencies of those mechanisms and then test those explanations empirically. Again, that testing cannot be quantitative, but rather qualitative, for hypotheses of social systems must be understood in terms of their explanatory power, which can only be measured in terms of precision in definition or description, for it will be remembered that in my discussion of the natural sciences causal laws are expressed in terms of normic, tendential statements. The power of a mechanism, when it is exercised, is not always realized due to the interaction of other mechanisms which may interfere with the actualization of the expected consequent. Yet, because we do not see the result of the mechanism, this does not mean that the mechanism does not work. So prediction in open systems is usually inappropriate, but we can still talk about causal laws operating in open systems even when we cannot predict their consequences. But how do we generate hypotheses? If no social theory regarding any number of experiences existed prior to the social science project, the social scientist would be faced with a jumbled mass of social phenomena that would be daunting, to say the least, to sort out. However, social science does not operate in a historical vacuum, any more than society does. Moreover, since social structures are not only activity-dependent, but also concept-dependent, there is always some existing explanation to account for most social phenomena. So the social scientist is not faced with how to go about generating a hypothesis. Instead, she usually chooses from two or more already existing explanations or hypotheses. Even if no formal theories exist, people still have their own concepts of what it is they are doing and why. These beliefs can be called proto-theories. The movement from proto-theory to theory takes place by constructing a “real definition of a form of social life that has already been identified under a particular description” (Ibid. 63). The adequacy of a definition is based on its explanatory power and the explanatory power of the hypotheses that the definition is able to generate. Thus, the definition (and the same can be said for hypotheses) capable of explaining everything that another definition explains plus something significantly more is the more adequate definition.

56 Philosophies of science But is there anything else that can guide us in our inquiries? Philosophy is not able to do the work of science, i.e. it cannot tell us a priori what laws and generative mechanisms science will discover, but it can tell us a priori what the nature of the world must be if the work of science is to take place. In the same way a discourse about society cannot tell us what kinds of social phenomena we might experience, but it can tell us that some kind of social relations must exist that make the social phenomena possible or allow for intentional action. For example, a grammar must pre-exist the individual if the individual is to learn and speak a language. But since we are historicallybound beings, the social structures we reproduce and sometimes transform must also be historically bound. The social relations in which we participate, therefore, are subject to change in that we produce or reproduce them through our activity. In other words, we not only produce social products, but we produce or reproduce the conditions of their production. Thus, the social relations that must exist to make particular social phenomena possible must be social relations of production. And in order to understand the essence of a particular social phenomenon, we must understand the social relations of production making that phenomenon possible. The deduction that social relations are necessary for any intentional action is an example of the formal use of a transcendental procedure in the social sciences. And such deductions give us what might equate to the major premise of a logical argument. The minor premise, then, is a “social activity as conceptualized in experience” (Bhaskar 1979: 65). This process of symbolically representing to ourselves a particular social activity is essential to our ways of knowing, but if the conceptual moment is as far as we go, then two errors can arise as a result of the implicit ontology of empirical realism which prevents us from seeing that: (1) the conditions for the phenomena (namely social activities as conceptualized in experience) exist intransitively, and may therefore exist independently of their appropriate conceptualization, and as such be subject to an unacknowledged possibility of historical transformation; and (2) the phenomena themselves may be false or in an important sense inadequate (for example superficial or systematically misleading). (Ibid. 66) So the movement from a set of beliefs to a theory consists in isolating the real conditions (i.e. social structures) that facilitate social activity. Yet, those conditions may not be adequately conceptualized. Therefore, further critique is necessary. If those isolated conditions are inadequately conceptualized, then the next step in this conceptual critique is to explain how such a conception is in fact inadequate due to its poverty of explanatory power. Such critiquing, of course, requires a more adequate conception that explains everything the inferior conception explains plus something more. If it can be shown that the

Philosophies of science

57

inadequate conception was necessary, then this set of beliefs may properly be termed ideology, in the sense of false consciousness. At this point the critique moves beyond simply explaining how the inadequate conception is inferior to changing the conditions that make such false conceptions necessary. So conceptual critique and change turn into social critique and social change. Theory, therefore, if it is to be useful or adequate, must be bound to practice. Explanatory critique and emancipation

As I have argued above, the selection of a theory or definition should be decided according to the greatest explanatory power. Now in the work of social critique, it is social structures that come under scrutiny through the activities they enable and limit. And, as mentioned above, social structures and their everyday operation are concept-dependent, which means that agents have some concept (even if an incorrect concept) of what it is they do (or believe). Now when it can be demonstrated that a particular social structure requires that people necessarily misunderstand what that structure is and how it operates, we are justified not only in exposing the falsity of beliefs necessitated by the structure, but we are justified in working to change that structure or do away with it. As Andrew Sayer (1992) points out, the effect of actions which are informed by false ideas will often differ from those which actors expect them to have. If we are to represent such situations adequately, we must attempt both to report those ideas, as they are held, authentically, and show in what respects they are false. (Note that to criticize an idea as false is not to deny that it is held or that it has consequences.) Therefore, in order to understand and explain social phenomena, we cannot avoid evaluating and critiquing societies’ own self-understanding. (39) In other words, to critique a belief is to condemn it, as well as any action predicated on it if that belief entails a mystification or false consciousness. A rather long quote about Marx’s critique of wage labor illustrates this point quite well: Wage-labour only occurs where the workers do not possess the means of labour (tools, workplace, raw materials), and therefore have to sell their power to work to someone who does. This initial separation of means of labour from worker is not given by nature, but the result of history. It perpetuates itself, since the product of the worker’s labour belongs to the owner of the means of labour, and only a portion of it is paid to the worker––in general, too small a portion for the worker to be able to acquire the means of labour. However, because the worker’s pay takes the form of the price of the labour-power he or she has sold, it appears as if ‘exchange is no robbery’, and, while pay levels may be the subject of negotiation, some

58 Philosophies of science wage level or other would be ‘fair’. Wage-labour spontaneously generates this ideology of ‘wages as payment for labour’, which, however, is false, in that (a) what is actually paid for is labour-power, (b) labour-power can only be a commodity when labour is not possible for the worker without such an exchange, since he or she is deprived of the means of labour, and (c) only a portion of the product of labour goes to the worker––and the surplus accruing to the owner ensures that the worker’s deprivation of the means of labour is perpetuated. In this case, not only does the institution of wagelabour cause false beliefs about itself, it also protects itself from the wrath of the worker by this illusion. To expose it is to criticize the wage system (i.e. capitalism), and to spread this word is to stir up dissent from capitalism, which of course is just what Marx intended. (Collier 1994: 172–3) So it can be seen that if a social object (structure, belief, or relation), in order to function, requires that people systematically misunderstand it, then that object should be changed or removed because misunderstandings or “false consciousness” are not only based on lies, but undermine the grounds for discourse in general. A person committed to a fact/value dichotomy might, however, object that the argument jumps from fact to value by slipping in the assumption that we are better off believing what is true. Yet, Andrew Collier tells us that the questions ‘what should I believe about X’ and ‘what is true about X’ are not logically independent questions. In fact they are equivalent, in the sense that the answer to one is necessarily the answer to the other. It simply doesn’t make sense to say ‘that is true, but I shouldn’t believe it’ or ‘I should believe that, though it is not true’. (Ibid. 174) Bhaskar argues that, all other things being equal, “truth, consistency, coherence, rationality, etc. are good, and their opposites bad, precisely because commitment to them are conditions of the possibility of discourse in general” (1979: 82). And within the domain of the natural sciences, where the fact/value dichotomy is usually accepted as true, the work of science is, nevertheless, predicated on truthfulness in relaying the procedure and outcome of an experiment, on consistency in setting up repeated experiments, etc. So under this explanation of critique, knowledge is a necessary component of self-emancipation, but it is not enough by itself. Certainly, it is better to be an enlightened dissident than an oppressed dupe, but knowledge is a limited power. What is required beyond the identification of certain social structures as oppressive or harmful is the removal or transformation of those structures into more enabling and helpful ones. The liberal political response, since it uses a form of methodological individualism which insulates social structures from critique, is to tweak the system in some way, but not to remove a social

Philosophies of science

59

structure. It is only by moving to the level of praxis that the belief that knowledge is power can be realized. Without engagement in practical and material activity, emancipation will be denied. And the other forms of social theory, whether focusing on individuals or groups, have either accepted a form of positivism denying the possibility of acting in meaningful ways or retreated into a form of idealism where change is only achieved inside the head, and they have all cut themselves off from the possibility of critiquing and thus changing those social structures upon which human emancipation depends. Finally, it should be clear by now that the relationship between theory and practice under a critical realist description is dialectical. Theory mediates between the real world and our empirical experience of it. Being that we do not typically have immediate access to generative mechanisms or social structures, theory is our provisional method for making our way in the world. If we hold theories which implicitly entail such notions as universal closure, Humean causal laws, or an atomistic and passive conception of humans, we immediately fall into problems by positing a model of the world that denies our intentional interaction with the world, forcing us into irrationalism. Therefore, assuming that it is better to be rational than irrational, using theory/practice inconsistencies as a means of guiding us in our understanding and development of composition theory is not only justifiable but important. It is now time to turn our attention to three schools of thought on composition theory: expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will examine each of these rhetorics in turn. These rhetorics, in their own way, have committed themselves to ontologies inevitably leading them into theory/practice inconsistencies. Yet, each philosophical inadequacy is different, grounded in particular agendas and beliefs. In the next three chapters, I will examine the epistemological and ontological claims, as well as their underlying assumptions, in order to construct the model of reality presupposed by the goals of each rhetoric. Within each of those chapters, I will also critique those models of reality, exposing their internal inadequacies and, thus, their theory/practice inconsistencies.

3

Expressivist rhetoric and voluntarism

Expressivist rhetoric experienced its real flowering during the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s (Berlin 1987: 177–8). At the same time, expressivists were reacting against a perceived model of writing known as the current-traditional model. The traditional model of composition, as elaborated upon by C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon in Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing (1984), sees writing as a set of fundamental skills whose primary function is transposing what has already been thought into written communication. As such, language under the current-traditional model is nothing more than the clothing of thought, the means of making external what is internal, ignoring the critical role language plays in thinking as evidenced by the work of Lev Vygotsky (1962). Writing instruction is, thus, seen as the transmission of fixed knowledge––rules of punctuation, modes of writing, the topoi of invention, etc.––to students who, it is supposed, are then able to apply these rules of writing to any situation or discourse with equal success. Finally, since the traditional model gives little attention to the writing process, the focus of instruction is on the finished product and its conformity to prescribed standards. This current-traditional method of writing instruction was seen by those who promoted expressivist rhetoric as yet another coercive component of society, along with a government promoting war and ignoring civil rights. Rather than seeing themselves as preparing students to fill technocratic slots in oppressive organizations, expressivist teachers sought to liberate their students from this alienating status quo ante by encouraging them to find their own voice, their own sense of self, free from the coercion of exploitive institutions. As a result, expressivist rhetoric’s central concern has been with the authentic self of the writer. Writing assignments are usually designed to engage students in topics they are interested in and about which they have a degree of understanding. The goal of the expressivists is not so much to increase the “volume of knowledge” the student has as it is to recast what is already known in terms of a critical self-liberating mind-set. The writing process is, thus, seen as organic, springing out of the individual’s imagination, much like the English Romantics’ secondary imagination. Students are encouraged to find their own “voice” in writing, but the ultimate

Expressivist rhetoric

61

goal for writers is empowerment or “self-actualization,” to find their “true self” by exploring their own experience as a way of understanding themselves and the world (Rohman 1965: 108). Rather than allowing someone else’s constructed meaning of experience to define them, the role of composition is to allow the student to develop an autonomy and sense of self. Under this regime the authentic self, for expressivists, is seen as inherently good, while the oppression of the self by others corrupts or distorts the true self. Expressivist rhetoric: a description and an ideal type Description

Donald Murray, in A Writer Teaches Writing (1968), contends that the “ability to write is not a gift, it is a skill” (xi), advocating along with the Romantic poets the democratic principle that all people are poets, some are just damned bad ones. In his article “The Interior View: One Writer’s Philosophy of Composition,” (1970) Murray devotes the entire article to explicating one sentence: “A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it” (21). Four important aspects are highlighted in this sentence: 1 2 3 4

A writer is an individual Who uses language To discover meaning in experience And communicate it

Because these four moments of compositional experience form a core of beliefs for expressivists and because Murray has been a central figure in expressivist rhetoric, I will use this sentence as an organizing principle for this section. 1

A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it.

The first of the four aspects focuses on the personal nature of writing. The writer is an individual who has a unique or authentic self. But because we are social beings who are formed through our interaction with others, the authenticity of this self, its essence, can be compromised by the undue influence of others. The writer, therefore, should not let others impose an interpretation on her experience or on her interpretation of general human experience. Murray explains that his “view of composing is frankly personal. The interior view of the writing act reveals that writing is an individual search for meaning in life” (Ibid. 21). It is vital that the writer finds some personal connection with the subject matter, becoming invested in the project of understanding and communicating her insights. In other words, she must make the subject matter her own. “If the writer does not feel that through

62 Expressivist rhetoric writing [s]he will discover something which is uniquely [hers],” Murray comments, “[s]he may soon concentrate on craft rather than content and speak with tricks rather than truth” (Ibid. 22), echoing D. Gordon Rohman’s (1965) notion that “‘good writing’ is that which has involved a writer responsible enough to discover his personal context within the ‘subject context’” (108). Murray’s contention here is not that the individual exists somehow separately from society or that the individual must learn everything through first-hand experience. We can learn from others’ experience and often do, but the point for Murray is that, if students are to be personally motivated in learning how to write, they will have better success if they write about things in which they are personally engaged. Murray (1970) explains it thus: The college freshman may learn something about literature and what another man found in life by reading the poem, and he may learn something about writing by discovering how the poem was made. He will probably learn more, however, looking into his own life and writing his own poem. The interior view of the writing process makes it clear that the writing course should have one central purpose: to allow the student to use language to explore his world. (24) So while we can learn from others’ experience, from reading about things, we learn better when we are dealing with our own experiences and when we are doing things. It is one thing to read about a scientific experiment, but when the student performs her own experiment, the lesson is more likely to stay with her. For expressivists there is a danger that others will usurp or unduly influence the student as she wrestles with life events in an effort to turn those events into personally meaningful experiences. Michael Paull and Jack Kligerman, in “Invention, Composition, and the Urban College,” (1972) discuss how in “many imperceptible ways, [students] were allowing interpretations of experience embodied in the language of others to order their own experience” (Ibid. 652). Acutely aware of these potentially damaging influences, they refrained from becoming too vocal in class discussions about assignments for fear that “any more involvement would shape the students’ perceptions more than they were already being shaped by the nature of the specific exercises” (Ibid. 652). As William D. Lutz (1971) explains it, “I want to make the student respond directly to his own experience and not someone else’s” (36). For expressivists, the reason external influences are important to control or limit is because the integrity of the self is threatened by those influences. The self or “person,” according to Rohman (1965), is “one who stands at the center of his own thoughts and feelings with the sense that they begin in him. He is concerned to make things happen and not simply to allow things to happen to him; he seeks to dominate his circumstances

Expressivist rhetoric

63

with words or actions” (108). The competing images are, on the one hand, of an individual who lives life, who becomes actively involved in making of life what she can, and, on the other hand, of an individual who is swept along by life, simply reacting to but never seeking to change her life situation. The one who lives life, rather than simply allowing life to happen to her, will be more involved in the education process, making that education her own. In short, the student should be an active participant rather than a passive observer. James Berlin (1988) has accused expressivists of claiming a notion of self as “universal, eternal, and authentic … that beneath all appearances is at one with all other selves” (489). But Berlin’s notion of self which he attributes to expressivists is borrowed from an Enlightenment concept of the autonomous self. Expressivists do not claim that the self is autonomous; rather, because the self can be coerced by others, because it is not autonomous, they are concerned to protect the development of the self during its formative years. William E. Coles, Jr. (1972) in speaking of the roles we develop for ourselves through style, the means we create to objectify ourselves, observes that our “roles [when they collide with other roles] are then adjusted to express our altered selves” (381). As such, the self goes through changes in its interaction with other selves and with the world. The self is neither universal, eternal, nor autonomous, but it is authentic; in other words, the self is irreducible to a set of forces, discursive or otherwise. 2

A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it.

The second aspect of Murray’s sentence focuses on the use of language as a tool for exploring our experiences and the world. “The student should discover language is fun,” contends Murray, “because it is a sturdy tool for the exploration of experience” (1970: 25). Language is more than a means of transcribing thoughts into a written code in order to share those thoughts with others. Language, in a fundamental way, is what we think with, the “incarnation of thought” itself as the Romantic poets intuited (Waldo 1985: 64). Coles (1969) in “Freshman Composition: The Circle of Unbelief” warns that “to suggest that writing involves no more than the ‘transfer’ of thoughts ‘from mind to paper’, is to invite the substitution of a process for an activity, perhaps a product for a process” (136). This notion of language as the incarnation of thought dovetails with the discovery model of writing wherein a person writes, not primarily to express thoughts, but to discover what one thinks about a particular topic. Peter Elbow (1973) explains the discovery model of writing thus: Instead of a two-step transaction of meaning-into-language, think of writing as an organic, developmental process in which you start writing at the very beginning––before you know your meaning at all––and encourage your words gradually to change and evolve. Only at the end

64 Expressivist rhetoric will you know what you want to say or the words you want to say it with. You should expect yourself to end up somewhere different from where you started. Meaning is not what you start out with but what you end up with. (15) “It is possible that inspiration will come to [the student] when he is walking in the woods or sitting in a drive-in theater,” advises Murray (1968) “but the writer knows that the best inspiration comes when he is putting pen to paper, that the happiest spontaneity comes while he is working…” (74). And this discovery component of writing should be turned upon the writer to understand herself and her relations to others and the world, bringing us to the third aspect of Murray’s sentence: “to discover meaning in experience.” 3

A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it.

“The writer’s basic job,” explains Murray (1970) “is not to say what he already knows but to explore his own experience for his own meaning” (23). The student should be encouraged to examine her life through writing about her experiences and developing a voice, a style, as “a means of self-realization, a way of growing,” advises Coles (1972: 380). Coles goes on to explain that a person’s style is an extension of the self as a tentative means of coming to know oneself, as well as a means of interacting with others. Since other styles will be confronted in the world, the student must maintain her own integrity of style while admitting her own inconclusiveness. She is not a finished or fixed product any more than her style or voice is carved in stone. But the student must not let another’s style or interpretation of experience define her; she must struggle to come to know, to develop, her own sense of self, her own sense of style. “Thus, style is a form of self-extension,” writes Coles, “one’s offering in the form of a role the best he is capable of imagining for himself at the moment enacted in terms of his subject” (Ibid. 380–1). Murray, in “Finding Your Own Voice,” (1969) discusses various responsibilities of the student–– ranging from finding your own topic and developing an informed opinion to selecting your audience and choosing your own form––but central to these responsibilities is the idea that the student needs freedom to learn, freedom to choose, freedom to write. Too much guidance becomes coercion and stifles the student (119–20). Thus, one aspect of discovering meaning in experience is to discover, to come to know, yourself. As Donald Stewart (1969) puts it, “We approached writing with the ‘liberal’ assumption that the basic reason we taught students to write was to allow them greater self-actualization through better thinking, ‘to live more abundantly’” (226). So writing is used to discover meaning in our experience, leading to a clearer understanding of ourselves, but we do not live in a vacuum. Our experience is circumscribed by the world; as such, in coming to understand ourselves, we must also understand

Expressivist rhetoric

65

the world and our place in it. In other words, not only should we learn about ourselves through writing, but we should also learn about others and our interaction with the world. But how can we know about the world? Walker Gibson, in “Composing the World: The Writer as Map-Maker,” (1970) quotes approvingly from James B. Conant’s Modern Science and Modern Man: …in view of the revolution in physics, anyone who now asserts that science is an exploration of the universe must be prepared to shoulder a heavy burden of proof. To my mind, the analogy between map-maker and the scientist is false. A scientific theory is not even the first approximation to a map; it is not a creed; it is a policy––an economical and fruitful guide to action by scientific investigators. (256) Gibson goes on to suggest that since the work of science does not give us a clearer understanding of the world, just a more fruitful, pragmatic guide to action, a better metaphor for science and composition studies might be “potmaking.” “The success of the finished pot,” he argues, “will not be measured in terms of accuracy––what’s an accurate pot? Instead, success has to be related to a larger and changing context in which questions are asked about responses of audiences, usefulness and beauty, effects on people’s actions” (Ibid. 258). And while students may feel at a loss at being told that language does not provide accurate maps, Gibson believes they “may find more than a compensation in joy, in play, in a sense of honest control over words without assuming that this means a control over things” (Ibid. 259). But why is it that language cannot give us accurate maps of “the reality of all mankind” (Ibid. 258)? Gibson contends that our messy, concrete experience of the world prevents us from making “absolute statements about the Nature of Life” (Ibid. 258). “Every time I get ready to accept a clearly indisputable doctrine of some sort – the evils of the military, say, or the folly of flying to the moon,” he writes: I look around at my immediate situation and find contradictory evidence. (The only generals I ever talked to were fine people.) Of course there are times when we turn our backs on such bothersome evidence and sound off anyway in abstract pontification. But I want my students to have a sense of what they’re turning their backs on––disorderly, foolish, intensely real stuff of actual experience––when they come out strong for this generalization or that one. (Ibid. 258–9) Because we cannot make “absolute” statements about life and the world, because language does not give us immediate access to the world, Gibson suggests, every generalization or abstraction we make about the world becomes suspect. The result of this form of knowledge is that the “intensely

66 Expressivist rhetoric real stuff of actual experience” is capable of countering our abstractions. Because the people in the military are honest, well-meaning people, the assertion that the military commits evil actions is questionable or at least too simplistic. So generalizations of any kind can be falsified or challenged by a personal experience that counters the generalization. While Gibson hopes his students will see the world as more complex than simple generalizations allow, he provides no avenue for escaping a relative form of knowledge wherein appearances are questionable, yet generalization based on some appearances can be countered by other appearances. A dichotomy is embraced by Gibson that requires either “absolute” knowledge or knowledge that is only validated by context, in other words, by the discourse community. But Gibson is not alone in this view of knowledge. Peter Elbow, in his use of writing groups and the believing game, suggests that in order to understand other people we must put ourselves in their situation, believing all they say in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of their position. Stephen Fishman (Fishman and McCarthy 1992) explains Elbow’s believing game as “an attempt to evaluate truth-claims, not by standing back, but by stepping closer to share someone else’s experience and language” (652). Elbow (1973) describes the believing game thus: In the believing game the first rule is to refrain from doubting the assertions, and for this reason you take them one at a time and in each case try to put the others out of your head. You don’t want them to fight each other … there is a kind of belief––serious, powerful, and a genuine giving of the self––that it is possible to give even to hateful or absurd assertions. To do this requires great energy, attention, and even a kind of inner commitment. It helps to think of it as trying to get inside the head of someone who saw things this way. (149) At first glance, the believing game sounds like immanent critique; the difference, however, is that the parts, the assertions, are not taken as a totality but are viewed separately. But Elbow balances the believing game with the doubting game. “The doubting game seeks truth,” he writes, “by indirection––by seeking error.” Elbow elaborates: To doubt well, it helps if you make a special effort to extricate yourself from the assertions in questions––especially those which you find selfevident. You must hold off to one side the self, its wishes, preconceptions, experiences, and commitments. (The machinery of symbolic logic helps people do this.) Also, it helps to run the assertion through logical transformations so as to reveal premises and necessary consequences and thereby flush out into the open any hidden errors. (Ibid. 148)

Expressivist rhetoric

67

One feature of the doubting game is its concern with logical propositions, and it is important to remember that logical propositions can be valid without the conclusion being true, suggesting a weakness of the doubting game. The search for erroneous thinking is limited to formal logic, ignoring the importance of accuracy in definitions and explanatory power in theories. This form of rationalism coupled with the believing game is what Elbow calls “the dialectic of experience because the more you get ideas and perceptions into the most fully experienced form, the better it works” (Ibid. 171). The idea seems to be that we can arrive at better versions of truth by countering each game with the other. Believing helps us understand alternative perspectives, and doubting helps us detect logical fallacies. The ultimate arbiter for deciding between contending interpretations of a phenomenon is, however, the discourse community: “that interpretation is correct which the speech community builds into those words” (Ibid. 156). So the final test for valid knowledge, according to this model, is its acceptance by the discourse community when something has been communicated to them. 4

A writer is an individual who uses language to discover meaning in experience and communicate it.

And this brings us to the final aspect of Murray’s sentence: communication. Once new knowledge is generated, the writer may wish to communicate this clearly with others; however, a communication can be expressed in many forms, and no one correct form exists. Murray (1970) writes, “[t]here is no one way to write and there is no one way for the student to learn to write. We must accept the individual student and appreciate his individualness” (24). Elsewhere, Murray observes that the student writer and his teacher … must first understand what every writer knows: there are no absolute laws of composition. Each principle of writing may be broken to solve a particular problem in a specific piece of work. The only test a writer applies to a page is the craftsman’s question, “Does it work?” (1968: 1) How one handles a particular issue in writing an essay should grow out of the writer’s interaction, the writer’s wrestling with that issue, in an organic fashion. To impose a particular mode, say a compare/contrast essay, is to cut the writer off from the possibility that other modes of expression will generate other ideas about or perspectives on the issue under consideration. Prescriptive instruction closes the student’s mind to further exploration, often times resulting in apathy toward the writing assignment. Gibson (1970) asks: Did the world have a composition right along, like an undiscovered America, and a lot of writers came on the scene to reflect, shed light on,

68 Expressivist rhetoric accurately expose this given composition? Or did a number of writers and talkers compose compositions of various sorts which then became as it were codified as the Composition of the World? (258) Gibson’s questions are obviously rhetorical, for he clearly believes the second scenario. His point is that composition should not be reified into a prescriptive form stifling creativity. Rather, composition should be fluid, changing with the needs of the writer, the writing situation, and the needs of the audience. Since expressivists have been attacked by social-constructivists for failing to understand the social embeddedness of knowledge, this issue should be dealt with before moving on to the construction of an ideal type. Stephen Fishman (Fishman and McCarthy 1992) defends expressivism against attacks claiming an excessive form of individualism at the heart of expressivist rhetoric by linking expressivism to the Romantic movement and especially to the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder. Of particular interest is Herder’s philosophy of language, wherein he contends that language presupposes community, another person with whom one can communicate (650). Moreover, Herder’s notion of artistic creativity is that the artist, remaining true to her own inner experience, shares this experience with others, an experience grounded in the artist’s own qualities, intentions, and social situation (Ibid. 651). Elbow’s (1973) believing game is an example of the social nature of language and knowledge because to play the believing game requires one to “get inside the head of someone who saw things” a particular way in order to understand the other person’s Weltanschauung (149). In “Romantic Rhetoric for the Modern Student: The Psycho-rhetorical Approach of Wordsworth and Coleridge,” (1985) Mark Waldo contends that style is equated to the individual’s imagination. But the individual, under Waldo’s conception of Romantic thought, was not seen as isolated from and standing against society. Rather, individuality must emerge out of the group or out of conformity. If there is no group conformity against which to push in asserting one’s individual voice or style, then individuality becomes meaningless. Supporting his position, Waldo quotes Georges Gusdorf: [Originality] corresponds to the concern for proper expression, to honesty in self-expression. In this sense, it behooves each to give himself his language, to find his style. Each person’s Weltanschauung is a view that belongs only to him; style signifies the task given to man of becoming aware of perspective. Each of us, even the most simple of mortals, is charged with finding the expression to fit his situation. Each of us is charged with realizing himself in a language, a personal echo of the language of all which represents his contribution to the human world. The struggle for style is the struggle for consciousness. (76)

Expressivist rhetoric

69

To understand Gusdorf’s notion of originality, a better understanding of his view of language is needed. Gusdorf (1965) sees the problem of language as a kind of double-edged sword: “It defines and perfects us,” yet “it terminates and determines us” (43). In other words, language allows us to be human, to give wing to imaginative flight and other forms of abstract thought, to express ourselves, yet it imposes a kind of cultural conformity on the individual; the individual, through language, is brought “into line with those around, in order to model us to the common measure of all” so that we can communicate with one another (Ibid. 43). Humans find themselves in a bind between language which determines how they can speak if they are to remain intelligible and language which is their vehicle for creative, original thought. Gusdorf’s solution to this problem is to work through these two positions dialectically. In Hegel’s sense of the interpenetration of opposites, Gusdorf contends, “one must admit the existence of an intimate union between communication and expression” (Ibid. 57). Expression demonstrates the uniqueness of the individual, while communication requires conformity of the individual to the communal in an unspoken contract of shared cultural meaning that allows communication to take place. Expression gives the individual scope to explore one’s voice, style, sense of aesthetics; it is a celebration of the subject’s uniqueness, yet if it is not expressed in a language or medium that can be shared with others, such expression exists in a solipsistic or even psychotic world. Rather than ignoring or denying the social nature of language and knowledge, expressivists embrace it, but because they spend more time working out the individual, expressive side of language rather than the social, terminating side, they are easy targets for social-constructivists who are focused on the social, terminating side of language. Ideal type

From here we can begin constructing an ideal type of expressivist rhetoric. The idea of an authentic self, which can be corrupted or coerced by others, is a central concern for expressivists. If there is no authentic self, there should be no concern with protecting the self from excess influences, such as prescriptive writing instruction. While the individual is part of a language community which provides the necessary feedback for learning a language, the individual cannot escape her particular level of cognitive development. She must begin learning to write where she is, not from where the teacher is. And while language is a personal means of making meaning, it is also a social tool. The expressivists do not deny the social origins of language, as some of their critics suggest (Faigley 1986; Berlin 1988). Rather they choose to focus more of their energy and attention on the personal aspect of learning how to write. As many of the theorists above point out, meaning is made by the writer turning an event into a personal experience, but that experience is always situated in the “dynamic interplay of self and world” (Rohman 110).

70 Expressivist rhetoric The form of knowledge-making proposed by expressivists is decidedly situated in a Kantian epistemology, wherein the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Thus, Gibson rejects the map-making metaphor in favor of the pot-making metaphor. The clay, like the phenomenon, is given by the object of study, but the shape is given by the understanding. So not only is knowledge cut off from the thing-in-itself; its validity is subjective, depending on the values, needs, etc., of the group considering that knowledge. Elbow’s doubting/believing “dialectic” is ultimately grounded in a discourse community, cutting off feedback from the thing-in-itself which might be used to guide us in our interpretations of phenomena. All we can know, under this model of knowledge-making, are the phenomena we experience. Yet the universal categories of the understanding, which Kant used to explain why two people could experience the same phenomenon in similar ways, is not clearly accepted by expressivists. The focus on the individual could suggest that each mind is unique to itself, but I cannot sustain this aspect of epistemology for expressivists, mainly because they do not attend to this issue. As a result of this ambiguity, there is no way to decide if expressivists are committed to a Humean ontology, but it is clear that the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena is held by expressivists. And clearly, a product of this type of ontology is that no measure of truth exists apart from the discourse community. Finally, because we can only know the appearance of a thing and not the thing-in-itself, social change must be generated by an atomistic, mechanistic interaction of things (read: determinism), or by a mechanism which will always remain a mystery to us (read: magic), or by changing our perceptions and attitudes. Expressivists fall into the latter position. In discussing the difficulty students have in dealing with complex questions, Coles (1970) writes: The difference between answering and addressing a question, the suggestion that location might be seen as a state of mind, the idea that change could be viewed as the substitution of one linguistic ordering of experience for another, and as a consequence mean a change of identity: these are not notions with which students are likely to be at first either familiar or concerned, and it takes time to bring them to an awareness of their importance. (30) One of Coles’ concerns is that students take things too literally, as suggested by the idea that location could be viewed as a state of mind. For example, asked to describe where they are in their education, students might respond, “we are at such and such university,” rather than “we are beginning to question some of our assumptions and no longer see the world in black and white terms.” But his assertion that “change could be viewed as the substitution of one linguistic ordering of experience for another” suggests that change is linguistically bound, that identity is purely a matter of how one chooses to think

Expressivist rhetoric

71

about oneself. Fishman and McCarthy (1992) while elaborating on the similarities between the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and modern day expressivists, write: Behind Herder’s and Elbow’s view that social unity can develop from sympathetic interplay among diverse forms of expression is a transformational view of society … when our exchanges with others are based upon self-expression, our exchanges can be transformative, can transform or make clearer who we are to ourselves and others. (652) This transformational view of society suggests that society can transform itself by individuals expressing themselves more clearly and by seeking clarification of other people’s self-expression. If only we took the time to understand each other better, we could solve our social problems, or as the Beatles put it, “All you need is love.” Elbow, in his book Embracing Contraries (1986), writes: In trying to come to grips with Freire’s book [The Pedagogy of the Oppressed] and my reactions to it, I am made to discover a contradiction at the heart of our culture which I hadn’t focused on before. A psychological contradiction, not an economic or political one. We preach freedom, but we don’t really practice it. (98) According to Elbow, the reason we do not practice freedom is because we have not made the appropriate psychological changes. Once we have changed how we think about freedom, we will be able to achieve freedom. The upshot is that change occurs by changing how we think or changing the linguistic order we employ. While material intervention is never denied by expressivists, social change never requires changing or doing away with social structures. To sum up, expressivist rhetoric operates under the assumption that there is an authentic self which, because it can be compromised by others, needs to be protected during formative years. While the self is not viewed as unchanging or eternal, it does have an essence irreducible to other powers or forces. If no authentic self exists, then the expressivist concern for protecting the individual from coercive forces and encouraging the individual to develop a unique voice becomes pointless. Centrally, the authentic self is the point of singular causality for expressivist rhetoric in Weber’s terms. Peripherally, expressivists also appear to accept a Kantian form of epistemology in that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. All the ramifications of this epistemology for expressivists are not clear except that the final arbiter of truth is the discourse community and that social change is achieved by changing the individual’s way of thinking or the linguistic codes he or she uses. Thus, three things can

72 Expressivist rhetoric be claimed about expressivism: there is an authentic self, the final arbiter of truth is the discourse community, and social change is achieved by changing the psychology of the individual. But it should be noted that this epistemology and notion of social change are not necessary to sustain the notion of an authentic self. As such, an expressivist position could be elaborated without a relativist epistemology and/or a neo-Kantian model of social change. Expressivist rhetoric: a critique Now that I have a model of expressivist rhetoric, the implicit assumptions that undergird expressivist rhetoric can be made explicit. The idea of an authentic self with an essence irreducible to other powers is necessary for sustaining a coherent notion of agency. Otherwise, human action is always the result of forces other than the intentions of the individual, predetermined by some antecedent and external cause prior to the act itself. The expressivist notion of agency does not mean that all human action is intentional, for much of human action is not intentional at all; agency does, however, entail that humans are capable of acting intentionally on their environment, on others, and on themselves within the limits of their socio-historical and material constraints. For example, a person can look for work intentionally, provided she is not physically or otherwise incapable or hindered, but a person cannot become intentionally employed if a job is not available or if the employer is unwilling to hire the person. Simply by choosing to think of oneself as employed does not make it so. So while we are not free to do anything we desire, we must be free to do, or attempt to do, some things within specific constraints; otherwise, human agency becomes nothing more than a rationalization after the fact (provided we were even capable of such rationalization). Because expressivists maintain a notion of human agency irreducible to other powers, expressivists seem to suggest an ontology that is not atomistic, mechanistic, and closed––at least regarding human action. Their problem lies in erring too far in the other direction, practicing a volutarism that is lodged in solipsism and relativism. Here the subject is a subject devoid of an external object of action. The Kantian epistemology clearly expressed by Elbow and Gibson, however, creates some problems. If we have no access to a non-discursive element of reality––in other words, if we are not able to check our abstractions, definitions, explanations, hypotheses, conceptions of self, etc., empirically against the thing being abstracted, defined, explained, hypothesized, etc.––we are held fast within a hermeneutic circle. Appealing to the authority of the discourse community is a last minute deus ex machina. The discourse community is more a cautionary after-thought by which to cover the many sins of a knownothing solipsism. So the problem then becomes how to decide between versions of truth proposed by the different communities. For example, while one community might believe a particular ethnic group is biologically inferior, justifying their extermination, another community might believe no

Expressivist rhetoric

73

meaningful biological difference exists between ethnic groups. How do we decide between the two positions? And how do we judge the “selves” formed by their respective compositional schemes? Appealing to the authority of the discourse community is simply trading a form of individual relativism for group relativism. It merely postpones the problem––shifting it to another ontological level, Hegel’s infinite regress. If there is no intransitive reality which stands over against our conceptions of it, we are left to create reality with our collective words. When I was a youngster, playground arguments were typically won by the kid who shouted the longest, eventually forcing other voices to silence. But expressivists have moved beyond truth being determined by the individual who shouts the loudest. Now truth is determined by the group who carries the day in forcing their vision of reality on others. In short, truth is determined by the group flexing the most economic or military muscle. This is demonstrated with disastrous effects today as the U.S. forces its peculiar brand of market-driven logic on developing countries despite the local opposition of the powerless who speak out but whose voices are rarely heard. Even appeals to reason cannot overcome this relativism. If the validity of a “truth” is only true to the discourse community employing it, no external grounds exist whereby an outsider can judge the validity of the “truth.” Thus, if the premises of a formal syllogism are only true to a particular discourse community, an outsider can only deduce whether the conclusion of that syllogism is valid or not. The truthfulness of the conclusion will only pertain to the discourse community, not to the outsider’s community, for formal logic, in such a situation, tells us nothing about the truth of the premises and can, therefore, tell us nothing about the truthfulness of the conclusion. And since the presumed Kantian epistemology cuts expressivists off from making claims about the real world, access to a form of truth grounded (at least partially) in the nature of the world––as well as action in that world––is denied. While clear communication between contending parties is an important step in overcoming problems resulting from competing logics, if we deny ourselves access to the non-discursive, empirical element of an intransitive world (or relatively intransitive social world), arbitration for truth must necessarily default to discourse communities with their particular values, needs, etc. Our analysis must, likewise, shift to the structure and history of these communities––which requires an abandoning of the focal point of expressivism––the individual self. And such an epistemology, as I have demonstrated in Chapter 2, is incapable of coherently sustaining a historical notion of science. If one can only know one’s experience of a phenomenal event and nothing about the thing causing the phenomenon, one must either maintain strict discipline, refraining from making claims about the world (which means that science cannot tell us what governs the natural world), or if one does make claims about the world, one commits the epistemic fallacy, for the assumption behind such claims is that the world is reducible to what one can say about the world, making science redundant.

74 Expressivist rhetoric Coupled with this Kantian view of knowledge is a neo-Kantian view of social change wherein social change is accomplished by changing individual psychology and morality, changing how we think and the linguistic codes we use. Clearly, changing how we think about things is vital to changing how we do things, but while this is a necessary component of social change, it is not sufficient, in and of itself, to realize genuine social change. Because such an approach ignores social structures, it insulates them from critique by reifying them into eternal forms or by denying them altogether. It will be remembered from the discussion of social structures in Chapter 2 that coherent accounts of meaningful social activity presuppose the prior existence of social structures. Speaking requires that a grammar and the social conventions of communication supporting it already be in place. Hence, wage labor presupposes a capitalist economy wherein the means of production are owned and controlled by capitalists; marriage presupposes the institution of the family and its ongoing functioning. And at a social systems level the existence of the family already premises economic and political institutions, as well as those historically specific social values and laws which inform the customs, legal obligations and restrictions associated with married life. Concomitantly, just because a person chooses to change her psychological orientation and consider herself employed does not mean she is employed. First, a job must be available; second, it must be offered to her by the employer; and third, she must accept the offer. Social structures not only enable the activities presupposed by those structures; they also limit or circumscribe those activities. They are prior to the self, not given by the self. These external priors are the stuff from which selves are produced. And in modern society one of those [priors] is the theory of composition springing out of the conundrums of classroom instruction, including the self-reflexive needs of teachers who are themselves “selves.” Any form of social freedom is always limited and enabled by the social structure under which that freedom is exercised. If we ignore the role social structures play in the scope of our activities, we may be unable to bring about the social changes we want. Some changes can be made within existing structures; other changes, however, may require the removal of certain structures and/or the creation of new ones. Because expressivists have left the issues of social structures undertheorized, they have failed to explain adequately how social change is possible, embracing a form of voluntarism wherein individuals create society as they please. Theory/practice inconsistency As mentioned earlier, no logical reason requires expressivists to maintain a Kantian epistemology or a neo-Kantian form of social change. Neither of these positions is necessary to maintain the central component of expressivism: the authentic self. Because expressivism does, however, accept this epistemology and this form of social change, it has committed itself to a theory/practice inconsistency. If the concern is to protect the individual from

Expressivist rhetoric

75

potentially harmful coercive forces, while the coercive forces of social structures are ignored, expressivists undermine the possibility of ending or ameliorating those forces. The very goal of preserving the integrity of the authentic self is cut short by the individualistic, voluntaristic notion of social change embraced by expressivists. In order to change social structures adequately, however, one must understand the nature of specific social structures and the activities they enable and limit, and in order to accomplish such change, one needs an adequate epistemology. The Kantian epistemology espoused by expressivists is a form of social relativism denying the possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself. All that can be known is our experience of the phenomena. This form of epistemology reduces knowledge to a pragmatic usefulness and no more. The possibility of moving through successive approximations to a better understanding of the nature of phenomena, both natural and social, is impossible with a Kantian epistemology, for we can never check our experience against empirical reality guided by theory. Moreover, if a Kantian epistemology with an unbridgeable gulf between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds is explicitly embraced, expressivists find themselves in a position where changing social structures becomes pointless as individuals are assumed to be capable of changing their reality independent of the institutional states in which they live. Hence, the epitome of expressivist philosophy can be summed up in the slightly bowdlerized stoic maxim: “While my body is in chains, in my compositions, I am free!” Expressivist rhetoric in the classroom As one might expect, student texts produced in response to expressivist writing assignments can range widely in terms of the quality of writing and thinking. For example, students in several different classes were asked to write about homelessness, specifically to explore their own subjective feelings about homelessness and how it might relate to them. Most of these students had little or no contact with homelessness apart from television and movies, but all of them had strong opinions on the subject. In order to provide some food for thought, all students read two essays. The first essay by Stuart Bykofsy, “No Heart for the Homeless,” (1995) argued that the homeless had no right to live on the street where they sleep, panhandle, urinate, and defecate because not only were they not tax payers, thus having no claim to the streets, but moreover, their presence lowered property value, hurting those who owned the surrounding property. Bykofsky does propose forms of workfare and warehousing of the homeless, but his main concern was to remove them from sight. The homeless were considered a blight upon society. The second essay by Jon D. Hull, “Slow Descent into Hell,” (1995) chronicles the lives of several homeless people, describing the events that led to their living on the streets and the efforts of some to get off the streets. While Hull’s essay paints a picture of the homeless with warts and all, it tends to put a human

76 Expressivist rhetoric face on these personal tragedies, thus coming across as more sympathetic to the plight of the homeless. After reading and discussing the first essay, many students identified with Bykofsky’s outrage at the homeless. The essay seemed to strike a chord in many students, despite the fact that few had any real dealings with the homeless. Students became aware, after reading the second essay, that getting off the streets was not a problem easily overcome: getting a job often required a home, and yet getting a home required a job. This catch-22 surprised many students who previously thought that getting off the streets was as easy as getting a job, which to their thinking was easily had. Nevertheless, most students still identified more strongly with Bykofsky’s attitude toward the homeless. Andrew begins his paper: I’m tired of it! I’m tired of hearing about it, I’m tired of seeing it, and hell I’m even tired of smelling it. What am I talking about? Bums, mooches, freeloaders, homeless, call them what you want. Why should we have to put up with this mess? Would the bums like it if we went and pissed all over their cardboard box, or their shoes? Then what are they thinking pissing on our properties, is it about the same thing? While this unvarnished outrage was more vitriolic than most, the sentiment was still reflective of a majority of students. Some students, however, took a more humane perspective, whether for religious reasons or from some other sense of moral obligation. For example, Keith, by way of a conclusion in his paper, relays an anecdote: There was a guy walking along a beach one day, at low tide. He was tossing trapped starfish back into the ocean. A critic told him he couldn’t possibly make a difference to all the thousands of dying starfish along the beach. The guy shrugged, threw another starfish back in the water and said, “Made a difference to that one.” Just one person cannot solve homelessness, but that’s okay. We can solve it for this person, and that one, and those few over there. That’s something we shouldn’t wait for society to fix. Helping the homeless is something each of us can do. These positions on homelessness are representative of the range of students’ thoughts and reactions to the problem of homelessness expressed in these classes, and this points out the shortcomings of expressivist rhetoric. While expressivist rhetoric does engage students where they are in their thinking and attitudes (a strength, in my opinion, of expressivism), it does nothing to move students beyond those comfortable or reactionary positions, let alone challenge their thinking or attitudes. For self-motivated students, it can be argued that simply contemplating this issue may allow these students to

Expressivist rhetoric

77

move beyond uncritically held reactionary beliefs. But expressivism offers little guidance in how to think more critically about homelessness and many other important social issues. Students are left to themselves to figure out how to think, and for many the inertia of examples set by parents and politicians is either too great to overcome or simply too comfortable to warrant the effort needed to move beyond such simplistic thinking. Students gain no insight into the problem of homelessness when they are allowed to maintain their own prejudices and misconceptions. These students may feel empowered by having their ideas validated by the teacher, which may reinforce each student’s sense of self, but they remain ignorant of larger social forces which play fundamental roles in the eviction of the homeless. And while understanding the deeper causes of homelessness will not necessarily protect students from becoming homeless themselves, that understanding is necessary to addressing the problem of homelessness if one hopes to ameliorate or end its systemic roots. In other words, expressivist rhetoric may give students a sense of individual power, a stronger sense of self, but that power is impotent in the face of unrecognized and unacknowledged social institutions which systematically exclude individuals from the material means necessary for equal opportunity to be more than a bad faith abstraction. Conclusion The central component of expressivist rhetoric is the notion of an authentic self, irreducible to other powers or forces. This irreducible, authentic self requires an ontology other than the empirical realist ontology: atomistic, mechanistic, and closed. Exactly what forms pertain to this ontology are unknown since expressivists have, as yet, not discussed it at any length––not surprising in that expressivists have accepted a Kantian epistemology, which claims an insurmountable divide between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, and have augmented it with a solipsistic project. With the thing-in-itself securely cut off, expressivists are forced into silence regarding the nature of that reality which stands over and against the authentic self they claim so assiduously to cultivate. As a result, expressivists must also fall silent regarding the nature of social structures and their influence on agency. This position leaves the ontological status of social structures and their relation to active self-realization at best ambiguous. Yet expressivists are clearly concerned about the influence others (individuals, groups, and institutions) can have on the individual, but because they cannot know (even in relative terms) the nature of social structures, expressivists are forced to envision a model of social change wherein individuals ward off the coercive influences of others by psychologically arming themselves against an array of vaguely defined “oppressions.” Hence, change comes about by thinking differently and employing a different set of linguistic codes. Their solution to the problem of social change and the coercive social forces blocking it remain individual or psychological

78 Expressivist rhetoric at best, thus placing them in a phenomenological camp that resembles quite closely what Bhaskar calls Weberian voluntarism. So what can we make of the ambiguous nature of social structures for expressivists? It seems that two paths are open to them: 1) they can deny the existence of social structures, or 2) they can acknowledge them and discreetely ignore them. If they deny the existence of social structures, then they must explain how the individual through self-awareness can overcome the coercive influences of others. But since this position would deny the possibility of a social language that pre-exists the speaker (for language is a social structure), expressivists are not likely to travel this route. On the other hand, if they acknowledge that social structures are ontologically real and exercise influence on individuals, then attempts seeking the liberation of the self only at the psychological level must result in failure. Compositional self-clarification must be followed by social action by which concrete, material freedom is realized. Here composition becomes the propaedeutic to action––collective or personal. That is, when social structures have been identified as distorting or as repressing the individual, then those structures must be altered or swept away in order to free the individual from their control, thus creating new freedoms through new social structures and new possibilities of freedom and oppressions to be acted upon. But if expressivists deny the need for such action, then they must either acknowledge their impotence to produce what they claim they achieve, or they must move to a form of analgesic idealism in which, ultimately, the self is only apparently distorted by outside forces but is finally free to pull itself up by its idealist bootstraps when it has awakened from its slumbers. Of course, another solution remains that can lead expressivists out of this impasse: acknowledge that freeing the self requires not just a psychological readjustment but a collective effort to change or do away with certain social structures. At this point, of course, it must be asked whether they are still expressivists. Expressivists, perhaps because they have not been vocal in theorizing more clearly the nature of reality presupposed by their rhetorical theory, seem to have avoided the traditional bind of living in an ultimately determined world while trying to maintain a notion of agency. In other words, they have not embraced a positivist view of science. Others, however, have turned to science, endeavoring to make composition a more rigorous and respectable discipline. This next group is known as cognitivists. They will be considered in the next chapter.

4

Cognitivist rhetoric and positivism

While some writing teachers addressed the social unrest of the 1960s by asserting the agency of the writer, others turned to the work of cognitive psychology in the area of problem-solving to establish the study of writing as a scientific project which would give added respectability to composition studies. “Freshman English will never reach the status of a respectable intellectual discipline,” Janice Lauer (1970) challenged her colleagues, “unless both its theorizers and its practitioners break out of the ghetto” (396). Out of such concerns, some composition specialists turned to the work of cognitive psychology in the area of problem-solving. While cognitivists, like expressivists, stressed writing as a process, one of their central theoretical goals was to explain from a psychological perspective how successful writers write. By so doing, they hoped to help inexperienced writers avoid such problems as writer’s block, getting bogged down searching for “just the right word,” etc. Lester Faigley et al. (1985) stated the central assumptions of the cognitivists when he wrote “that the goal of composing is to communicate, that writing abilities follow a developmental sequence, that composing is an orderly process from which general principles can be abstracted, and that these general principles can be used to teach writing” (15). But underlying these explicit assumptions was another set of premises about the nature of reality, the functioning of the human mind, and the relationship between thought and reality. By examining these assumptions, both explicit and implicit, an ideal type of the cognitivist position can be constructed. The construction of an ideal type and its critique are the main goals of this chapter. Cognitivist rhetoric: an exploration and an ideal type Exploration

Frank D’Angelo, in his seminal work A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric (1975), explains why rhetoric should be studied from the perspective of a gestalt or cognitive psychology. Any act of communicating requires a mind that not only intends to communicate a particular message, but also takes in the world, giving us an understanding of nature, other human beings, and the

80 Cognitivist rhetoric communication situation. And it is the workings of the mind, how it perceives and understands the world, that attract cognitive theorists of composition. In a Kantian vein, cognitivists see human intelligence as a structuring form imposing order upon the experience of the phenomenal world. Human intelligence takes the chaotic experience of external phenomena as they impinge upon our senses and turns that experience into a coherent perception capable of being logically apprehended. “Perception is of the whole,” writes D’Angelo. This is because the human organism imposes wholeness upon the elements of perception. As external stimuli impinge upon the organism, neural activities in the organism induce states of consciousness that organize energies within the viewer. These energies then manifest themselves in a structuring of the environment. (13–14) While D’Angelo points out that stimulus elements lend themselves to this construction of wholeness because of their proximity to one another and because of their similarity, the important aspect of this structuring of reality is the work of human intelligence in completing and structuring sensations by schematizing them. In other words, “stimulus elements form complete patterns because the human organism will not tolerate chaos; if forms are incomplete, then the organism will tend to complete them” (Ibid. 14). Like Kant, D’Angelo does not deny the existential reality of the thing-initself, the generative mechanism (in critical realist terms) that produces the phenomena experienced and eventually known by the individual, but he is careful to point out that it is human intelligence that gives coherence to its thought-object. To support his position, he quotes the structuralist Jean Piaget, who contends that intelligence, viewed as a whole, takes the form of a structuring which impresses certain patterns on the interaction between the subject or subjects and near or distant surrounding objects. Its originality resides essentially in the nature of the patterns that it constructs to this effect. (Ibid. 15) So for D’Angelo, as with Kant and Piaget, the uniqueness of human intelligence (or the understanding, in Kant’s terms) is that it synthesizes the experience of an event, completing and structuring it, thereby giving itself its thought-object. And while D’Angelo does not explicitly claim this structuring quality of the understanding is the same for all people, as the categories of understanding are universal for Kant, such a universalizing claim is implied by his call for studying these structuring properties as a better way to understand rhetoric. “Thus from the existence of conceptual patterns of discourse,” D’Angelo writes,

Cognitivist rhetoric

81

we infer the existence of similar patterns of thought; from the existence of conceptual patterns of thought, we can infer the existence of corresponding patterns of discourse. One of the tasks of the rhetorician is to relate the structure of thought to the structure of discourse. (Ibid. 16) Thus, verbal patterns of discourse relate to conceptual patterns of thought, and these patterns, in essence, must be the same for everyone, or an ideographic study of thought patterns would be needed for each student. In his article “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process,” (1978) D’Angelo becomes more explicit about these thought processes when he argues that the “rhetorical topics themselves can be viewed as differentiations of basic mental processes that have evolved over thousands of years” as the human mind has evolved from an undifferentiated, amorphous whole to a differentiated, more complex, autonomous mind (79). In other words, D’Angelo, drawing explicitly on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man and implicitly on Hegel’s dialectic, contends that as life advances, it transforms itself in depth, moving toward higher and higher levels of consciousness. It is gaining the “psychic zones of the world.” As a result, humanity is achieving a more complex mental activity to guide it along “the path of progress” to higher levels of consciousness. (Ibid. 81) In this way, D’Angelo is envisioning humankind as a “single organism, growing, changing, and developing in a single direction,” (Ibid. 81) much as Hegel envisioned humankind as the outward manifestation of Absolute Spirit’s progressive realization and history as the vehicle whereby Absolute Spirit objectifies and realizes itself materially. In order better to understand this, we should consider more closely the nature of the dialectic, and specifically Hegel’s dialectic. For Hegel, the key to the process or movement of dialectic is negation or absence. Conceptually, it is the subject’s awareness of an “inner lack” or unmet desire. The movement from non-identity to self-alienation requires the negation of the “other.” And, ultimately, the dialectic moves to a moment of totality or reunification by absenting the absence or the alienation created by the movement of self-differentiation. Such an “absenting of absence,” to use Bhaskar’s terminology, is, in essence, an incorporation into the subject of that object which has stood over and against the subject, blocking the former’s movement to a higher stage of self-knowledge and action. In Hegel’s dialectic, Absolute Spirit (in a state of undifferentiated totality) in an effort to come to a fuller sense of itself, a more adequate sense of identity, alienates itself from pure matter, thus producing from within itself the “resistant other.” By this move, Absolute Spirit becomes aware of itself as

82 Cognitivist rhetoric pure, reflective, uncompromised spirit which is opposed to matter. But, having achieved its goal of seeing itself as “pure thought,” absolute spirit recognizes its own impotence to transform the world, for it has no material form by which to carry out that transformation and bring it closer to its newly evolved needs and desires. Faced with the realization that it has achieved its pure sense of self, but at the cost of impotence, the Absolute Spirit now “reverses” its first positing act. The Absolute Spirit now reappropriates matter to itself so that it now can manifest its universal tendencies in its particularities, as well as in its universality. Hence, the historicity of the world, and of Absolute Spirit, is manifested as a spiraling series of affirmations, negations, and negations of negations. That is, the Absolute Spirit then evolves through a multitude of self-differentiations and self-unifications until it has manifested itself in the present world of vast particularization suspended in an intricately mediated totality. After each phase of differentiation, a new level of unity must emerge, ultimately leaving nothing outside Absolute Spirit. This process takes the form of a spiraling dialectical sublation wherein nothing is thrown away; rather, everything is brought back into the new totality. The concrete particulars of the material world are the necessary means by which Absolute Spirit goes about differentiating itself, moving through a complex series of self-alienations to self-realizations, and thus driving itself and humanity’s development to ever higher levels of self-consciousness. In other words, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is …a logical process or dialectic which actualizes itself by alienating or becoming something other than itself, and which restores its self-unity by recognizing this alienation as nothing other than its true expression or manifestation – a self-generating, self-differentiating and self-particularizing process of reason that is recapitulated and completed in the Hegelian system (which demonstrates this) itself. (Bhaskar 1994: 116) At one level, the concrete particulars, i.e. individual humans, have a freedom as they go about their daily activity. Yet this freedom is circumscribed by the dialectical history of the Absolute as it has developed thus far and the ultimate goal of Absolute Spirit’s self-development and self-realization. So what looks like freedom must ultimately end in a predetermined outcome. This predetermined outcome does not mean, of course, that each individual’s lifecourse is a series of lock-stepped events. Rather, such determination is a long-run affair stretching over generations and eons. Indeed, individual victories can in time be transmuted into defeats and vice versa. For Hegel, as later Hegelians complained, the sensuous human was little more than a marker in the Absolute’s struggle to create a world which could sustain the mind. Returning to D’Angelo’s use of Hegel’s dialectic, as our collective consciousness becomes more complex, a corresponding complexity emerges in

Cognitivist rhetoric

83

our thinking patterns. And the cognitivist soon becomes interested in those rhetorical patterns that are mirror images of thinking patterns. This development of humankind’s consciousness suggests an isomorphic relation to the development of the composing process. W. Edgar Vinacke, whom D’Angelo quotes approvingly, puts it this way: To gestalt psychologists, there is an identity of form (hence, “isomorphism”) between psychological or conscious processes and their underlying physiological processes… In other words, isomorphism considers that there is a fundamental and invariable relationship between physiological and conscious aspects of behavior … psychology seeks to understand and explain the conscious aspects of experience, while inferring that the physiological aspect has an identical form. It would relate the two by proving in instance after instance, that they do have the same form. (quoted in D’Angelo 1975: 16) Concerned that this isomorphic relation between the physiology of human consciousness and the writing process assumes a sort of evolutionary determinism, D’Angelo argues, “the evolutionary process that leads to greater complexity and differentiation can take a negative path. It can lead to egocentricity, fragmentation, and alienation. So free choice is still possible” (Ibid. 85). However, shortly thereafter, referring to the evolutionary path humanity is on, he observes, “[n]evertheless, the ultimate goal is nothing less than universal convergence,” i.e. a convergence of human consciousness toward a unified, but dialectically more complex state (Ibid. 85). Another powerful influence in the development of cognitivist rhetoric is the work of Linda Flower and her collaborations with psychologist John R. Hayes. In “The Dynamics of Composing,” (1980a) published in Gregg and Steinberg’s Cognitive Processes in Writing, Flower and Hayes show themselves to be influenced by both Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1962) and Newell and Simon’s Human Problem Solving (1972). Interestingly, both of these works, dealing with human thinking processes, are grounded in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1961), particularly his use of the feedback loop or mechanism. Encouraged by the success of computer programers in developing machines that seemed to mimic human thinking processes, both Miller, Galanter, and Pribram in Plans and the Structure of Behavior and Newell and Simon in Human Problem Solving began envisioning human thinking processes in terms of computer programing. Information processing languages, such as ones developed for computers to play chess, use a hierarchy of goals and an iterative logic to decide upon its moves. For example, the goals for a chess program might be 1) protect the king, 2) maintain material balance between your pieces and your opponent’s, 3) control the center of the board, 4) develop strategies, 5) attack opponent’s king, and 6) promote pawns. “This ordering

84 Cognitivist rhetoric of the goals,” write Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1962), “is significant, because the machine always tries to achieve them in that same order.” As they go on to explain, first the machine will look to see if its King is safe. If not, it will try to defend it; if so, it will go on to the next goal. The next thing the machine will do is to check up on the possible exchanges, to make sure that its pieces are adequately protected. If not, the machine will protect them; if so, the machine will turn next to center control. Can it move its Pawns into the center? If so, it is done; if not, the machine turns to development, then to attacking the King; and finally, if none of those goals leads to a good move, the machine will consider the Pawn structure. (185) Out of a clear hierarchical structure, the machine decides iteratively and progressively what will or will not be a good move. The human mind, it is assumed, thinks in the same way. For example, a composing plan might consider the content the writer is trying to communicate, the needs of the audience, what they know and do not know, what they value, and how the writer wants to be perceived by the audience. The function of the feedback loop is to allow the machine (or the human) to reflect upon existing conditions and then to move recursively through the goals according to a pre-established hierarchical designation. As each move is made (or each sentence or paragraph is written) the machine (or writer) considers the new conditions (or text) and goes through the hierarchy again to decide on the next course of action. As Miller, Galanter, and Pribram put it: A Plan is, for an organism, essentially the same as a program for a computer, especially if the program has the sort of hierarchical character described above. Newell, Shaw, and Simon have explicitly and systematically used the hierarchical structure of lists in their development of “information processing languages” that are used to program high-speed digital computers to simulate human thought processes. Their success in this direction––which the present authors find most impressive and encouraging––argues strongly for the hypothesis that a hierarchical structure is the basic form of organization in human problem-solving. (Ibid. 16) Thus, the assumption that “composing is an orderly process from which general principles can be abstracted” is based upon a model of the mind grounded in cybernetic theory, with its key dynamic being the recursive feedback loop. A task is given, and through self-monitoring via the feedback loop and in conjunction with peripheral subroutines, the computer is able to solve its task. The mind, according to this model, is a systematically structured, regulating mechanism consisting of long-term memory and a processing

Cognitivist rhetoric

85

unit. It operates according to its primary and secondary goals within a specific task environment, consisting of the rhetorical problem and the text produced thus far. Readjustments are made by recursively reviewing information from memory and the task environment, guided by its primary goal toward the eventual production of a finished text. Influenced by this work in computer programs and following the lead of other psychologists who equate human problem-solving strategies to computer program problem-solving strategies, Flower and Hayes (1980b) began studying thinking-aloud writing protocols in an effort to construct a model of the writing process. Thinking-aloud writing protocols consist of a writer with a writing task who is instructed to verbalize every thought that comes to mind as she writes, regardless of how trivial they may seem, and these verbalizations are recorded on an unobtrusive tape recorder. Since writers are likely to become absorbed in the writing process and forget their instructions to talk aloud, the experimenter must be careful to remind writers to speak up whenever they fall silent. The final transcript of the recording is then compared with the text produced by the writer in an effort to “describe the psychological processes that a subject uses to perform a task” (8). The model of the composing process that Flower and Hayes developed consists of three major components: the task environment, the writer’s longterm memory, and the composing process. The task environment consists of the writing assignment (with its topic, audience, and cues as to the writer’s motivation for writing) and the text produced thus far. However, the task environment also includes anything else “outside the writer’s skin that influences the performance of the task,” such as external motivations produced by the instructor’s directions and emphasis on the seriousness with which the project should be tackled (Ibid. 12). The writer’s long-term memory consists of knowledge of the topic, knowledge of the audience, and stored writing plans. It is assumed that writers have knowledge about many topics and audiences and that they have at least a few writing plans they can draw on such as linear narrative, the journalist’s taxonomy, “who, what, where, when, why,” or the traditional five-paragraph essay. And, finally, the composing process itself consists of three major tasks that are continually overseen by what Flower and Hayes call the monitor. The first task is Planning, which utilizes three subprocesses: 1) generating or retrieving relevant information from long-term memory, 2) organizing the most useful information retrieved from long-term memory into a writing plan, which might be structured hierarchically, temporally, or both, and 3) goal-setting, which uses some of the materials retrieved from long-term memory that are not necessarily useful for writing about the topic but can be useful to evaluate or judge the written text, for example, audience needs. The second task is Translating: “The function of the translating process is to take material from memory under the guidance of the writing plan and to transform it into acceptable written English sentences” (Ibid. 15). And now that we have some text

86 Cognitivist rhetoric produced, the next task is Reviewing for the purpose of improving the quality of the text, accomplished through two subprocesses: reading and editing. With such a model, the idea is that students can learn to break down any writing assignment into discrete problems to be solved. Once the task is broken down, the student then sets about solving the problems one by one. Rather than viewing writing as linear stages––pre-writing, writing, re-writing (Rohman 1965)––the writing process is seen as recursive. The student may retrieve information from long-term memory, organize it with particular goals in mind, and then translate it into written text. The student need not, however, move directly to reviewing and editing the text, but might retrieve at any time in the composition process another piece of information that is organized and translated into more written text. After a while the student might concentrate on reviewing and editing, which might trigger another retrieval chain from long-term memory, resulting in further organizing, planning, translating, and revision. Some rhetoricians turned their attention to invention, the retrieval process whereby writers probe long-term memory for bits of information relevant to the writing assignment. Richard Larson (1968) in “Discovery through Questioning: A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Invention,” offers his students a series of questions designed to help students see what is of interest and value in their experiences, to enable them to recognize when something they see or read or feel warrants a response from them, in other words to stimulate active inquiry into what is happening around them in place of the indifference or passivity with which they often face other than their most dramatic experiences. (Ibid. 127) Influenced by the work of psychologists Rollo May and Arthur Koestler and the phenomenon of creativity, Larson sees his questions as a means to help students familiarize themselves thoroughly with their experiences of their world. Then the student must be willing to “transform, reformulate, or recombine those experiences into new imagined forms” (Ibid. 127). Only out of such intimate examination, it is believed, can creativity emerge. Larson, in “Invention Once More: A Role for Rhetorical Analysis,” (1971) advocates using rhetorical analysis of what are considered well-written essays in order to help students identify the plans that creative, successful writers have used. These plans can then become heuristics for rhetorical invention as the students grapple with other data, ideas, or feelings. And E. M. Jennings, in “A Paradigm for Discovery,” (1968) offers another heuristic when he seeks to get students to break out of typical associative patterns of thought and “deliberately [seek] juxtapositions of apparently unrelated contexts” as a way to think creatively (193). Both Larson and Jennings situate their work within the insights gained from cognitive psychology, wherein the structures of the

Cognitivist rhetoric

87

mind are identical to the structures of the world, for the structures of the world are, indeed, made to conform to the mind by the workings of the mind itself. While some rhetoricians focused on invention, others turned their attention to problem-solving. Lee Odell, in “Piaget, Problem-Solving, and Freshman Composition,” (1973) sees problem-solving as “any situation in which an individual identifies some dissonance or disequilibrium and explores both the internal and external world in the hope of arriving at an insight or intuiting a hypothesis that will allow him to restore equilibrium” (37). And being able to write well, he argues, is predicated on one’s ability to formulate and solve problems. But how, exactly, are problems formulated and solved? Drawing on Kenneth Pike’s articles “Beyond the Sentence” (1964a) and “A Linguistic Contribution to Composition,” (1964b) Odell argues that in order to explore and to understand any experience one must be able to perform several operations. First, one must segment the continuum of experience into units, discrete bits of experience… Second … whatever the “chunk” of experience might be it is well understood only if one can contrast it with other items, specify its range of variation… and locate it in a larger class of things, in a temporal sequence, in a physical context, and in a class system. (Odell 1973: 39) Again, as with Flower and Hayes, a central component of formulating problems and problem-solving itself involves breaking an experience down into smaller components and then examining those components in various ways. Richard Larson, in “Problem-Solving, Composing, and Liberal Education,” (1972) presents an eight-step plan for problem-solving. The eight steps are as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Define the problem. Determine why the problem is indeed a problem––a source of difficulty for the decision-maker. Enumerate the goals that must be served by whatever action is taken. Determine, where possible, the goals which have highest priority. Invent procedures that might attain the stated goals. Predict the results that will follow the taking of each possible action. Weigh the predictions. Evaluate the choices that seem superior. (629–30)

This model of problem-solving mirrors some of the same criteria Miller, Galanter, and Pribram discuss: identifying the solution to the problem as a goal; determining secondary goals needed to achieve the primary goal; designating goals in a hierarchical order; and reflexively evaluating a course of action based on initial conditions and predictions of possible courses of action.

88 Cognitivist rhetoric Ideal type

Based on these observations about cognitivist rhetoric, an ideal type or definition can be constructed around certain assumptions upon which cognitivist rhetoric operates. First, the mind is viewed as a structuring component impressing structure on our experience of the world. As such, a harmonious correspondence exists between the structures of the mind and the structures of the world, as the structures of the world are given by the mind. In terms of Weber’s singular causality, this correspondence between mind and world is centrally necessary for cognitivist rhetoric. Second, the mind, at least in a problem-solving context, is seen as operating on the same basis as computer programs, wherein problems are solved by breaking experience down into discrete units and examining those units in various ways, and wherein creativity is achieved through manipulating information retrieved via associative chains from long-term memory. In other words, the model of the mind used by cognitivists is reductive. And, finally, prediction of human behavior is an integral component of the research methods employed by cognitivist rhetoricians. At this point, a critique of cognitivist rhetoric is now possible. Cognitivist rhetoric: a critique When D’Angelo contends that the mind is a structuring component, he does not make a clear separation between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world as Kant does; he implies such a separation, however, when he treats human intelligence as a structuring power that gives completion and finish to the structure of its objects. In other words, if the mind must supply the particular contours of the object, we can never be certain what the object really is, but only our conception of it as determined by the workings of the human understanding. As a result, the cognitivist cannot make any comparative claims about the world, only about our perceptions of the world. If this injunction against making claims about the world is ignored, and the cognitivist does make claims about the world, she is, however, committing what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy. For the world is thereby reduced to what we are able to say about the world, meaning we have done away with the intransitive dimension of knowledge. And without this intransitive dimension, the possibility of our knowledge changing over time––weeding out erroneous assumptions, qualifying earlier understandings, etc.––is denied. All we would have is a steady accumulation of perspectives, including mistaken perspectives, none of which could be rationally culled out. Following the transcendental idealists on another tack, D’Angelo also values the use of theoretical model-building to help explain what cannot be empirically confirmed. As D’Angelo (1975) puts it, the “linguist then seeks empirical justification by determining how well a particular logical model explains the facts of communication, by observing the behavioral consequences and by being able to predict future behavior” (25). But if the

Cognitivist rhetoric

89

thing-in-itself is off limits, since all we can really know is what the understanding gives to itself, proposed models of reality or mind can only be helpful fictions. Their reality can never be demonstrated, again, reinforcing the epistemic fallacy. Now if there is an impassable divide between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world, what can be said of the phenomenal world of the cognitivists? More to the point, what must the world be like for one to be able to “predict future behavior”? As we have seen from the discussion of empirical realist philosophy, a world wherein one can “predict future behavior” must be closed, atomistic, and mechanistic, for causal laws and their prediction require a constant conjunction of events both inside and outside experimental conditions. And such an ontology means that at rock bottom ultimately everything is determined, including human behavior. Being that D’Angelo has implicitly committed himself and the cognitivist project to a form of transcendental idealism, with its divide between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds and a conception of the phenomenal world in empirical realist terms, does he admit to the implicit rejection of agency? D’Angelo claims, it will be remembered, that freedom of choice is still possible because the evolutionary path of human consciousness can develop in either negative or positive ways; development is not on a purely positive trajectory. But does this really clear him of the charge of evolutionary determinism? Just because the evolutionary path can move alternately in negative and positive ways, this does not establish the grounds for human agency. If there is still an “ultimate goal” towards the universal convergence of human consciousness, then ultimately the outcome is determined, and the evolutionary process, even as it alternates between negative and positive paths of development, is nothing more than a pseudo-freedom. D’Angelo leaves key terms––“higher levels of consciousness” and “ultimate goal”––undertheorized. Do higher levels of consciousness mean inevitable progress? And to whose ultimate goal is he referring? D’Angelo’s obvious borrowing from Hegel’s dialectic suggests a prime mover, which is the totality of human consciousness for D’Angelo, which directs the development of human consciousness even as it leaves room for the seemingly free movement of the concrete particular. But by accepting an ultimately predetermined outcome, he undermines the possibility of real freedom within the lifetime of the person, no matter what rhetorical structures are at his disposal. Moreover, the empirical realist ontology he presupposes is incompatible with agency. D’Angelo seems to be a Hegelian dialectician in regards to teleology and an ultimately closed dialectic, whereas, in the final instance, human action is denied. But, concomitantly, he is a transcendental idealist in that he sees reality conforming to the fixed patterns of understanding. D’Angelo also makes an interesting move by reducing psychological processes to physiological processes. “If, as the evidence seems to indicate, intelligence manifests structuring of some kind,” he writes, “then these psychological processes (according to some psychologists) must have their

90 Cognitivist rhetoric counterparts in underlying physiological processes in the brain” (1975: 15–16). And if the physiological processes of the brain are subject to the mechanical laws of nature (as conceived under an empirical realist ontology), then those processes are ultimately determined, meaning that our psychological processes––our thinking patterns––are also determined. I would like to consider another aspect of the mind according to Flower and Hayes––the human mind operates on the same basis as computer programs. As mentioned earlier, this assumption is grounded in cybernetic theory, with the key component being the feedback loop. A task is given, and, through self-monitoring via the self-acting, recursive loop and in conjunction with peripheral subroutines, the computer is able to perform its task or solve problems. The human mind, then, consists of a regulating system with a processing unit and long-term memory. One of the assumptions of the computer model is, of course, equilibrium within the system, through a homeostatic mechanism; the tendency of the system is to maintain internal stability due to the coordinated response of its parts to any stimulus or situation disturbing its normal function or condition. The homeostatic system is incapable, however, of acting spontaneously or changing its program. By contrast, humans act spontaneously or intentionally to change not only the world but themselves. Even computer programs which are designed to learn through a feedback loop can at most add new information to their memory, but they cannot change their basic program at will. They have no sense of “play,” by which protocols can be experimented with, or changed at a whim. In short, humans are inherently disequilibrating creatures, while computer programs are equilibrating systems. I would now like to draw attention to the details of problem-solving. As mentioned above, Odell assumes that problems are identified and solved by breaking experience down into discrete analytic units which can then be examined in serial isolation from one another. With such abstract analytics, their range of variation, wherein they change but remain recognizable as essentially the same thing, can then be identified as belonging to larger classes of things and examined within temporal sequences and within physical contexts. In this way, their contribution to the whole can be synthetically grasped. Of course, this focus on discrete units is reminiscent of empirical realism’s focus on singular events and things, and the method of analysis reinforces this level of abstraction, wherein things are viewed as atomistic and as mechanically interacting with other atomistic things. Now all of these ways of understanding are useful, but what is conspicuously missing is a method of analysis that focuses on mediating relations––i.e. structures that enable and limit particular activities and which demarcate the internal necessity of things. In other words, this approach to problem-solving adumbrates the atomistic, mechanistic conception of reality for empirical realism. I do not mean to suggest that one could not get at the heart of a problem with Odell’s list of questions; however, as a problem-solving heuristic, nothing here directs one’s gaze to dialectical relations, whether reciprocal,

Cognitivist rhetoric

91

symmetrical or their possible causal asymmetry. The tendential focus is on surface interaction between atomistic units, and, hence, precludes synthetic intuitions of wholeness. Or one could also follow Larson’s heuristic. According to this list of steps for problem-solving, the student 1) defines the problem; 2) determines why the problem is a problem; 3) lists the goals that must be met by whatever action is taken; 4) places the goals in a hierarchy; 5) invents procedures to attain the goals; 6) predicts the results of the proposed actions; 7) weighs the predictions; and 8) evaluates the choices that seem superior. The problem with such an approach, as Larson acknowledges, is that the heuristic is only as good as the person employing it. Here the problem of the classroom arises––an external authority, the teacher, sets the problem. Thus, the student seeks to solve the problem, not because she chose it, but merely out of the need to avoid the opprobrium of the instructor. “Such a design may prove especially useful when the student must write quickly about a complex issue,” writes Larson (1972), “though he needs carefully to avoid making the problem-solving process into a sterile formula––which is what it becomes, unfortunately, in the hands of some current writers on public issues” (634). How does one teach students to avoid using the heuristic as a sterile formula? How do any of these questions or steps challenge a person’s prejudices? In fact, these questions and steps can easily accommodate any prejudice, leaving students to ground their inquiry upon faulty conceptions. The reason these problem-solving heuristics are only as good or moral as the person using them is that they treat knowledge as something amoral or value-free, which points to a positivist ontology where phenomenal facts are discovered, rather than co-determined by both the object and the noumenal properties of the subject situated in a nexus of particular historical constraints and socially-perceived needs and values. One could just as easily decide poverty is a problem because those who work must, through the welfare system, support those who do not work, as to decide poverty is a problem because it diminishes the possibility of life with dignity for those who live in poverty. Neither heuristic when approaching poverty, say, directs a person’s attention to the structural requirements of capitalism to maintain a pool of unemployed. In other words, without a focus on historically-situated social structures, one’s analysis of any concrete social phenomenon guided by these heuristics can be cripplingly ineffective. For example, with the cognitivist problem-solving heuristic a student studying poverty could ask the following questions. How does poverty compare with wealth? How much can poverty change and still be recognized as poverty? To what class(es) of things does poverty belong? What brackets the occurrence of poverty in a temporal sequence? What is the physical context within which one finds poverty? And to what system does poverty belong? The two most potentially fruitful questions for this example are the fourth and sixth. The fourth question––what brackets the occurrence of poverty in a temporal sequence?––could be used to examine poverty in terms of its historical

92 Cognitivist rhetoric development, which might draw one’s attention to social structures which assist the redistribution of wealth upwards. But it could just as easily be used to explain that some people were industrious, worked hard, and saved, and as a result became wealthy, while others did not work as hard and did not save and as a result became poor. The sixth question––to what system does poverty belong?––could lead one to examine the capitalist economic system, but it could just as easily lead one to examine a system of human motivations. One critique assesses the enabling and limiting power of social structures; the other results in blaming the poor for the poverty in which they live. The point, here, is that these problem-solving heuristics offer little to critical thinking, and they foster the illusion that knowledge is something out there, independent of its social production. In short, cognitivist rhetoric reifies knowledge. As a result of this implicit reification of knowledge, the cognitivist uses a set of technocratic assumptions which prescribe the teaching of writing as a mere act of communicating whatever content one wishes to communicate. Such are the consequences of the cognitivists’ unspoken acceptance of the fact/value dichotomy. As Linda Flower explains in her book, Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (1989), “I have assumed that, whatever your goals are, you are interested in discovering better ways to achieve them” (1). There is no component in Flower’s work or in Odell’s or in Larson’s heuristics encouraging critical thinking about content. If my student wants to argue that poverty is the result of lazy individuals, my job, under the cognitive model, is to help her express that view in as clear a fashion as possible, not to challenge her to consider the function of social structures or historical development that would make the problem more complex. The critical question for cognitivists is “how do I present my issue to a particular audience in order to achieve the goal I want?” The unspoken assumption, again, is that knowledge is valuefree. The seriousness of this technocratic value-neutrality is immediately seen if we ask how can a class in composition best meet the needs of a Klansman. Does the instructor merely help the student stylistically hone his racism and hatred of blacks and foreigners, or must the cognitivist broach the noumenal world of values and begin to reshape the values and perceptions of the Klansman? It will not be enough merely to announce ex cathedra that the Klansman’s values are obviously incorrect and proceed to a more enlightened set of humane premises. But how can knowledge be value-free? Consider Isaiah Berlin’s famous example of what happened in Germany under Nazi control: the country was depopulated; millions of people died; millions of people were killed; millions of people were massacred. All of the statements are true; however, the last statement is the best 1) because of its evaluative accuracy, and 2) because of the potentially misleading locutionary force of the other statements. This example suggests that value is integral to knowledge. In the social sciences, unlike the natural sciences, ideas are also part of the object we seek to explain, for evaluation is an integral part of how we go about our daily business usually reproducing social structures and occasionally transforming them.

Cognitivist rhetoric

93

People act according to ideas. Those ideas, however, may not always be correct. My student who believes that poverty results from individuals lacking initiative is incorrect, and the social scientist, in giving an account of the problem of poverty, would want to include such social attitudes and resulting political behavior in his or her account of poverty. That account would also, however, want to include the real causes in the structure of financial institutions, government policies, the world market, and so on. If social scientists are right about the real causes, then my student, whose beliefs are thus contradicted, must be wrong. The next step is to explain why such beliefs as my student’s are held by many people. A possible answer to this question is that some social institutions foster such beliefs. For example, if capitalism presents the wage/labor system as a fair trade of work for wages and people believe this, then the critique of poverty will get no further than examining defectively socialized individuals (or sub-cultures as proposed by Edward Banfield) who have not properly learned a work ethic, thus insulating from critique the social structures themselves which require the perpetuation of poverty as a sine qua non for a well-functioning capitalist system. If it is better to believe the truth, all things being equal, then social institutions that foster false beliefs are better removed than endured. Hence, Andrew Collier (1994) argues that “the questions ‘what should I believe about x’ and ‘what is true about x’ are not logically independent questions. In fact they are equivalent, in the sense that the answer to one is necessarily the answer to the other” (174). It would be absurd to claim that it is better to believe something that is not true or only partially true. And if that is correct, then it would be absurd to claim that it is better to live with social institutions that foster false beliefs. Roy Bhaskar (1979) explains this point nicely: If, then, one is in possession of a theory which explains why false consciousness is necessary, one can pass immediately, without the addition of any extraneous value judgements, to a negative evaluation of the object (generative structure, system of social relations or whatever) that makes that consciousness necessary (and, ceteris paribus, to a positive evaluation of action rationally directed at the removal of the sources of false consciousness). Might it not be objected, however, that the fact/value distinction only breaks down in this way because one is committed to the prior valuation that truth is a good, so that one is not deriving a value judgement from entirely factual (natural) premises? But that truth is a good (ceteris paribus) is not only a condition of moral discourse, it is a condition of any discourse at all. Commitment to truth and consistency apply to factual as much as to value discourse; and so cannot be seized upon as a concealed (value) premise to rescue the autonomy of values from factual discourse, without destroying the distinction between the two, the distinction that it is the point of the objection to uphold. (63)

94 Cognitivist rhetoric My student’s argument that poverty is the result of lazy individuals is, at best, only partially right within a given situation. Her argument ignores many systemic forces and specific historical developments central to the problem of poverty, and, more important, cognitivists ignore the critical thinking component in the writing process that might otherwise bring this to light, offering, instead, a problem-solving heuristic which tends to ignore social structures as well as the beliefs promoted by those structures. To sum up, what can be said about the ontological assumptions of cognitivist rhetoric? For one, the empirical realist model of reality is presupposed by both their model of the mind and by their unquestioned goal of predicting human behavior. As a result of this closed, atomistic, mechanistic ontology, human agency must be denied. Cognitivists in their explicit statements do not deny human agency, but the rejection of human agency is implied by the model of reality necessary to sustain their explicit statements and goals. In short, cognitivists are committed to a positivist account of reality, which necessarily includes a vision of human beings, wherein everything is determined by an antecedent cause or complex of causes and where facts and values are dichotomous. One assumption here is that if we cannot verify the antecedent cause, it is because we have not adequately accounted for initial conditions, or lack the necessary tools for sensing and measuring, which would give us access to those conditions or causes, or we have not yet discovered the causal laws that apply. Once such problems are overcome, and armed with an understanding of applicable Humean causal laws and an account of initial conditions, one would be able to predict all future action or behavior. As Laplace puts it, “nothing would be uncertain [to science] and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes” (quoted in Bhaskar 1997: 67–8). The other assumption, regarding knowledge, is that we can treat knowledge in a technocratic mode, one which ignores human values integral to knowledge and knowledge-production. As a result, problemsolving heuristics can become a mechanistic procedure ignoring values, even destructive ones, and they are only as good or as bad as the person using them. At this point, we are ready to examine the theory/practice inconsistencies of cognitivist rhetoric. Theory/practice inconsistency The model of reality presupposed by the cognitivist project must support the scientific activity of predicting human behavior. If such activity could be carried out in a scientifically repeatable fashion, reality would have to consist of atomistic things capable of interacting only externally with one another within a closed system. In other words, the empirical realist ontology must be accepted by the cognitivists (unless they dramatically changed their claims and practices). It will be remembered that a Humean causal law is constituted by a sequence of events such that every time A occurs, it is followed by the event of B.

Cognitivist rhetoric

95

The critical realist accounts for causal laws differently. First, a phenomenon is identified. Then hypotheses of possible generative mechanisms which might have caused the phenomenon are put forth and then tested to determine their reliability and explanatory power, and possibly one of the hypothesized generative mechanisms will be established as real with the advance of new measuring or sensing technology and/or new tests. In this way, causal laws are attached to the tendential ways things act rather than to a sequence of events. Yet empirical realists reject hypothesizing about generative mechanisms because such hypothesizing is seen as a form of mysticism, violating Ockham’s razor: never posit more theoretically than is necessary to account for a given phenomenon. For the empirical realist, generative mechanisms do not exist. But even if the scientist is a neo-Kantian who accepts the work of model-building as a way of hypothesizing generative mechanisms, the hypothesizing of those mechanisms is only used as a helpful fiction. The mechanism, if it exists, is always off limits, being part of the noumenal world, so the possibility of eventually coming to know the mechanism as real, for the neo-Kantian, is always denied. Since generative mechanisms are denied, the empirical realist and the neo-Kantian are left with atomistic things incapable of initiating activity. The action of a thing must result from the external action of other things upon it. Moreover, if Humean causal laws are to apply outside the closed conditions of the laboratory experiment, the empirical realist and neo-Kantian must assume that the world is ultimately a closed system wherein every action is predetermined by an antecedent cause, yet I have already shown in Chapter 2 that such an ontology must ultimately result in a denial of agency and an acceptance of complete determinism. Now if someone is predetermined by outside forces to behave in a particular way (or to write in a particular fashion) what would be the point in trying to change that person’s habits or ways of thinking? In other words, a clear implication of the cognitivist’s presupposed model of reality is that human agency is impossible, yet the practical goal of cognitivist theory is to help people communicate their ideas more clearly and effectively, requiring human agency to embrace and apply the offered advice. So it becomes incoherent to offer advice to people who cannot act intentionally on that advice. Accordingly, this positivist explanation of the mind, if it were correct, would only lack the appropriate means of measurement, the ability to account for variables, and an understanding of the pertinent causal laws before it would be possible to predict the outcome of a writing assignment based on the assignment, an accurate description of the writer, and an adequate account of initial conditions (or the task environment). So with the absence of freedom or agency, it becomes unclear as to why advice on writing is necessary in the first place. Cognitivist rhetoric in the classroom One of the cornerstones of cognitivist rhetoric is the development of heuristics designed to take students deeper into their own understanding of an issue

96 Cognitivist rhetoric by focusing their attention on aspects that might otherwise be overlooked. Heuristics are the modern day equivalent of Aristotle’s topoi, the topics of invention, or as Lauer (1970) explains them, heuristics are “the art of discovering ‘what to say,’ of making original judgements on experience, of discovering means of communicating this unique insight with a particular voice to a particular ear” (396). This new focus on heuristics came about because composition specialists became interested in the work of psychologists who were systematically studying the creative problem-solving skills of creative people in order “to identify the general features of these heuristic procedures” (Ibid. 396–7). Once identified, these heuristics could be shared with students to help them discover something original or worthwhile to say on a given topic. Richard L. Larson, in his article “Discovery Through Questioning: A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Invention,” (1968) developed seven sets of questions, each designed for a different kind of topic, such as writing about single items, writing about abstract concepts, writing about questions, etc. With feedback from some colleagues, I designed a writing assignment that drew on Larson’s questions for writing about “single completed events, or parts of an ongoing process” (132). This set of questions was deemed most appropriate for discovering knowledge about the homelessness problem. Specifically students were asked to consider the following questions when thinking about the problem of homelessness: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

●

What are its causes? What are its consequences? What does its occurrence imply? What is affected (indirectly) by it? To what group or class might it be assigned? To what other events is it connected? How? To what kinds of structure (if any) can it be assigned? On what basis? What, if anything, does it reveal or emphasize about some general condition? Is it (in general) good or bad? By what standard? How do we arrive at that standard? What action (if any) is called for?

In addition to considering this set of questions, students also read and discussed the Bykofsky and Hull articles (see Chapter 3) on the homeless and were given the National Coalition for the Homeless fact sheet, “Employment and Homelessness,” (1999/2001) to help get them thinking. A few students were able to draw on this information and consider these questions in ways that led them to a fairly sensitive understanding of the homelessness problem. For example, Angela writes, I believe that most homeless people end up that way for different reasons. Some are to blame because of mistakes they make or laziness. Others are

Cognitivist rhetoric

97

just victims of many consecutive bad circumstances which make them end up on the street. She also sees many obstacles standing in the way of homeless people getting their lives back together: The homeless have to worry about being able to feed themselves, clothe themselves, and clean themselves so that they can even have the chance of an opportunity to apply for a job to begin the road back to being able to support themselves. If they are able to meet these goals they then have [the] obstacle of finding a job. If they are able to do this, they must maintain cleanliness, make sure they are able to make it to work, most of them without the use of an alarm clock or watch, so that they can keep the job. Along with these stresses, they must begin to save money so that they can strive toward having a place to call home someday. Angela’s understanding of the obstacles facing the homeless, however, goes beyond this list of immediate concerns. She also believes society must do more than set up soup kitchens. She concludes: In order for the number of homeless to go down several things would have to happen. There would have to be a place for them to go to get food and shelter so that they would have a better means of keeping a job if they found it. Also, the amount of money paid in a minimum wage job would have to be able to support a person who is working a 40 hour week on average. As it is, there is almost no way for a person to support themselves [sic] with this kind of a job because poverty level is so high because the cost of living in America is so high. If we want the streets to be cleaner and the homeless people off of the public land, we will have to provide them with the chance of being able to work to provide for themselves and get themselves out of poverty. Presented with pertinent information and questions to prompt her thinking, Angela was able to come to the conclusion that 1) interim support is needed to help the homeless get back on their feet, 2) minimum wage is not a living wage, and 3) decently paid jobs are necessary to provide people with any hope of security from ending up on the streets. Another student, Dana, also developed a fairly clear understanding of this problem. She too recognized that minimum wage is not a living wage; moreover, she discovered that most people working minimum-wage jobs often could not afford an apartment by themselves, and that a large majority of people working minimum-wage jobs in America are not teenagers living at home but are 20 years of age or older. Consequently, she writes,

98 Cognitivist rhetoric if a person finds himself in a minimum-wage job, he discovers that this income is not sufficient to support himself or his family. Many times he has no insurance and no benefits. This in itself would be shaky enough without a third factor that plays into the picture. What if this person loses his job? Job security is not something common to minimum-wage labor, and the ever-changing convenience of temporary help agencies lends to the further demise of job security for those who rely on a minimum-wage income to live. Again, the importance of a job that pays a living wage is understood by this student; however, the solution, as with Angela, is simply to help these homeless people find jobs––“we should do what we can to help them get a job.” While Amber recognizes the need for affordable housing, a living wage, and services for counseling and providing welfare, she also believes that “jail or some alternative form of discipline for those who simply won’t work” is appropriate. Ultimately, her solution to the homeless problem is “to reintegrate the homeless people back into society and foster self-empowerment” by public support for shelters, training and education. Amber recognizes that individuals must be motivated to take advantage of opportunities and that opportunities must be provided by society as a whole, yet she lacks an understanding about the systemic nature of unemployment, offering, at best, a bootstrap solution, one wherein the unemployed are expected to find jobs even if enough jobs are not available. Lisa also expresses an understanding of the difficulties the homeless face: underemployment, lack of a living wage, unaffordable housing, and lack of adequate public support. Yet her solution to the homelessness problem is a form of methodological individualism, wherein by changing the hearts of individuals, we can thus change society. “I like the program,” she concludes, that President Carter is involved with, Habitat for Humanity. It’s people like that and programs like those that will eventually get our homeless people off the streets. It’s things such as those that I want my children to respect and get involved with. I believe that if people teach their children that there are people in this world that need our help and encourage this kind of unconditional love that eventually this situation of homelessness will be a thing of the past. As well meaning as these students are, and as worthwhile as such programs are, they all fail to acknowledge the systemic nature of unemployment, instead treating it as a problem brought about by individuals who lack training, education, motivation, and a proper work ethic. Despite the question, “to what kind of structures can [homelessness] be assigned?” these students were unable to make any correlation between homelessness, unemployment, and an economic system that does not afford jobs for everyone, let alone living-wage jobs.

Cognitivist rhetoric

99

But these papers indicate a thoughtfulness not expressed by a majority of students. For the most part, students used the information and questions provided to come to quite different conclusions. Brett feels that while the government should offer help to the jobless and homeless through education and job placement, the homeless themselves “need to start taking responsibility for their actions as well. Don’t reduce yourself to the mentality that there is no way out of poverty,” he writes to the homeless, “you must take the initiative to get out there and find a better way of life.” For Abby the problem is the homeless “don’t have enough self respect for themselves to try and get off the streets,” and she advises them to “try not to make bad choices because it could end up hurting you in the long run. You may not think so at the time but it will catch up to you.” Robert writes, “For the men and women and even children living in the streets that would rather be living in some sort of shelter or house, I would say that they need to look a little harder trying to find a place to work. If there are absolutely no jobs for them out there, then I would recommend looking in another city, state, or maybe even country.” It seems Robert assumes that, while the homeless have no homes, they are still quite mobile. And Adam, titling his paper “No Pity,” argues that none “of the homeless were born on the streets, so they had to have done something wrong to get to where they are in their lives. Is that our faults?” he asks. “No,” he continues, “This might sound sort of rude, but I believe the bums are flat out lazy. If they can put out that much effort to beg for money, why can’t they try and get a job [sic]. Maybe because it’s a whole lot easier not to work. I truly believe that there is a job out there for everyone.” Adam may be sincere in his belief that “there is a job out there for everyone,” but his belief does not make it so. In Adam’s case, as with the majority of students writing this assignment, the information regarding unemployment, underemployment, and the high cost of rent, along with the list of heuristic questions do little to lead him to anything but an entrenchment into his mistaken assumptions about the problems of homelessness. If the ideas expressed in his paper were prompted by serious consideration of the information and questions made available to him and if those ideas were original insights for Adam, one is surely forced to question the usefulness and value of this kind of original insight. As with expressivist rhetoric, the possibility that students will simply reinforce their own prejudices and misunderstandings is a clear likelihood with cognitivist rhetoric, despite the cognitivist focus on helping students discover what to say on any given subject. Two assumptions are harnessed together in the cognitivist theory of composition: the technocratic assumption that writing instruction primarily should teach students how to communicate effectively what it is they want to communicate, and the psychological assumption that a heuristic, functioning as a problem-solving device, can provide them with something worthwhile to say. The first assumption is committed to a valueneutral conception of knowledge, which, if left intact, forces the teacher to leave unchallenged the mistaken beliefs of her students. Certainly, one can

100 Cognitivist rhetoric argue that the teacher is free to challenge those mistaken beliefs, requiring students more adequately to defend or revise their ideas, but then one must wonder if one is still operating as a cognitivist. The second assumption, while not intrinsically faulty, leaves students to cast about for knowledge pertinent to their topic. As directed as heuristic questions may be, students are still free to reinforce their own mistaken beliefs rather than re-examine those beliefs and the corresponding social institutions which encourage them. Which course of action students take is more a matter of personal interest than pedagogical intervention or design. This cognitivist hands-off gesture may lead to the teacher’s abandonment of her expertise and knowledge. This is not to say that teachers are always right or that students are merely empty vessels to be filled with the beliefs and ideas of their teachers. Certainly teachers may be wrong about many things, and students do need to go through the process of coming to grips intellectually with their topics of study, whatever they may be, in order for that knowledge to become their own in a more profound way than unquestioned acceptance or rote memorization might allow. However, when teachers have a better understanding of something than students, the teachers’ job is to share that understanding in ways that allow (or require) students to examine their own beliefs and the corresponding social structures which engender those beliefs. Conclusion Cognitivist rhetoric has accepted the positivist model of science, and hence the empirical realist ontology, dependent on a constant conjunction of events to establish causal laws and a closed-system universe wherein those laws operate. Yet the problems associated with such a model of reality have been ignored by cognitivists, leading to theory/practice inconsistency. The inconsistency itself is not readily apparent, as it should be if the structures of the mind and the structures of the world were identical. But because we are capable of imagining the structures of the world, and ourselves, incorrectly, it is more than possible that we could commit theory/practice inconsistencies. When we neglect the models of reality presupposed by our epistemologies, we are most vulnerable to theory/practice inconsistencies. Thus, the ease with which we can commit theory/practice inconsistencies should warn us that we must attend to issues of ontology, despite the current philosophical fashion to do otherwise. Moreover, if we have implicitly accepted the empirical realist ontology, we run the risk of reifying knowledge rather than seeing it as the historically specific production of humans in their social interaction with the natural and social worlds. Another group of rhetoricians has taken aim at this issue of the social construction of knowledge, the social-constructivists. And it is to them that I now turn my attention.

5

Social-constructivist rhetoric and super-idealism

Social-constructivist rhetoric has become a major paradigm of composition theory, at least in terms of publications, if not classroom practice. A pedagogical goal for most social-constructivists is the liberation of the student. The terms of such liberation range from acculturation into a knowledge-making community for purposes of demystifying knowledge-production and power (Bruffee 1999: xii), to promoting dissensus, or the agreement to disagree (Trimbur 1989: 615), to preparation for participatory citizenship (Ohmann 1964: 22), to exposing ideological practices that dehumanize social experience (Berlin 1988: 492). This liberation is ultimately accomplished by making students aware that knowledge is a historically situated, rhetorical act. It is not something found in the mind of God, nor is it contained in the interaction of the subject and object, nor does it reside in the rational mind of the individual. In reaction to cognitivist rhetoric, social-construction denies that knowledge is a harmonious correspondence of the structure of mind and the world. In reaction to expressivist rhetoric, social-construction denies that knowledge is a product of the individual working in isolation. And in reaction to positivism, social-construction denies that knowledge is something “out there” waiting to be discovered. Rather, knowledge is socially constructed in the dialectical interaction of a discourse community and its immediate historical conditions. Exactly how these goals are defined, implemented and taught in the classroom varies greatly. For Kenneth Bruffee, acculturation is accomplished through group work and the interpersonal struggle of reaching consensus. For John Trimbur, demystifying the normal workings of discourse communities makes room for dissensus, wherein students learn to agree to disagree, thus clearing room for poly-vocal discourse and utopian elaborations of a better future. For Ohmann, preparation for participatory citizenship is achieved by studying linguistic structures, semantics, syntactical alternatives, and, finally, rhetoric in order to understand how language is used to organize social experience. For Berlin, exposing ideological practices is accomplished by teachers and students collectively examining shared social experience “within a social, interdisciplinary framework” (1988: 492). The list could go on, but I am not interested in the particulars of classroom practice,

102 Social-constructivist rhetoric but rather in the pedagogical goals; thus, the point I want to make here is that some form of liberation of the student is usually sought by social-constructivist theorists and practitioners, whether in a politically radical or centrist way. Social-constructivist rhetoric: an exploration and an ideal type Exploration

Kenneth Bruffee, in “Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographic Essay,” (1986) offers a clear explanation of several key points of social-constructivist rhetoric, the central point being that entities we normally call reality, knowledge, thought, fact, texts, selves, and so on are constructs generated by communities of like-minded peers. Social construction understands reality, knowledge, thoughts, facts, texts, selves, and so on as community-generated and community-maintained linguistic entities––or, more broadly speaking, symbolic entities––that define or “constitute” the communities that generate them… (774) Language holds a pivotal position in social-constructivist thought because for the social-constructivist there is no vantage point from which to view reality outside the mediation of language. In other words, reality, knowledge, selves and so on are considered linguistic constructs because there is no way to know them outside the mediating function of language. Language, as Vygotsky tells us, becomes an individualized, abbreviated code which becomes internalized as children mature. A child working out a problem by herself will maintain a running dialogue spoken out loud, even when there is no one to whom she is speaking. In fact, she is carrying on a dialogue with herself. As the child matures, the running dialogue becomes internalized rather than disappearing, as Piaget contends. This internalized code, it is believed, is the basis for thought, countering the conception that thought and language are separate, that language is simply the clothing for thought. As Bruffee explains it, “thinking is an internalized version of conversation” (Ibid. 777). But conversation implies a community, even a community of myself with my internalized expectations of other people’s responses to my utterances or thoughts. But in order for this internalized community to exist, there must first be a real community of others with whom I speak, try out ideas, plan strategies, seek self-clarification, and establish personal working identities. First, and foremost, I need this real community in order to learn the language. Second, because the community conditions me in preparation for internalizing my expectations of others, the very existence of one’s self has a collective existence and origin. If I have no conception of how others might respond to

Social-constructivist rhetoric

103

particular forms of discourse––a conception which, ultimately, I can only gain from the actual experience of interacting with others––I will fail to conceptualize adequately an audience, their attitudes, and their possible responses to my gestures and meanings. The social-constructivist position, explains Bruffee, “assumes that the matrix of thought is not the individual self but some community of knowledgeable peers and the vernacular language of that community” (Ibid. 777). Thought does not occur without language, and language does not occur without community; therefore, thought does not occur without community. Since any community of knowledgeable peers and their language, which constitutes that community, are historically situated and, thus, unique in certain ways, knowledge is also seen as subject to changing historical and cultural constraints. In other words, for social-constructivists there are no universal foundations for knowledge. Bruffee (1999) writes: The nonfoundational social construction understanding of knowledge denies that it [knowledge] lodges in any of the places I have mentioned: the mind of God, touchstones of truth and value, genius, or the grounds of thought, the human mind and reality. If it lodges anywhere, it is in the conversation that goes on among the members of a community, of knowledgeable peers and in the “conversation of mankind.” (153) But if no universal foundations for knowledge obtain, then social-constructivists must address the issue of radical relativism. How does one decide between competing “truths” if no vantage point outside one’s community, one’s culture and language, exists from which to adjudicate those competing “truths”? And if they brazenly embrace that radical relativism, then how can one ever liberate oneself from the tyranny of that particular discourse community? Patricia Bizzell, in “Beyond Anti-Foundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining ‘Cultural Literacy,’” (1990) wherein she addresses the need for a national discourse and a set of agreed-upon but tentatively-held truths, acknowledges the problem of relativism and points out that anti-foundational philosophers have spent most of their energy discounting any foundational claims, but little energy proposing a way out of the resulting relativism. She writes: As I have suggested, anti-foundational philosophers are preoccupied with the necessity of saying no to foundational knowledge. Hence their concern is simply to knock down any authority claims made by others and to offer instead little more than a presumed individual autonomy. (666) This vesting of the individual with the sole means of validating truth smacks of methodological individualism, wherein individuals are free to

104 Social-constructivist rhetoric create society (and reality) any way they choose, independently of the discourse community––the very position of which social-constructivists accuse expressivists. And, given that social-constructivists are committed to the social, community-based notion of knowledge, if some form of authority is to be established for knowledge even under such restrictions, it must, according to social-constructivists, be done relative to a community, not the isolated cogito. Moreover, Bizzell complains that many anti-foundationalists have only moved toward a skepticism of any knowledge but have not gone far enough to establish a respectable authority for knowledge itself. And to move beyond individually held beliefs to a body of consensually validated knowledge is the sine qua non that might allow us to have a national discourse––a body of knowledge all of us could share. Hence, the task of generating a respectable form of authority for knowledge is predominantly a rhetorical task as she sees it. She writes: We have not yet taken the next, crucially important step in our rhetorical turn. We have not yet acknowledged that if no unimpeachable authority and transcendent truth exist, this does not mean that no respectable authority and no usable truth exist… If we could take this next step, we could perhaps find the collective will to collaborate on a pluralistic national discourse that would displace Hirsch’s schemes while addressing the same lack [of a national discourse] he delineates. Indeed, we might imagine the public function of the intellectual as precisely rhetorical: our task is to aid everyone in our academic community, and in our national community, to share a discourse. (Ibid. 665) The reason the task of creating a form of respectable authority for truth is seen as rhetorical is because truth can only be maintained vis à vis the discourse community itself. Since truth cannot be determined by appeal to something outside the language community, truth must reside within it, and the way to generate agreement within the community is through effective rhetorical persuasion. Writing about Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts within the natural science communities, she writes, “as Kuhn argues, a paradigm gains ascendancy not because it is proved true, but because ‘preceding argumentation’ within the community has persuaded most of its members that it is a reasonable choice” (Bizzell 1979: 769). Louise Rosenblatt, in “The Transactional Theory: Against Dualisms,” (1993) draws on John Dewey’s pragmatics as a way to overcome an all too commonly accepted dualism: foundational, absolute knowledge versus complete relativism. Rejecting such dualisms, Rosenblatt sees “transaction” as a term “to designate a relationship in which each element, instead of being fixed and predefined, conditions and is conditioned by the other” (380). Rather than an impassable gulf existing between subject and object, the two

Social-constructivist rhetoric

105

are interconnected such that no sharp separation can be established between the two. Rosenblatt explains that pragmatism provides a solution for the dualism of absolute truth versus complete relativism… John Dewey accepts the anti-foundational position that we cannot perceive an unmediated “reality,” but forgoes the quest for absolutes, and in his Logic contributes the idea of “warranted assertibility” in scientific inquiry. What conditions or operations warrant or justify an assertion as “true”? Agreed-upon criteria for what constitute sound methods of inquiry and judgment make possible agreement on “warranted,” though tentative answers. (382) Adapting this warranted assertibility concept to literary studies, for example, Rosenblatt contends that while we cannot claim a particular reading of a text as the “correct” reading, we can maintain that some interpretations are better than others. At the same time she acknowledges that an agreed-upon criteria for validity of interpretation may be a contested area, yet such acknowledgment is taken as a sign of a more “sophisticated understanding of the openness and the constraints of language” without abandoning the idea of “responsible reading of texts” (Ibid. 382). But ultimately Rosenblatt appeals to the community based on democratic principles to be the arbiter of “truth,” albeit in tentative terms (Ibid. 385). So individually-held beliefs are rejected in favor of community-held beliefs, but Bruffee reminds us that “community” means a community of “knowledgeable peers.” So it would appear that not just any group can declare themselves to be knowledgeable. Yet since any authority is immediately suspect, it is unclear how we decide who is granted the respectable status of “knowledgeable peer” and who is to be denied. Meanwhile, I would like to turn to another aspect of the linguistically circumscribed production of knowledge––ideology. Not only is the knowledge-making process, including previous theories and forms of knowledge inherited from the past, as well as the fruits of that process, historically situated, but since knowledge is subject to cultural and class forces which function through language, knowledge is always made within a particular ideological perspective. While Bruffee is concerned about demystifying knowledge-production and power relations, Greg Myers (1986) feels that Bruffee does not pay close enough attention to ideological pressures. Regarding educational reforms which Bruffee has suggested, Myers claims that Bruffee “sees the resistance to [those reforms] as a matter of habit, not of ideology” (168). Myers seems to suggest what James Berlin (1988) makes explicit: that “rhetoric is regarded as always already ideological” (477). Bizzell (1991) explains the social-constructivist understanding of ideology thus:

106 Social-constructivist rhetoric We do not really use ideology in Marx’s sense, as an explanation that distorts reality, an explanation we could presumably escape from if we had a truer vision of reality. Rather, we tend to adhere more to Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology as an interpretation that constitutes reality. (55) So reality is constituted by our interpretation of it, and our interpretations are shaped by the ideological formations informing our world-views. Moreover, one always operates under some form of ideology. Thus, ideology, like language before it, is a mediation between self and object of thought which can never be answered or neutralized intellectually. This understanding of ideology compounds the problem of finding “warranted assertibility” for truth claims. Not only are we bound within a linguistic community, denying any appeal to sources outside the linguistic community for determining “truth,” but all knowledge claims are inherently, unavoidably ideological, implying that knowledge is always generated from a set of, ultimately, arbitrary values or beliefs. I say “arbitrary” because the implication of this understanding of ideology is that the values and beliefs forming the basis of an ideology only have truth-value because the community embracing their particular ideology does so because those values and beliefs are important to the community itself. No means exists whereby one could rationally demonstrate how or why those values and beliefs can or should be embraced universally. Bizzell explains: Thus enmeshed in ideologies, we see ethical commitments as just another ideological construct, ratified by no transcendent authority or by no match with transcendent truth. The scholar who avows ethical commitments, then, risks looking foolishly ignorant of this postmodern understanding of ideology. (Ibid. 55) So the values and beliefs people embrace are irrevocably cast as one-sided ideological constructs, leaving no way to decide between competing value systems apart from group consensus––leaving no possibility of constructing a discourse community that can bridge opposed Weltanschauungen. And because we cannot escape the shaping power of ideologies, Bizzell suggests that we accept the inevitability of ideology as a component of all knowledge and not be embarrassed by the uncertain nature of knowing and evaluating. She contends that “if we were utterly convinced of the inevitability of ideology, we would not feel uneasy about seeing the world through ideological interpretations––including ethical commitments––any more than we feel embarrassed about needing to eat or drink” (Ibid. 55). Bizzell also sees a dialectical relationship between ideologies and people. While our understanding of the world is shaped by ideologies, she contends, ideologies do not absolutely determine our understanding because our inter-

Social-constructivist rhetoric

107

actions with the world and with one another “impinge on ideologies and change them” (Ibid. 56). So while ideologies have an influence over us, they are not the final arbiters of our world-views, for we can also change ideologies. But it remains unclear if ideologies change because of intentional action on our part to reflect a change in our values and understanding, or if change simply occurs in a chaotic fashion. But ideology is not something which must remain a complete mystification. One can, for example, examine an ideology in order to discover its differential material implications in the social life of different groups or statuses within a group. Berlin (1988) writes that “ideology must continually be challenged so as to reveal its economic and political consequences for individuals” (489). Ideologies can be interrogated to understand who benefits from a particular version of truth, how the distribution of the material goods and services of society are justified, what power relations are legitimated, and so forth. Social-constructivists believe that ideology, when made accessible to all groups, becomes a field wherein democratic principles apply because there are no universal truths that determine how power is distributed, what is possible, and what is good. These “must be continually decided by all and for all in a way appropriate to our own historical moment” (Ibid. 490). The beliefs 1) that reality, selves, knowledge, and so forth, are communitygenerated linguistic entities, 2) that ideologically-mediated knowledge is inescapable, and 3) that “truth” can only be adjudicated by the discourse community form the central core of social-constructivist rhetoric. While there are other peripheral issues separating social-constructivist theorists, my concern is not to map out all the divergent themes under the umbrella of this rhetoric. Rather, my concern is to elaborate the core beliefs of social-constructivist rhetoric so as to construct an ideal type. Ideal type

The singular pivotal issue of social-constructivist rhetoric is the understanding that what we normally call “reality, knowledge, thought, facts, texts, selves, and so on [are] community-generated and community-maintained linguistic entities” (Bruffee 1986: 774). Once this is established, social-constructivists can explain why knowledge-making is historical in nature, requiring us to treat knowledge as tentatively held “truths.” We do not comprehend reality immediately; reality is, rather, mediated for us through the function of language. Our experience of the world is turned into a perception by language, enabling us to represent to ourselves the material world in the form of a thought object. Moreover, since knowledge is historically situated and linguistically mediated, no transcendent or foundational claims can be made about knowledge. Because language is historically situated in a matrix of cultural beliefs and class forces, language is seen as essentially political. And since reality is linguistically mediated, social-constructivists argue that knowledge-making

108 Social-constructivist rhetoric is always already ideological in nature. This ideological aspect of language and knowledge-making is, therefore, inevitable, something out of which we can never step to gain a better perspective of reality and the knowledgemaking process. But because knowledge is expressed in wholly tentative terms, knowledge-making must accommodate a reflexive quality, requiring us to maintain a continual vigilance over those tentatively held “truths.” As Berlin (1988) puts it, social-constructivists share a notion of rhetoric as a political act involving a dialectical interaction engaging the material, the social, and the individual writer, with language as the agency of mediation. Their positions, furthermore, include an historicist orientation, the realization that a rhetoric is an historically specific social formation that must perforce change over time; and this feature in turn makes possible reflexiveness and revision as the inherently ideological nature of rhetoric is continually acknowledged. (488) And, finally, since no grounds are admitted from which competing “truths” can be judged and decided upon, social-constructivists rely on the community to set the criteria whereby those competing “truths” are adjudicated. In other words, to avoid accusations of relativism, social-constructivist “truths” are given, at best, warranted assertibility by the discourse community, but always on its terms. Social-constructivist rhetoric: a critique Language is central to social-constructivist rhetoric because, according to social-constructivists, reality as we know it is necessarily mediated by language, which, as a result, influences how our experiences are shaped into perceptions. “We are,” Berlin explains, “lodged within a hermeneutic circle” because the act of interpretation is inescapable in our encounter with the world and with one another (Ibid. 489). As a result, knowledge or truth is what we mutually agree it is (Berlin 1987: 166). Kenneth Bruffee, in “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind,’” (1984) expresses the same sentiment when he writes that “there is no fixed and certain point of reference, no Arnoldian ‘touchstone’ against which we can measure truth” (646). And elsewhere he tells us that social-constructivist rhetoric assumes that there is no such thing as a universal foundation, ground, framework, or structure of knowledge. There is only an agreement, a consensus arrived at for the time being by communities of knowledgeable peers. Concepts, ideas, theories, the world, reality, and facts are all language constructs generated by knowledge communities and used by them to maintain community coherence. (1986: 776–7)

Social-constructivist rhetoric

109

At first glance, this position might make sense to those sensitive to the function of language; however, the notion that reality is a linguistic construct requires a closer look. Rather than claiming that our understanding or our perceptions of reality are social, linguistic constructs, social-construction theorists claim that reality is a social, linguistic construct. The implicit argument supporting this position is that since we can only know things that have been linguistically represented to us, the real is always a linguistically structured entity. Anything else is unknowable, and as a result, we must fall silent about those things which “stand behind” words and meanings. Two points need to be contested regarding this understanding of reality and knowledge. First, to claim that reality is a social, linguistic construct is to reduce reality to what can be said about reality, what Bhaskar calls the epistemic fallacy. If reality is nothing more than what we can say about reality, then we are thrown on the horns of a dilemma. Either reality is exhausted by our utterances about it, such that nothing further remains to be discovered (or socially constructed!), making science redundant, or reality changes with each shifting conception of it, making science unnecessary. But here we encounter a dilemma. On the first horn of this dilemma, for reality to be exhausted by what we say about it presupposes an empirical realist ontology, wherein humans are passive observers whose senses, being impinged upon by the phenomena of the world, immediately and exhaustively comprehend the nature of reality through careful observation. But the central point of socialconstructivist rhetoric is the generative role language itself plays in mediating reality. Hence, social-constructivists must avoid this “first horn.” The second horn of the dilemma leaves us with an equally unpalatable option: for reality to change with what we say about it presupposes 1) that the fabric of the universe is spoken into existence by our words, and 2) that science must start over at ground zero every time a paradigm shift occurs in the philosophy of science. The second alternative is as absurd as the first. Thus, ignoring the ontological or intransitive dimension of reality and putting all their eggs in their epistemological basket, so to speak, socialconstructivists, on closer scrutiny, fall into incoherence. The second point to be contested is the privileging of discursive knowledge and the rejection of any other kind of knowledge. Given the history of philosophy and the lack of attention paid to the mediating function of language, it is somewhat understandable that social-constructivists have emphasized linguistic or discursive knowledge, but to reject other forms of knowledge or to reduce all forms of knowledge to discursive knowledge is a serious mistake. This mistake is further facilitated by the mistaken belief that knowledge is purely propositional, ignoring practical knowledge. “Much of everyday knowledge,” writes Sayer (1992), “takes this practical form: a young child learns a great deal before it acquires a language; we have many skills which we are aware of and yet cannot describe verbally and also many of which we are usually unaware. Not all social behaviour is acquired and

110 Social-constructivist rhetoric mediated linguistically, even in the form of talk internalized in our heads” (15). To privilege discursive or propositional knowledge commits what Sayer calls the intellectualist fallacy, a form of Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy. By ignoring the intransitive dimension, social-constuctivists have created intractable problems regarding their account of knowledge-making, but this same move also creates a problem of how one decides between competing “truths.” Bruffee, in Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge, (1999) discusses M.L.J. Abercrombie’s 1959 study, The Anatomy of Judgement, wherein it was observed that medical students learned to diagnose patients more quickly and more accurately when they practiced their diagnostic skills as a group, rather than individually, on rounds with their teacher/physician. Enthused by the success of this group work, Bruffee argues that “[l]earning judgment … occurs on an axis drawn not between individuals and things but among persons” (180). But Bruffee fails to take into account the role the patient plays in medical students learning to diagnose an illness. If you take away the patient, the medical student, regardless of how bright she is, will have nothing to diagnose or judge. Surely Bruffee is not suggesting that medical students could do without patients in learning to practice medicine. His point is that individual learning is facilitated when it is reinforced by social learning. But this statement indicates a focus on the social, transitive dimension of knowledge-making to the detriment of the intransitive, ontological dimension. This obsessive focus on epistemology ignores the role that the object of knowledge plays in the production of knowledge. Because the object of knowledge does not change with how we think about it (or remains relatively intransitive if it is an object within the human sciences), we are able to work, with the aid of theory-construction, toward a progressively better understanding of the object. In other words, through a process of successive approximations, knowledge is co-determined by the object as the subject interacts with it over time. Language in and of itself does not constitute reality, but language guided by feedback from our interaction with, our labor on, the material world constitutes our conceptions of reality. But if we ignore the relationship between the subject and its obdurate object, we cut ourselves off from a vital component that can help guide us in constructing thought-objects that are more closely aligned with the real object. How else can we construct theories that more accurately model the generative mechanisms we are trying to understand? The upshot of my criticism at this point is that social-constructivists have over-problematized the subject–object relationship, claiming that since we cannot know the object immediately and exhaustively, as empirical realism would suggest, we know absolutely nothing of the object as such. They have accepted, implicitly or explicitly, the Kantian divide between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds. And given this presupposition, if access to the thing-in-itself is denied and reality cannot be used as a countercheck to our theories through empirical feedback, how is one to decide between compet-

Social-constructivist rhetoric

111

ing “truths”? In an effort to avoid such absolute relativism, Bruffee (1984) explains that “[k]nowledge is maintained and established by communities of knowledgeable peers. It is what together we agree it is, for the time being” (646). Now certainly knowledge is socially constructed, but if it is constructed only out of what we say it is, we have simply traded an individually-based relativism for a collectively-based relativism. Bizzell (1990) tells us that: To take the next step in our rhetorical turn, we will have to be more forthright about the ideologies we support as well as those we attack, and we will have to articulate a positive program legitimated by an authority that is nevertheless non-foundational. We must help our students, and our fellow citizens, to engage in a rhetorical process that can collectively generate trustworthy knowledge and beliefs conducive to the common good––knowledge and beliefs to displace the repressive ideologies an unjust social order would inscribe in the skeptical void. (671) The assumption here is that we cannot escape ideologically formed perspectives, and so we must accept the inevitability of ideology; moreover, by being “forthright about the ideologies we support as well as those we attack,” we will be able to arrive at some form of group consensus that will legitimate one version of authoritative “truth” over others. But as I mentioned in Chapter 3, appealing to the authority of the discourse community is only a stop-gap measure at best. Because there are multiple discourse communities, social-constructivists have only traded the problem of deciding between personally-held versions of “truth” for the problem of deciding between collective versions of “truth.” If the first problem is rejected by social-constructivists, why is the second acceptable? Because there is safety in numbers? Bizzell holds out rhetorical persuasion as the solution to bridging the gaps separating different discourse communities in an effort to build a national discourse. But it should be remembered from the discussion of Kuhn and the problem of incommensurable theories that in order for two theories to be in contention, their descriptions must clash over the same object. If appeals cannot be made to the object itself, and if “truth” is only constructed and given warranted assertibility by each discourse community, then it cannot be said that these different discourse communities are arguing about the same thing. Rather each community constructs its own reality different from the reality of other discourse communities. By appealing to the authority of the discourse community to escape relativism, Bizzell has unwittingly undermined her own point of trying to talk with others about a real something that is the object of contention. If what she is talking about is grounded only in the community, then each community simply goes about the business of shaping its own world-view or discipline. It has and can have no say in how other communities set about producing reality. Those outside

112 Social-constructivist rhetoric the community, those who share another paradigm, are talking about something entirely different that is being constituted by their community. So Bizzell is either preaching to the choir, or she is speaking to the other in tongues. In an attempt to avoid a foundational knowledge immune to refutation, correction, or further elaboration, social-constructivists have unwittingly accepted a false dichotomy: a foundational knowledge of the type social-constructivist theorists reject as “positivistic,” or a non-foundational knowledge, tentatively held but ultimately grounded only in the discourse community. This false dichotomy ignores the intransitive dimension of knowledge-making and focuses exclusively on the transitive, epistemological dimension, and as a result trades an individual form of relativism for a collective form of relativism. Another problem created by social-constructivist rhetoric is related to the notion that selves are socially constructed linguistic entities. Berlin (1988) claims that there is no authentic self (489). What we are to understand as the self is nothing more than the interaction of various historical forces, forces of representational discourses. No enduring, authentic self is molded and shaped by personal and social history; rather, personal history and social forces are the core of the individual. Berlin, in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, draws on the work of Paul Smith (1988) in his understanding of the self and human agency. Berlin (1988) sees the organization of the subject as a contradictory complex of subject formations that makes for a negotiation among different positions. It is neither possible to remove all conflicts among these formations nor to freely choose among competing alternatives. Instead, a dialectic among them is created, and out of this emerges the possibility of political action… (69) So the subject is a complex of fragmented positions rather than an authentic individual who operates in various position-practices, constraining some activities while enabling others. And, by the same reasoning, political action is not the result of intentional action on the part of the individual subject operating within the constraints of social, political, and natural structures, but merely emerges out of a decentered amalgam of subject formations. These subject formations embody competing ideologies that may be contradictory themselves or can stand in opposition to other subject formations. It is out of these competing ideologies that agency is found. In other words, agency or resistance to ideology is nothing more than “a by-product of the ideological itself” (Smith 1988: 25). Smith goes on to explain that it becomes necessary to propose that “choice” or conscious calculation is possible only as the by-product of the human agent’s negotiations among and between particular subject positions. Resistance is indeed produced by and within the ideological. Where discourses actually take

Social-constructivist rhetoric

113

hold of or produce the so-called “subject” they also enable agency and resistance. (40) So the choices one can make are the result of possibilities found within the competing ideologies of a culture, and subjects are the sum of these discursive structures. Yet Smith is not willing to say there is a self that chooses from among the possibilities (Ibid. 38–9); rather, it seems these competing discourses and ideologies work out a “choice” that the agent appears to take. In taking such a tack, Smith seems to avoid a deterministic outcome, for, as in much of chaos theory, there is no way to determine a specific long-term outcome in a series of events. Consequently, the possibilities of all eventual outcomes are present within the conflicts and contradictions of the various ideologies within which the subject lives. Now if there is no self choosing from the various possibilities of resistance, Smith is left with the mystical idea of various discourses “speaking the individual.” He allows for agency to take place, but for Smith agency is no more than the avoidance of determinism, the ludic nature of language playing itself. When an authentic self, irreducible to other forces and powers, is denied, social-constructivists are left with only a semblance of agency. Intentional action is reduced to the mere appearance of intentional action because, ultimately, that action is the result of a decentered complex of outside forces. Of course, social-constructivists are concerned to acknowledge that the subject is not completely autonomous from the limiting powers of social and other forces; in short, they avoid voluntarism. But to reduce the individual to a decentered concatenation of other forces suggests an atomized ontology devoid of emergent powers. It will be remembered from the discussion of emergent powers in Chapter 2 that while a complex entity possessing emergent powers is subject to the determinate laws of lower strata of reality, the entity is by no means reducible to the laws of those lower strata. Humans, for example, are physical beings, but they are not wholly reducible to the laws of physics; they are, however, subject to the laws of physics. Humans are also biological creatures, but, again, they are not reducible to the laws of biology. By suggesting, however, that human agency is reducible to social forces or competing discourses is to presuppose that the material world, Kant’s phenomenal world, is atomistic and mechanistic, if not operating within a closed-system universe. And this conception of reality, of course, puts social-constructivists in the embarrassing position of explaining why they seek a liberation from the coercive or mystifying powers of ideology if the individual cannot interact intentionally with the natural and social worlds. Indeed, the deeper question arises: what is being liberated? Bhaskar, examining the relationship between the individual and society, acknowledges the social-constructivist concern that society impacts the individual, but he balances this Durkheimian understanding with the equally important recognition that individuals can have an impact on society, on

114 Social-constructivist rhetoric social structures, albeit not in just any way they choose. Human social activity is limited by the social structures that enable or allow that activity. Typically, as we go about reproducing our mundane, daily existence, we unintentionally reproduce the social structures that are the condition as well as the outcome of our everyday activity. But occasionally we encounter seams in the life-world where we become aware of the ideological justification undergirding existing social structures, and we are able to work collectively toward consciously changing particular structures. So while agents have freedom to act, it is never complete freedom, just as when agency is determined, it is never wholly set in its course. As Bhaskar (1979) notes, “an agent is only free to the extent that s/he is capable of realizing his or her interests (which means knowing, acting on and bringing about a state of affairs satisfying them)” (114). So by dialectically connecting the individual with society through praxis, Bhaskar overcomes the false dichotomy that pits the individual and the social against one another. By reinstating the self, agency is regained and social change directed by human intentionality becomes possible, while at the same time it is acknowledged that social forces and ideologies have an enduring inertia of their own. The individual and the social/material conditions in which one lives are, therefore, dialectically interactive, both dependent on the other, both influencing the other while at the same time being influenced by its opposite. One last point must be made regarding social-constructivist rhetoric. As I have suggested, the conception of ideology embraced by this rhetoric leaves no room for moving through successive approximations to a progressively better understanding of the conditions in which people live. Even though Berlin accepts the possibility of interrogating ideologies to expose how the distribution of social goods, powers, etc., are legitimized, one is always operating from within the prison house of ideology. At best one can only trade one ideology for another, which is why Bizzell claims that we should simply accept the inevitability of ideology. But to claim that people always function from a position of error presupposes that we are cut off completely from the thing-in-itself. However, since we can only make sense of the historical activity of science by asserting the accessibility, though qualified, of the thing-in-itself, this notion of ideology must be rejected or we must accept that science is an incoherent activity. While we can never assume that our knowledge is error-free or has exhausted the object of inquiry, to claim that all explanations are ideological is equivalent to viewing the object as a layered onion. We can peel away layer after layer of ideologically mistaken descriptions of the object, but the real object always eludes us. At the center of the onion there is nothing. Certainly we must be on guard against ideologically grounded mistakes in our thinking, but if all knowledge is always already ideological, then we are thrown back into a Kantian or neo-Kantian ontology with its intractable problems regarding knowledge-production and human agency. Ideology, rather than simply being a set of beliefs, with a hidden agenda, which forms one’s perceptions, is a set of beliefs that are at once false and

Social-constructivist rhetoric

115

necessary to the continued existence of the existing social structure itself. To identify a set of beliefs as ideological, one must possess a theory capable 1) of explaining everything the set of ideological beliefs can explain, plus something significant which the ideological beliefs either deny or cannot explain, and 2) of explaining the conditions necessary for the reproduction of those ideological beliefs (i.e. the conditions making the continued acceptance of those false beliefs by agents necessary) grounded in existing social structures or a set of social relations. Once one is in possession of such a theory and its critique of a set of ideological beliefs, one can immediately move to the next step of calling for the removal or reform of whatever social relations necessitate those beliefs in the first place. All things being equal, it is better to believe what is true than to believe a lie. In sum, critical realism demonstrates how the postmodern subject/object divide, such as that found in social-constructivism, is an over-problematized mistake, resulting from an undertheorized understanding of ontology within the historical development of philosophy. Moreover, critical realism goes beyond the postmodern perceptions by explaining 1) the problems of freedom as it is related to human agency, and 2) the historical development of science as an activity which is subject to error and falsification but which nevertheless can progressively reveal to us the laws of nature, something postmodern philosophy has yet to do. As to postmodern philosophy and social-constructivist rhetoric, it has not been demonstrated definitively that either is a necessary ideology. But to hazard a guess as to the course such a critical demonstration might take, it seems to be a necessary requirement of current pedagogy that those of us in education typically see part of our job as delivering our students from mistaken beliefs. Yet some of those beliefs are necessary to the perpetuation of the capitalist economic system and our own place in that system and its everyday reproduction. They are part of the ideological constructions generated by capitalism, as Marx demonstrates in Capital. To challenge the capitalist system seriously is likely to be the equivalent to committing academic suicide, for if we truly want to free our students from such errors, we would be radicalizing our students and joining them in the streets to bring down the system. By avoiding this insight and accepting the inevitability of ideology, we insulate ourselves from such responsibilities and their dangers to our careers. And under the postmodern notion of ideology, it can be claimed easily that any project aimed at capital’s demise is equally ideological and thus equally mistaken. In fine, subjectivist rhetorics are the opiate of the academics which allow them to continue their bad-faith slumberings. Theory/practice inconsistency The model of reality presupposed by social-constructivist rhetoric most closely aligns with that of the neo-Kantian’s and super-idealist’s in Bhaskar’s critique. The impassable divide between subject and object is accepted by

116 Social-constructivist rhetoric social-constructivists. As a result, reality is reduced to what a discourse community says about reality, for empirical access to the thing-in-itself is denied. All that can be known, under this model of reality, is our socially generated knowledge about reality. To escape accusations of relativism, the validity of “truth” is relegated to the discourse community, trading an individuallybased relativism for a communally-based relativism. And the process of choosing between competing “truths” is not based on which “truth” has the greater explanatory power, but rather on which version of “truth” is more persuasively presented. So the persuasive power of the rhetor is privileged over the explanatory power of theory. And finally, an authentic self, irreducible to other powers or forces, is rejected in favor of a kaleidoscopic self constituted by multiple subject formations resulting from competing discourses. In other words, the self is a socially generated linguistic construct. The primary theory/practice inconsistency committed by social-constructivists relates to their linguistically constructed “self.” By accepting such a version of the subject, agency has been done away with, and the action performed by individuals is the action brought about by various representational discourses. Discourses are said to “speak us” and to direct our actions; human agency becomes an illusion. The primary pedagogical goal of social-constructivists, however, is a liberation (of some form or another) of the student. The point of social-constructivist rhetoric, as Ira Shore (1980) points out, is to bring students to the point where they can “begin changing their powerless places in society” (49). But if it is only various discourses speaking and acting through us, how do we change the student, and what is being changed? Are we merely rotating the kaleidoscope a quarter turn, changing the fragments’ relations to one another and hence creating another pleasing, if impotent, symmetry? While self-directed social change is one of the central pedagogical goals of social-constructivist rhetoric, the hermeneutic circle of knowledge leaves no room for genuine self-direction, for there is no self. Another goal of social-constructivist rhetoric is the establishment within community-based criteria for conferring warranted assertibility on tentatively held “truths” in order to create a common ground for dialogue, within the classroom and within the larger national discourse community. Because “truth” is only “truth” to the discourse community constructing it, there are no rational means whereby one can demonstrate that one version of “truth” is better than another, apart from persuasion. Yet if the community sets the standards for what is “truth,” it must follow that the community also sets the standards for what is persuasive discourse––of what can be legitimately said and what cannot be said. For the critical realist, reality is constituted by the intransitive dimension (or relatively-intransitive if we are talking about social structures) which is irreducible to what we say about reality. The intransitive dimension makes it possible for two discourse communities to talk about the same thing with different vocabularies, definitions, descriptions, and so on. It also opens up the possibility of a future “meta-community” of discourse that can emerge

Social-constructivist rhetoric

117

dialectically from the mutual ashes of those former discourse assemblages. As a result, their discourses are not incommensurable; rather, they share a common referent which is not supplied by the community itself. But for social-constructivists, there can be no presumed common referent, for the object of reality is given in the act of discourse by the discourse community itself. As a result, different discourse communities cannot speak about the same thing, for each operates in a reality unique to itself, making all discourse between different communities incommensurable. The possibility of a coherent conception of discourse presupposes an intransitive dimension of reality, one which allows for the possibility that our ideas about reality are mistaken, partly mistaken, or even correct. As a result of the rejection of an intransitive (or relatively-intransitive) reality, talk about building common ground between differing communities becomes incoherent, forcing socialconstructivists into another theory/practice inconsistency. Social-constructivist rhetoric in the classroom Social-constructivist rhetoric focuses on, among other things, how knowledge is shaped, who has power to participate in shaping knowledge, and what happens when others shape our knowledge for us. As such, social-constructivist writing assignments might address these same issues. For example, students were asked to contemplate how their knowledge about homelessness had been shaped for them by the various social groups to which they belonged. Previous to this, students had expressed in writing some of their initial beliefs and attitudes about the homeless. This served as a record to which they could later refer. They were then provided with a fact sheet, “Employment and Homelessness,” (1999/2001) prepared by the National Coalition for the Homeless. At this point students were able to identify some social myths about homelessness they had previously believed. They were then asked to consider how some of those beliefs had not been objective or based on sound evidence and reason, but were based on the uncritical acceptance of ideas or values inherited from various social groups to which they belonged. One student, William, wrote about the influence of peers in shaping his actions toward the homeless: “Our peers have a tremendous influence on our lives” he writes. “Sometimes the power of just wanting to belong can make us go along with a certain idea or behavior that we may not normally feel comfortable with.” After explaining how a group of friends would attend boxing matches as a sort of men’s night out, William went on to explain what happened one night after the fights: One evening as we were leaving, we were approached by a homeless man who asked for some money. One of my friends became upset about this and slapped the man in the face. I was shocked by this, but I said nothing. The others just laughed about it as if they were watching the Three Stooges and that this was normal behavior. My buddy Brad was still

118 Social-constructivist rhetoric berating the man and after a couple of minutes I simply said to leave the poor man alone. It was enough to get Brad to stop, but I felt guilty for not saying anything sooner simply because I didn’t want to be the target of ridicule. William was uncomfortable with the behavior of his friend, indicating they did not share the same view about this homeless man or about appropriate public behavior; nevertheless, his own behavior was modified in such a way that he did not immediately confront the other’s actions for fear of not fitting in. Even though he and his friend did not believe the same thing about homeless people, William altered his behavior so that it looked like he did. In the same vein, William examined peer influence in the workplace. He was part of a construction crew working in the downtown area of a major mid-western city on a site nearby a facility where the homeless could go for assistance. “One morning,” he explains, as we were preparing for work someone in the crew noticed a bunch of homeless men sleeping in the park nearby and began preaching about what a shame it is that with all the people needed in construction that these “bums” couldn’t get off of their lazy asses and sign up to work. Soon everyone was giving their two cents worth including myself. Later on in the day after reflecting on what happened in the morning, I felt bad because I have always believed that it is not my position to judge others. Yet that is exactly what I had done just so I could fit in. William was a non-traditional student with more maturity and life experience than most traditional students, and this maturity may have played a part in his willingness to examine his own actions and beliefs, a willingness that was important for him in writing this assignment. And while the writing assignment may have prompted William’s awareness of the socializing influences of peers, the assignment did little to further his understanding of the problem of homelessness. William simply had a more humane attitude toward the homeless than many of his peers, but whether this was a result of the writing assignment or not is not altogether clear. Earlier writing assignments by William do suggest that he had this more humane attitude when he first came to class. Another student, Elaine, wrote about her family, church, and an adult friend influencing her beliefs about homelessness, contending that while some of the beliefs she learned from others were not myths, but seemed to be supported by her new understanding of homelessness, still other beliefs she had internalized were incorrect. “Beliefs often result,” Elaine begins her paper, from the unexamined acceptance of ideas from people who have some form of power over us. In many cases, these ideas are not objective and may be incorrect. Sometimes these beliefs are overtly expressed; other

Social-constructivist rhetoric

119

times, the fact that people ignore the subject speaks volumes about it and influences others’ beliefs indirectly. One excellent example of absorbing subjective beliefs without question is my attitude toward homelessness. My family, my church, and my elders have shaped my beliefs without my realizing it. On a trip to Washington D.C., she explains that her parents warned her to stay away from panhandlers. She goes on to explain that she knew her father loved her and wanted to protect her, and past experience showed that ignoring his advice had consequences she did not like. However, because Elaine and her family had little experience with homeless people, the issue never came up again in her family. Yet she still developed certain attitudes toward the homeless, which were indirectly reinforced by other values taught by her parents. Her parents’ silence regarding the homeless, she observes, meant I had to infer principles [about the homeless] from the knowledge they did provide me. They often told me I could do anything I wanted if I just worked for it long and hard enough. This led to my assumption that the homeless could work their way out of their situation. My parents also told me everyone has to pull his own weight. I assumed that the homeless I saw, obviously unemployed, must just not be trying hard enough. I thought the homeless were able to, and needed to, help themselves. Other unspoken assumptions about homelessness and personal success came from the examples of the elders in her church. Elaine writes: All my elders either had jobs or were retired with big houses and lots of money. This led me to assume that if people have jobs, they have enough money to afford a nice house and have money to raise a family and enjoy life. In actuality, many jobs don’t pay enough to afford adequate housing, even when people work more than full time. Elaine, like most other students writing this assignment, experienced a growing awareness that much of what she previously had believed about homelessness was incorrect and that certain values and beliefs, which she unconsciously picked up from authority figures in her life, reinforced those incorrect views on homelessness. She concludes her paper: I never thought critically about these beliefs I was internalizing until now. Because I respected the sources and trusted them to tell me the truth, I assumed the information they were feeding me was the most correct way to look at the subject. Now, as I step back and consider why I respect these sources, I realized how much I could have learned for myself if I had just considered why I believed these people.

120 Social-constructivist rhetoric While Elaine might not have been able to gain a better insight into the problem of homelessness by considering why she believed “these people,” this writing exercise did make her aware that common sense explanations about the social world may be problematic. Moreover, by reflecting on the genesis of her attitudes and beliefs, she was able to discover why she had believed something at one time in her life, which she now rejected, once she was presented with more information about the issue and was encouraged to trace the origins of those beliefs. While this writing assignment was useful for students in developing their understanding of the homelessness problem, and developing a willingness to question pronouncements cloaked in authority, it does little to prepare students to confront social structures and institutions which systemically lead to homelessness for some, while simultaneously blaming homelessness on those who become homeless. Such an exercise might be a first step toward thinking critically about knowledge, but it falls far short of thinking critically about the complex of social structures that govern much of our lives. As a result, this social-constructivist writing assignment might encourage students to think about the homelessness problem differently, but it does little to encourage them to change the world. Conclusion Social-constructivists, in denying an intransitive reality external to their discourse about it, have implicitly accepted a qualified solipsistic model of communication. Only those within the same discourse community can converse because they share the same reality. Those in another community have a different reality and, thus, are talking about different things. But in maintaining, correctly, that knowledge is socially constructed, they have given themselves little room within their own discourse community to communicate with other communities. Such a shortcoming of this form of communication is based on convergent thinking, all minds, no matter what their starting point, eventually accepting the same criteria for “truth” and arriving at the same world-view. If one strays from the criteria, creating her own reality, an incommensurability is immediately encountered, and chaos can be avoided only by imposing the authoritarian-mailed fist sheathed in the velvet glove of parochial consensus. Social-constructivists have also accepted an atomistic reality wherein people are denied emergent powers and are reduced to other forces or powers. As a result, they have implicitly denied intentional human action, undermining the possibility of people collectively and intentionally changing their material, social circumstances to create a better life and more advanced forms of communication. It is not clear that social-constructivist epistemology implies a closed-system universe, but the social-constructivist conception of the self is surely atomistic, reducing all activity to mechanical interaction between discrete things. And such a model of reality makes self-directed, emergent

Social-constructivist rhetoric

121

powers impossible, thus, undermining intentional human action. Now that I have demonstrated the theory/practice inconsistencies of the expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist rhetorics, where do we go from here? In the concluding chapter I will suggest what the basic components of a critical realist rhetoric might look like and how that rhetoric could be used in the writing classroom.

6

A rhetoric of praxis Toward a critical realist theory of composition

Up to this point, my task has been to demonstrate how the rhetorics critiqued in the previous chapters fall into theory/practice inconsistencies; more specifically I have shown how all these rhetorics have failed 1) to address how knowledge can be corrigible without being relative, 2) to explain how knowledge can contribute to emancipatory change beyond methodological individualism or some other form of static idealism; and 3) to coherently explain the possibility of human agency. Before I proceed to a discussion of critical realist rhetoric, I would like to return briefly to Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Activity as preparation for laying part of the foundation of a critical realist rhetoric. The transformational model of social activity revisited It will be remembered from Chapter 2 that individuals do not create society as they please (the error of voluntarism), nor does society completely determine the individual (the error of reifying social structures). Rather, social structures both enable and constrain social activity at any given moment, and individuals in their everyday activities typically reproduce the social structures grounding their activities. Occasionally, when agents become aware of the nature of certain social structures, they are able collectively to work toward the transformation of those structures. Also, as mentioned above, smaller quantitative changes can occur over a period of time, eventually accruing enough momentum or critical mass that they result in a sudden, qualitative change. But how does the individual interact with socio-historical institutions? The mediating system between social structures and individuals is what Bhaskar calls position-practices. These are the organizational statuses and roles occupied by individuals within social institutions. These position-practices normatively circumscribe the range of acceptable activities or practices associated with the structured positions. In other words, the structural imperatives of social institutions form the framework within which personal practices are grounded and within which roles and statuses are conferred on individuals. Room typically exists for the individual’s personal style or idiosyncracies in

A rhetoric of praxis

123

performing the duties of a position, but the individual cannot stray too far from the parameters of the framework without risking censure. For example, teachers occupy position-practices within schools. As such, when a teacher retires, quits, or moves on, any qualified person can fill that position, and the school continues to function pretty much as before. The teacher, however, must function within the parameters of the practices required of that position or risk losing her job. Such is the nature of what Brecht calls the “basic food position” under which we all operate. All of this activity––enabled and coerced––this functioning of social structures and individuals operating within them, is situated in what Bhaskar (1994) calls a rhythmic, “a tensed spatializing process consisting in the exercise and/or impact of the causal efficacy of the powers (that is to say, tendencies) of a structure or thing” (67). In other words, these relatively intransitive social structures are temporally and ecologically situated and, hence, in a constant state of becoming. They are not temporally static or eternal but evolving, yet they seldom change at the whim of an individual. Moreover, the positions or roles within social structures are occupied by historically changing individuals. As a result, the decision-making process within institutions should be flexible, taking into account the historical uniqueness of emerging problems and situations. But, of course, this is not always possible. That is why the dialectical ambivalence of oppression and liberation must become part of the strategy of any critical actor. Transforming “the system” requires embracing “the system.” Transforming “the system” means realizing its ideals––ideals whose realizations have been blocked by an alienated rhythmic of reification and contemplation. For example, writing teachers may be charged with teaching their students how to write academic prose. Realizing an institutional goal, however, allows one to incorporate that goal into critiquing the institution itself within a larger scope and in a more meaningful way. And this need not be seen as an exercise in indoctrination, but more accurately it is an exercise in teaching students how to think critically about the world in which they live. Because structures are not eternal forms but exist only by virtue of the human activity they circumscribe, humans are able, ultimately, to exercise an influence on them and change them. The changes we are able to effect, however, carry with them unforeseen consequences as our knowledge about these changing structures is necessarily incomplete, and these structures are situated in an open system and are, in fact, open systems themselves. The point of this critical realist analysis of rhetoric is that rhetoric, if it is to be useful, must, in the final analysis, result in practical consequences which begin in the system of position-practices and end there as a set of transformed protocols within that system. In other words, rhetoric, understood as the production of knowledge––not just as persuasive discourse grounded in that and other knowledge––if it is to avoid reinforcing a form of idealism, must embody an emancipatory impulse; it must lead to development––both personal and institutional––and to change. The transformational model of social

124 A rhetoric of praxis activity suspended as it is in a tensed, spatialized, material process of becoming allows for human praxis––indeed requires praxis as a form of self-knowing. The current conservative wisdom, however, tells us that “there is no alternative,” suggesting that either our present institutions are inevitable or that they cannot be superseded by better ones. As such, the political and economic élite, who make such arguments, promote an ideology which insulates social structures from critique and anesthetizes the people who experience the results of those structures, both those who are exploited and those who benefit from that exploitation. The exploited who internalize this ideology often times fall to fighting amongst themselves, seeing this or that group as intruders who have taken their jobs, or if they have jobs, seeing those without as lazy and deserving of what they get. The exploiters often internalize this ideology to justify not only their wealth, which they believe they deserve, but the poverty in which others live as their just desserts. Any rhetoric, to be emancipatory, must face the challenge of both critiquing our world and changing it. It must avoid both the philosophical error of reifying social structures and the error of reducing them to what individuals want––the error of methodological individualism. At the same time, a rhetoric of praxis must avoid both the errors of reducing agency to a mere conduit of linguistic forces or reducing it to the mechanical outcome of antecedent causes. If knowledge should lead to praxis, as I argue it should, then agents must be understood as free (within constraints) to carry out their self-directed praxis, and social structures must be understood as activity- concept- and space/time-dependent. In short, an emancipatory rhetoric must grasp the nature of agency, situated in historically specific structures which limit and enable human activity, as well as the essence of those structures, i.e. their structural imperatives. Moreover, to maintain a flexible and self-reflexive stance toward any problem, a rhetoric of praxis must understand agents, position-practices, and social structures as irreducible entities, yet dialectically interacting with one another. And Bhaskar’s transformational model of social activity provides a framework to assist the rhetor in this undertaking. From theory to praxis: a critical realist rhetoric To my knowledge, no one yet has discussed what a critical realist theory of composition should entail, and so I am, to a degree, sailing in uncharted waters. I am not, however, bereft of any landmarks to help me chart a course. Naturally, all the critical realist claims about the nature of reality, human agency, and knowledge production should be part of a critical realist rhetoric. A few specific points, however, may be worth pointing out. First of all, since the point of knowledge from a critical realist perspective is human emancipation, a critical realist theory of composition should focus on developing knowledge that can lead to human emancipation. In particular, writing assignments can be powerful exercises for allowing students to wrestle with and come to grips with emancipatory knowledge.

A rhetoric of praxis

125

Second, as knowledge is not purely the result of the mind, but rather a result of the mind as it interacts with the material world via human bodies and their senses, emancipatory knowledge must take into account social structures and institutions in their material conditions as they limit the potential development of individuals and curtail social justice. More specifically, emancipatory knowledge must place social structures and institutions center stage. As Istvan Meszaros suggests in Socialism or Barbarism (2001) there can be no universal claim of equality without substantive equality (1). In other words, the notion of equality becomes bankrupt when social structures, institutions, and relations are maintained which systematically deny people equal access to the material means necessary for their full development as human beings. Without substantive equality, universal claims are nothing more than ideological and/or political shams, which, when left unchallenged, attempt to pass off rigged games as fair. Third, the development of knowledge is an ongoing task, in that while there is always the possibility of gaining deeper understanding about our world, there is also the possibility that what was considered true at one time may be found false or only partially correct at a later time. Knowledge is, in a word, corrigible. As such, we must always maintain a self-reflexive position vis à vis the world, ourselves, and our knowledge of both the world and ourselves. Yet we must also realize that while knowledge is corrigible, it is not relative. Fourth, a theory of knowledge of the social world cannot maintain the fact/value dichotomy of modern philosophy, as this dichotomy ignores the implied values of truth and consistency necessary for the possibility of communication in general. If people are allowed to ignore truth and consistency and change the definitions of their words and concepts without indicating such changes to others, the possibility of communication is undermined. Certainly people can and do change or shift the meanings they work with in communicating with others, but the fact that they do so does not legitimate such practices as integral to or as a normal process of communication. Instead, we are (or should be) continuously on guard for such shifts if we are serious about meaningful communication. What teacher has not asked her students to define their terms in papers or class discussion? The values of truth and consistency are integral components to communication in general and not simply semantic tricks for arriving at value statements from fact statements. Therefore, knowledge about the (value laden) function of social structures which inhibit human emancipation must be fundamental to a critical realist rhetoric. In other words, we must not shy away from our responsibility to make value judgements about the nature of social structures. While changing how people think is not a sufficient condition for effecting social change, it is a necessary one. In other words, social change of an emancipatory nature must entail changing both how people think and the institutions which enable exploitation and impede social justice. “We cannot very well change the world if we do not first understand it better,” William

126 A rhetoric of praxis K. Tabb (2001) explains; however, “The task is not to understand simply [for] the sake of understanding, but in order to be better prepared as we engage in the struggle for progressive social change” (210). But how can we change people’s understanding of the world? Teachers can present information to students and challenge their conceptions of reality, but ultimately the student must be willing to learn. As Aristotle observed, teaching is one of the three cooperative arts, the other two being farming and medicine. The process of any of these activities requires the good faith participation of both parties––teacher and student, farmer and nature, physician and patient. Teachers cannot force their students to learn, but we can at least engage them at a level conducive to their interests. And writing courses, because they traditionally lack a specific subject matter, are particularly suitable for making use of issues that are both interesting to students and useful for challenging how students think. This traditional lack of a subject matter in writing courses is both a strength and a weakness. Sophisticated writing, the kind we hope to get from students, cannot be divorced from a degree of sophisticated understanding of a concrete subject matter. Even teaching students to apply formal logic to their own writing and to detect logical fallacies and conflicting assertions in an argument, while important, will not necessarily lead to a more sophisticated understanding and, thus, to more sophisticated writing. “How could someone learn,” asks Frank Smith (1990), “to detect conflicting assertions in a chemistry text, an article on chess, or the estimate for repairs to an automobile, without an understanding of chemistry, chess, or automobile mechanics, in which case contradictions would be immediately apparent?” (97). The answer, of course, is that one cannot. A prerequisite to utilizing critical thinking skills is an adequate grounding in the subject matter about which one is thinking critically. As John McPeck (1981) puts it, “There is no set of supervening skills that can replace basic knowledge of the field in question” (9). The implication here is that it may be unrealistic to expect that student writing will get progressively better when students are writing about several unrelated topics over the course of an academic term because little opportunity is given for students to develop a more sophisticated understanding of those topics, even if the various topics are related to the individual’s self-clarification or self-actualization. When there is no traditional subject matter in writing courses, teachers are free to select topics that will be potentially interesting to their students. But the subject should be one that leads students to understand themselves by understanding the world and their place in the world. When students are allowed for an entire academic term to focus on a particular issue, and the social activities associated with it as they are embedded in social structures, and to write several papers converging on that issue, they have a greater chance of understanding their topic better and, thus, writing better papers. Good writing is not guaranteed by good understanding, but poor understanding almost certainly inhibits good writing. Because of this relation between

A rhetoric of praxis

127

thinking and writing, teaching students to think more critically, or dialectically, is central to the goal of teaching them to write. Moreover, because social institutions are relatively enduring, objective structures, a student’s relation to those structures is never purely subjective. Students can easily be mistaken about the function of those structures and their relationships to them. As students work through the processes of selfclarification about the function of particular institutions, that self-clarification is made explicit as a piece of writing which offers the teacher an opportunity not only to understand, but to challenge her students’ thinking, encouraging them toward more critical evaluations of their present understandings and values. Helping students to think dialectically is, thus, as important as teaching them general conventions of writing. Some might object, however, that writing teachers are supposed to teach writing, not other subject matter, that we should be training them in the skill of writing. The difference between this conventional view of teaching writing skills divorced from how one thinks about the topic upon which one is writing is similar to the difference between training and education. David F. Noble (2002) explains the difference between training and education in this way: In essence, training involves the honing of a person’s mind so that it can be used for the purposes of someone other than that person. Training thus typically entails a radical divorce between knowledge and self. Here knowledge is usually defined as a set of skills or a body of information designed to be put to use, to become operational, only in a context determined by someone other than the trained person; in this context the assertion of self is not only counterproductive, it is subversive to the enterprise. Education is the exact opposite of training in that it entails not the disassociation but the utter integration of knowledge and the self, in a word, self-knowledge. Here knowledge is defined by and, in turn, helps to define, the self. Knowledge and the knowledgeable person are basically inseparable. (27–8) As educators we must decide what our primary goals are. Are we training people to fill technocratic slots in the global economy, wherein their skills are directed by others for purposes which ultimately may be counter to their own best interests as well as the best interests of humanity, in exchange for a paycheck, or are we training people to become responsible citizens of a democratic society, even a democratic society which is becoming compromised by special interests focused on the maximization of profits often to the detriment of meeting human needs? If we choose the latter, then the primary goal of education is to teach people how to think about the world in ways that cut through the misconceptions foisted upon us by social institutions that stand in the way of human development and social justice. In other words, we want to help students achieve self-knowledge generated by a dialectical understanding of

128 A rhetoric of praxis themselves situated within social structures and institutions, an understanding that prepares them “to struggle for progressive social change.” But how does the teacher challenge students’ thinking without alienating or discouraging them? Postmodern pedagogies suggest that students be invited to see themselves as equals with the teacher in the production of knowledge. The experience and training of the teacher offers just another understanding, and students, by offering their subjective experience as another way of understanding, have as much right to be up in front of the class as does the teacher. By abdicating her position of authority, the teacher aligns herself with the student against others in positions of power, and while such a move may avoid alienating students and may give the teacher a sense of being a radical, it does the students a disservice. Clearly, the underlying assumption of such pedagogies is a relativist view of knowledge, a view leading to either silence or theory/practice inconsistencies. Moreover, such pedagogies encourage teachers to relinquish their responsibility to students. If knowledge is not relative, as I have argued it is not, then the teacher must accept her responsibility as an authority figure, at least in terms of knowing more than the students. A hierarchy within the classroom cannot be escaped, nor can the burden of leading the class. So how can we maintain a hierarchy in the classroom without alienating or discouraging our students when we challenge them to more critical evaluations of their beliefs? The teacher must dialectically balance her authority as an “expert” with the students’ needs to make the “material” or “content” their own. In short, a healthy hierarchy in the classroom is maintained both by identifying with the students regarding the difficulty of learning to think dialectically as well as acknowledging the difference between the positionpractices of student and teacher. And teachers share their expertise by, among other things, modeling how to attack a problem dialectically. When we critique a problem, we first describe it exhaustively, and then we look for its structural essence. (And again, the idea of “essence” is only a problem if we assume an empirical realist ontology where complex internal change is denied, “essence” is reified, and knowledge is static.) We begin with as much of the empirical reality as we can grasp and then look for dialectically related processes and entities, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical. By understanding how the parts work together, we can begin to understand the structural imperatives of social institutions. Bertell Ollman (1993) explains the difference between non-dialectical and dialectical investigations thus: Unlike non-dialectical research, where one starts with some small part and through establishing its connections tries to reconstruct the larger whole, dialectical research begins with the whole, the system, or as much of it as one understands, and then proceeds to an examination of the part to see where it fits and how it functions, leading eventually to a fuller understanding of the whole from which one has begun. (12)

A rhetoric of praxis

129

Since students are typically not trained in dialectical modes of thought, the teacher must model this method for her students several times, while at the same time encouraging them to try their hand. In this way, students begin to acquire the intellectual tools necessary for understanding which institutions should be changed and why, as well as how those institutions might be changed. In other words, acquiring the tools of dialectical thought and learning how to use them is a first step in demystifying the hegemonic ideologies which dominate our lives. When students fail to accommodate all the parts of the whole or when they fail to identify a dialectical relationship, rather than confronting them immediately with their error, the teacher can do such things as ask questions to redirect the students’ work. (As such, giving students the opportunity to write multiple drafts likely will prove necessary for critical realist assignments.) Such diplomatic interaction with students may help avoid alienating or discouraging them. And such tactics are important, but in order to avoid dialectical critiques becoming sterile classroom practices, the teacher must do more. The teacher must be an integrated whole, a person who is self-confident enough simultaneously to teach in the classroom and act politically outside the classroom and to allow the student to see the consistent conduct embodied in both roles. A rhetoric of praxis must produce knowledge that leads to political action; otherwise, it is only the appearance of praxis, an impotent praxis or posturing that culminates inside the head but leaves the status quo unchallenged and unchanged. Teachers who teach praxis but who are not engaged outside the classroom risk being exposed as phonies, and students are often quick to pick them out. Similarly, the artificial negativity of an ultraBolshevist nature will, ultimately, fail to measure up to its pronouncements and be discredited. But how will students know if a teacher is involved politically outside the classroom? They may never know, but the teacher can talk about her outside praxis in the classroom when it serves as an appropriate example or explanation related to class discussions, especially discussions about praxis. In this way, the teacher can serve as a moral and intellectual model for students without becoming a craven propagandist for a given position. That is, teachers must walk a thin line, indeed, never using the classroom as a venue for indoctrination but never forsaking the honest advocacy of her position on a given subject. Indoctrination in the classroom robs students of their agency, making them mere puppets mystified by authority figures, just as it reduces the instructor to a papier-mâché parody of a responsible person. Hence, the goal of a rhetoric of praxis is informed intentional political involvement outside the classroom. So can the classroom be a place of social change? I believe it can, but it requires the commitment of the teacher to be a fully engaged individual, engaged inside and outside the classroom in dialectical critique leading to action. But such a commitment, of course, carries with it the risk of provoking the wrath of administrators and bureaucrats, whose primary concern is above all else maintaining a smoothly running

130 A rhetoric of praxis machine, rather than preparing students for meaningful involvement in the democratic process. If students lack the tools and ability to apply dialectical critique to their world, their involvement in the democratic process will be mystified, not meaningful, and their transformative capacity impaired. Expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist rhetorics stop at the “classroom’s edge” which is the price of their manifold idealisms. And staying within these bounds, safely girded in an “intellectualist fallacy,” they can often operate with a firm sense of mission that claims great accomplishments. But the praxis they promote, if they promote any at all, is an impotent praxis that finds satisfaction with only changing minds for the moment, not the world. Certainly, we cannot expect to engage all of our students successfully such that they become fully engaged human beings. After all, they are, and must be, allowed to exercise their own powers of self-conscious agency. But we can take some hope in the recent turnouts of college students and others in Seattle, Washington D.C., Quebec, Genoa, and more recently in New York City, to protest against such institutions as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, all of which organizations have been instrumental in undermining the quality of life for a majority of the world’s population, including Americans. It would seem that the materials with which we are now working in order for our students to understand the world may be more accessible to social critique and its dialectical fashioning. For the majority of college students, however, life has been relatively comfortable, causing them little concern about what goes on in the world much beyond their favorite sports teams, entertainers, and consumer goods. As Marx points out in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, (1970) “[i]t is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness” (21). People relatively comfortable with the status quo are not likely to be motivated to critique existing systems or when they do critique will construct it carefully so as to avoid puncturing their own self-interested position. But as the standard of living continues to fall for an increasing number of Americans, in the face of ecstatic Wall Street celebration of the 1990s, or more recently amidst Wall Street scandal and the evaporation of people’s pension funds, the possibility arises that more students will feel the pinch of their social existence, changing their critical disposition toward their situation and the world. When contradictions become more apparent and people become more questioning, the ground will be better prepared for rhetorics of praxis. Critical realist rhetoric and assignment design As suggested in the section above, teaching our students to think dialectically should be one of the central goals of a critical realist rhetoric. But how do we design writing assignments which help students develop their own abilities to think dialectically? To begin, it might prove useful to identify

A rhetoric of praxis

131

some key features of dialectical thought. First, dialectical thinking seeks to grasp its subject within its historical unfolding, to see its subject not just as a completed thing but as a process of becoming. In other words, dialectical thinking rejects the reification of social structures and knowledge and seeks to understand the dialectic of process and product. This is important because for many students it is difficult to imagine that the social institutions which circumscribe their lives have not been around forever, or that such institutions are not the inevitable outcome of natural forces. Because these institutions exist, students often assume such institutions must be normal or inevitable. Once a social institution is seen in this way, that institution becomes the invariable component in any equation one might construct to describe social problems, and human needs and nature become the variables that must bend to the needs of the institution. I want my students to understand that, say, the economic social structure of capitalism is neither eternal nor inevitable, but rather the result of specific socio-historical material conditions that came about first in England and then spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world until it has reached its present globalized state. Students need to understand that social structures, although they create an inertia of their own and can be difficult to change or overthrow, are variables in the social problems equation and that some human needs and the laws of nature are the invariable components. Only when this understanding has been achieved will students then be able to understand the possibility of altering or removing social structures which inhibit full human development or undermine universal social justice. Second, dialectical thinking strives to understand processes (especially social processes) from multiple perspectives. In this way, students not only can grasp, at least intellectually, how and why people think the way they do in various situations, but the world-views, values, or ideologies people need to adopt in order to justify, in some rational form, the necessity, if not legitimacy, of their activities and the activities of others within social institutions. For example, when students start to understand the individual stories of people who are homeless, they are often times less inclined to dismiss homelessness as purely the fault of the homeless. Or when students start to understand the primary objective of businesses within a capitalist system is to make profit, not meet human needs, they can begin to understand that the creation of unemployment through layoffs––whether prompted by slow economic growth or the greener pastures of third world countries, where labor and resources are cheap and environmental regulations are rarely enforced if in existence at all––is the result of business people making smart business decisions to protect their companies, rather than a conspiracy of mean-spirited rich people trying to screw the little guy. Certainly the possibility is real that some business people are mean-spirited and not above screwing the little guy, but the fact that a mean-spirited attitude is not necessary at all for unemployment to occur, suggests that any problems relating to or stemming from unemployment cannot simply be

132 A rhetoric of praxis fixed by convincing people to become kinder or gentler. The CEO who does not understand that his highest priority, from the perspective of capital, is to protect company profits likely will not have a job very long. As a result of this structurally imposed value, it is not uncommon for business people and business-minded people to construct their world-view in such a way as to regard unemployment as an individual problem to be solved by “trying harder.” In general, for the capitalist to openly accept responsibility for unemployment is to acknowledge that unemployment is a systemic problem, not an individual problem, thus opening themselves up to social demands to pay a greater share in taxes to compensate those who are victimized by the system. And paying more in taxes goes against the first priority of business––protect profits. Even if business people do understand the systemic nature of unemployment, they rarely acknowledge this openly, nor do many of the politicians who are beholden to corporations for financing their re-election campaigns. Once students understand this, they are less inclined to see “a change of heart” as the solution to unemployment and its related problems. Systemic problems, i.e. problems resulting from a social structure or institution, require solutions that address the systemic functioning of the social structure. This brings me to the third aspect of dialectical thinking: understanding a process/product as simultaneously interconnected to or interpenetrating multiple structures, both social and natural. Students often have a tendency to see the workings of the world as fragmented and disconnected. As a result, homelessness, for example, is often times analyzed by students only as far as it relates to the homeless individual, as was seen with Andrew’s paper in Chapter 3 or with Brett, Abby, Robert or Alan’s papers in Chapter 4. By ignoring the impact of the economic system on unemployment, the connection between homelessness and the economic system is lost. By seeing the interconnections between homelessness, the economic system, the Federal Reserve Board, the welfare system, the health system, the educational system, etc., students begin to understand the issue in a much more complex fashion than before. To understand the problem of homelessness dialectically, students need to see the process/product of homelessness effected by a variety of social institutions which enable some activities while limiting others. In this context I might want my students to realize several things about the problem of homelessness: 1) that homelessness is not purely the result of the breakdown of the nuclear family––while the breakdown of the nuclear family may contribute to a person becoming homeless, the two are not necessarily connected dialectically; 2) that homelessness is not purely the result of a poor educational system––while a poor education may contribute to a person becoming homeless, again the two are not necessarily connected dialectically; 3) that society in general pays indirectly for related problems to homelessness, such as health problems resulting from the homeless seeking emergency medical aid from time to time, wherein the costs for that aid are passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher medical bills.

A rhetoric of praxis

133

I also want my students to realize that homelessness is invariably connected to poverty, poverty is often connected to unemployment, and unemployment is intricately linked to the economic system itself. Let me trace these connections out in more detail. Homelessness (and by that I mean the condition of being forced against one’s will to live on the streets) is asymmetrically connected to poverty, for while a person can experience poverty without being homeless, the condition of homelessness thus defined would not exist without the state of poverty. If a person had the means to procure shelter and wanted shelter, barring extreme circumstances such as no shelter being available at any price, that person would not be homeless. Poverty need not be dialectically connected to unemployment, for either condition can exist without the other. The working poor can be employed but still live in poverty, and the independently wealthy might not be employed but still are not considered poor. The two, however, often accompany one another and can be dialectically connected in a contingent manner. Unemployment can eventually result in poverty for those with limited resources (savings, family support, etc.) and limited access to ameliorating social services. Unemployment is symmetrically connected to capitalism, for as capitalism seeks greater and greater profitability and productivity, it invariably creates the problem of overproduction, requiring slowdowns, layoffs, wage cuts, benefit package reductions, etc. Were the capitalist not allowed to treat workers as disposable, the health of the capitalist enterprise would be compromised. If this compromise were to become widespread, the result could be the collapse of the entire economic system. Milton Friedman, Nobel prize winning economist, coined the term “a natural rate of unemployment” in the annual presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1967, acknowledging that unemployment is not an aberrant side effect of an otherwise well functioning system, but a necessary systemic condition of the system itself. For this reason, whenever unemployment gets too low, i.e. when too many people have jobs, the typical response from the Federal Reserve Board is to increase interest rates, driving up unemployment in order to limit inflation. As such, capitalism cannot sustain full employment of the population, nor is full employment desirable to the capitalist, for full employment would drive up wages, cutting into capital’s profit. In other words, capitalism cannot exist without inflicting unemployment on some workers. And unemployment would not exist without capitalism (or some similar system), which not only privatizes but removes from public access the means of production, forcing the majority of those who want to work to sell their labor power to the capitalist in exchange for a wage. To understand the problem of homelessness as it relates to the capitalist economic system is to realize that the conditions which can lead to homelessness (i.e. unemployment) are inevitable as long as the economic system is maintained. As a result, the possibility that some people will end up homeless becomes more an outcome of systemic forces than individual choice.

134 A rhetoric of praxis Ultimately, regardless of how motivated and well trained the working population is, some people will not be able to find work––despite the fact that at any given time there are job openings. To interpret the existence of a limited number of job openings as an indication that full employment is possible is a failure to understand the economic system itself. Such an interpretation confuses what is possible for one person to achieve with what is possible for all people simultaneously to achieve; in other words, it commits the error of methodological individualism. Nevertheless, to maintain a dialectical understanding, the agency, and thus responsibility, of the individual cannot be ignored but must be connected to social structures through the multiple position-practices the individual occupies within those social structures. In other words, individuals should not be treated as completely powerless in the face of powerful social institutions. In some instances, people can seek better or different training which will allow them more flexibility in a changing labor market, or people can become politically involved in efforts to provide social services for those who are necessarily excluded from job opportunities for the sake of the economy. They can also organize to challenge the legitimacy of the system itself once they understand its illegitimacy and its ideologies, such as private enterprise, “greed is good,” rugged individualism, etc., which insulate from critique the very system that calls such ideologies into existence. Certainly, dialectic is more complex and manifold than the three aspects of dialectical thought I have identified, but these three will serve as a basis for discussing writing assignments. It is not my intention to present an exhaustive discussion of the dialectic and dialectical thought as it might relate to assignment design; such a task is beyond the scope of this work, but this might be a fruitful endeavor for future research. However, given this limited set of dialectical components, a critical realist writing assignment might draw on one or more of these aspects of dialectical thought (and, of course, other aspects of dialectical thought not discussed here) in designing a writing assignment. For example, when I have used environmental issues as a writing topic, students were allowed to choose a particular environmental problem of their interest, and this problem would become the center of all their writing and research for the academic term. Readings and class discussions were about the environment and related issues at a general level so that students could utilize that information and understanding in relation to any particular environmental problem. In such a class, the first assignment asked students to explain their environmental problem from an historical perspective, describing what social, political, environmental, economic, etc., forces contributed to the problem. Students were asked to identify who benefitted from the creation of the environmental problem and who suffered because of it. They were also asked to indicate if and when the problem became more serious, how we knew about it, who proposed a solution, who opposed the solution, and why. The main point of this assignment is for students to

A rhetoric of praxis

135

understand the historical, and hence non-eternal or non-inevitable, condition of a social problem. The second assignment called for the students to take the stance of the people they had identified as being the most responsible for causing the environmental problem. Often the culprits are large corporations who sometimes publish mission statements, explaining to the public how their businesses are actually good for everyone (better living through chemistry). Sometimes students had to examine the activities of these people, extrapolating from those activities what their motives and justifications are for doing what they do. The main thing I want my students to learn here is that these people are not destroying the environment because they are mean-spirited. Rather, they have a certain set of values or world-view which allows them to make sense of what they do. Often when students understand the workings of the economy, their criticism shifts from those causing the problem to the economic system which requires continual growth and continual consumption of resources in a world of finite resources and limited reproductive and recuperative capacities. The final assignment explored the various interconnections between their environmental problem and other ecosystems and human systems. Students were asked to identify three or four such systems to which their environmental problem is connected to help them develop an understanding of how the world is interconnected. We cannot look at problems in isolation and hope to understand their complexity. From the breakdown of the ozone layer by the manufacturing of CFCs, to the escalating death of phytoplankton in the oceans due to increased ultraviolet B radiation from the sun passing through the “ozone hole” over Antarctica, to the death of krill which feed on the phytoplankton, to the death of the Adélie penguins in Antarctica which feed on the krill, everything is interconnected. As students begin to understand the interconnections of their world, they begin to create complex visions of reality. This may not give them easy answers, but it helps them understand the complexity of the questions we should be asking. How do we weigh the jobs of some 600,000 people who service air conditioners, refrigerators, and the like, with the lives of a few hundred or thousand penguins? And how do we balance both of these against the estimated expected deaths of hundreds of thousands of people resulting from UV-related skin cancer in the next decades due to the loss of ozone protection? As students begin to grasp larger conceptions of their world, they begin to think more critically because they now have more to think about. And by situating a social problem within social institutions and structures, students can begin to understand the importance of addressing systemic forces. Not all topics, however, will lend themselves to the type of writing assignments I have just discussed, but with some imagination, teachers can figure out other ways of applying dialectics to assignment design. And while I believe it is important to choose topics students can relate to, I recognize that not all students will be happy with one topic. As one group of freshmen explained to me when I had given them the topic of campaign finance, many

136 A rhetoric of praxis of them simply did not care. In such an event, the teacher can only hope to give students enough information, showing how an issue relates to their lives and their future, to spark some interest, to engage their concerns. But ultimately we cannot force our students to care or to move from an attitude of self-centeredness to an attitude of social concern. Sometimes such a move only comes with age and experience, if it comes at all. I have suggested that a writing course might be more successful when the course is structured around one topic, as this allows the teacher to draw on her expertise and students to help one another in their intellectual development within the course topic through class readings and discussions, but it also makes the class more manageable for the teacher. Were every student to pick his or her own unrelated topic, the possibility of shared readings and discussions would be limited, especially in regards to dialectical critique, but it does occur to me that a course could be designed wherein a limited number of topics could be offered, and students who chose the same topic could carry on group discussions and share their research with one another. Then some general class readings and discussions could be carried out to train students in dialectical critique. Such an arrangement might engage more students in their topics, thus, giving them a vested interest in understanding their topics, but I have not attempted such a course yet, so I cannot speak from experience about this type of course design. In other words, I have not bridged that theory/practice divide yet. It does, however, seem worth trying. It should be pointed out that the environmental issues course demanded a great deal of research on the part of students. I did encourage students who were working on similar topics or the same topic to share their research, but the workload for students was significant. At the same time, I spent many hours in the library helping students find relevant information for their topics and papers. As a result I have set aside the environmental issues course for a while and have turned my attention to topics where I could do a good deal of research beforehand to help them get started. Thus, it is to the issue of homelessness that I now turn. Critical realist rhetoric in the classroom The writing assignments based on the three rhetorics critiqued earlier all shared the topic of homelessness, and excerpts from actual student papers were examined. It is now time to turn to a critical realist assignment on homelessness. Since knowledge is fundamental to thinking critically, students read, discussed, and wrote about a good deal of material before they were given their critical realist assignment. Students were first introduced to the topic by reading and discussing the Bykofsky and Hull articles mentioned earlier. In an expressivist vein, students were encouraged to express their initial reactions to homelessness before they were given further information to complexify the problem. This gave the students a base line from which they could later measure their intellectual development.

A rhetoric of praxis

137

Next, students read and discussed the “Employment and Homelessness” fact sheet, sharing specifically what information challenged their earlier conceptions of homelessness. Then two short articles by Ralph Nader were read and discussed. The first article, “The Real Strength of Economy,” explores the decline of labor unions and the impact of current trade policies which, tending to be pro-capital and anti-labor, pull standards of living down rather than raise them. Nader notes the increased collective productivity of Americans over the last ten years which, rather than being accompanied by an increased living standard for the average American family, has resulted in an increase in work time. The second article, “Living Wage,” examines such issues as income disparity, increased cost of housing, and the failure of the minimum wage to keep pace with productivity. “The Market as Prison,” by Charles E. Lindblom (1982) was also read and discussed. Lindblom argues, among other things, that a market system has a built-in punishing mechanism (economic slowdowns, unemployment, factory flight to third world countries, etc.) which kicks in whenever social conditions threaten the potential of capital accumulation, pointing out that this is a structural feature which operates simply by business people doing what is good for business. Students were then introduced to Bhaskar’s critiques of Weber’s, Durkheim’s, and Berger and Luckman’s explanations of the person/society connection (see the section on critical naturalism in Chapter 2). The errors of each position were explained as well as their elements of truth. A discussion of these elements of truth helped students understand why people might believe any of these positions, yet an understanding of the errors helped students understand why all of these positions had to be rejected. This finally led to Bhaskar’s Transformational Model of Social Activity as a way out of these interesting but dead-end theories. Students were then encouraged to think about a variety of social structures in terms of how they limit and enable social activity. Conceptualizing the function of social structures was not always easy for students, but after group and class discussions, most students felt they understood the concept. With all this information as a basis, students were then asked to imagine themselves as CEOs of big corporations competing with other corporations to improve productivity and profit accumulation. Students discussed a variety of ways they could increase their profit margins: find cheaper raw materials, improve productivity through new technology or through speeding up assembly line manufacturing, forcing workers to take a wage cut, or moving to another country where labor and materials are cheaper. Once they had discussed these possibilities, I asked them what they would do if one of their competitors implemented one or more of these strategies and was thus able to undersell the others. They quickly realized that they too would have to follow suit, employing the same or similar strategies to compensate for their lagging behind. By continuing this thought experiment, students were able to see that a very real possibility existed for collectively producing more goods than

138 A rhetoric of praxis the market could absorb, and this brought up the importance of forced unemployment. In order for businesses to remain competitive and for the economic system as a whole to stay healthy during both times of growth and recession, it became clear that unemployment was a necessity. And if we accepted the protection of the economic system as vital to our wellbeing then as a society we had to be willing to accept the conditions that some people would not have job security, that the wellbeing of some people would not be protected, at least not by the economic system itself. Milton Friedman’s “natural rate of unemployment” was then discussed so students could see that unemployment was a structural component of capitalism. At this point, students were ready to start writing. They were asked to explain the phenomenon of homelessness in America, deciding who was responsible and to what degree. More specifically, the homeless they were to write about are those who did not choose to be homeless. They were asked to write this paper for an imaginary audience consisting primarily of two groups of people: those who feel that the individual is the captain of her destiny, and those who believe that the individual is a product of society, a powerless pawn before larger social institutions. Students were told they needed to avoid a simplistic either/or explanation, such as “when you look at it from this position you can see that society is to blame, but when you look at it from this position you can see the individual is to blame.” Instead, students were asked to take both initial positions embodied in the audience (and in Weber and Durkheim) and dialectically connect them, saving the insights of both positions, avoiding the errors of both positions, and moving to a higher or more complex level of understanding the homelessness problem. One student, Jesse, explained the problem of homelessness this way: Our economic system is like a game in a way. All of us play this game, unfortunately when a game is played someone has to lose. In our country’s economy the homeless are the losers. We have inherited this system that allows us to succeed and prosper. However it is the same system that allows some to fail. As long as our economic system is controlled by big business interest, there will always be unemployed people trying to find work… In our country the money is trickling up instead of trickling down. The majority of our country’s economic gains over the past three decades have gone to the wealthiest segments of the population. “The net financial wealth of the top one percent of households now equals the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent of American Households.” While Jesse connects the problem of homelessness to unemployment and unemployment to the economic system, he does not explain why unemployment is a condition necessary for capitalism to remain healthy. Rather, he seems to suggest that the problem of unemployment is the result of big businesses. He gets close to seeing the problem as systemic, but then backs away. This can be seen more clearly, perhaps, in his conclusion:

A rhetoric of praxis

139

Some of the homeless are willing to work, so they should be able to work and at the same time make a living wage. This is our social obligation to these people. However, as long as big business controls the economic policies in our country, there will always be people who lose. These big corporations do not care if everyone has a job and is able to make a living; they only care about making money for themselves! These people need to bear some responsibility in seeing that people who are willing to work share in the gains of our Nations [sic] economic growth. Jesse has a sense that socially produced wealth should be shared socially, and that a living wage is not minimum wage, but he is not able to see poverty and unemployment as systemic outcomes of capitalism itself, but rather an outcome of large corporations that are wielding incredible power over our lives. It is not clear why Jesse does not grasp this problem, but he is considering a larger context than simply that of individual homeless people, and this willingness to step back and examine a larger context is an important step toward questioning how and why social institutions function the way they do. At the least, questioning the legitimacy of multinational corporations who act with impunity and operate with little social accountability is a good place to start. Another student, Tyrone, begins his paper by comparing Monte Hall’s “Let’s Make a Deal” television show with life within our economic system: “some days you have what Monte is looking for, and other days you don’t; in some ways, there is little hope of being chosen, but if you don’t show up, you can’t play the game.” After discussing the problems of housing, minimum wage, lack of skills and education and the importance of low-skill jobs to the American way of life, Tyrone asks about the homeless who have worked but are now cast aside: Did poor choices put them there? Perhaps, but what does it matter? They are as important to the “machine” as any other part––for they are the gears, pins, and wheels that drive it––and thus entitled to benefit from the association. In other words, they deserve an adequate place to live. If we take the position that our ability to chose is limited, that society shapes and defines us, then these individuals are blameless for their poverty. If they are blameless, then our economic system has as one of its consequences a build-in component of poverty and homelessness. Our social safety nets are unable to cure the problem so the problem must be endemic to the system. That doesn’t mean our system is inherently bad; we must first determine what bad is. That is to say that we must define what our values are and establish goals that reflect them. The effectiveness of the system is measured against addressing these goals. This is the crux of our dilemma: if we value sex, entertainment, and greed, then our system does a pretty good job of delivering. If we value equality, dignity, and generosity, then our system needs some work.

140 A rhetoric of praxis Like Jesse, Tyrone suggests that all people willing to work should be given the chance at a life with dignity, even if they have made some poor choices along the way that resulted in losing a job. But unlike Jesse, Tyrone also raises the possibility that the problem of poverty and unemployment is systemic. However, Tyrone does not explain why unemployment is “endemic to the system”; he simply seems to take it on faith. The task of explaining a dialectical relationship between individual responsibility and social responsibility as it relates to homelessness is difficult, and one with which most students struggle, and while Tyrone does not address this issue head on, he seems to suggest a dialectical relationship. At least that is how I read his paper, which may be wishful thinking on my part, but, as will be seen in the next excerpt, because he also handles the issue of what might be done about the problem of an economic system which creates poverty and unemployment in a more subtle way than most students, I believe he is actually showing sensitivity to his audience (trying not to get in their face too much, but still suggesting how to get them beyond their simplistic views). Tyrone is a skilled writer and this degree of audience awareness is not unusual for him. At any rate, the way I read his paper, he brings these issues together in his conclusion where he returns to his “Let’s Make a Deal” extended metaphor: You could wear an orange clown wig, have a grocery bag full of household items, turn summersaults [sic] and still not get picked by Monte. Monte made the rules and we were happy to comply. And if they weren’t fair, well, we didn’t really mind; even if we went home empty-handed we would still smile for the camera and wave goofily from T.V. land. But if I had to show up every day, and had to try one costume after another, and brought a penlight the day Monte asked for a salt shaker and a salt shaker the day he wanted a bottle-opener, then I might begin to question how Monte ran the program. If I were like most of my fellow contestants, however, I would press on, defying the odds, holding out against hope for the big payday, the brass ring, the quest for ultimate wealth, or at least a new set of dishes. Or maybe I’d exercise that little thing called free will and quit showing up. And maybe when Monte lit up the tube for all America I’d just reach out and change the channel. The difficulty of trying to make something of your life when you have been laid off and eventually end up on the streets is suggested by the frustration of having to try on different costumes and guess what household item Monte will ask for every day. In many ways, so much is out of the control of the individual, yet if any change is to come (whether it be change in the individual’s life or change in social institutions) people must exercise their ability to choose and act; they must have hope that they can succeed and must act on that hope, even if that something is to “change the channel.” Some might read this closing line of Tyrone’s paper as an epistemological withdrawal into

A rhetoric of praxis

141

the inner world of the mind. But, again, I think Tyrone is approaching his audience in a suggestive way to get them to think about the possibilities, rather than telling them straight out that we need to change the system. Eric takes a more head-on approach to the topic. After introducing his topic and discussing the elements of truth and error in the two opposing views of the individual/society connection, he returns to the issue of homelessness: So how does homelessness relate to individual choice and the coercion of society? Imagine that every person in America had a job. Now, history shows us that the economy goes through periods of inflation and recession. Suppose the economy goes into recession. There is now less demand for the products of the economy, so businesses will have to cut costs if they are to remain profitable. One thing that must be done is to cut production. Raising prices will only make those businesses less competitive. The largest expenditure that most businesses have is paying their employees. If production is down, then it doesn’t make economic sense to keep the same number of employees at the same rate of pay. Either wages will be cut or some will be let go or both. Those who are let go will have a difficult time finding a job in a slumping economy. Those who have their wages cut may not be able to get by anymore. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 20% of the homeless are employed but are still unable to escape homelessness. Once the economy begins expanding again, businesses need a pool of unemployed persons from which to hire new employees. Due to the natural patterns of expansion and recession in the economy, some are guaranteed to be unemployed. The idea that there is a “natural rate of unemployment” is an accepted fact now. In this section, Eric, unlike both Jesse and Tyrone, is seeking to explain why unemployment is a structural part of capitalism and that unemployment can lead to homelessness. He even points out that some of the homeless are not unemployed but hold down jobs. After arguing that unemployment is built into the economic system, Eric raises the ethical issue: is forced homelessness an acceptable consequence of our social arrangements? If it is not, Eric continues, “we will have to change the system.” Finally he concludes his paper by returning to the question of social responsibility for homelessness: But is it our responsibility? If it will take such a huge effort to change a system so foundational to our thinking and our way of life, then should we change it? Given that by our participation in the system, we are reproducing that system, we can conclude that we are individually and actively participating in behavior that guarantees homelessness will always be a problem. Unless we are willing to believe that homelessness is not a problem, we must accept our responsibility for the problem even though it is guaranteed by the society we live in.

142 A rhetoric of praxis Knowing that in order to solve the problem of homelessness we must change the most foundational system in which we live gives us a deeper understanding of the problem. This understanding does not, however, present us with any practical solutions. The only thing we may easily conclude from this understanding is that we must change the dualistic manner in which our society has viewed the problem of homelessness. This begins by each of us understanding that the simple explanations we traditionally have been given for this problem, and most others, are bankrupt; and that in order to effectively deal with homelessness, we have to deal with both individuals and with the very foundations of the society in which homelessness exists. Any attempt to solve homelessness must address the issue on those terms. Eric’s explanation of the dialectical relationship between individual and social responsibility tends to be almost one-sided in that he focuses almost entirely on social responsibility. He does, however, maintain that any solution to homelessness must take both the individual and social institutions into account. But if we look more closely, we can see Eric recognizes that the enabling and coercing powers of social institutions are typically greater than the power of the individual to act, which suggests that he does understand, at some level, the dialectical relationship between the individual and society, and this is an important step. Many students find it difficult to imagine that they cannot be whatever they truly want to be. After all, they have been told often enough that with hard work, they can achieve anything. So understanding that social institutions exercise an incredible power over our lives, not determining our lives, but limiting the choices from which we may choose, is an important lesson. Only by recognizing this limiting power of social structures can we then begin to imagine other social structures that would allow us a different range of choices. Eric’s paper indicates he is sensitive to the implications of dialectical thinking. Amber, another student, is also sensitive to the implications of dialectical thought. After a detailed explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of Weber and Durkheim, and the suggestion that social problems result from a complex of social and individual forces, Amber goes on to point out that an “economic system such as ours is historically defined by periods of growth and recession. Companies must cut back on production during times of recession: they get rid of workers and a rise in unemployment results.” But the problem of homelessness, she goes on to explain, is more complex than unemployment: Unemployment is only one of many factors contributing to the homeless problem. Many homeless people are actually employed; however, the majority of jobs available to them only pay minimum wage. The current federal minimum wage is far from adequate. It has failed to keep up with rising costs of living; thus, many minimum wage workers are unable to afford housing … the income needed to afford a 2-bedroom housing unit

A rhetoric of praxis

143

at Fair Market Rent, in Kansas, is $21,589 per year, or $10.38 per hour. This is 202% of the minimum wage. Therefore, a minimum wage worker in Kansas would need to work 81 hours per week in order to afford this 2-bedroom unit of modest circumstances. As most other students have done, Amber complexifies the homeless problem by considering not only job availability but minimum wage and a rising cost of living, especially as it is reflected in rent and property values. All of these factors, however, are part of our political-economic system, and by way of conclusion, Amber goes on to observe: The beneficiaries of this system are the wealthy heads of industry. This is evident by the fact that “the net financial wealth of the top one percent of [American] households now equals the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent” (“A Living Wage”). Such a lack of balance diminishes the legitimacy of our democratic society. Our elected leaders make decisions with the economy in mind. The system itself is never questioned. Americans are conditioned to believe that this system is the best and that it cannot be changed. The powerful cultural myths that still exist in our society serve to insulate the system from change. Therefore, I am suggesting that this inertia must be overcome, and tremendous change is needed in order to eliminate the social problems embedded in our society. Current attempts to deal with homelessness are only attempts at managing the problem, rather than solving it. The dualistic thinking of individual versus social responsibility must be resolved. Poverty and homelessness are examples of the failure of society on many levels. If we hope to understand and address the problems of poverty and homelessness, we must view them from the expanded perspective of both individual and social responsibility simultaneously. Amber’s paper reveals a clear understanding of the social rather than “natural” causes of social problems, thus rejecting the explanation of the social élite that “there is no alternative.” She also recognizes there are “cultural myths” which tend to mystify our collective understanding of those social problems. Moreover, she points out that a particular segment of society (the capitalist class) benefits from the current state of our political-economic system, and its accompanying set of social relations and beliefs, at the expense of many others. And finally she makes it clear that we cannot hope to solve such problems as poverty or homelessness until we grasp “both individual and social responsibility simultaneously.” In her paper, Amber clearly demonstrates her ability to grasp the implications of thinking dialectically about the homeless problem. Another student who demonstrates a sensitive understanding of dialectical thinking is Holly. After a short introduction which sets up the two opposing views being examined, Holly asserts:

144 A rhetoric of praxis It cannot be denied that, in capitalism, wealth by material possession is the utmost goal for the individuals who take part in the system. People are held at lesser value than businesses because businesses contribute to this “ethic” while individual people do not. This means that the development of the business is more important than any one worker of that business. In a system where unemployment is necessary for businesses to succeed and employment is necessary for an individual to succeed, failure of the weaker is inevitable. Businesses need a pool of unemployed persons to function as low-wage workers if their businesses grow, while individuals need employment to maintain a place to live. This social structure of Capitalism limits the opportunity for individuals to obtain a job and therefore contributes to the growth of homelessness in America. Although Holly does not explain the mechanism in capitalism which makes unemployment necessary, she hints at it in her discussion of the needs of business outweighing the needs of the individual. She does recognize, however, that from a capitalist perspective, the economic enterprise is what must be protected, even when such protection results in destroying people’s lives. Holly also understands that to connect individual responsibility to social responsibility dialectically, the individual must still have some responsibility vis à vis whatever social institution she operates within. Holly explains these two responsibilities thus: Although the people who make up this bottom percentage are at a disadvantage, through hard work and will power the future doesn’t have to be predetermined. It is possible to rise above the unemployment epidemic by standing out among the other applicants. This could be achieved by showing motivation and developing skills that are useful to employers. A continual effort must be put forth in order to prove one’s value to a potential employer and it is the individual’s duty to show that. So what if every single unemployed person did possess all of these qualities? Wouldn’t every single unemployed person deserve a job? Of course if every person had the same qualifications they should all deserve the same consideration; however there aren’t enough jobs for everyone even if they all meet the criteria society has demanded. Therefore the individuals themselves do not have complete control of their situation––it’s simply the luck of the draw… Holly understands that individuals must take responsibility for their actions, but at the same time, because social institutions and structures also play a part in circumscribing individual actions through their power to enable and coerce individual actions, collectively we have a social responsibility to those who are excluded from work or coerced into unemployment, by the economic social structure. And finally, Holly recognizes that when a social structure creates a problem, it is our responsibility to examine the structure, and if it is found wanting, to change it:

A rhetoric of praxis

145

It’s time to take notice of what’s really important. Is it material growth or the growth of individual well-being? Since the humane answer to that question is individual well-being, then shouldn’t our system of governing also be? By changing the economic system to benefit those less fortunate, motivation of the unemployed could be enticed. However difficult it may be to change an entire system, the results of forming a more beneficial system could be phenomenal. Those who treat the current system as stagnant and chose [sic] not to question, are contributing to selfishness, greed and therefore homelessness in this country. To exercise our humanistic free will we should apply it to forming a social structure that is fair and just for everyone. This change should be made in hopes that a new way of thinking would envelop society as well as the individual. Holly is able to see how social institutions can bring about conditions that are antithetical to our values: we demand that individuals must take responsibility for themselves by working, yet we maintain an economic system that will not allow everyone to work. Faced with such a realization, two options immediately become apparent: either we socially take care of those excluded, or we change the social structure to one that does not cause this social problem, and Holly recommends the latter. But Holly also recognizes that changing how people think is not an easy task, as existing social institutions can shape our values and beliefs if we do not recognize them for what they are. As such, she makes a final connection to the relationship between how we think and the social institutions within our society, suggesting that new social institutions can lead to new ways of thinking. That is, with time and a new social environment, old patterns of behavior can change. Those who have given up must learn how to live with hope again, and those who have prospered by a willingness to exclude others will have to readjust to a new, more inclusive world. I would like to say that all of my students experienced as much success with this assignment as the students whose papers I have discussed, but unfortunately that is not true. However, even for those who did not have great success, they all demonstrated a marked difference in their understanding of the homeless problem compared to when they first came to class, and all students were able to write papers that were clearly focused and well organized. The difference between good papers and less successful papers was the degree to which students were able to develop all their ideas clearly. Those who better understood the material and concepts of the course, were able to write more complex and insightful papers. Some students, during one-on-one conferences, told me they understood all the material and concepts from our readings and class discussions, but they had difficulty showing this understanding with consistency in their papers. I liken this to passive and active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary consists of words we recognize when others use them but are not words we use ourselves, whereas active vocabulary consists of words we understand and use comfortably. But it takes time and practice to move words from the passive to the

146 A rhetoric of praxis active list. My sense is that those who participated more in class discussions and asked questions tended to grasp the material better and, thus, write better papers than those who were silent most of the time, although it may simply be the case that those who participated in class tried harder than those who did not participate. However, each time I have taught this course, I have increased the number of activities for students to engage with the materials and concepts––group activities, journal writing, quiz questions over assigned reading, etc.––and with each increase of activities I have seen an increase in the number of students who do well with this assignment. But all students are unique individuals, and their development in any social category is not determined by an assignment. Conclusion Any pedagogy of praxis must begin with challenging how students think, but writing assignments designed to encourage a more critical stance toward its topic may, however, be fighting on two fronts: the “common sense” understandings of society grounded in various ideologies, and the politically conservative intellectual inertia of universities and colleges, which are becoming more closely tied to corporate interests and the corporate ideology. Conservative academics are often quick to close ranks against any thinking that challenges their ideologies and to dismiss those challenges as ideological themselves. Students are often caught in a bind of competing versions of reality professed by the “experts.” Faced with such a dilemma, students often buy into the bankrupt postmodern assertion that knowledge is relative depending on the discourse community and withdraw into ennui, or they may adopt a position of “hip” disdain for any kind of social commitment. So part of the task of radical teachers is not only to challenge some of the common sense beliefs of our students, but to equip them intellectually to see through the smoke screen of academic bad faith. But does a critical realist writing class do something more than an expressivist, cognitivist, or social-constructivist class? Unlike in the expressivist class, students in a critical realist class are encouraged by the assignments to gain an understanding of themselves by understanding themselves in relation to the world, more specifically, in relation to the social institutions and structures that circumscribe the activities of their lives. Sometimes students don’t like this and would rather write about topics more interesting to them, but self-indulgence does not help a person to grow intellectually and socially, and assignments that allow students to avoid examining their understanding of the world could be called self-indulgent. Unlike in the cognitivist class, students in the critical realist class are encouraged to find value statements hidden within supposedly value free social arrangements. Once students begin to see certain social institutions in conflict with their basic understandings of morality, the door is open to questioning the legitimacy of those institutions. And unlike in the social-constructivist class, students’ critical

A rhetoric of praxis

147

analysis is directed, not just toward linguistic differences between social groups, but toward the material differences that exist between social groups which are the result of the systemic functions of social institutions and structures. Once social institutions and structures are identified as culprits in creating misery and poverty for some in order to create luxury and wealth for others, thus undermining full human development and universal justice, solutions to social problems are understood to require more than contesting how we and the world are defined; they require changing social institutions which impede full human development and undermine universal justice. In all these ways, a critical realist class differs from its counterparts. But does the critical realist class lead students from theory to praxis? I cannot say that it does, but it does provide students with an understanding of social problems and the skills of critique in a way the other rhetorics do not. And it can do so because critical realism has restored ontology to the dialectic of knowledge formation, rather than ignoring ontology or conflating it with epistemology. Understanding how we might change the world first requires that we understand the world, and critical realism, for the time being, shows itself superior to any other philosophy of science. As William Tabb (2001) says, “We cannot very well change the world if we do not first understand it better,” and critical realism helps us not only understand the world better but it helps us understand our human potential for progressive social change; it prepares us for meaningful citizenship within a democratic society. The conservative political reaction to using schools to prepare students for active citizenship, however, is that the teacher’s job should be dispensing knowledge, not political or moral views. But this argument, as has already been shown, is predicated on the belief that knowledge is separate from values, a misguided but widely held belief. To assume the fact/value dichotomy is to misunderstand the process of communication and to reify knowledge. Moreover, such a view of knowledge insulates particular practices or social structures from critique, an insulation that is deadly to a healthy democracy. If politicians and school administrators have nothing to hide, there is no reason to protect practices or structures from critique. If we are to avoid theory/practice inconsistencies, moreover, then the production of knowledge cannot be separated from praxis. Thus, the classroom must at least be a training ground for praxis, wherein students learn to identify theory/practice inconsistencies and to see social issues in holistic, historical contexts situated in a critical realist ontology. Students must be taught how to identify and challenge ideological beliefs, including the hermeneutic excesses of postmodernism and the reifications of positivism. As the world becomes smaller and as we become a greater threat to the ecosystem, these skills become increasingly important, not only to the survival of a healthy democracy, but to the survival of the human species. A rhetoric of praxis, predicated on a critical realist ontology, is a much needed corrective to the intellectual errors that have held the field in political and academic spheres. Unlike its counterparts, critical realism is able to

148 A rhetoric of praxis conceptualize both the need to change the way people think and the need to change social structures without falling into theory/practice inconsistencies. And a critical realist dialectic can help 1) arm our students against the relativism often used to undermine the conceptualizing of social change, and 2) counter the argument that “there is no alternative.”

References

Archer, Margaret (1998) “Realism and Morphogenesis.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie (eds). London: Routledge, 356–81. Ashley, David, and David Michael Orenstein (1995) Sociological Theory: Classical Statements (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn. Berlin, Isaiah (1976) Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the Philosophy of History. New York: Viking. Berlin, James (1987) Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. —— (1988) “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English 50.5, 477–94. Berlin, James A. (1996) Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English. Bernard-Donals, Michael (1998a) “Composition in an Antifoundational World: A Critique and a Proposal.” Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer (eds). New Haven: Yale UP, 436–53. —— (1998b) The Practice of Theory: Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Academy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —— and Richard R. Glejzer (eds) (1998) Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy. New Haven: Yale UP. Bhaskar, Roy (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press. —— (1989) Reclaiming Reality: A Critical Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy. London: Verso. —— (1993) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso. —— (1994) Plato Etc.: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution. London: Verso. —— (1997) A Realist Theory of Science. London: Verso. Bizzell, Patricia (1979) “Thomas Kuhn, Scientism, and English Studies.” College English 40, 764–71. —— (1990) “Beyond Anti-Foundationalism to Rhetorical Authority: Problems Defining ‘Cultural Literacy.’” College English 52, 661–75. —— (1991) “Marxist Ideas in Composition Studies.” Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. Patricia Harkin and John Schilb (eds). New York: MLA, 52–68.

150 References Bruffee, Kenneth A. (1984) “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind.’” College English 46, 635–52. —— (1986) “Social Construction, Language, and the Authority of Knowledge: A Bibliographical Essay.” College English 48, 773–90. —— (1999) Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge (2nd ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP. Bykofsky, Stuart (1995) “No Heart for the Homeless.” The Comstock Reader. Joseph T. Calabrese (ed.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 85–7. (Originally published in Newsweek, Dec. 1, 1986.) Coles, W.E., Jr. (1969) “Freshman Composition: The Circle of Unbelief.” College English 31, 134–42. —— (1970) “The Sense of Nonsense as a Design for Sequential Writing Assignments.” College Composition and Communication 21, 27–34. —— (1972) “An Unpetty Pace.” College Composition and Communication 23, 378–82. Collier, Andrew (1994) Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso. Copleston, Frederick (1964) From the French Enlightenment to Kant. Vol. 6 of A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. 1976–1994. New York: Doubleday. D’Angelo, Frank J. (1975) A Conceptual Theory of Rhetoric. Cambridge: Winthrop. —— (1978) “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64, 79–85. Elbow, Peter (1973) Writing without Teachers. London: Oxford UP. —— (1986) Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New York: Oxford UP. Emami, Zohreh, and Timothy Riordan (1998) “Tony Lawson on Critical Realism: What’s Teaching Got to Do with It?” Review of Social Economy 3.3, 311–23. “Employment and Homelessness.” Feb. 1999, Aug. 2001 Fact Sheet No. 4. National Coalition for the Homeless. Faigley, Lester (1986) “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” College English 48.6, 527–42. —— , Roger Cherry, David Jolliffe and Anna Skinner (1985) Assessing Writers’ Knowledge and Processes of Composing. Norwood: Ablex Publishing. Fishman, Stephen M., and Lucille Parkinson McCarthy (1992) “Is Expressivism Dead? Reconsidering Its Romantic Roots and Its Relation to Social Construction.” College English 54, 647–61. Flower, Linda (1989) Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing (3rd ed.). San Diego: Harcourt. —— and John R. Hayes (1980a) “The Dynamics of Composing: Making Plans and Juggling Constraints.” Cognitive Processes of Writing. Lee W. Gregg and Erwin R. Steinberg (eds). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 31–50. —— (1980b) “Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes.” Cognitive Processes of Writing. Lee W. Gregg and Erwin R. Steinberg (eds). Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 3–30. Friedman, Milton (1968) “The Role of Monetary Policy.” American Economic Review 58.1, 1–17. Gibson, Walker (1970) “Composing the World: The Writer as Map-Maker.” College Composition and Communication 21, 255–60. Gusdorf, Georges (1965) Speaking (La Parole). Trans. Paul T. Brockelman. Evanston: Northwestern UP.

References

151

Hobson, Eric H. (1994) “Writing Center Practice Often Counters Its Theory. So What?” Theory-Practice in the Writing Center. Joan A. Mullin and Ray Wallace (eds). Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1–10. Hull, Jon D. (1995) “Slow Descent into Hell.” The Comstock Reader. Joseph T. Calabrese (ed.). Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, 87–92. (Originally published in Time Feb. 2, 1987.) Jennings, E.M. (1968) “A Paradigm for Discovery.” College Composition and Communication 19, 192–200. Joseph, Jonathan (1998) “In Defense of Critical Realism.” Capital & Class 65, 73–106. Khalil, Elias L. (1996) “Social Theory and Naturalism: An Introduction.” Evolution, Order and Complexity. Elias L. Khalil and Kenneth E. Boulding (eds). London: Routledge, 1–39. Knoblauch, C.H., and Lil Brannon (1984) Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacey, Hugh (1998) “Neutrality in the Social Sciences: On Bhaskar’s Argument for an Essential Emancipatory Impulse in Social Science.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, et al. (eds). London: Routledge, 473–502. Larson, Richard (1968) “Discovery through Questioning: A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Invention.” College English 30, 126–34. —— (1971) “Invention Once More: A Role for Rhetorical Analysis.” College English 32, 665–72. —— (1972) “Problem-Solving, Composing, and Liberal Education.” College English 33, 628–35. Lauer, Janice (1970) “Heuristics and Composition.” College Composition and Communication 21, 396–404. Lawson, Tony (1994) “Economics and Expectations.” Keynes, Knowledge and Uncertainty. S. Dow, et al. (eds). Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Lindblom, Charles E. (1982) “The Market as Prison.” Journal of Politics 44.2, 324–36. Lutz, William D. (1971) “Making Freshman English a Happening.” College Composition and Communication 22, 35–8. Manicas, Peter (1998) “A Realist Social Science.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie (eds). London: Routledge, 313–38. Marx, Karl (1963) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International. —— (1970) A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Maurice Dodd (ed.). S.W. Ryazanskaya (trans.) Moscow: Progress Publishers. McPeck, John M. (1981) Critical Thinking and Education. New York: St. Martin’s. Meszaros, Istvan (2001) Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads. New York: Monthly Review. Miller, George A., Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram (1962) Plans and the Structure of Behavior. New York: Holt. Moffett, James (1983) Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton. Murray, Donald M. (1969) “Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent.” College Composition and Communication 20, 118–23. —— (1968) A Writer Teaches Writing: A Practical Method of Teaching Composition. Boston: Houghton.

152 References —— (1970) “The Interior View: One Writer’s Philosophy of Composition.” College Composition and Communication 21, 21–6. Myers, Greg (1986) “Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition Teaching.” College English 48, 154–73. Nader, Ralph “The Real Strength of Economy.” Nader 2000, 21 August 2000. . Nader, Ralph “A Living Wage.” Nader 2000, 26 October 2000. . Newell, Allen, and Herbert Alexander Simon (1972) Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Noble, David F. (2002) “Technology and the Commodification of Higher Education.” Monthly Review 53.10, (March), 26–40. Norrie, Alan (1998) “The Praxiology of Legal Judgement.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie (eds). London: Routledge, 544–58. North, Stephen M. (1987) The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth: Boynton. Odell, Lee (1973) “Piaget, Problem-Solving, and Freshman Composition.” College Composition and Communication 24, 36–42. Ohmann, Richard (1964) “In Lieu of a New Rhetoric.” College English 26, 17–22. Ollman, Bertell (1993) Dialectical Investigations. New York: Routledge. Outhwaite, William (1998) “Realism and Social Science.” Critical Realism: Essential Readings. Margaret Archer, Roy Bhaskar, Andrew Collier, Tony Lawson and Alan Norrie (eds). London: Routledge, 282–312. Pateman, Trevor (1987) Language in Mind and Language in Society. Oxford: Clarendon. Paull, Michael, and Jack Kligerman (1972) “Invention, Composition, and the Urban College.” College English 33, 651–9. Pike, Kenneth L.(1964a) “Beyond the Sentence.” College Composition and Communication 15, 129–34. —— (1964b) “A Linguistic Contribution to Composition.” College Composition and Communication 15, 82–8. Ringer, Fritz (1997) Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Rohman, D. Gordon (1965) “Pre-Writing: The Stages of Discovery in the Writing Process.” College Composition and Communication 16, 106–12. Rorty, Richard (1980) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Rosenblatt, Louise M. (1993) “The Transactional Theory: Against Dualisms.” College English 55, 377–86. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1957) Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical LibraryWisdom Library. Sayer, Andrew (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Shore, Ira (1980) Critical Thinking and Everyday Life. Boston: South End. Smith, Frank (1990) To Think. New York: Teachers College.

References

153

Smith, Paul (1988) “Discerning the Subject.” Theory and History of Literature 55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sprinker, Michael (1998) “The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.” Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer (eds). New Haven: Yale UP, 341–67. Stewart, Donald C. (1969) “Prose with Integrity: A Primary Objective.” College Composition and Communication 20, 223–7. Tabb, William K. (2001) The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Monthly Review. Trimbur, John (1989) “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning.” College English 51, 602–16. Vygotsky, Lev (1962) Thought and Language. Trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Massachusetts: MIT Press. Waldo, Mark L. (1985) “Romantic Rhetoric for the Modern Student: The Psycho-rhetorical Approach of Wordsworth and Coleridge.” Rhetoric Review 4.1, 64–79. Wiener, Norbert (1961) Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: MIT Press. Will, David (1980) “Psychoanalysis as a Human Science.” British Journal of Medical Psychology 53, 201–11.

Index

absolute spirit 81–2 abstract analysis 90 abstractions 14, 65–6, 69, 72 acculturation 101 actualism 23–5, 30, 32, 39 agency 25; strong 24; weak 24 antecedent conditions 12, 30, 50, 54, 94–5, 124; initial 22–3, 87, 94–5 anti-realism 16 Aristotelian material causes 39 Aristotle 14, 96, 126 atomistic model 20, 22–6, 30–1, 43–6, 59, 70, 72, 77, 89–91, 94–5, 113, 120; events 20, 26; interaction 31; things 20, 21 autonomous existential reality 26 automonous self 63, 103 authentic self 112–13, 116 beliefs 3, 5, 7, 12, 14, 28, 33, 42, 55–8, 61, 63, 66, 77, 79, 93–4, 100, 104–6, 107, 111, 114–15, 117–20, 128, 143, 145–7; community 105; false 93, 99, 100, 109, 114–15, 120; individual 105; internalized 118 believing game 66–8, 70 Berger, Peter 48, 137 Berlin, Isaiah 97, 114 Bhaskar, Roy 4–7, 13–25, 27, 29–30, 32–5. 37–9, 41–50, 52–4, 58, 78, 81, 88, 93–4, 109–10, 113–14, 122–4, 137; critiques 19–20, 115, 137 Bykofsky, Stuart 75–6, 96, 136 capitalism 45, 51, 53, 58, 74, 91–3, 115, 131–3, 137–9, 141, 143–4 causal agency 20, 26, 39; action 20; efficacy 30; intentional interaction 29–30; liabilities 38; powers 38; statement 25

causal analysis 10–1, 27; cause and effect 17, 26; causes and conditions 25, 93–4; factors 12; laws 19–20, 23–5, 36–7, 39, 43, 55, 89, 94–5, 100; see also Hume causal asymmetry 91 causal interdependency 54 causal structures 39 causality theory 53, 71 change 45, 107, 114, 116, 120, 122–4 ; by people 45; in people 45; qualitative 54, 122; quantitative 54, 122; in reality 109; social 125–6, 128–9, 147–8; the world 125–6, 129–30, 147 chaos theory 80, 113, 120 chess programs 83–4 child development 102, 109 Chomsky, Noam 16; linguistic theories 16 church elders 119 civil rights 8, 60, 79 classroom practice 1, 7, 91, 95, 101, 116, 125, 128–30, 136–7, 145–7; indoctrination 129 closed systems 10, 16, 20–4, 30, 37, 43–4, 54, 72, 77, 89, 94–5, 100, 113, 120; qualified 23 coercive forces 46–8, 60, 63–4, 69, 71, 75, 77–8, 113, 123, 141–2 cognitive errors 7 cognitive psychology 8, 29, 79, 80, 86, 99; abilities 21; development 69; practice 42; tools 9, 20, 28, 39, 41 cognitivist rhetoric 79, 88, 92, 94–5, 99–101, 121, 130 cognitivist school 1, 2, 7–9, 13, 18, 59, 78–80, 83, 88–9, 91–2, 94–5, 99–100, 121, 130, 146 coherence of scientific experiments 37–8 collectivism 46 communication 14, 60–1, 67–9, 73–4,

156 Index 79–80, 84, 88, 92, 95–6, 99, 120, 125, 147 community 102–8, 111–12, 116–17, 120; academic 104; coherence 108; conditions 102; incommensurable 117; internalized 102; national 104 composition: laws of 67; model 60; process 83, 85–6; studies 7–10, 13–14, 16, 65, 79–80; theory 1, 2, 10, 15, 17–18, 21, 59, 61, 74, 96, 99, 101, 122, 124 compositions 67–8, 78, 84 computer programs 83–4, 88, 90; equilibrating systems 90 concept making 2, 41–2, 125 conception: of discourse 117; of reality 73, 109–10; of self 8, 72; of universe 43, of world 135 conceptual: critique 56–7; moment 56; object 26, 88, 108; systems 42, 81; tools 21 conceptualization 56, 103, 137, 148 concrete particular 14, 82, 89 consciousness 31, 80–3, 89, 93, 130; false 31, 93; higher levels 89; unhappy 31 consensus 101, 104, 106, 108, 111, 120 constant conjunction of events 19–20, 22–4, 26, 31, 36–7, 39, 43, 89, 100 constructs 102; ideological 106; language 108 contemplation 21; rational 23 context 19, 29, 36, 43, 44, 50, 52, 54, 62, 65–6, 86–8, 90–1, 127, 139; historical 101, 103, 105 conversation 102–3 Copernican epistemology 4 counterfactual reasoning 11 creativity 86, 88, 96 critical: evaluation 127–8; naturalism 17, 33, 43–4, 50, 137; philosophy 33, 92; realism 5–6, 13–14, 16–18, 30, 33–7, 43, 50, 53, 59, 80, 95, 115–16, 121–5, 130, 134, 136, 146–8; rhetoric 121–2, 124–5, 130, 136; self-liberating mindset 60; thinking 92, 94, 120, 126–7, 135–6 cultural: artefacts 15; beliefs 107; conformity 69; constraints 103; influences 11, 105; meaning 69; phenomena 10, 13 culture 9, 21, 103, 113; current-traditional model of writing 8, 60 cybernetics 9, 83–4, 90 D’Angelo, Frank J. 79–83, 88–9 democracy 61, 105, 107, 127, 130, 143, 147

description 31; redescription 31–2 determinate negation 34 determinism 83, 89–90, 94–5, 113; evolutionary determinism 89 deterministic 26, 30, 32, 39, 43, 70, 113 dialectical critical realism 5–6, 59; critique 129–30, 136; thinking 131–2, 134, 142–3; understanding 132 dialectics 3–5, 15, 47, 69–70, 81–2, 89–90, 101, 106, 108, 112, 114, 117, 123–4, 127–35, 138, 140, 142, 147–8; interactive 114; of knowledge making 7; Marxian 47 dialogue 102 differentiated and stratified world 38–9, 53 discourse 29, 43, 56, 58, 60, 80–1, 93, 102–4, 112–13, 116–17, 120, 123; abnormal 29; community 2, 6, 66–7, 70–3, 101, 103–4, 106–8, 111–12, 116–17, 120, 146; incommensurable 117; moral 93; national 104, 111, 116; normal 29; persuasive 116; polyvocal 101; value 93 discovery model of writing 63–4 doubting game 66–7, 70 dualism 104–5, 142 dualistic concept 45 dualities 3, 5, 49 Durkheim, Emile 46–8, 113, 137–8, 142 economic system 14, 17, 45, 48, 51, 71, 73–4, 92, 98, 107, 115, 131–5, 137–45 ecosystem 135, 147 editing 86 education 127, 132, 139 educational reforms 105 egocentricity 83 Elbow, Peter 66–8, 71–2 emergent powers 4, 20–1, 37, 47, 53, 113, 120–21 empirical: events 20; methodology 46; realism 20–3, 26–7, 30–1, 33, 36, 38, 45, 56, 59, 75, 77, 89–90, 94–5, 100, 109–10, 128; tests 4, 6, 12, 19, 36, 38–9, 42, 55, 72, 88, 111, 116 empiricists 46; classical 25–6, 50 employment 96, 98–9, 117, 131–4, 137–42, 144 Enlightenment thought 3, 5, 32, 35, 63 environmental: issues 134, 136; problem 135 epistemic fallacy 27, 32–3, 42–3, 73, 88–9, 109–10

Index 157 epistemology 1, 4–7, 13, 17, 27–8, 32–4, 39, 42–3, 54–5, 59, 70–5, 77, 100, 109–10, 112, 120, 140, 147 equality 125, 139; substantive 125 essay writing 67, 86; compare/contrast 67 ethics 106 events 19–21, 24–7, 36–8, 43, 46, 53, 73, 80, 113; repeatable series 36; sequences 36–7 existential intransivity 54 existentialism 4, 50, 80 experience 19–21, 23–7, 46–7, 51, 55–6, 61–8, 70, 73, 75, 80, 83, 86–8, 90, 96, 101, 103, 107–8, 118–19, 124, 128, 136; dialectic of 67; meaning 64; personal 51–2; sensory 26; social 101 experiment 4, 9, 20–5, 31, 36–7, 58, 62, 85, 137; closed systems 24; coherence 37–8; conditions 23–4, 89; inclusive state-description 24–5; intervention 22–3, 36; method 36; repeated 58; results 36, 58 explanatory power of a theory 5, 29, 40, 55–7, 67, 95, 116 exploitation 124–5 expression 46, 67–9, 71, 82, 92; selfexpression 71 expressivist school 1, 7, 8, 13, 18, 59–63, 68–79, 99, 121, 130, 136, 146; rhetoric 8, 60–1, 68–9, 71–2, 75–8, 99, 101, 121, 130 external: forces 38, 95; world 87 fact/value dichotomy 58, 92–4, 125, 147 Federal Reserve Board 132–3 feedback 29, 69–70, 83–4, 90, 96, 110–11 feminism 8 financial institutions 93 Flower, Linda 83, 85, 87, 90, 92 form/matter distinction 26 foundationalism 16, 103–4, 112; antifoundationalists 14–16, 103–5; nonfoundational 103, 111–12; soft 16 fragmentation 83, 112, 132 freedom 26, 29–31, 71–2, 74, 78, 82, 89, 95, 114–15, 124; to choose 64, 89; “in-gear” 29; to learn 64; “out of gear” 29; pseudofreedom 89; threats 31; to write 64 Freud, Sigmund 16 generalizations 65–6; challenged 64 generative mechanisms 4, 6, 37, 43, 46–7, 50, 55, 59, 80, 95, 110; structures 43, 51, 93

gestalt psychologists 83 globalization 131 goals 85–7, 89, 91–2, 94–5, 101, 109, 116, 127, 129, 139 group: relations 107; social group 147; work 101, 110, 136–7, 146 “growth through English” model 8 Hayes, John R. 83–5, 87, 90 Hegel, Georg 81–2, 89; dialectic 89 hermeutics 6, 9, 15–16, 33, 44, 46, 51, 72, 108, 116, 147 heuristics 86, 91–2, 94–6, 99–100 hierarchy of goals 84, 87, 91; in classroom 128 historical: materialism 46; constraints 103 homelessness in America 18, 75–7, 96–9, 117–20, 131–3, 136–45; systemic 133 homeostatic mechanism 90 Hull, Jon D. 75–6, 96, 136 human: activity 46, 51, 53–4, 89; agency 9, 23, 33, 39, 43, 47–9, 52, 54, 72, 77–8, 89, 94–5, 112–16, 122, 124, 129–30; behavior 88–9, 94; conduct 54; emancipation 59, 124–5; sciences 2, 4, 6, 14, 16, 19, 33, 44; subject 42 human nature 45, 131; active 72; animal 45, 54; consciousness 89; disequilibrating systems 90; intelligence 88–9; intentionality 114; motivation 92; passive 72; rational 45, 54; spontaneity 90; system 135; values 94 Hume, David 19–20, 26–7, 30, 33, 37, 43; empirical realism 20–1; horizontal and vertical explanations 22; Humean causal laws 10, 19–20, 22–4, 30–1, 44, 46, 53, 59, 70, 94–5; Humean ontology 37; law of causality 19; vertical causality 19 hypotheses 12, 24, 38, 53–5, 72, 84, 87, 95 ideal types 10, 12–14, 69, 88, 107 idealism 3, 5, 43, 59, 78, 115, 122–3, 130; super-idealists 115 ideological: formations 106; perspective 105; practices 101; pressures 105 ideological justification 114; constructions 115; critique 115 ideology 105–8, 111–15, 124–5, 129, 131, 134, 146–7 imagination 60, 68–9 immanent critique 13, 19, 34, 66 individual 61–3, 114, 122, 125, 134, 138, 141–4; active 63; agency 47; behavior 45; expression 71; passive 63; power 77;

158 Index problems 45; psychology 72, 74, 77; as writer 61–2, 67–70 individualism 44–6, 67–8, 70–1, 75, 103, 113, 134 infinite regress 10 inflation 133 influence on writers 61–2, 69, 77–8 information 25, 85, 88, 90, 96–7, 99, 126–7, 134, 136–7; information processing 83–4 inspiration 64 institutions 8, 12, 48, 60, 74, 77, 93, 100, 120, 122–5, 127–9, 130–2, 134–5, 138–40, 143, 144–7 intellectual discipline 9, 100, 104, 106; development 136; fallacy 110, 130; logical use 26; model 129; prejudice 42; tools 129 interaction 61, 63–5, 67, 70, 94, 100, 101, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112–13, 120, 122, 124–5, 129 interactionism 24 interconnections 135 internal: change 128; complexity 20; essence 21–2, 37; motives 46; qualities 38; relations 46; stability 90; world 87 internalization 102, 110, 118–19, 124; interpretation 11, 25, 46, 61–2, 67, 70, 105–6, 108; validity 105 intransitive dimension of ontology 6, 16, 27, 29, 34–6, 39, 41, 54, 56, 73, 88, 109–10, 112, 116–17, 120, 123 investigators 11–12 isomorphism 83 judgment formation 7, 96, 105, 110 Kant, Immanuel 4, 9, 13, 25–7, 30, 32–3, 43–4, 70–5, 77, 80, 88, 110, 113–14; two worlds model 32–3, 110; see also neo-Kantians knowledge 14, 17, 22, 26–9, 32, 34–6, 38–43, 47, 58, 60, 66–8, 70, 74–5, 85, 88, 91–2, 94, 99–112, 114, 116–17, 120, 131, 136, 146–7; absolute 66; claims 106–7; community 42, 104, 108; conceptual 40; corrigible 125; development 125; discursive 42, 109–10; emancipatory 124–5; fallibility 41; infinite layers 39; making 101, 107–8, 110–12, 117, 147; new knowledge 21–2, 39–40, 67; as power 58; practical 40, 42, 109; production 1, 3, 6–7, 21, 28, 30, 41–2, 53, 70, 94,

101, 105, 110, 114, 117, 123–4, 128; scientific 9, 20, 22, 32, 41; selfknowledge 64, 125, 127; sensate reductive 22, 25; social history 21, 39, 101; socio-historical development 39–41; transitive 39–41; of the world 65, 125 “knowledgeable peers” 103, 105, 108, 111 Koestler, Arthur 86 Kuhn, Thomas S. 27–30, 41, 104, 111 labor market 134 laboratory experiments 20–1, 23, 36–7, 95; closed system 20, 37, 95 language 9, 16,–7, 20–2, 29–30, 32, 41–3. 49, 54, 56, 60–3, 65–6, 68–9, 78, 101–3, 105–10, 113, 147; linguistic codes 71, 74, 77, 102; linguistic constructs 102, 109, 116; linguistic entities 102, 107, 112; linguistic fallacy 43; linguistic forces 124; linguistic ordering 70–1; linguistic structures 101, 109; linguists 88; social 21–2, 69, 78; transcribing thought 63; two language model 32; vernacular 103 language community 69, 104, 106; constraints 105; generative role 109; mediating function 109–10 laws of nature 9, 23, 115, 131 learning 62, 69, 108, 110, 126, 128–9; individual 110; social 110 liberalism 45, 58 literary studies 9, 105; literature 62 logic 3, 67, 73; of dialects 7; formal 126; logical argument 56; logical fallacies 67, 126; logical independence 58; logical models 88; logical propositions 67; symbolic 66; logical transformations 66 long-term memory 84–6, 88, 90 maps 7, 35, 65, 70 Marx, Karl 46–7, 49, 57–8, 106, 115, 130; historical materialism 46 material presence of society 46; material conditions 125, 131; material goods 107, 125; material world 110, 113, 125 May, Rollo 86 meaning 63–4, 69 mechanisms 37–40, 43, 54, 55, 70, 83, 95; causal 53; higher stratum 38; lower stratum 38; mechanical laws of nature 90 mechanistic model 20–3, 26, 30–1, 43–4, 70, 72, 77, 89–90, 94, 113, 120; interaction 31, 90; mechanisms 37–8

Index 159 memory 85, 90; memorization 100 metacritics 33–4; metacritical dimension 41, 44 methodological individualism 44–6, 52, 58, 103, 122, 124, 134 methodology 9, 46, 90 mind 2, 4, 9, 13, 16, 20–1, 25–7, 38, 60, 63, 67, 70, 79–82, 84, 86–90, 95, 100, 101, 103, 120, 125, 127, 130, 132, 140–1, 143; identity between human minds 27; model of 88, 94; passive 26 moral responsibility 9; example 129; morality 146 Murray, Donald 61–4, 67 natural philosophy 14, 33; natural laws 20–3, 30, 36, 113; universal laws 22–4 natural sciences 2, 4, 6, 14, 19, 33, 44, 54–5, 58, 92; natural science community 104; natural world 30, 32, 100, 113 naturalism 16, 33, 50, 54; anti-naturalist 44; critical 33; limits 54; “naturalist fallacy” 16; realism 33 Nazism 92 neo-classical economics 45 neo-Kantians 27, 44, 46, 72, 74, 95, 114–15 nomological knowledge 13 non-discursive element 15, 42, 72 noumena 25–6, 70, 75, 77, 88–9, 91–2, 95, 110 “object of knowledge” 25, 34, 42, 110; object of inquiry 114; object of nature 46, 51; object of study 45–6, 70; real 34 objectivity 15, 26–7; objectivist view 21 observation 20–3, 36, 42, 44, 46, 109; passive 36, 109 ontology 1–2, 4–7, 13–14, 17, 19, 21–3, 26–8, 30–7, 39, 43, 45–6, 55–6, 59, 70, 72–3, 77–8, 89, 91, 94–5, 100, 109–10, 113–15, 128, 147; explicit 43; implicit 43; ontological depth 38, 53 open systems 14, 20, 23–4, 36–7, 55, 123; human beings 23; natural settings 20; non-reducibility 23 oppression 60–1, 123 ozone layer 135 Panglossian world 23 participatory citizenship 101, 127, 147 pedagogical goals 1, 13–5, 17, 101–2, 116; intervention 100; pedagogy 115, 128, 146

perception 21, 27, 42, 51, 62, 67, 70, 80, 92, 108–9, 114–15; of reality 27–8, 109; of the world 88, 107 personal nature of writing 61; personal context 62 perspectives 3, 46, 67, 76, 79, 88, 105, 108, 111, 124, 131–2, 134, 143–4 phenomena 4, 13, 15, 19, 22, 24–6, 29–32, 38–9, 44, 46, 53–4, 56–7, 67, 70, 73, 75, 77, 80, 86, 88–9, 91, 95, 109–10, 113, 138, 145; collective 46; individual 44; natural 75; phenomenal world 32, 88, 110, 113; social 44, 53, 75, 91 philosophy 5, 16, 31, 33, 35, 39, 41, 43, 55, 100, 109, 115, 124–5; philosophical inadequacy 59 philosophy of science 2, 16–7, 19–34, 39, 41, 43, 109, 147; critical realism 33–4 physical sciences 9, 32, 44; laws 32, 54, 113; processes 30; revolution in 65 physicalism 30, 32; predicting movement 30 physiological processes 89–90 Piaget, Jean 80, 87, 102 planning 85–6 political behavior 93, 102, 108, 112, 124–5, 129; political ideology 107 Popper, Karl 17; falsification theory 17 position-practices 122–4, 128, 134 positivist science 5, 16–7, 30, 44–6, 59, 78–9, 91, 94–5, 100–1, 112, 147; Popperian 16–17 postmodern philosophies 4, 9, 13, 32–3, 106, 115, 128, 146–7 post-process model 8 poverty 91–4, 124, 133, 139–40, 143, 147 practical reason 5 practice of science 4 practitioners 8–9, 14 praxis-dependent structures 33, 48–9, 124; connections 114; duality of praxis 49; impotent praxis 130; level of praxis 58, 147; rhetoric of praxis 122, 129–30, 146 predetermination 39, 82, 89, 95 prediction 9, 11, 20, 22–3, 30, 39, 54–5, 87–9, 91, 94–5; predictive experimentation 14; predictive science 30 prejudices 76–7, 91, 99, 117, 120; misconceptions 77; reactionary positions 76 prior conditions 11, 22–3; knowledge 21 probabilities 11

160 Index problem-solving strategies 8–9, 84–8, 90–2, 96, 128, 134; eight-step plan 87, 91; heuristic 90–2, 94, 99 process/product 132 profits 137, 141 psychoanalysis 16 psychology 89–90; assumptions 99; psychologists 96 racism 92 radical behaviorism 44–5 radical skepticism 27 rationalism 3, 5, 12, 38, 59, 67, 101; irrationalism 59; rationalization 72 reading 86 real object 41 realist 19, 46–7 reality 1–2, 5–6, 13–14, 18, 20–2, 27–8, 30, 36, 59, 73, 77–8, 80, 88–9, 94–5, 100, 102–3, 105–13, 115–17, 120, 124, 126, 135, 146; intransitive 73; layers 22, 53; levels 53; mistaken 117; model building 26, 38–9, 88, 95; model of 1–2, 5–6, 13, 18, 20–2, 27–8, 30, 36, 59, 73, 77–8, 80, 88, 94–5, 100, 115–16, 120, 126; non-discursive 72–3; objective 31; reality shifts 29; strata 54, 113 reductionism 30, 88, 113, 116 regresses 24–5; infinite 73; interactionist 25; reductivist 24–5 reification 47, 68, 74, 123, 128, 147; of knowledge 92, 100, 147; of social structures 53, 122, 131; of society 47, 50 relations 45–7, 51–3, 64, 125, 127; between groups 45, 113; between individuals 45, 113; external 53; internal 53; productive 53; relational sociology 46 relativism 15, 46, 72–3, 75, 103–5, 108, 111, 116, 128, 148; absolute 111; group 73, 111–12, 116; individual 73, 111–12, 116; radical 103; social 75 research methods 88 resistant other 81 resources: finite 135 reviewing 86 rhetoric 1, 7, 10, 13–14, 17–18, 59, 79–80, 89, 101, 104–5, 108, 111, 114, 116, 122–4, 129, 136, 147; critique 10, 18, 136, 147; rhetorical task 104 Romantic movement 68 Rorty, Richard 27, 29–33; two language model 32 rules of writing 60

science 32, 35, 43, 54, 56, 65, 73, 109, 114; history of 32, 73, 114; normal 29; revolutionary 29 scientific investigation 6, 15–16, 25, 27, 35, 55, 65, 105; activity 94; experiments 21–2, 24, 36–7, 94; research 15 scientific paradigm shift 28–30, 32, 104, 109 scientific thought 6; certainty 11; community 12, 28, 32; discipline 9, 16; knowledge 9, 20, 22, 32; laws 35, 37; practices 33–4; progress 24, 28; revolutions 41; school 39; theory 65 self-actualization 61, 64, 126 self-alienation 82 self-awareness 78 self-centeredness 136 self-clarification 78, 126–7 self-consciousness 82, 130 self-determination 81–2 self-differentiation 82 self-directed interaction 23 self-discovery 8, 62–4 self-extension 64 self-image 71, 124–5 self-interest 130 self-motivation 76 self-realization 64, 77, 82 self-reflexive 125 self-unification 82 semantics 101, 125 sensation 21, 25, 125; conceptualization of 21 sense of self 60–4, 77; active 62–3; authentic self 61, 63, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 77; integrity 62; own “voice” 60, 64, 69; passive 62 serial experience 19 skills 127, 139, 144 “smallest components” 39, 87 social-constructivist school 1, 7–9, 13, 18, 21, 59, 68–9, 100–17, 120–1, 130, 146; rhetoric 101–2, 107–8, 112, 114–17, 120–1, 130 social: behavior 109; concern 136; conditions 35, 41; context 42, 44, 50, 54; critique 57, 130; effects 45; endeavor 5, 21–2; forces 40, 113–14; forms 49; freedom 74; history 112; inquiry 44; institutions 48, 77, 93, 127; justice 125, 127, 131; order 111; product 34, 56; relations 47, 51, 56, 58, 93, 115; scientific 21–2; services 133–4; values 74 social sciences 17, 33, 44, 54–6, 92–3; explanatory 54; theory 55

Index 161 social structures 15, 30–1, 45–8, 50–9, 71, 74–5, 77–8, 91–4, 100, 108, 112, 114–16, 120, 122–9, 131–2, 134–5, 137, 142, 144–8; activity 15, 34, 50, 56, 74–5, 114; activity-dependent 50–1, 55, 124; change 57, 70–2, 74–5, 77, 125–7, 129, 147–8; conceptdependent 50–1, 55, 57, 124; constraints 50; construction 27, 103, 109–11, 120; conventions 74, 91; knowledge 49; phenomena 44, 53, 55–7; practices 31; problems 31, 45, 53, 71, 131, 135, 142–3, 145, 147; systemic function 132; systems 54–5, 74; theory 47, 55, 59; time-spacedependent 50–1, 124; world 30, 113, 120 social theory models 47; Berger 48; Bhaskar 47–8; Durkheim 47–8; Weber 47–8 social theory of science 15, 21–2, 33 society 45–56, 62, 68, 71, 74, 97, 104, 107, 113–14, 116, 122, 132, 138, 141–4; laws of society 51; position-practices 52; society/person connection 48, 50 sociology 17, 33, 41, 45; methods 45; socialization 21, 50; sociological positivism 46 spiralling dialectical sublation 82 statements about being 32; fact statements 125; ontology 32; value statements 125 statements about knowledge 32; epistemology 32 structures of the mind 88, 100–1; structures of the world 88, 100–1; structuring component 88 student: active participant 63; liberation 60, 101–2, 115–16; own experience 62; passive observer 63; responsibilities in writing 64 students 95–101, 111, 115–17, 120, 123, 125–38; 140, 142–3, 145–6; change 116 study of society 44, 46, 53; see also critical naturalism style 64, 68–9; integrity 64 subjective rhetorics 8, 115 super idealism 27–9 syntactical alternatives 101 systemic forces 135, 138–40, 147 tabula rasa 20–1 task environment 85, 95 taxes 132 teachers 100–1, 125–9, 136, 146

teaching writing 1, 127 temporal sequences 87, 90–1 theoretical reason 5; beliefs 14; critique 7; pursuits 16 theoretico-practical duality 7 theory 42, 55, 57, 93, 108, 110–11, 115, 124, 147; construction 110; incommensurable 111; proto theory 55; theory determined 42, 47; theory laden 42, 47 “theory hope” 3 theory of knowledge 6, 105, 125 theory/practice inconsistencies 1–8, 12–14, 17–18, 59, 74, 94, 100, 115–17, 121–2, 128, 136, 147–8 “thing-in-itself” 26–7, 46, 70–1, 75, 77, 80, 89, 110, 114, 116 thinking aloud 85, 102 thinking process 21, 29, 35, 60, 63–4, 71, 81, 83, 85, 90, 92, 97, 114, 126–31, 145–6; computer mimicry 83; critical 127, 136; cultural influences 21; internalised conversation 102, 110 thought 102–3, 107, 129; thought-object 26, 34, 41, 80, 106–7, 110 totalities 53, 66, 81–2, 89 training 127–8, 134 transcendent: authority 106; truth 104, 106–7 transcendental critique 4 transcendental philosophy 4, 13–14, 33–4, 36; arguments 33–5; idealism 23, 25–7, 33, 44, 88–9; refutations 34 transcendental procedure 56 transcendental realism 5, 15, 33–5, 43; transformational model of society 48–50, 71, 122–4, 137 transitive dimension of science 5–6, 16, 34, 39–41, 110, 112 translating 85–6 truth 5, 58, 62, 66–7, 70–3, 93, 103–8, 110–11, 115–16, 120, 125, 137, 141; absolute 105; claims 66, 106; collective 111; determined by force 73; personal 111; respectable authority 104, 111; scientific 5; universal 107 understanding 25–6, 32, 35, 40, 60–1, 65, 70, 75, 80, 88–90, 94–6, 100, 103, 105–7, 109, 114, 118, 120, 125–9, 134, 136–8, 142, 146–7; oneself 61, 64–5; other people 66, 68, 71; shift 35; universality of 27, 89; of the world 65, 106, 125–6, 146–7

162 Index unemployment 96, 98–9, 119, 131–4, 137–42, 144–5; systemic nature 132–3 universal categories of understanding 25, 27, 70, 80 universal convergence 83, 89 universal laws: see natural philosophy universal self 63 utilitarianism 45–6 values 92, 94, 103, 106–7, 119, 125, 127, 131–2, 135, 139, 145–7; value judgments 93, 125; value systems 106; value-neutral 92, 99 variables 20, 23, 25, 37, 95, 131; controlled 20; uncontrolled 20, 23; undesirable 36–7; unexplained 23 verbalizing thoughts 85 vocabularies 30–1, 116, 145; incommensurable 30; new 30–1, 33 voluntarism 47, 50, 53, 72, 74–5, 78, 113, 122 wage-labour 57–8, 74, 93, 133 warranted assertibility concept 105–6, 108, 111, 116

wealth 91–2, 124, 133, 139, 143–4, 147 Weber, Max 10–13, 46–8, 88, 137–8, 142 welfare state 91, 132 World Trade Organization 130; International Monetary Fund 130; World Bank 130 world views 106–7, 111, 120, 125, 131–2, 135; change 125–6 writers 61–4, 67–8, 84–5, 95, 108, 140; interaction 67; needs 68 writing process 1, 9, 42, 60, 62–3, 79, 83, 85–6, 92, 94–6, 123, 126–7, 134, 138; good writing 126–7, 145–6; interior view 62; model of 60; organic 60, 63; principles 67; transfer of thought to paper 63; writing courses 126, 136, 146; writing instruction 60, 127; writing plans 85; writing protocols 9, 85; writing assignments 18, 60, 62, 67, 75–6, 85–6, 95–6, 99, 117–20, 124, 129–30, 134–6, 145–6; writing groups 66; writing samples 18, 138–45