Objective Epistemology
Proponents:
- Campbell, Blair, Whately, A.S. Hill, Barnett Wendell. John F. Genung (current-traditional)
- Robert Zoellner (behaviorist)
- Alfred Korzybski, S. I. Hayakawa (semanticist)
- "[T]he real is located in the material" (7).
- It can be accessed "through the inductive method - through collecting sense data and arriving at generalizations" (8).
- "Truth...exists prior to language" (8).
- The interlocutor is an observer.
- As a writer, the interlocutor’s job "is to record this reality exactly as it has been experienced so that it can be reproduced in the reader" (7).
- "The audience is likewise outside of the meaning-making act. It is also assumed to be as objective as the writer" (8).
- Language is "a sign system, a simple transcribing device for recording that which exists apart from the verbal" (7).
- current-traditionalist (dominant form)
- behaviorist (writer rewarded for appropriate behaviors (10))
- semanticist ("focused on the distortions that are introduced in communication through the misuse of language" (10))
- structuralist (focused on the structure of language (10))
- Focus on discourse that deals with the rational faculties: description, narration, exposition, and argument (8).
- Emphasis on "the patterns of arrangement and superficial correctness" (9).
- Invention "need not be taught since the business of the writer is to record careful observations" (9).
Subjective Epistemology
Proponents:
- Plato, Emerson, Freud, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, M. H. Abrams
- Truth is located "either within the individual or within a realm that is accessible only through the individual's internal apprehension, apart from the empirically verifiable sensory world" (11).
- Truth is "located in an unchanging realm of ideas" (12).
- Truth can be known, but not shared or communicated (12).
- Uses sense experience to understand the world
- Confirms the suggestions of the speaker or writer in and through individual experience (12).
- The function of language:
- Rhetoric is used "to correct error as one speaker engages in a dialogue with another, each sharing a dialectical interchange in which mistaken notions are exposed" (12).
- Metaphors can be used to give a limited sense of truth to the audience (12).
- "To provide an environment in which the individual can learn what cannot be taught...[which includes] provisions for encouraging the expression of private versions of experience couched in original metaphors" (13).
- Utilize journal keeping to encourage "the individual to record her observations of the world in her own unique way" (14).
- Utilize peer group editing. The peers "serve...as friendly critics, pointing out when the writer has been inauthentic,...trying in this way to lead the writer to authenticity in voice and visual" (14).
Transactional Epistemology
Proponents:
- Baldwin (classical)
- Janet Emig, Janice Lauer, Frank D'Angelo, Jermone Bruner, Jean Piaget (cognitive)
- Fred Newton Scott, Richard Ohmann, Ann Berthoff, Richard Yong, Alton Becker, Kenneth Pike (epistemic)
- Truth comes "out of the interaction of the elements of the rhetorical situation: an interaction of subject and object or of subject and audience or even of all the elements - subject, object, audience, and language - operating simultaneously" (15).
- Thereby, truth is open to debate.
- Classical: Truth is located between the interlocutor and audience (15)
- Cognitive: "[C]orrespondence between the structures of the mind and the structures of nature. The mind, furthermore, passes though a series of stages in achieving maturity" (16).
- Epistemic:Transaction among interlocutor, audience, material reality, and language" (16).
- All of these elements are "regarded as verbal constructs" (16)
- In the cognitive approach, the teacher is responsible for guiding students through the stages of maturity (16).
Other Important Points
Berlin claims that current-traditional rhetoric has remained dominant in classrooms because it has been used in contrast to the poetic. In order to elevate the poetic and regard it as an "art", rhetoric had to be called a "'mere' science" (29). This meant that objective epistemology (particularly, current-traditional rhetoric) remained because it was born out of the paradigm of scientific observations.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, there were three major approaches to teaching writing: (1) current-traditional ("designed to provide the new middle-class professionals with the tools to avoid embarrassing themselves in print" (35)); (2) liberal culture (which was "elitist and aristocratic, contending that the aims of writing instructions in the English department ought to be to encourage those few students who possess genius" (35)); and (3) transactional (which "emphasized writing as training for participation in the democratic process - a rhetoric of public discourse" (35)). As the transactional approach "saw reality as a social construction, a communal creation emerging from the dialectical interplay of individuals", it was "an early approximation of an epistemic position" (47).
"In 1948, however, George S. Wykoff...delivered a paper at the NCTE meeting on the importance of freshman composition to the college student. The discussion it generated was so long and intense that John Gerber of the University of Iowa proposed a spring meeting of a day or two to continue the talk about composition. The NCTE authorized the meeting for April 1 and 2, 1949, in Chicago, and five hundred people attended. Thus the Conference on College Composition and Communication as born - its name reflecting the interest of both teachers in composition programs and teachers in communications programs" (105).
"[F]or Elbow as for other expressionists, the personal is the political - the underlying assumption being the enabling individuals to arrive at self-understanding and self-expression will inevitably lead to a better social order" (155).
Other Key Words
- Rhetoric: "the production of spoken and written texts" (1)
- Poetic: "the interpretation of texts" (1)
- Ideology: "the pluralistic conceptions of social and political arrangements that are present in a society at any given time. These conceptions are based on discursive (verbal) and non-discursive (nonverbal) formations designating the shape of social and political structures, the nature and role of the individual within these structures, and the distribution of power in society" (4).
- Epistemology: "focus[es] on the rhetorical properties - as distinct from the economic, social, or political properties - of the systems considered (6)
- Expressionist rhetoric: a subset of subjective epistemology; an expressionist believes that all writing is art, emphasizes creativity in the classroom, focuses on individual transformation (as opposed to social change), and values process over product (74-5). Popular in the 1920s.
- Progressive education: "an extension of political progressivism, the optimistic faith in the possibility that all institutions could be reshaped to better serve society, making it healthier, more prosperous, and happier" (59). Applied findings of science to human behavior.
- Communications emphasis: "concern for integrating writing, speaking, reading, and listening" into the classroom, and "to do so with special attention to the individual differences and needs of students" (99).