Under construction
(Burke 1945: 192) 'The great departures in human thought can be eventually reduced to a moment where the thinker treats as o pposite, key terms formerly considered a pposite, or v.v. So we are admonished to be on the look-out for those moments when strategic synonymizings or desynonymizings occur. And, in accordance with the logic of our ratios, when they do occur, we are further admonished to be on the look-out for a shift in the source of derivation, as terms formally derived from different sources are now derived from a common source, or v.v.' .
(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .
(Ordonez 1991: 103) 'The work of Annis Pratt emerges as a useful key to the perception and assessment of myth and archetype in narrative by women' .
(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .
(Ulmer 1994: 48) 'Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 214-5)
'All told, throughout these pages we have been considering five major
aspects of science:
'(1) high development of technological
specialization
'(2) involvement with rationale of money
(accountancy)
'(3) progressive departure from natural conditions,
usually saluted in the name of "naturalism"
'(4) reduction of scenic
circumference to empirical limits (the reason why the technological powers
that take us farthest from natural conditions have been called "naturalistic")
'(5) stress upon the "problem of knowledge" as the point of
departure for philosophic speculation'
.
(Burke 1945: 189) 'If then, you would talk profoundly and intelligently about the conditions of the possibility of the knowledge of nothing, what do you have that you can talk about? You have the knower . You can say, for instance, "Whatever an object in general may or may not look like, you can be sure that when you do come across one you are going to have to encounter it in terms of space and/or time". And since you can't here be talking about an object (if you are, what is it?) what you must be talking about is the nature of your own mind' .
(Burke 1945: 38) 'Stated broadly the dialectical (agonistic) approach to knowledge is through the act of assertion, whereby one "suffers" the kind of knowledge that is the reciprocal of his act' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'Since we began our enterprise with all respect for the requirements of empirical science, we have defined knowledge by empirical tests. Knowledge by definition, then, is the knowledge of conditions and relations. It is the knowledge of appearances , the knowledge of objects as they necessarily appear when seen in terms of our human categories (the categories of the mind in general). So, by definition, the transcendent realm of the unconditioned things-in-themselves (the scene that contains the possibilities of freedom) cannot be known . Hence, we must restrict the claims we can make about it. But whereas it can't be known , it can be thought about , for we are now thinking about it' .
(Burke 1945: 123) 'In strict logic, perhaps, the "love" and "knowledge" are simply in different planes, rather than being in opposition to each other. But as regards matters of Symbolic, since words have also incantatory effects, inviting men to make themselves over in the image of their imagery, the purely logical implications of reductionist terminologies take on new attributes, when translated into their equivalents in the realm of the imagination' .
(Burke 1945: 195) 'If this realm of the things-in-themselves can be thought though not known , this limitation upon our claims to knowledge about them applies in reverse to science. Science compels us to admit that things-in-themselves can't be known; but in putting them outside the area of scientific knowledge , by the same token we put them outside the area of scientific refutation or denial . The sources of morality thus lie beyond the reach of the terms proper to the physical sciences (which is but another way of saying that, in this terminology, action cannot be reduced to motion)' .
(Gibbs 1987: 569) 'My main contention, then, is that Sperber and Wilson are "sneaking" mutual knowledge in the backdoor of their theory of conversational inference by appealing to the idea of mutual cognitive environments which can be manifest but not known. At a psychological level, it appears that Sperber and Wilson have adopted a framework for describing verbal communication which crucially depends on the very concept that they wish to abandon' .
(Gibbs 1987: 565) 'This original definition of mutual knowledge raises a serious paradox. The infinite series of beliefs statements is seen as necessary, although it is highly unlikely that listeners can compute an infinite series of these propositions in a finite period of time' .
(Gibbs 1987: 575) 'Clark and Marshall (1981)... have attempted to show that mutual knowledge can be established in practice by arguing that the apparent paradox of mutual knowledge is base on two incorrect assumptions. The first is the assumption that mutual beliefs must be represented in a mental model as an infinite series of belief statements'. What they propose is that 'if A and B make certain assumptions about each other's rationality, they can use certain states of affairs as a basis for inferring the infinity of conditions all at once' .
(Gibbs 1987: 562) 'My purpose in this article is to assess the role of mutual knowledge and beliefs in a psychological theory of conversation inference. I will attempt to support what I call the mutual knowledge hypothesis, which assumes that listeners use the knowledge and beliefs they share with speakers in the process of interpreting utterances in conversation' .
(Gibbs 1987: 574-5) 'Even if one assumes that mutual knowledge is not necessary for comprehension, there is much psychological evidence which is not in accord with many of the basic assumptions underlying the relevance hypothesis. The weight of this evidence suggests that it may be premature to accept the relevance hypothesis as a reasonable model of the psychological processes used in working out conversational inferences' .
(Gibbs 1987: 584) 'People will design their questions in light of the mutual knowledge which exists between themselves and their listeners' .
(Gibbs 1987: 585) 'My arguments is favor of the mutual knowledge hypothesis and against the relevance hypothesis are grounded in five interrelated observations. First, I have suggested the Sperber and Wilson's proposal that mutual cognitive environments constitute the true context for comprehension is not sufficiently clear and distinguishable from the concept of mutual knowledge. As such, the relevance hypothesis seems to make use of the very idea that it attempts to replace. Second, mutual knowledge is possible to determine in a finite period of time via Clark and Marshall's (1981) mutual knowledge induction scheme without resorting to an infinite set of beliefs statements usually viewed as a consequence of establishing mutual knowledge. Third, it appears that mutual knowledge is indeed a necessary prerequisite for the comprehension of many kinds of utterances in conversation. This is particularly true if listeners are to distinguish between inferences that are ostensively intended or "authorized" by speakers from inferences that are "unauthorized". Conversations are only cooperative to the extent to which speakers specifically intend and listeners specifically recognize "m-intended" messages. Part of my thesis here is that how listeners are able to distinguish "authorized" versus "unauthorized" inferences must be part of a cognitive theory of conversational inferences. Fourth, parts of the processing model underlying the relevance hypothesis are not supported by contemporary psycholinguistic research. Specifically, there is little empirical evidence in favor of the idea that listeners must first decode an utterance into some propositional representation before choosing a context in which that proposition is viewed as most relevant. Finally, there is some recent psycholinguistic evidence demonstrating that speakers formulate their utterances precisely to satisfy the amount of knowledge they share with their listeners. This shared knowledge is also directly utilized by listeners when interpreting utterances in everyday discourse. These findings appear most congruent with the predictions of the mutual knowledge hypothesis' .
(Gibbs 1987: 579)
'Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the mutual knowledge
hypothesis and the relevance hypothesis concerns the constraints each
places on the kinds of inference generated during utterance interpretation.
Consider the following exchange:
'He: Are you going to the party
tonight?
'She: I hear Jack's coming.'
.
(Gibbs 1987: 581) 'Although Sperber and Wilson (1986) comment that it is easy enough to modify [their] definition [of communication] ... and make intentionality a defining feature of communication, it is not at all clear how this modification can be made without acknowledging the specific role mutual knowledge has on the determination of ... inferences' .
(Fish 1982: 342-3) 'While there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of agreement ... concerning the ways of producing the text. Nowhere is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone's knowledge of what it means to be operating within the literary institution as it is now constituted.... This does not mean that these rules and the practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable' .
(Fish 1982: 528) No one ' is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word because it implies a two stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning' .
(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .
(Booth 1974: 21) 'If one recognizes, as we all must, that in the social sciences and humanities values are implicatied at every point, even in the assertion of the simplest fact, then of course we are in trouble, because by definition we are caught in whirlpools of Mere Assertion, knowledge being by definition unobtainable about values' .
(Booth 1974: 13) 'What is most interesting here is the automatic reliance on the distinction between facts and values, and the quality of the reply one often receives if he questions that distinction. If the word dogma is applicable to any general notion that cannot, for the believer, be brought into question, the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allow your values to intrude upon your cognitive life- that thought and knowledge and fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other- has been until recently a dogma for all right-thinking moderns' .
(Foucault 1986b: 156) 'Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) '"Communication" cannot be assumed to be constant across cultures. Cultural conceptions of communication are deeply intertwined with conceptions of person, cultural values, and world knowledge -- such that instances of communication behavior are never free of the cultural belief and action systems in which they occur' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 8) In the ethnography of communication approach, Dell Hymes proposed 'that scholarship focus on communicative competence: the tacit social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic knowledge governing appropriate use of language (including, but not limited to, grammar). Communicative competence includes knowledge of how to engage in everyday conversation as well as other culturally constructed speech events' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 19) 'As I will make clear in chapter 12, the order of chapters, and thus the type of inquiry for each area of empirical focus, is not random: they reflect a transition ... from a focus upon the individual (whether the actions, knowledge, or intentions of a self) to a focus upon interaction (how self and other together construct what is said, meant, and done) to a focus upon the semiotic systems shared and used by self and other during their interaction (language, society, and culture). An ability to build such transitions ... into one's theory, and to allow and account for them in one's practice, is a crucial part of a discourse analysis that seeks to integrate what speech act theory, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, pragmatics, conversation analysis, and variation analysis can offer, both individually and together, to the analysis of utterances' .
(Schiffrin 1994: 7) 'Some interactional approaches ... focus on how people from different cultures may share grammatical knowledge of a language, but differently contextualize what is said such that very different messages are produces. Other interactional approaches ... focus on how language is situated in particular circumstances of social life, and on how it adds (or reflects) different types of meaning ... and structure ... to those circumstances' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 41) 'Because "manifest" is weaker than "known" or "assumed", a notion of mutual manifestness can be developed which does not suffer from the same psychological implausibility as "mutual knowledge" or mutual assumptions"' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 28) To survey every language as we need to now, from the broader, hermeneutic perspective, is not to emulate the "social sciences" of a generation past, when the stress fell on the second term, still less would our practice take its cue from somewhat harder versions of research, such as linguistics or psychology. Composition on the terms I have argued for here would more closely resemble what Turner calls processual anthropology. As a form of engaged, politicized inquiry into speech and writing, a processual composition would continually struggle to recall the larger, always changing dimension of public life. 'Through this struggle of recollection, our field might discharge its institutional task -- teaching students how to write -- while at the same time affirming the possibility of a knowledge without domination and a commonality without coercion' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 23) However, Spellmeyer posits: 'Were it not for differences between individuals, and for miscarriages in practical application, knowledge might indeed be communal and self-referential just as the constructionists believe. But regardless of how carefully we draw the boundaries of a community, regardless of how like-minded its members may seem, these members will sometimes find themselves at odds over fundamental issues.... The history of any discipline is a history of just such discordant moments because knowledge can never entirely escape its historical and institutional blindnesses, and our own everyday practice takes those blindnesses into account' .
(Minsky 1980: 18) 'It should be emphasized again that we must not expect magic. For difficult, novel problems a new representation structure will have to be constructed, and this will require application of both general and special knowledge' .
(Booth 1979: 108) 'But we must not be un-Burkean in what we mean by a phrase like "really mean". We are not -- it should be clear by now -- in pursuit of a meaning that is knowledge in a scientific sense of fixed concepts proved by tests of certainty or levels of probability. We are pursuing a truth-of-action, a meaning that is more probed than proved -- a way of knowing, a knowing that is itself a kind of action' .
(Lanham 1976: 60) 'It was not that Ovid was a bad plotter. The rhetorical view denies that plot is possible. It was not that Ovid "had no taste for heroes and certainly, no capacity for creating them", as Brooks Otis charges. He did not believe in heroes, or the self they were based on. He was not bad at transitions; he wanted to lose the reader. He was not incapable of tracing a coherent genealogy for Rome; he did not believe in the Virgilian conception of history upon which such descent was based. He was not too dense to master a suitable repertoire of Augustan philosophical clichÈs; he denied the theory of knowledge from which they grew. Too skeptical to think the whole truth contained in a single myth, he thought the epic genre a fraud, an obvious pretense that the world makes more sense than it does' .
(Lanham 1976: 34-5) 'The task of the critic, as of the cultural or literary historian, is not to choose sides and then ignore the other half. Nor is it to try, however tempted, to adjudicate the dispute, decide who is right and then simplify....We must ... rehearse again the quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric. And this time around, we must do more than use philosophy to debunk rhetoric, as the scientific world view has done.... Seeing Western literature correctly depends on controlling these two contradictory theories of knowledge, of self, of style.... Upon seeing Western literature aright depends our ability to hold together the two different ways of knowing which together make us human' .
(Lanham 1976: 45-6) 'Socrates never looks beyond his own coordinates. He can speak only one language. Every humanist from Plato's day to our own has praised Socrates for trying to know himself. It is legitimate to ask whether his self was especially worth knowing. Isn't it really the testy, impatient, intolerant self of the religious zealot? It is not charity to the historical Socrates to accept Plato's allegorical portrait of him as ... Serious Man.... Socrates would have recognized, had he truly known himself, the rhetorical ingredient in all human behavior, would have seen his truth as only half the human truth, half the human self, but only half of it. As it is he did not found humanism, a knowledge of the self, but only half of it' .
(Bove 1990: 53) 'We can no longer easily ask such questions as, What is discourse" or, What does discourse mean? ... But why not? Because to ask them and to force an answer would be, in advance, hopelessly to prejudice the case against understanding the function of "discourse" either in its poststructuralist context or in its existence as an institutionalized system for the production of knowledge in regulated language' .
(Bove 1990: 61) 'Foucault grew increasingly interested in what the rise of the modern disciplines had to do with modern state power-- with what he called "governability"-- and how it displaced sovereignty as the hegemonic figure of power and authority.... In disciplinary societies, self-determination is nearly impossible, and political opposition must take the form of resistance to the systems of knowledge and their institutions that regulate the population into "individualities" ... In this understanding of governability, truth produced by these knowledge systems blocks the possibility of sapping power; it speaks for-- or... "represents"-- others' .
(Bove 1990: 62) 'The contemporary use of "discourse" turns literary critics away from questions of meaning; it also turns us from questions of "method" to the description of function. It suggests that a new set of questions should replace the interpretive ones that have come to constitute criticism and the normal practice of teachers and scholars. We might ask such things as, How does language work to produce knowledge? How is language organized in disciplines? Which institutions perform and which regulative principles direct this organization?' .
(Bove 1990: 55) Canguilhem's 'work showed that the history of systems of thought, of disciplines, and of sciences was not merely the chronology of concepts, ideas, and individual discoveries.... He outlined the history of science as the workings of a number of material practices that make up a society. He traced how some of these practices and sciences extended-- like "vectors", as it were-- throughout a culture, and he showed how they opened new species for new forms of knowledge production' .
(Bove 1990: 63) 'When viewed as an element in a historical system of institutionalized discourse, the traditional idea of the "author," and the privileged value accorded to it in literary scholarship and criticism, is one of the two or three key concepts by means of which the critical disciplines organize their knowledge around questions of subjectivity and discipline both their practitioners and those they "teach"' .
(Culler 1992: 213) Responding to Knapp and Michaels, who maintain that 'Beliefs cannot be grounded in some deeper condition of knowledge' (1982.Against theory. Critical inquiry 8: 738), Culler posits, 'this might be true for such things as religious beliefs, but the various beliefs that function as principles, criteria, and premises in people's work on literature most probably belong to a structure of knowledge and argumentation' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 33-4) 'Scripts ... are viewed as structurally similar to other knowledge structures in terms of their hierarchical organization and linear ordering' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 30) 'Comprehension is a joint function of textual aspects and of the reader's knowledge where both textual features and reader knowledge exist at various levels of abstractness....In the present paper we examine "scriptal" relatedness, which is one of the many intersentence relationships described by linguists. The paper consists of three parts. The first part discusses the script construct in the context of other constructs and illustrates how scripts provide connectivity between sentences. The second treats the role of scripts in the retention of texts, and the third addresses the role of scripts in reading comprehension' .
(Haberlandt and Bingham 1982: 44) 'We think that the critical contribution of script theory was to focus attention of the role of events and on reader knowledge of events in reading comprehension. The script concept will probably change as a result of future research, but the underlying theme of reader knowledge of events will remain an important part of theories of text comprehension' .
(van Dijk 1977: 27-30) 'We will briefly state a number of hypotheses regarding ... processing implications....It will be assumed that in discourse comprehension fragments of the morpho-phonological and syntactic surface structure of the sentence sequence are stored only in short-term memory to construct a proposition sequence.... It is assumed that beyond a limited number of propositions, the proposition sequence of the text base is not fully accessible for recall.... Given a sequence of assigned propositions, the reader will make hypotheses about the relevant macro-structure proposition covering the sequence by applying the macro-rules to the sequence.... Macro-structure formation takes place in the course of reading the text, not a posteriori. The same holds true for the assignment of conventional categories to the macro-propositions. Both the assignment of macro-structures and of conventional super-structures is recursive. As soon as a first level becomes too complex. a second level is formed, and so forth. The macro-structure is available when it is necessary to explicitly summarize a text.... The macro-structure is also the basis for recall of the discourse immediately after presentation. The macro-structure is directly available in episodic memory. It then yields, by inverse macro-rule application and recognition, access to lower-level macro-structures and possibly to some text base propositions if the discourse was not too long.... Macro-structures may also constitute "plans for speaking".... Macro-structure formation is a highly complex process, so it can hardly be expected that effective comprehension exactly follows the rules formulated above: expedient strategies are used in the global interpretation of discourse.... Finally, there are strategies based on contextual cues and knowledge of the general communication situation. We may know the speaker so well that we may easily predict the main themes of his discourse, even with very scanty information.... Familiarity with the relevant macro-structures will certainly facilitate the task of global comprehension' .
(Winograd 1977: 72) 'A schema is a description of a complex object, situation, process, or structure. It is a collection of knowledge related to the concept, not a definition in the formal sense' .
(Bathrick 1992: 335) 'The challenge of cultural studies to traditional organizations of knowledge within existing university structures represents more than just the addition of yet another innovative critical strategy for humanistic study. The questions raised touch on fundamental issues concerning how we perceive our educational mission, what we consider worthy of study and debate, who we are as cultural and social human beings' .
(Bathrick 1992: 321) 'Central to cultural studies from the outset has been a debate about the organization of knowledge and the role of the intellectual in the process of cultural change. This essay focuses on this latter meaning of the term cultural studies' .
(Bathrick 1992: 320) 'The designation cultural studies has tended to stake out an area of conflict concerning the very meaning and relation of text and context, representation and the represented, cultural production and the world in which such production takes place....Cultural studies has sought to problematize the borders of textuality itself and, in so doing, to interrogate the ways in which fields of knowledge are constituted and organized' .
(Enkvist 1981: 104) 'If we wish to relate instances of experiential iconicism in text generation or in text interpretation and comprehension to our general knowledge of the world (as we must), a cognitive model becomes necessary. And we must cite principles of human interaction if we can to detect the motives for the preference of one text strategy to another. In brief, we shall need the whole gamut of models if we wish to explain why somebody opts for an iconic arrangement of his text and how he carries out his iconic strategy through text patterning and, ultimately, syntax. This is simply another way of saying that experiential iconicism can be discussed in terms of examples brought from various levels: syntax, text patterning, cognition, interaction' .
(Foucault 1986a: 146) 'Chomsky in his book on Cartesian grammar "rediscovered" a form of knowledge that had been in use from Cordemoy to Humboldt. It could only be understood from the perspective of generative grammar because this later manifestation held the key to its construction: in effect, a retrospective codification of an historical position' .
(Geertz 1973: 5-6) 'In understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. This, it must immediately be said, is not a matter of methods. From one point of view, that of the textbook, doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, "thick description"' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 155) 'What is knowledge? A disguise rather than a foundation for truth. Dangerous and destructive, the will-to-knowledge suppresses freedom and produces control' .
(Leitch [n.d.]: 154) 'Foucault demonstrates that archival discourse expands, divides, and deploys knowledge and power in the interest of social control' .
(White 1974: 407) 'To say that we make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of fiction in no way detracts from the status as knowledge which we ascribe to historiography' .
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