Today’s Plan:
- Miller
- Herrick (nope)
- What is Rhetoric? (nope)
- Homework
Miller
My initial questions:
- What is positivism? Why is it a problem for technical writing? What does Miller identify as the most problematic dimension of a non-rhetorical approach to scientific communication?
- Miller identifies 4 problems for technical writing pedagogy that stem from the positivist tradition. How do we avoid them?
- How does Miller–writing in 1979–describe the epistemology that is replacing positivism?
- What does it mean to teach technical writing from a communalist perspective? Why might some students reject a communalist approach to teaching writing?
Cole wrote:
Positivism, in the realm of scientific and technical writing, is the fundamental viewpoint that language and rhetoric should be treated as nothing more than unfortunate vehicles to be used for the transportation of scientific facts and concepts. It is the belief that in a perfect world overly-emotional words would give way to clear, untainted figures and facts to express science. One of the larger issues with this argument is that it is based wholly on the supposition that scientific facts are immutable artifacts of reality rather than human constructions created in the effort to understand reality. One of the key issues with this ideology in the realm of technical writing is that it causes the aim of all writing pertaining to science to be the creation of a scientific report, rather than the communication of knowledge between humans. This unemotional, calculating approach is especially harmful when applied to the social and emotional creatures that humans are as it creates a belief structure that says that creatures who do not understand or share presented ‘facts’ have failed or are inherently wrong.
Grace wrote:
In “A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing,” by Carolyn Miller she argues that viewing technical writing through the lens of positivism allows this idea that ideas and emotions lay completely separate. The presentation of fact and human emotion remain unrelated. You write with a goal in mind and you write nothing else. Within the English language lies tools for the written to persuade the reader in the way they want, creating an issue for technical writing as it is supposed to be scientific (thus lack of room to interpret)
To clarify: Miller sees positivism as a problem because it attempts to eliminate emotion from discourse.
This captures my own emphasis on the importance of rhetoric in a democracy, the practice and communication of science is dependent on persuasive writing. People aren’t machines. They aren’t Vulcans. We can–like Plato–condemn people for their lack of pure rationality and wish for an intellectually oligarchy in which the inferior know their place and listen to their superiors. Or we can–and I think this is the better option–recognize that communicating information requires we do so in a way that is engaging and persuasive. That leaves open the possibility of response and debate (rather than closing such things off via a tone of imperative authority).
Understanding the difference between logical, “philosophical,” positivism and affective, “rhetorical,” social construction requires we pay more attention to the nature of subjectivity. Shaelyn offered the following reflection:
If you didn’t know already, I’m not a STEM student. So the math and science classes I had to take growing up and even now at UNC were difficult for me because I always tried to create something out of it that wasn’t “part of the study” or not “part of the facts”. I hated having to write Lab write-ups cause they seemed to want you to just give the strict facts and what you saw from them factually, while also insisting that would take fifteen pages. Even sometimes with historical research papers, I would want to talk about what that research and that person’s life or the experiences affected the world or myself, but I always felt like I wasn’t being smart enough or that I was making it too personal, that these assignments needed to be factual. And in class its odd because in a lot of my humanities classes I can’t tell if there’s more than one right answer. Maybe it’s because thirteen years of public schooling conditioned me to think this way, but whenever I have different ideas or visions about the topic (things like authorial intent) being discussed, I always get so afraid of what the professor will say, if they’ll think I’m wrong or stupid, because I wasn’t thinking about the thing in a logical way, even if they respond positively to my ideas. It’s like the professor will say “there’s no wrong answers” but when you answer something with something different then they’re thinking, for a split second you can see the judgement on their face, it’s not intentional most likely, but like since public school made me think there was only ever one right answer, maybe I was waiting for that look.
My response: Cicero once said that the greatest impediment to those who want to learn is those who want to teach.
Many contemporary administrators and “curriculum designers” fail to understand that “teaching,” in the sense they think it, is impossible. What is their sense? That teaching is akin to programming–taking information block A and uploading it to student B. If student B fails to reproduce this information, then their must be something wrong with the student. Remember Miller’s characterization of how positivism treats misunderstanding: “After all, if we do not see the self-evident, there must be something very wrong with us” (p. 613).
Those of us who study teaching (called pedagogy, how to teach), know this is absolute bullshit. No one can be taught anything. You can, of course, learn things. But “learning” is not a seemless upload of information, it is a process–sometimes traumatic–of transformation. It comes from failure, frustration, and pain. It is an internalization, a changing.
One does not learn to write, one becomes a writer. That is–an individual is not an eternal, stable subject onto which we “add” things (the ability to write, a sexuality, a politics, etc). You are what you eat, so to speak.
Above, in my opening to Shaelyn’s comment, I made a distinction between philosophy and rhetoric–but I scare-quoted “philosophy.” Austin’s comment helps me explain those scare-quotes (which announce my hesitation). Austin writes:
Last semester, I took a philosophy course with Dr. John Ramsey, where we spent weeks reading articles by a particular philosopher named Averroes, in which he determines that all sense data is unjustifiable. This is because we can consistently doubt our senses; after all, it’s possible that we’re all living within a dream. He then makes the claim that the only way to justify any findings is through a consensus of other thinkers working on the same topic. It’s wonderful to see how even after six hundred years, the same ideas can be brought up in the same ways.
Not all philosophy is positivist. Most 20th century philosophy, beginning with phenomenologists like Heidegger, begin to ask the same kind of questions that Averroes is exploring here: to what I extent can I trust my senses? To what extent can I trust language?
These questions regarding language are pressed furthest by philosopher Jacques Derrida (he picks these questions up from others like Wittgenstein). Let’s try a little game.
That game intends to show you why we need writers who recognize the myriad possibilities of interpretation–who are always attuned to how others might (mis)interpret. The goal isn’t to produce absolutely clear language–that is impossible. The goal is to realize there is no spoon.
Mary writes: “most texts I have encountered have multiple meanings. The occasional text will be very straight-forward, but most cause debates on the text’s true meaning.” Even if we agree what the text “means,” we might disagree on our experience of the text/event. Phenomenology challenged positivism by emphasizing how much our “mood,” our emotional-affective state, impacts/shapes/directs our reception, understanding, navigating, experience of the world (to what degree we are in control of our actions remains a question).
Someone was brave enough to try and explicate the term “epistemology.” They were a bit off. Here’s my explication of the term:
So, epistemology is a word we use for “conception/study of knowledge”–what is knowledge? how do we know something? Miller is tracing out two different epistemologies–positivism and a “new” emerging epistemology that she calls “communalist” and that will eventually be called social construction. There’s two key paragraphs from Miller that deserve close reading. First:
This new epistemology makes human knowledge thoroughly relative and science fundamentally rhetorical. […] Briefly summarized, it holds that whatever we know of reality is created by individual action and [emphasis added] by communal assent. Reality cannot be separated from our knowledge of it; knowledge cannot be separated from the knower; the knower cannot be separated from a community [the naming of a thing]. Facts do not exist independently, waiting to be found and collected and systematized; facts are human constructions which presuppose theories. We bring to the world a set of innate and learned concepts [ideology] which help us select, organize, and understand what we encounter. (p. 615)
This is an amazing passage! Why do I emphasize the and? What do I mean by ideology?
A glimpse into why contemporary America is in such a dangerous place:
Truth, or the knowledge for which science seeks, is thus the correspondence of ideas, not to the material world, but to other people’s ideas. Certainty is found not in isolated observation of nature or in logical procedure but in the widest agreement with other people. Science is, through and through, a rhetorical endeavor. […] Science understood as argument asks for assent, for an act of will on the part of the audience. Good technical writing becomes, rather than the revelation of absolute reality, a persuasive vision of experience. (p, 616)
And finally:
Under this communalist perspective, the teaching of technical or scientific writing becomes more than the inculcation of a set of skills; it becomes a kind of enculturation. We can teach a teach technical or scientific writing […] as an understanding of how to belong to a community. To write, to engage in any communication, is to participate in a community; to write well is to understand the condition’s of one’s own participation–the concepts, values, traditions, and style which permit identification with that community and determine the success or failure of communication. (p. 617)
If we have 10 minutes left, I have a video I want to watch.
Homework
Keep coding jobs! By Monday, I will ask that you have 12 total coded jobs.