gage epistemology

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TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF COMPOSITION

John T. Gage

A method is both a set of procedures and a set of assumptions. Mostof the interest in the method of teaching composition has been focussed onthe procedures, and my aim in this essay is to move this interest in the

direction of the assumptions on which those procedures are based. Inparticular, I think we have neglected the question of what epistemologicalassumptions govern our teaching methods, i.e., how such methods assumecertain kinds of relationship between what our students' writing says andby what means they claim to know i t If it is the case that some of ourmethods make assumptions about writing and ktlowledge that areinadequate, then it becomes particularly important that we attempt toadjust our teaching methods to assumptions about the nature of knowledgethat are more appropriate.

Noone denies a relationship between good writing and goodthinking, and we depend on this relationship, in part, to justify teachingwriting skills. More importantly, no theory of teaching writing claims toimprove writing skills while making thinking worse. t seems unthinkable.Yet, because it has become a commonplace that good thinking is anautomatic by-product of good writing, we have neglected to look at howsome of the means by which we teach composition reinforce andencourage habits of mind that are unhealthy.

When addressed directly, the heading under which thinking skillsare taught is invention. For those who are most literal about theapparent distinctions between invention, arrangement an,d style, thenewer term pre-writing has seemed more appropriate. In the textbooksand in defenses of pre-writing techniques, I find no awareness that in thetranslation of invention as used in classical rhetoric to pre-writing, asignificant concept of invention theory has vanished, the concept of

stasis. Classical invention, which dealt with ways of discovering and

testing available arguments, always began with the identification of astasis, or the precise question at issue o ~ which a writer and an audiencefound themselves in disagreement Before they come together, anaudience and a writer each know something already about matters thatinterest them mutually, and t is the difference e t ~ e e nwhat they know

JOURNAL OF ADVANCED COMPOSITION, VoL II, Nos. 1-2 (Double Issue), 1981.Copyright 1982 by the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.


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that motivates the need for communication in both directions andwhich therefore compels the act of writing itself. Thus, while classicalinvention systems aided the writer in finding means of bridging thisdifference, they were not designed to aid in discovering.something to say.The writer's topic and thesis were defined by the mutual presence of awriter and an audience in a rhetorical situation.

Present day invention and pre-writing techniques assume no suchsituation. In fact, both terms are used interchangeably to mean fmding atopic. Such techniques assume that students need to discover somethingto write about, which implies that they must feel motivated to write beforethey are motivated to say something, before the experience of a writingsituation which includes the need to say something. We send students insearch of something to intend, then, as i f intention itself were subject tofree choice. Students do not begin writing in order to fulfill an intention;rather, they are assumed to begin intentionless to search for something towant to say.

I take it that none of us has to learn how to fmd something to intend.When we have intentions, what we seem to mean is that they have us t sonly after we have them that we feel the need to be sure that we understandwhat they are, whether we wish to have them, and, on the basis of whatjustifies them, what we must do to see them through. t is by havingintentions, first, in other words, that we are even compelled to think aboutthem. Only in the knowledge that our intentions are our own, they they arejust, and they conflict somehow with other intentions, do we feel the needto begin to search for the means that will be necessary and sufficient tobring them to pass. When we teach our students to search for intentions-which seems to me not only unecessary but impossible we in factencourage them to sidestep the ethical and epistemological questions thatfollow from having real intentions, because what we have asked them tofind will be pseudo-intentions, invented to serve as means to some otherend, the end of completing a writing assignment. Such pseudo-intentions,invented for the classroom, cannot compel decis,ions about adequatemeans, except adequate means of fulfilling an assignment, be'cause theydo not emerge from the compulsion to write in the situation of conflict ofbelief, the situation acknowledged to come first in the classical idea ofstasis.

What I am describing here, of course, is the familiar idea ofrhetorical stance. What is not so familiar about this old problem is that


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because students are encouraged by our methods to write before they arecompelled to say something, the intentions that they choose will carry noobligation to be tested against the conflicting intentions of others, nor to belooked into for their rightness or justice. The methods of pre-writing,directed at one's subject but not at one's conflict with an audience,provide no means of conducting such an inquiry into the basis of one'sbelief, nor do they depend on any necessity to so inquire. nd the result ofnot asking such questions of belief is the implicit message that one idea isas good as another, provided that it is one's own.

This same implicit message is conveyed by some methods ofteaching the forms of writing as available stylistic or structural options.Such methods require students to demonstrate the ability to use forms ofsentences, or paragraphs or essays, which are defined as abstractparadigms, and seem to depend on the assumption that adequate choice ofsuch forms is determined by the mere knowledge of the availability ofthese options, rather than by the prior existence of some real intentionwhich brings with it the real need to write in one way and not another.

Of course, it can be objected that writing teachers do stress the needfor such a purpose in determining the choice of options, which must beknown in order to be used. Most, if not all, of these methods be in by'prescribing the necessity of purpose. To prescribe that students must havea purpose, however, is not adequate if the techniques encourage studentsto neglect it because they do not depend on it. The empty forms that weencourage students to exercise as options are taught as if competence werethe result of manipulating content to fit the form, and they reverse theform follows function ratio that proverbial wisdom tells us ought to

pertain.

Our problem seems to be whether knowing the forms is the same asknowing how to use them. Here I would appeal to a distinction made bysome philosophers. Gilbert Tyle, for instance, has distinguished two kindsof knowing: knowing that and knowing how 2 What is interesting in thephilosophical distinction is that it does not seem possible to get from one tothe other in any logical sense, that one cannot account for the ability ofanyone to know how to do a thing because that person knows the rules, nordoes knowing how constitute knowing the rules. Ryle's discussion of thedifference is particularly relevant to our problem, because he shows thatknowledge of what the options are cannot constitute knowledge of how toapply them in a given case. The paradigmatic cases are by nature too


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general to embody the exigencies of situations and it makes no logicalsense to say that before one can know how to apply a maxim one mustknow how to apply the maxims for applying maxims and so forth in aninfinite regress. What we do well Ryle concludes w do unaided bymaxims arid general rules though certainly we learn by doing a thing rightor wrong and then worrying about which is which. The philosopherMichael Polanyi in a similar discussion even concludes that the onlypeople to whom maxims are even comprehensible are those who alreadyknow how to do what they prescribe. 3 After doing a thing then one can

look into its success using paradigms and maxims as a guide but thisinquiry can only be carried out in the context of an intention that makes adifference. Noone can be taught how to do something according to thisline of reasoning who is not committed to the intention that is served bydoing it well.

In writing the sort of competence w desire is not the mere ability toexercise abstract paradigmatic patterns but the ability to adjust and finetune those means to fit particular situations which the forms themselves

are unable to predict. n the exercise of this ability form always comessecond. The problem for teachers is not however to factor the rules formaking this adjustment out of the composing process so that they can betaught prescriptively even though such factoring seems to be the goal ofmuch current research into the composing process. Rather I think theproblem is in part how to learn to live with the uncertainty that is inherentin that process so not to mislead either our students or ourselves about thenature of the skill we are teaching.

We mislead our students and ourselves when by our methods weimply that the difference between knowing how to write and not knowinghow to write is a matter of being in possession of some secret formula.Even if our students do become competent manipulators of a few selectedforms of discourse the price they pay is the misleading assumption that aformula can be counted on for the correct solution to any writing problem.Unfortunately this impression carries over into the intangible world ofthought. Our methods of teaching writing often encourage the equallymisleading assumption that the difference between being right or wrong

between knowing a thing and not knowing it is the possession of somesecret formula that constitutes an easy test of the truth.

Before I say how I think our methods do this let me say that any suchfaith in a formulaic and automatic means of measuring truth whether right


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right frame of heart, but he does put faith in what he calls the art ofdiscovering warrantable beliefs and improving those beliefs in shareddiscourse. 5 Rhetoric, then, becomes the ideal of mutual inquiry intosharable reasons, of measuring conclusions against the quality andadequacy of the reasons actually offered for them. 6 Instead ~ an art ofpersuasion in a manipulative sense, rhetoric becomes the model forexploring the possibility of assent in the symbolic exchange of what oneknows in the context of what others know. The contemporary conflictabout methods of teaching writing might be characterized along the lines

of the split which Booth says is contributing to the failure of our rhetoric.Booth himself includes many freshman English texts as contributors tothe contemporary dogma that the difference between good and badpersuasion will become simply a difference in skill, not knowledge orwisdom. Such texts assume, he says, that the goal of all thought andargument is to emulate the purity and objectivity and rigor of silence, inorder to protect oneself from the errors that passion and desire andmetaphor and authority and all those logical fallacies lead us into. 7

I resist an absolute categorization, but such methods as teach what Ihave called empty forms, whether as systems of invention or as paradigmsfor .arrangement, seem to promulgate just such a faith in a p r o r ~mechanistic means of solving problems of knowledge and persuasion. Idisagree that, by idealizing the form, we can discover the formula in whichthought is presumed to be at its objective best One of the most distressingof these schemas, from my point of view here, is what has been done withthe ideas of Kenneth Burke by composition teachers. They have lifted outof context, only sometimes apologetically, certain formulae for discoveringide's in writing which have nothing of that role in Burke's philosophy. twouldn't be so bad, except that Burke's is a philosophy which is meant tomake us wary of formulae. Burke shows how it is the nature oflanguage toplay out the conflicts produced by our inevitable ignorance about somethings, and he shows us, therefore, how it is possible to live with conflict andignorance. without resorting to what he calls the hysterical retreat intobelief'8 which he says is responsible for intolerance, hatred, propogandaand brutality. This vast, ethical philosophy about the powers and limits oflanguage, once transformed through the intervention of theorists of

composition, has been reduced for millions of students to a simpleprocedure for getting quick answers. The procedure implies, despite thecaveats of Burke an advocates that the pentad is an invention device, thatsure answers await those who but ask the correct, pre-defined questions.


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The mechanistic models of the form-givers have, of course, beenrejected by all those who advocate that writing can best be learned in theexercise of free expression and honest introspection: Such techniques,which range from not writing at all to keeping journals of private feelings,would correspond- in the distribution that I still resist even as I make t tothe irrationalist dogmas in Booth's assessment At least, such a characterization allows us to recognize that these free techniqqes support theassumption that knowledge s a private affair, sought by purging oneself ofotherness. At least they seem to privilege the essentially intuitive feelings

that resist communication ifthat process entails compromising the self withconvention. Either the objective or the subjective extreme encourages thesame anti-rhetorical view of knowledge: that it s independent of agreement,either because it exists as a result of he application of some rule outside theself or because it exists as the result of escaping rules which frustrate thetrue expression of the self. The subjective/objective distinction itself, likethe fact/value split of which Booth speaks, is one of the dogmaticassumptions that reduces rhetoric and writing to an act of declaration,setting rhetoric and writing apart from the intention of engaging a real

audience in the process of mutual inquiry into conflicting ideas.

A more adequate theory of knowledge for the teaching of writingwould seem to require acknowledging the rhetorical nature of he self as it ismade in an exchange with and being dependent on other selves. t alsorequires a willingness to live with the problematical nature of the intersubjective 9 relationship between language and knowledge, rather than toattempt to overcome this nature by reducing writing to a skill of filling in

empty forms or to a knack of equally purposeless self expression. t wouldrequire acknowledging both the source and test of knowledge in others, andreplace persuasion narrowly defined with cooperation. t would seek toengage students in a process in which they have to confront what they knowwith what others know, to take the reasons of others seriously, to carewhether they say what they have to say well and to look for grounds forassent in a situation of disagreement And the theory of knowledge wouldseek to develop a means of allowing the form of writing to be generatedorganically-as Plato has it n the Phaedrus out of the sense of what

needs to be said in the contest of this dialectical exchange.

I should say that this s not an impossible task, and in defense of ourprofession, that there are some methods in our teaching strategies whichattempt to achieve this aim. I have left myself little room in this negative


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harangue to advocate anything or to give a fair account of these methods. Iwill do no more than suggest, therefore, that from the philosophical defenseof rhetoric as a means of knowing, certain practices recommend themselves.I am reluctant to say that there is any single practice that is most consistentwith what I have described as a more adequate epistemology. For onething, any such procedure can be reduced to the sort of easy formula whichI have said leads to unhealthy assumptions. In fact, the principles whichAristotle developed from what appears to be a dialectical perspective werereduced in just this fashion quite early in the rhetorical tradition, so we

have the heritage of empty forms from much of the rhetorical tradition tocontend with as part of our problem. Not surprisingly, however, suchpractices as I would advocate depend heavily on the classical tradition, forit is the neglect of such concepts as dialectic and stasis which I see ascontributing to the inadequacy of contemporary methods. lO

To this short list I would add the concept of the enthymeme, whichmight be restored to its role of centrality in the teaching of rhetoric and bythat means encourage us to view knowledge as discovered and tested in the

mutually respected reasons of others. The practice of enthymemicinvention is getting more attention recently,11 but, rather than end thistheoretical essay with a sudden departure into the practical, I will only sayhow this way of approaching writing is based on different assumptionsfrom those which I have accused of nadequacy. Most invention techniquesare accompanied by the advice that students should know their audience;yet, because such techniques are designed to get students to look into thenature of their subject, they do not depend for their success on this advicebeing carried out The enthymeme, however, when applied to invention, is

necessarily dialectical and can only be discovered and written in themental presence of an audience, because it is the audience which ismutually engaged in the defmition of the question at issue which theenthymeme addresses. The audience is mutually engaged in the definitionof the shared assumption which allows the logic of the enthymeme tofunction. Thus I engage students in finding the enthymemes whichgenerate the logic of what they have written (and that will always be there,whether their writing is expository or narrative or what have you). Iinvolve them by ask ing how much the truth of what they have said depends

on the possibility of their knowing what others might say about the samequestion and what their own reasons are. They can discover, by thismeans, that what they would like to think is only as good as what othersthink about it in response. Beyond this, then, I would have students be ableto use enthymemes as a way of thinking out the exigencies of a piece of


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writing,beforehand, not to be able to assert what they wish were true in theabsence of conflict, but to discover what can be made the basis ofagreement, in the context of known reasons to disagree. Although in onesense, then, the enthymeme must be formulaic to have this function, yetthere are no secret rules or pure forms which will guarantee when t willfind its audience, how it must be put together or where it will all lead Allthese things depend entirely on the nature of the audience and on thestudents reasons for writing to reach the audience. In fact, the effort tocompose structural emthymemes conveys the implicit message-to use

my earlier phrase-that conviction is no easy matter and that it involvesrisk and responsibility of confronting others ideas with respect in themutual search for assent. So, at the same time, the enthymeme is notreducible to a systematic procedure, which may have been one ofAristotle s reasons for viewing it as a metonymy for the whole rhetoricalenterprise.

The use of the enthymeme is only one way in which we can approachteaching writing that does not distort the rhetorical nature of knowledge

and discourse, as I think some of our other methods do. I mention t only tosuggest that such methods are impossible. Employing them in the writmgclassroom is not a matter of finding the perfect technique, as I have tried toindicate, but a matter of simply acknowledging that no such technique islikely to emerge for the teaching of the essentially intractable skill of goodwriting. Perhaps, in the mad rush of our profession to produce thetechnique which will guarantee this skill, we have neglected sometimes toask ourselves why we think it is such an important skill to acquire. Do wewant to produce writers whose skill is an uncritical source of power over

others? Or do we want to produce writers whose experience with both thepowers and limits of language help them achieve a critical, inquiringstance towards the powerful persuasions of others? It s a loaded question,I realize. It was loaded when Plato asked it

University of OregonEugene, Oregon


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NOT S

ISee, e.g. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetorical Stance, Now Don t Try to Reasonwith Me: Essays and Ironies for a Credulous Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1970),25-34, and A.M. Tibbetts, Rhetorical Stance Revisited, Composition and itsTeaching: Articlesfrom College Composition and Communication During the Editorshipof Edward P J Corbett, ed. Richard C. Gebhardt (Ohio Council of Teachers of EnglishLanguage Arts, 1979), 67-71.

2Gilbert Tyle, The Concept o f ind (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1949),esp. pp. 27-35.

3Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 31.

4For a discussion of how Booth's, and others', inquiries into rhetoric suggest aphilosophy of good reasons, see Walter R Fisher, Towards a Logic of Good Reasons,

The Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 (December, 1978), pp. 376-84.

SWayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric o f Assent, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. xiii.

6Some thing similar is argued by Booth in The Uncritical American: or, Nobody'sfrom Missouri Anymore, Now Don t Try to Reason with Me, esp. p. 65.

7Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric o f Assent, pp. 87, 88.

8Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (2nd ed., Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1957), p. 106. See also, pp. 104, 105, 112, and 113.

9See , e.g. Barry Brumett, Some Implications o 'Process' or'Intersubjectivity':Postmodem Rhetoric, Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976), 21-51.

lOFor a treatment of the epistemological themes in classical rhetoric which isdifferent from my own, yet leads to similar conclusions about contemporary methods, seeC.H. Knoblauch, Modem Composition Theory and the Rhetorical Tradition, FreshmanEnglish News 9 (Fall, 1980),3-17.

II E.g. by Lawrence D. Green, Enthymemic Invention and Structural Prediction,College English 41 (February, 1980),623-35. Green's study enlarges on the use of theenthymeme in William J. Brandt, et aI The Crqft of Writing (Prentice Hall, 1969).

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