What written knowledge does: three examples of scientific discourse

In this chapter, Bazerman reads three different articles from three different disciplines with a modification of Kinneavy's rhetorical triangle:

• the object under study, 
• the literature of the field, 
• the anticipated audience, and 
• the author’s own self.

Bazerman adds #2, the literature of the field, making it not a triangle, really. 

This four-part analysis is a modification of James Kinneavy’s communication triangle. He sees language (or text) mediating among an encoder (or writer), a decoder (or audience) and reality; I have added the fourth item of the literature.

#2 above, the literature of the field, also seems to correspond to Popper's 3rd world. 

Karl Popper in “Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject” in Objective Knowledge argues similarly that knowledge once created becomes largely autonomous, something separate from either reality or our subjective sense of it. Once created, knowledge can be treated as an object, upon which further intellectual operations may be made, much as a spider web once woven becomes an object in the world. In like manner, I consider the literature of the field as a fact in itself, a fact with which all new publications must contend, just as they must contend with the objects they presume to study. With respect to new publication the literature of the field has a status beyond simply the record of past subjective perception. The new publication, in criticizing, correcting, extending, and simply using the prior literature treats that literature as the “third world” Popper describes. 

He chooses the three texts strategically. "The origin of the papers in separate fields (molecular biology, sociology, and literary criticism) representing the three traditional divisions of the academy (sciences, social sciences"

In the beginning of the article, Bazerman talks about three different views of language, each of which contrasts with his own. 

• The first view is that reality is located outside of language (e.g., Bacon) 
• "Meaning is said to lie in these primary referents; once we grasp these referents, we can discard the clothing of public language that allows us to locate this pre- symbolic reality. From this perspective, the problem of language is only one of clarity and precision—to help us locate what we need and then to vanish"

• The second view is that reality is located inside of language (poststructuralism, new criticism, sophists, etc.).
• The third view is that reality is located with living language, i.e., speech (Plato) 
• "this argument considers written language an epiphenomenon, a pale reduc- tion of the living language of personal presence. Written texts appear contextless and socially meaningless in comparison with spoken lan- guage that arises out of the needs of a moment and has an observable effect on identifiable listeners. In the interactive dialogue of spoken con- versation, community and communication seem to be born"

The fourth way, Bazerman's way, is that language is a conversation? In any case, his way will show that the public moment (the third view) is constructed rather than pure. 

"In helping show the construction of the public moment, in- sights into private activities do not deconstruct, devaluate, or invalidate the public moment. They would only be disillusioning if we held naive illusions that texts were to appear spontaneously and pristinely, and then were immediately to transubstantiate, without being read, pon- dered, and acted on, into the pure world of truth. To recognize the rhe- torical character of visually transmitted symbolic activity is only to recognize that we live and use our texts in a human world." 

 

In this quote, you can see nascent activity theory coming through. Then again, B was already into Vygotsky at this point. 

These three arguments against granting substantial importance to written texts are illuminating rather than damning. They help reveal the dialectical interconnectedness of written language with the worlds around it and point to the danger of seeing the printed page as an iso- lated, internally whole phenomenon. Written language can decay faster than the page it is printed on, although a powerful text can outlast multi- ple editions, translations, and reconstructions. The force of written lan- guage only maintains to the degree that contextual factors are properly aligned and the text is able to capitalize on these factors. That is why writing is hard. When we write with any success, the success is likely to be weak and transient. Only the rare statement has long-lasting social force.3

The regularization of writing genres and situations within specific communities can increase the likelihood of successful, forceful commun- ication, as several of the case studies below will illustrate. If the com- munal wisdom of a discipline has stabilized the rhetorical situation, rhe- torical goals, and rhetorical solutions for accomplishing those goals in those situations, the individual writer and reader no longer need make so many fundamental choices and perform virtuosities of communica- tion. Writing up an experiment on visual perception may seem a more transparently easy activity to an experimental psychologist than fram- ing an argument in aesthetics to a philosopher, but that has more to do with the stabilization of the rhetorical world in one than the innate depth in the other.

Regularization. This squares with what B says earlier, how he wants to make it easier for us all to write. 

Bazerman doesn't say this, but it seems like there's a truth to each of the three criticism pointed to above. It's like they take a moment of the temporal process as the truth without seeing the temporal development as a whole as the real thing. For example, the literature of the field (see above) functions as a social fact (Fleck); it's outside of us and shapes what we say, even giving rise to the public moment's shape. There was even that moment in B; without using Instagram of course, he was saying that scientists construct experiments in light of how they will be written up--like taking a picture FOR Instagram rather than taking a picture only to have the picture end up on Instagram. In any case, it just seems like all three criticism are right in a sense, but of course we can't stay at multiplicity (Perry); they're all wrong insofar as the idea of writing as social action is the truth. Social action was probably the phrase I was looking for, but that idea underscores time and a recurrent temporality in a way that the other views don't. 

Found it. 

In communities organized around the production, reception, and use of texts, as in the cases examined here, much of the spoken interaction and even nonverbal behavior can be seen as in fact secondary to the written interaction. For example, chapters 3, 4, 7, and 9 suggest that emerging standards for the reporting of experiments create imperatives for experiments to be done in certain ways, so that an acceptable ac- count may be given of them in an article. Similarly, chapter 7 suggests that specific debates in the literature create the impetus for new experi- ments. It is not a great stretch of the imagination to see talk occurring over the laboratory bench and even over morning coffee as bound to- gether by the goal of producing written statements that would be found acceptable by the relevant audience (see, for example, Latour and Wool- gar 151-86). 

Conclusion. 

To recapitulate the major points of comparison among the three texts analvzed is to notice that the three statements of knowl- edge are three different things. In mediating 

• reality, 
• literature, 
• audi- ence, and 
• self, 

each text seems to be making a different kind of move in a different kind of game. All three texts appear to show interest in phe- nomena which form the topics for the essays (as well as provide the titles), But the phenomena are not equally fixed prior to the essays. 

• The substance DNA and the concept genetic carrier were well known (although not agreed to be synonymous) prior to Watson and Crick’s essay.
• TheWordsworth poem was also well known, but Hartman claims what was known should not count as true knowledge, which can only come in the subjective recreation of the poetic moment. 
• In the ambivalence essay Merton must first establish that the phenomenon exists and is consequential, 

World. Game. Move. 

This is making me think about how the rules I keep hearing about in the Practice Turn book, like the Bloor one I'm reading right now, might just be rhetoric. Like in Fahnestock & Secor, 

Ultimately all the topoi we have discussed reduce to one fundamental assumption behind critical inquiry: that literature is complex and that to understand it requires patient unraveling, translating, decoding, interpreting, and analyzing. Meaning is never obvious or simple for, if it were, the texts under scrutiny would not be literature and therefore would not Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor be worthy of unraveling, interpreting, decoding, etc. Obviously, here we stumble on an endless circularity in literary criticism, the characteristic which creates the complexity which justifies it. We are led to ask, “Do we have literary criticism because literature is complex, or is literature complex because we have literary criticism?” We cannot resolve this circularity; we can only point to its existence

For B, then, each of the different disciplines are different because they use writing to mediate different conceptions of the world; they world the world differently through language. What counts as knowledge or what knowledge is knowledge of is something different in each world.

But this isn't just about knowledge, it's about written knowledge and social action. "Writing is a social action; texts help organize social activities and social structure; and reading is a form of social participation; thus, saying something about writing is saying something about sociology"

Like Swales, then, Bazerman seems to be exploring the different disciplines to discover their different moves in order to be able to teach writing better. 

"The diversity of the knowledge-producing activity embodied in these three texts suggests how important the form of knowledge is. Getting the words right is more than a fine tuning of grace and clarity; it is defin- ing the entire enterprise. And getting the words right depends not just on an individual’s choice. The words are shaped by the discipline-in its communally developed linguistic resources and expectations; in its stylized identification and structuring of realities to be discussed; in its lit- erature; in its active procedures of reading, evaluating, and using texts; in its structured interactions between writer and reader. The words arise out of the activity, procedures, and relationships within the community. 16"

WAW. B just seems like a very WAW person, like he'd want to talk about language a lot, like he'd like to talk to students about what language is and how it works, before having them study different disciplines in order to change their minds. 

https://drconway.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/behind-the-wizards-curtain-using-rhetoric-to-understand-literary-and-cultural-studies-criticism/

• Kivinen, O., & Ristelä, P. (2003). From constructivism to a pragmatist conception of learning. Oxford Review of Education, 29(3), 363-375. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054980307442