What can genre analysis reveal about the rhetorical conventions favoured by different disciplines, and the epistemological

assumptions reflected in those conventions? How can a knowledge of such conventions and assumptions be of value in teaching and learning academic writing? V. Michael Paganuzzi In attempting to answer these questions I will refer to work in several fields, including the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, social study of science, epistemology, rhetoric and genre analysis, and try to clarify what is meant by a number of terms. I am not going to try to come up with definitive answers: this will be an exploratory investigation. Indeed, I regard my task here as Locke regarded his in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: it is ambition enough to be employed as an underlabourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge. I have long been puzzled by the terms appearing in the title questions and set out to clarify them for myself.
The relativist view of knowledge: the social construction of reality

Among the metascientific disciplines (e.g. the history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, social study of science, psychology of creativity, economics of research), two in particular are relevant to my present interest: the philosophy of science and the sociology of science.
Perspectives on knowledge in the philosophy of science

In an article on the philosophies of the branches of knowledge, Toulmin (1985) says there are two main schools of thought, with several intermediate views, regarding the epistemic status of scientific knowledge. a. A strict Realist view. According to this, any statement in science simply reports a more or less comprehensive empirical set of facts about nature and aspires to be an accurate, objective mirror of the ... facts about which it speaks. Facts, or reality, are regarded as being out there, and scientists just have to discover and describe them. b. At the other extreme is the strict conventionalist, or Relativist, view. This underscores the constructive role of the scientists own theory articulation. According to this view, most statements in science reflect the patterns by which the scientist shapes his conceptual picture of the world of nature - the patterns in terms of which all states of affairs clearly conceivable on the basis of current ideas have necessarily to be formulated. In the last 20 years or so the Relativist view has gained ascendancy. One of the key figures in propagating this view of science has been T.S. Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for his view that scientific change is revolutionary, rather than evolutionary (Kuhn 1970), but Bruffee (1986) argues that Kuhns conception of the nature of scientific knowledge is equally significant. Scientific knowledge, for him, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all (Kuhn 1970:201, cited in Bruffee 1986), and Bruffee (p. 774) goes on to spell out Kuhns social constructionist epistemological assumptions: A social constructionist position in any discipline assumes that entities we normally call reality, knowledge, thought, facts, texts, selves, and so on are constructs generated by communities of like-minded peers.

A major consequences of Kuhns arguments is to cast doubt on one of the central tenets of the positivists, viz. that theory-free observations are sufficient to decide between rival theories. It now seems that all observations are tainted by theory. Bruffee argues that Richard Rorty (whose main interest is metaphilosophy) has generalized Kuhn (see e.g. Rorty 1979): whereas for Kuhn scientific knowledge is a social construct, Rorty holds that all knowledge is a social construct. In fact, Rorty regards knowledge as socially justified belief.
Perspectives on knowledge in the sociology of science

(The border between the philosophy and the sociology of science becomes indistinct at many points, as Rortys view of knowledge as socially justified belief illustrates.) The genealogy of the various disciplines active in this area is complex, but it is probably fair to say that the sociology of science developed out of an older discipline, the sociology of knowledge. (See Woolgar 1988 for an account of all the strands in the area.) The sociology of knowledge was defined by Hartung (1952:686) as the discipline devoted to the social origins of thought. It is an analysis concerned with specifying the existential basis of thought, and with establishing the relationship obtained between mental structures, or thought, and that existential basis. It is generally held that the publication in 1936 of Mannheims Ideology and Utopia in translation marked the start of the discipline. However, its roots can be traced back at least to Bacon: according to Curtis and Petras (1982:3), <Bacons> discussion of the various idols that rule the thoughts of men in different areas of social life is frequently cited as the earliest specific example of the approach... Richards (incidentally illustrating again the fuzzy border between disciplines here) argues that The essential philosophical question that underlies the sociology of knowledge concerns the degree to which the validity of thought depends upon social factors in its creation. Until recently, scientific knowledge was regarded as positive because of the alleged objectivity of its methods, whereas in social or historical thought truth was no more than the product of consensus. (Richards 1987:203) However, this alleged unique epistemological status of scientific knowledge is seriously shaken by the findings of the sociology of knowledge. As Ziman (1978:119-20) puts it: Strict application of the principles of the sociology of knowledge seems to lead to the inescapable conclusion that science is no more than one of many competing world pictures in the noetic domain, and is not privileged by comparison with any other systematic scheme to which a social group can subscribe, such as the famous magical beliefs of the Azande. Ziman (1984:102) has also described the development of the sociology of science from the sociology of knowledge, as a discipline concerned specifically with examining science itself as a social institution: In the last decade, academic metascience has been greatly influenced by a research programme which looks on science as primarily a social institution. This programme stems from the more general discipline of the sociology of knowledge, which used to be concerned mainly with the place of social-science knowledge in the culture of a particular type of society,

but which is now being turned on the natural sciences and their associated technologies. It has become clear in the last 20 years, according to Ziman, that science cannot be understood unless it is treated as a social institution, both within its own sphere of activity and in its relationship with the world at large (Ziman 1984:3). The main conclusions relevant to my present concern to be drawn from this brief survey of views in the philosophy of science and the sociology of science are, firstly, that facts are not just out there, for all who have eyes to see, and secondly, scientists do not live and work in a vacuum, simply discovering facts and disinterestedly testing theories. Indeed, as Myers (1990:25) points out, the process of fact-making can actually be observed, in labs, letters, conferences and conversations, thanks to the work of Latour and Woolgar (1979), David Bloor and his colleagues working in the strong programme, and others. We now know that it is not uncommon for arguments about what is the case being resolved by social events, such as someone not getting his article published, or grant renewed, or her discovery into the textbooks. As Ziman (1984:10) says, writing about epistemology, it is more dependent on sociology than we like to think: in practice the credibility of a scientific conjecture depends very much on the scientific status of the person who moots it!
Science is rhetorical, and rhetoric is epistemic

The upshot of all this is that scientists do - indeed must - persuade us to see things their way. In other words, it becomes clear that science is rhetorical. Moreover, as Bazerman (e.g. 1983), Frawley (1987), Hansen (1988), and Swales (1990), among others, have shown, the rhetorical strategies employed in any discipline tend to reflect the epistemological assumptions of that discipline. So we see that the epistemological assumptions of the discipline determine the rhetorical conventions used in the genre, which in turn gives shape to the final product, where knowledge is presented to the discourse community. Hansen (1988:172) summarizes this process in a passage that is worth quoting in full: When practitioners of any discipline advance a claim of knowledge, they use the rhetorical conventions of their discipline to make their case. As Bazerman (1983), Gilbert and Mulkay (1984), and Myers (1985) have shown for the physical sciences, any new claim that is advanced has to steer a careful course through a highly politicized social context before it gains the status of knowledge; therefore, the maker of the claim must pay careful attention to the audience and the texts organization, language, emphasis, and even references - rhetorical matters all - in order to gain a hearing for the claim. Over time, a discipline develops regularized, sometimes explicitly codified, ways of presenting arguments. These ways amount to rhetorical strategies for persuading an audience within the discipline to accept the claims of the arguer. Moreover, they reflect the assumptions of the discipline about what can be known, how it can be known, and how certainly it can be known; in other words, they reflect the disciplines epistemology. We have now met all the terms said to be in need of clarification at the beginning. The sociology of knowledge and sociology of science have been discussed, and before going on with the argument I want to look at epistemology and rhetoric.
Epistemology

The OED records that epistemology is the theory or science of the methods or grounds of knowledge. This is perhaps not very informative, but the point is that epistemology can mean a theory (or theories) about something, or a science, a study of something. What

the something is, is brought out in Gilbert Ryles introduction to his article on epistemology in Urmson (1989): There is a wide-ranging, loosely knit set of philosophical problems concerning such notions as those of knowing, perceiving, feeling sure, guessing, being mistaken, remembering, finding out, proving, inferring, establishing, corroborating, wondering, reflecting, imagining, dreaming and so on. This part of philosophy is often called the Theory of Knowledge, or epistemology ... The nature of the problems examined is brought out by Raymond Aaron (1985), where he says that epistemology is the study of the nature and validity of knowledge. In the same sort of way, too, as the term chemistry, say, can be used in the sense of the study of something, and also in the sense of the chemistry of detergents say, referring to certain features of detergents, epistemology can mean the study of somethingcertain kinds of problems -- and also can refer to features of a certain kind which certain things, such as academic disciplines, may possess. In the first sense epistemology is what Ziman (1978:185) calls the assessment of organized knowledge. In the second sense it concerns what Bazerman (1988:174) describes as beliefs about what can be known, how it can be known, in what form it can be expressed, and how it should be argued.
Rhetoric

The term rhetoric is perhaps more slippery than epistemology. It has a long history, and in the course of its history has meant different things. The sense in which the term is relevant to our present concerns is that given by Hansen (1988:170), using Barry Brummetts definition: rhetoric is the advocacy of realities. This seems to be the view taken by most scholars in the field today. T.O. Sloane (1985) argues that the basic rhetorical perspective is ... : all utterance ... is aimed at influencing a particular audience at a particular time and place, even if the only audience is the speaker or writer himself; any utterance may be interpreted rhetorically by being studied in terms of its situation - within its original milieu or even within its relationship to any reader or hearer as if it were an argument. According to this view, rhetoric is an integral component of all ... discourse (Sloane 1985); it is the organization of persuasion through literary inscription (Richards 1987:207). The pervasiveness of rhetoric is well described by Hansen (1988:169-70): Increasingly now, philosophers, rhetoricians, historians and sociologists of science, and scientists themselves are admitting that scientific discourse of any kind should come under the name of rhetoric. ... Economist Donald McCloskey ... would add that even calculations are rhetorical in nature, claiming that statistics ... are figures of speech in numerical dress ... The mathematicians Ruben Hersh and Philip Davis agree that even the best and purest of mathematics is in some respects rhetorical ... As we have already seen, the rhetorical strategies preferred by a discipline reflect its epistemology, its view of what can be known etc. In other words, rhetoric is epistemic. This issue was discussed recently in a series of articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (see for example Brummett 1990, and Scott 1990). In the opinion of one of the disputants, Alan G. Gross (1990:304), if rhetoric was epistemic, then the rhetorical analysis of science should yield an appropriate epistemological and ontological harvest. And it has, to my satisfaction, at least.

Genre analysis and learning and teaching writing

The relevance of all this to the genre analyst, and to the teaching and learning of academic writing, can now be made clear. As rhetorical choices in a genre are a reflection of the epistemological assumptions of the parent discipline, then in order to be able to write research articles, say, in nursing science, the writer must think like a nursing scientist. This link between thinking and writing is impressively drawn out by Hansen (1988) in her article comparing the writing of a sociologist and an anthropologist. She shows how an examination of the rhetorical features of the ethnography written by the anthropologist reveals that knowledge of social phenomena <in this field> is very much a result of the researchers interaction with what is to be known, and also a result of who the researcher is, since she inevitably brings her own past to the task of observation. The rhetoric of <this> text implies that facts are not merely observed and then unequivocally represented in transparent language, but rather that knowledge is constructed out of the processes of interaction and presented in language that is committed to telling the truth in a certain way. (Hansen 1988: 176) Her examination of the quantitative research report written by the sociologist reveals, on the other hand, epistemological assumptions borrowed from the physical sciences, according to which observations can be totally objective. After comparing the two texts, Hansen asks, what can be done to help people write like mature scientists in their chosen fields? Her answer is, More of the kind of analysis I have tried to do here. The pedagogical or heuristic value of such analyses is also recognized by Swales (1990), who says there may be pedagogical value in sensitizing students to rhetorical effects, and to the rhetorical structures that tend to recur in genrespecific texts. Construed as involving the kind of analyses carried out by Hansen (1988), and Frawley (1987) for example, together with the kind of work being carried out by Swales (e.g. 1990) and Dudley-Evans and Henderson (e.g. 1989), then, genre analysis has tremendous potential here. To quote Hansen (1988:207) again: Learning to think in <the appropriate> way may come in the course of the apprenticeships that students spend being enculturated into the knowledge, assumptions, techniques, and so forth, that define a discipline. But often the masters of the discipline do not raise to a level of articulate instruction how to write for a discipline, counting instead on simple association and imitation to do the job. And if students have not been in the discipline long enough to simply absorb these ways of thinking and writing, they will likely flounder around ... As Swales (1990) says, It is likely that consciousness-raising about text structure will turn out to be as important as it has been shown to be for grammar. Both novice writers and mature writers will benefit from having their consciousness raised in this way. As for teachers, Hansen (1988:207) points out that they can learn such basic things as which disciplines proceed from positivistic assumptions in their attempts to claim knowledge about reality and which ones proceed from hermeneutic assumptions... They can turn their skills of close reading of texts to analysing the whys and wherefores of invention, arrangement and style in disciplinary discourse. By articulating their findings, they can give both masters and apprentices in the social science disciplines explicit declarative and procedural knowledge that will ... be welcome, both for the practical ways it gives of talking about writing in that discipline and for the occasion it gives a discipline to examine its assumptions about knowledge and writing.

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