Two Cultures

Bats as birds

2009-11-30T14:19:00.006-06:00

Earlier in this blog, I argued that modern anti-Biblical readers have been too hard on James Ussher--who, after all, put in quite a remarkable effort. Now, I'd like to argue that they've been too hard on the writer of Leviticus.

Leviticus 11:13-19:

These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

Hold up. The bat? Doesn't God know that bats aren't birds? Ha ha. This Judeo-Christian God is pretty ignorant of his own creations.

But I find the passage quite acceptable, on two related grounds. The first is purely translational. If the Hebrew word we translate as "bird" meant "all flying things bigger than an insect," bats would quite properly be included. (In a similar vein, the Greek word we translate as "hand" [χείρ] included the wrist. So most depictions of Christ's crucifixion show the nails through his palms, even though the Romans normally put the nails between the radius and the ulna, which could support more weight. Whether the wrist is actually part of the hand is a linguistic issue, not a biological one.)

I don't know Hebrew, and I don't know what the original text of Leviticus says. But regardless, I see nothing inherently wrong with having viewed bats as birds (or whales as fish*). In our post-Linnaean world, such categories seem decidedly strange. But historically people have categorized things in many ways for linguistic purposes. The resulting words are likely to serve their purposes as long as everyone agrees on their meanings.

By today's definitions, and for today's purposes, a bat is not a bird. A whale is not a fish. A wrist is not a hand. And a man is in truth an ape. But I won't criticize those who once had other definitions for other purposes. Questions of definition, like whether Pluto is a planet, are not questions of natural fact.

*Every translation I've seen of Jonah 1:17 says Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, not a whale. The story is often told with him being swallowed by a whale, however, and I can't see that it loses much from that.

The Origin

2009-11-24T06:01:00.001-06:00

One hundred fifty years ago today, a book was published called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by a British naturalist named Charles Darwin. It sold out on its publication date, and overnight, it changed the way we view our place in the universe.

I've often wondered how much difference it would have made if Darwin hadn't written this book--or, for that matter, if he had never come up with the theory. After all, he's hardly the only one who came up with a theory of evolution by natural selection. Indeed, the theory was first presented coherently as a joint paper by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1858.

The situation with Wallace is especially interesting to me, because of the extreme coincidence. There are many cases in the history of science in which two people came up with nearly identical theories or discoveries at the same time, independently. But Wallace not only came up with the idea without Darwin's help, he sent a letter to Darwin explaining the idea and asking what he thought of it--not knowing that Darwin had already worked it out. What are the odds of that?

So could Wallace have pushed forth the theory as Darwin did? Coincidentally, I ran across Wallace's own answer last night, quoted in an essay by Thomas Henry Huxley:

I have felt all my life, and still feel, the most sincere satisfaction that Mr. Darwin had been at work long before me and that it was not left for me to attempt to write the 'Origin of Species.' I have long since measured my own strength, and know well that it would be quite unequal to that task.

It's hard for me to imagine anyone better suited to this essential task than Charles Darwin was. The world is different now because he wrote.

Happy Birthday, Universe!

2009-10-23T13:14:00.002-05:00

The universe is now 6013 years old.

At least, that's true according to the calculations of James Ussher. Specifically, the universe was created at noon on October 23, 4004 B.C.

I first wrote about Ussher in 1988, as a freshman at Emporia State University. You can read the essay here. It's called "Does God Exist?" but it makes no effort to answer the question. Rather, it explores what happens when people try to answer it.

I take Ussher's research seriously:

...in the mid-seventeenth century, James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of all Ireland, figured out that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. As Ussher was a noted Bible scholar whose name carried weight, science had an obstacle to overcome for over three hundred years. The sensory evidence scientists used contradicted the religious evidence Christians used. Note that Ussher’s statement on the age of the earth was a theory, not a postulate. It was based on the Bible which in turn is based on the concept of God. Ussher’s theory is similar to scientific theories on the age of the earth, which are based on radiometric dating which is in turn based on sensory evidence that radiometric dating works.

So Ussher's work isn't better or worse than scientific approaches, just based on different assumptions (which are almost certainly flawed--but he didn't know that).

I'm not alone in respecting Ussher's work, even as I reject it. Stephen Jay Gould, in Eight Little Piggies, has a fascinating essay on the subject: "Fall in the House of Ussher."

Rhetoric of science v. rhetoric of technology

2009-10-21T08:29:00.003-05:00

What is the essential difference between the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of technology? The two disciplines are often lumped together, but in my view, they shouldn't be. Technology changes the way we communicate about facts. It changes our understanding of facts. It even changes the nature of the facts themselves. All of these points are essential to rhetoric.

I don't see how you can dispute the first point if you're reading this on my blog. With a click of a button, I can give millions of people access to my ideas. They may not choose to take advantage of this access, of course, but the principle remains. When PZ Myers posts something, it reaches people a lot more quickly and easily than if he were publishing it in a book. (And I might add that bound books are pretty impressive technology in their own right.) Perhaps more relevant as far as rhetoric is concerned, these people can reply much more easily than they could without technology, too. In effect, as my colleague Bethany Iverson has argued, the Internet is recreating the ancient interactive environments in which the principles of rhetoric were first developed, but it's doing so on a vastly larger scale.

Google is one obvious part of a huge web of technology that changes the way we learn and think. What's the population of Massena, Iowa? You almost certainly don't know--but you might as well. You can look it up in seconds. Even if you're away from a computer, you can look up more things on a mobile device than you could have in the entire Library of Alexandria. This easy access to facts (and to nonfactual statements) makes it easier for writers to support their arguments, and easier for readers to challenge them. Are you really 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder in your home, if you own a gun? A quick Google search will allow you to check something that might otherwise have gone unquestioned.

None of what I've said so far is likely to be very controversial. My last claim, that technology changes the nature of facts themselves, may be more so. But what I mean by it is really quite simple. Although a purist might find this distinction overly simplistic, I think most scientists try to understand the world as unmodified by humanity. In some cases, they may manipulate their environment to study it. This is called experimentation, and it's intended to shed light on what things are like when they're not manipulated. In other cases, they may study the effects of humanity on the environment, as climate scientists do. In general, however, I stand by my statement.

Technology, however, does something quite different. It actively changes the environment--and therefore the facts about it. Computers, cell phones, roads, ballpoint pens, nuclear weapons ... all of these are products of technology. We couldn't study the rhetoric used by proponents of nuclear weapons if the weapons didn't exist in the first place.

There are other differences, as well, between the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of technology, but excessive length is a rhetorical error I strive to avoid. The other points will have to wait for another day.

The data in the bacteria

2009-10-20T09:24:00.003-05:00

Richard Dawkins, in The Greatest Show on Earth, devotes much of Chapter 5 to describing the work of Richard Lenski, who performs experiments on the evolution of bacteria. "Creationists hate it," Dawkins explains, because it shows evolution in action, and "it also undermines their central dogma of 'irreducible complexity'" (130-131).*

Creationist Andrew Schlafly asked Lenski to send his data. He agreed to. Then "Lenski went on to make the telling point that his best data are stored in frozen bacterial cultures, which anybody could, in principle, examine to verify his conclusions" (131).

Now this, to me, is a fascinating concept. The data are in the bacteria. The implication seems to be that Lenski's job, in writing his report, was merely to put on paper what already existed in nature. By extension, that may be viewed as the job of scientists in general. Language is a conduit between nature and mind. Read the words, and you know what's really out there.

Elsewhere in this blog, I've stated firmly that I do believe there is a Real World Out There. The Earth really is round (although not a perfect sphere), and bacteria really do evolve (and there are no qualifications for this statement).

At the same time, I'm skeptical of the implications I just mentioned. There are facts in nature, yes. In that sense, we can say that the data are in the bacteria. But even so simple an organism as a bacterium has a great deal of data in it. The choice of which data to emphasize is a rhetorical one. Not everyone will be working from the same concepts, so not everyone will choose the same data.

The conclusions are even more open to interpretation. I'm fairly certain that even if Schlafly were qualified to examine the cultures, he wouldn't come to the same conclusions Lenski did. One obvious response to this statement is that Schlafly's conclusions would be wrong. That misses my point, though: the same data can be interpreted by different people in different ways. It has no meaning until that meaning is created by humans. The moons of Jupiter, seen through Galileo's telescope, could as well be defects in the glass without the proper context.

Let me be clear. The moons of Jupiter were there long before Galileo--or any other human--was born. I am not claiming that the fact of their existence was created by humans. The knowledge of their existence, however, was.

Language, then, is not, and cannot be, simply a conduit between nature and mind. The most it can do is help lead to a shared understanding of our world. And I must say, that's quite enough to ask of it.

*Not all creationists emphasize irreducible complexity. It's mostly at the focus of the intelligent design theorists, led by Michael Behe, who does believe in a type of evolution--albeit one guided by a Designer. That doesn't deny the point Dawkins makes, though.

Returning

2009-10-19T16:04:00.002-05:00

After a long absence, I'm returning to this blog. Past entries have been very helpful to me, and I hope also to an occasional other reader.

Oddly, the blog has been useful to me even when I haven't been writing in it. I keep asking myself how I would write about this or that thought in my blog. On some sheet of paper somewhere, I have a list of topics I want to blog about, and on lots of little slips of paper scattered throughout my life, I have notes and the dates I came up with them. Some of them, unfortunately, are excessively cryptic. "Autorhetoric"? I have some ideas on what I might have been thinking when I wrote that one-word note to myself, but I'm not at all sure which of them is correct. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it's enough that the note inspired several thoughts between its original writing on an old receipt and its current electronic version that you read here.

Will the blog be even more useful to me when I do write in it? Let's find out.

The God Particle

2008-04-12T18:08:00.002-05:00

This book is brilliant.

Its humor is at the level of Dave Barry. Its clarity is at the level of Isaac Asimov. Its science is at the level you would expect from an author who won the Nobel Prize in physics (Leon Lederman).

I originally saw it in the university bookstore yesterday, and I almost bought it. Then I decided to check it out of the library instead. That decision made sense, but now that I've read most of it, I plan to buy it.

One thing I find especially interesting about it is the perspective of a real scientist on the history and philosophy of science. It's quite different from anything I've read that was written by a historian or philosopher of science. The history, especially, is exactly what Thomas Kuhn wrote to oppose: the view that each revolution simply adds to what has gone before.

My feeling is that people in science studies need to study more of what the scientists say--whether they end up agreeing with the scientists or not--and not quite as much of what historians, philosophers, and even rhetoricians of science say.

Responding to student writing

2007-07-28T14:51:00.000-05:00

What's the best way to respond to student writing? I've received something over 3000 student papers so far, I think, along with thousands of drafts, and I still don't know.

I started out with the "more is better" approach. In my first year of teaching at Southern Illinois University, while working on my MA, I was nearly obsessed with the classes I taught. I'd write roughly a page of comments on every draft of every paper. It wasn't unusual for my comments to be longer than the draft itself.

Did these comments actually help the students write better? I don't know. I think the real message they sent may have been independent of the text: I cared. If your instructor takes the time to write a page of carefully considered comments on your draft, it's kind of rude to ignore that and fail to revise it.

I can't do that now. (I probably shouldn't have done it then; my research took a major nosedive when I started teaching.) So what can I do?

I can meet with each of my students in conference, as I try to do twice a semester. These conferences almost always strike me as helpful. But then, they're not for my benefit. Some students have complained that it's hard to remember all of the issues that come up in a conference. Granted, they can take notes (and some of them shyly ask permission to do so, as if I would mind), but even if they take notes, they can miss something important. They'd rather have me write everything down for them.

I admit to seeing some benefit to that. Certainly, I don't like the idea of presenting a helpful suggestion that will be forgotten. But although I do end up writing comments more often than I have conferences, I don't think I should base my decision primarily on what they want.

Students tend to want the input that will make their assignments as easy as possible. In many cases, that means specific statements of exactly what they should change. And I admit that this approach is easier for me, too. Again, however, the goal isn't to benefit me. It's not even to help the student write the best possible paper. It's to help the student become the best possible writer. And if I tell my students what to write or how to write it, then they end up writing my paper, not their own.

So I try to give them as much control as possible. I explain what concerns I have; they suggest ways to deal with those concerns. Then we evaluate those suggestions and work toward a solution. They take the draft home and attempt to implement the solution, and then I take a look to see how everything worked.

I vary that from student to student. Not everyone thinks the same way, so not everyone writes the same way or learns the same way. It's a balancing act--between giving them freedom and guiding them in the right direction.

I'm still figuring it out, and I expect I will be thirty years from now.

Social Constructivism

2007-07-25T10:01:00.000-05:00

I've been putting some thought into whether I should be posting here regularly. On the one hand, I'm a single father raising two children alone while working on a PhD. I find I don't have a lot of time for things that don't really have to be done, and blogging probably falls into that category.

On the other hand, I found this blog (what there is of it) immensely useful last semester, during a class in the rhetoric of science. I could look back over what I'd been thinking on various subjects in the past, and then build from that in my current work. I imagine this blog will be useful for this sort of thing in the future, even if no one ever reads it.

So with that in mind, let me offer some thoughts I have on social constructivism, which has been mentioned in a lot of books I've read over the last year. Too many authors seem to use the term interchangeably to refer to the social construction of knowledge and the social construction of facts. I think the distinction is critical, especially if we're talking about scientific facts.

This distinction is based on the difference between knowledge and fact. Nearly every fifth-grader (not just the ones on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader) knows the difference; it amazes me that people with PhDs routinely blur the terms. It's really quite simple. Facts are facts whether you know them or not. Knowledge is knowledge only if you know it.

I do believe that knowledge is socially constructed. I have different knowledge than I would if I were, say, a Bushman in the Kalahari. This difference is based largely on the differences in our society. If I'd grown up in their society, I'd have their knowledge. (The physical environment makes a difference, as well, but because many of these differences are also related to our societies, I'll lump them in with social differences. My physical environment includes laptops and skyscrapers, both of which are a part of my society.)

As for whether facts are socially constructed, I think that depends on whether we're talking about facts of definition or facts of the Real World Out There. Is Pluto a planet? The answer is a fact of definition. It depends on what our society decides. It changes nothing about the Real World facts of the entity.

Does the earth rotate? The answer is a Real World fact. It doesn't matter how many people think it doesn't. It doesn't matter what our society decides, or what we know. The fact remains the same.

So if we say, as I heard a very bright PhD student say last year, "People thought that the earth didn't rotate, and that was one of their scientific facts," then we are either horribly distorting the meaning of "fact," or we're talking utter nonsense. This is very close to the argument Bruno Latour makes in Laboratory Science: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact. I find it amazing that anyone would take this idea seriously.

Now, if by "scientific fact," we're speaking of the facts of the social sciences ("All cultures have an incest taboo, although they define it differently"), then it's absolutely true that facts are socially constructed. That's almost a tautology. Of course social facts are socially constructed. But that isn't Latour's argument, nor is it the one I see in so many people influenced by him.

"But belief doesn't matter anyway, one way or the other. All those people who believed for all those years that the earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it one bit." --Isaac Asimov. (I'm quoting from memory, but I think that's pretty close to the original.)

Morgan Webb on majoring in rhetoric

2007-01-24T11:36:00.000-06:00

U. Magazine's current issue has an interview with Morgan Webb, who has a degree in rhetoric from Berkeley. I find this quotation interesting:

I got hired at Tech TV because of my technical background to do research. My degree did come in handy. As a Rhetoric Major, you look at history and philosophy and you're basically constructing and deconstructing people's arguments. You get a fair bit of English, history and philosophy, but you're focusing on how to construct an argument. A lot of people do it for Pre-Law, but I liked it because it had elements of an English degree, but was slightly more analytical. It turns out there is a lot of money in writing about computers and explaining how they work.

Oops

2006-11-08T10:56:00.000-06:00

I gave a presentation last week involving Isocrates and his use of persuasion by division. I've been interested in Burkean division since I noticed that Pasteur and other scientists seemed to be using it persuasively, but only recently have I been able to trace its deliberate use back to Isocrates. Before discussing division, however, I commented on how Isocrates uses identification, most notably in the Panegyricus. This work literally "praises the Athenians among the Athenians," to use Aristotle's words. I referred to it as "a clear case of epideictic rhetoric." It's right there on my PowerPoint presentation, so I can't deny having said it.

Later on in that same class period, I was looking through Kennedy's translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric, when I saw this footnote on page 244:

Aristotle regarded the Panegyricus as a deliberative speech since it gave advice on the need of the Greeks to join together under Athenian leadership against Persia; because of its extensive praise of Athens it is often classified as epideictic.

Well, dang. Maybe it's not such a clear case after all.

In fairness to myself, however, I never did see the three genres of rhetoric attributed to Aristotle (deliberative, judicial, and epideictic) as being very clear or useful.

The good old days

2006-10-24T13:34:00.000-05:00

I firmly believe that American society is improving in almost every area, and indeed, that we're better off in more areas than any other society in history. Still, there are areas in which we used to do better, and our view of rhetoric is one of them.

This blog entry--my first on here in entirely too long--was inspired by Richard Weaver's "Language is Sermonic." A quick Google search reveals that I'm not the first student of rhetoric to be inspired by the lines I wanted to quote. Take a look at what Becky posted almost exactly two years ago:

A great shift of valuation has taken place. In those days, in the not-so-distant Nineteenth Century, to be a professor of rhetoric, one had to be somebody. This was a teaching task that was thought to call for ample and varied resources, and it was recognized as addressing itself to the most important of all ends, the persuading of human beings to adopt right attitudes and act in response to them.

And while you're at it, you might look over the rest of her blog. It's quite worthwhile.

On another note, I ordered a new computer about ten days ago, and it should be arriving soon. I'm hoping it will make blogging easier, so you'll be hearing more from me on here.

David Deutsch

2006-07-21T14:48:00.000-05:00

David Deutsch, who teaches physics at Oxford, laid the groundwork for current research on quantum computation. That alone is kind of interesting. But what really caught my attention was an entry he wrote almost a year ago (on my birthday, incidentally) in his blog. He takes to task a BBC report claiming that "A team from James Cook University in Australia reports that the tiny coral reef goby lives a frantic existence to avoid becoming extinct." It's well worth reading.

His home page, by the way, contains links to stuff involving Karl Popper and Richard Dawkins, so it's hard for me not to like the guy just on that alone.

Ecology and evolution

2006-07-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

I decided almost a year ago that I wanted to specialize in the rhetoric of science. The question, then, becomes, which science?

Evolutionary biology has always been a major interest of mine. I've been a fan of Stephen Jay Gould's work since I was about eleven. But I'm also fascinated by the implications of quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, I don't have the math I need to speak the language of quantum mechanics, and I don't kid myself into thinking I can truly understand it just by reading the popular works about it.

I've kind of fallen into the work of Pasteur and Lavoisier, even though I don't consider it in my primary area. I could stick with chemistry, but I'm not sure I want to.

I'd been thinking lately about ecology, and especially its connection with evolution. At first, there didn't seem to be much of a connection (except in the sense that everything is connected). Then I read something pointing out that the theory of evolution is essentially an ecological theory. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with their environments; natural selection explains how organisms adapt to these environments.

Scott Sampson, a Canadian paleontologist, seems to feel even more strongly about this connection than I do: "To my mind, of the many diverse concepts within science, the two most in need of broad understanding are ecology and evolution. These revolutionary ideas--actually flipsides of the same coin--are the unifying themes of all the natural sciences" (Intelligent Thought 220-221).

Fortunately, we're not alone in seeing a connection. The University of Minnesota puts both of these disciplines in the same department: Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. They offer a minor that seems fascinating: Quaternary paleoecology. I'm not sure yet if I can minor in that, or if I want to, but it certainly seems worth looking into.

Another book recommendation

2006-07-12T13:17:00.000-05:00

Intelligent Thought : Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, by John Brockman. Sixteen essays that remind me of why I'm so glad to be moving away from Kansas.

Seriously, the intelligent design movement is very strong here, and I find that frustrating.

The real Darwin

2006-06-03T21:32:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Richard Leakey's annotated version of The Origin of Species. I can't help being struck by how much I misunderstood several aspects of Darwin's thought. Specifically, I viewed him as significantly different from other evolutionists, both before and since, even though he has more in common with them than I'd imagined.

In high school, I learned that Jean Baptiste de Lamarck presented the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This theory, of course, is wrong, and Darwin was given credit for correcting it by replacing it with his theory of evolution by natural selection. I think that Stephen Jay Gould once wrote an essay suggesting that Lamarck was closer to being on track than he's often portrayed. Still, I viewed Lamarck as believing acquired characteristics could be inherited, and Darwin as opposing him.

But Leakey corrects this view on page 19:

Darwin believed that the effects of habit and of use or disuse of an organ could be inherited, as did most biologists of his time. Although such ideas are often referred to as 'Lamarckism', the theory proposed by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck was rather different in that he believed in an inherent desire for improvement, besoin, which was the driving force of evolutionary change.

That is not at all the way I understood Lamarckism, and certainly it was news that Darwin favored the use or disuse theory that the high school textbooks associate with Lamarck.

Speaking of Gould, as I was earlier, even Leakey associates him with the theory of punctuated equilibrium:

But some paleontologists, notably Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, think the fossil evidence suggests that at various stages in the history of life evolution has progressed unusually rapidly--in 'spurts'--and that the major branching in the evolutionary tree has occurred at these points.

Gould and Niles Eldredge developed this theory in 1972. In short, it says that things don't evolve continuously. They go through periods of stasis, when they have no reason to evolve because they're adequately adapted to their environment, and then change when their enviornment forces them to. This seemed like a significant improvement over Darwin's theory.

What puzzles me is that Darwin himself seemed to believe this, as we first see on page 88:

I must here remark that I do not suppose that the process ever goes on so regularly as is represented in the diagram, nor that it goes on continuously; it is far more probable that each form remains for long periods unaltered, and then again undergoes modification.

To my untutored eyes, that looks like something Gould or Eldredge might have written.

Moreover, Darwin repeatedly refutes those who believe organisms have an innate tendency toward development, pointing out that such a tendency is not natural selection at all. But such a tendency would imply continuous evolution. By rejecting this tendency, he supports the argument that things evolve only when they have reason to do so, whether by natural selection, sexual selection, or some other related form.

So how did Darwin come to be associated with favoring gradualism, or with opposing the use and disuse theory? I don't know. I think that's worth looking into.

The Challenger, Katrina, and rhetoric

2006-05-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a couple of articles by Arthur Walzer and Alan Gross on the rhetoric of the Challenger disaster. One of them, "Positivists, Postmodernists, Aristotelians, and the Challenger Disaster," was published in College English in April of 1994. The other one, "The Challenger Disaster and the Revival of Rhetoric in Organizational Life," is available online.

Let me begin my discussion by focusing on a sentence from the first one: "Although there is a degree of simplification in any attempt to identify a single or even a principal cause of an accident involving a complex technology, the Challenger case is unusual, if not unique, in the annals of recent disasters in that the reliability of the component that failed (an O-ring) was questioned and debated on the eve of the launch" (420). These debates are of intense interest to rhetoricians.

In my view, these debates have much in common with the debates about the levee system in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. In each case, engineers believed that the existing system was insufficient; in each case, they presented powerful evidence; in each case, they weren't heard until it was too late. Although rhetoricians have commented widely on the response to Katrina after the disaster, they've said much less about the events that led the city to be so poorly prepared for it. So far as I've been able to find, no one has taken the sort of Aristotelian approach that Gross and Walzer took to the Challenger disaster.

This might be worth pursuing.

More on Einstein and ethos

2006-05-16T08:53:00.000-05:00

I had trouble sleeping last night, so I took a look at The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born. It's a bit too interesting to work well as a cure for insomnia. It's especially interesting to read in conjunction with anything about Einstein, because Born and Einstein were working at the same time and had some of the same influences. (It was to Max Born that Einstein made his famous remark about God not playing dice with the universe.)

But what I really wanted to mention is this line, which relates to the last post: "Some physicists threw the ideas of Einstein and Lorentz together, referring to 'their' theory as the 'Lorentz-Einstein Principle of Relativity'" (41). If Einstein's lack of citations in his paper was, indeed, an attempt to create a division between himself and other scientists, it apparently didn't work well at all.

Ethos in scientific articles

2006-05-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

Rather than doing a single long review of Gross's book, I thought I'd comment on various things as they occurred to me. One point, which I've been thinking about since his earlier work, involves the creation of ethos in scientific articles. On page 27 of Starring the Text, Gross explains,

By invoking the authority of past results, the initial sections of scientific papers argue for the importance and relevance of the current investigation; by invoking the authority of past procedure, these sections establish the scientist's credibility as an investigator. All scientific papers, moreover, are embedded in a network of authority relationships . . . within the text, a trail of citations highlighting the paper as the latest result of a vital and ongoing research program.

Although I think this description is accurate for almost all modern scientific papers, it's fascinating because of one brilliant paper that it doesn't describe: Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." In Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance, Dennis Overbye tells us, "Unlike many scientific papers, it did not specifically refer to any other scientist or body of experimental data and contained no footnotes. This, remarks Galison, may be a reflection of Einstein's experience in the patent office, since footnotes, suggesting that somebody else has been there first, are anathema in a patent application" (139).

It's not clear to me why Overbye would claim that the paper refers to no other scientist or body of experimental data. The first sentence refers to Maxwell, and the rest of the introduction places Einstein's work in the context of Newton's. He also mentions the work of Hendrik Lorentz. But Galison's suggestion makes sense. The lack of citations in this work, so unusual for a scientific paper, may actually have helped develop Einstein's ethos.

Or it may not. Overbye points out that "most physicists couldn't tell the difference between his [Einstein's] approach to electrodynamics and that of Lorentz . . . " (145). Perhaps Einstein made an error here. He was still at the stage of his career when he could most effectively have developed his ethos with a Burkean identification, showing the connection between himself and others. Later on, he might have had more luck with division than identification, much as Pasteur did in his late career. In 1905, though, he wasn't ready for that yet.

Hmmm. I'm not sure. In any case, it's gotten some thoughts going, and I see that as a good thing.

The NCA Convention

2006-05-14T13:10:00.000-05:00

About three months ago, I submitted a paper to be presented at the National Communication Association's annual convention in San Antonio. It's been accepted. The title is "Burke, Pasteur, and the Rhetoric of Science."

I wrote it alone, with no feedback from anyone else, in spite of the many times I've told my students about the importance of feedback. So I had no idea whether it was even in the same league as the other papers that would be submitted. Apparently, it's quite acceptable; the reviewer's comments floored me. I'm very much looking forward to presenting it and getting feedback from other experts in the field. I submitted it through the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology, so there should be plenty of scholars with similar interests who will have worthwhile input.

This is why I'm returning to academia.

Starring the Text

2006-05-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

I just stopped by the post office this morning to pick up my shiny new copy of Alan Gross's latest book, Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies. I'll comment on it in more detail later. Just looking over it, however, it seems to address some of the issues and clarify some of the misunderstandings presented by the critics of his earlier work, The Rhetoric of Science.

Lewis Thomas

2006-04-18T10:26:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, I spent some time in my mother's basement, looking through old books. I found my father's 1969 edition of The Double Helix, by James Watson--which, incredibly, I'd never read. (Please don't ask me how I managed to avoid reading this book, even though I grew up around a copy of it. I really have no excuse.)

I also found an early edition of The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas, one of my favorite authors. (I'm happy to say that I've read this one, but not recently enough.) I'd forgotten that Dr. Thomas had been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. I think that's fascinating. It's one more reason for me to enjoy going there.

Also of interest is that according to the Wikipedia article about him, "He also failed to graduate high school." So did I. I would not often recommend taking this path through life, but it worked well for me, and it doesn't seem to have hurt him any, either.

Brevity and length

2006-04-11T12:53:00.000-05:00

Last week, my students and I worked on cutting out excess words from some writing that had many of them. We started with "At this point in time, I believe that many people misunderstand issues such as racism" and turned it into "Many people misunderstand racism." Most readers of this blog (if there ever are any) will probably agree that the second sentence is better.

But will it get a better grade? I'm not sure of that. MIT's Les Perelman has commented that the grading of the new SAT writing exam seems to be based almost purely on length:

"I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one," he said. "If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time."

That's just the SAT. Are other papers graded the same way? I'm afraid they probably are. Probably 90 percent of college writing assignments have a length requirement. Papers below the length requirement are usually penalized, even if the content is good. Papers far above the length requirement are usually rewarded, even if the content is questionable. And certainly, it's rare for teachers, even English teachers, to grade a paper down because of wordiness. (My own writing is very wordy, as you can see, but no professor in college or graduate school has ever lowered my grade for that reason.)

Should I be teaching my students to present each idea in as many words as possible?

I have to say no. True, their grades might improve if they did so. But I still see value in brevity, and I will still try to teach my students to practice it.

More on rhetoric and interdisciplinarity

2006-04-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

I was just looking over the faculty list for the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Here's what I find interesting: not one professor there has a PhD in rhetoric. They have degrees in history, philosophy, literature, law, and other areas, but not in rhetoric. As I said earlier, to study rhetoric is to study other things, too.

Having said that, I'm hoping that some of the growing rhetoric departments around the country will be looking in about five years for someone with a PhD in rhetoric. By then, I plan to have mine. It will be from the University of Minnesota. (Texas Tech, the other possibility I took seriously, has an excellent program, as well. But I finally decided that I'd be better off at UMN.)

March 30, 2006

2006-04-03T08:24:00.000-05:00

As I write this, I'm in an airplane on my way to Lubbock, Texas, to check out their Ph.D. program in Technical Communication and Rhetoric. One might assume from this statement that I'm writing on a laptop. I'm not. I'm doing this the old-fashioned way: with pen and paper.

I will, of course, have to transfer this to a computer before putting it on my blog. When I do so, I will not edit the text. Whatever flaws may stem from this primitive method will be transferred to the Internet for all to see. (This approach also explains why there are no links in this blog entry.)

Writing with a pen is leading me to consider how important technology in writing really is. More specifically, it's leading me to consider the importance of technology in writing classes. (That faulty parallelism--"consider how important" in one sentence, followed by "consider the importance" in the next--is the sort of thing I'd correct on a computer, but ignore on paper.)

Let's start by comparing my first two semesters of teaching, in 1991 and 1992, when I was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University. In my first semester, I taught two sections of Composition 101, which met in a traditional classroom three times a week. In my second semester, I taught two sections of computer-assisted Composition 101. We met in a traditional classroom twice a week, and in a computer classroom once a week.

Back in those days, instructors couldn't assume basic computer skills. Some of my students had never used a mouse before. Few were familiar with WordPerfect 5.1. So our one day in the computer classroom was usually spent on computer skills.

I don't mean to imply that these computer skills were unrelated to the writing skills I covered. For example, I'd combine a lesson on copying and pasting with a lesson on organization. Still, the fact remains that I covered a lot of material in my first semester that I didn't have time for in my second. The reverse is true, too, of course--I covered material in my second semester that I didn't cover in my first. But much of it would have been covered in a word processing course. All things considered, I think my students learned more about writing in my first semester of teaching, without the computers, than in my second, with them.

That was fourteen years ago. It's been a while since I've had a student who didn't know how to use a mouse. Not only has my students' knowledge of technology improved, the technology itself has improved. How has that changed the things we learn and the way we learn it?

Almost every serious writer today uses computer-based technology in almost every step of the writing process. Writing processes differ, of course, as they always have. That element, however, seems remarkably consistent. Research, prewriting, editing, revising, publishing--all of it requires extensive use of technology. Or, if the technology is not actually required, it's so advantageous that no sane writer voluntarily avoids it.

Written products have changed, as well. A blog entry is not structured in the same way as a conventional journal entry. Hyperlinks require a whole new way of thinking--and therefore a whole new way of writing.

Can one learn to write well with just a pen and paper? Of course. But one cannot learn to write the way--or even the things--that today's writers write.

Trained incapacity and untrained capacity

2006-03-29T11:50:00.000-06:00

Erin Wais, who studies rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, wrote a fascinating paper last year on trained incapacity. Thorstein Veblen coined the term, applying it to business models, and Kenneth Burke expanded its applications beyond that. The term itself is not complicated, although some of its implications are. Erin explains that "Burke defines the phrase as 'that state of affairs whereby one’s very abilities can function as blindnesses.'" People who are trained to do one thing are trained not to do something else; sometimes, however, that "something else" might have been a better approach.

Like many good papers, that one got me to thinking, and I shared some of these thoughts with my literature students when I discussed "The Yellow Wallpaper" with them a couple of weeks ago. This story, written in 1899, deals with a woman's mental illness. The woman's husband, John, is a physician. He approaches the problem by insisting that his wife get complete rest, not even allowing her to write. His training makes him sure that his approach is correct: "I am a doctor, dear, and I know," he insists. His wife is not so sure: "John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster." If it weren't for his training, he wouldn't know to take such a silly approach as he does.

This story takes place over a hundred years ago. Is trained incapacity less of a problem in healthcare now? I'd like to make the argument that it is. Not because physicians know more than they did then--their higher level of training, if anything, probably leads to a higher level of trained incapacity--but because their patients are taking more control than they once did.

One remedy for trained incapacity may be untrained capacity. When patients, who tend to be rather ignorant about advanced medicine, insist on having things explained in simple terms before making their own decisions, that limits the risks of situations like the one in "The Yellow Wallpaper." (The woman in the story had little choice, but most patients in real life have more.)

This may sound strange coming from a teacher, but I think we sometimes underestimate the value of ignorance. The best example I can think of involves racism. Racism is not ignorant behavior. It's learned behavior. Watch toddlers of different races playing in the sandbox. They haven't yet been taught to be racist, so they aren't. If they were never to be trained that way, they would never develop this trained incapacity.

Having said that, I don't mean to imply that training is necessarily a bad thing. Part of the problem might relate to Pope's observation in "An Essay on Criticism": "A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing." The learned behavior of racism can be fought with more learning. The mistakes made by nineteenth-century physicians can be fought with twenty-first century medicine.

So how do we know how much training we should have, or of what kind? I don't know. I'm still training myself in that.

What does it mean to study rhetoric or composition?

2006-03-28T09:27:00.000-06:00

Clancy has brought my attention to a post in The Valve. I've commented on this post both in Clancy's blog and in The Valve. Now I want to raise an issue that goes well beyond this article and into what it means to be a scholar of composition or rhetoric.

Mark Bauerlein, who teaches literature at Emory, says that "to speak responsibly about racial identity and race relations requires a lot more inquiry into the history, econoomics, demographics, and psychology of race relations than may be found in the doctoral curriculum in composition." In other words, composition scholars don't know enough about race relations to speak responsibly about it. Professional scientists often make similar claims about rhetoricians of science. Rhetoricians aren't scientists and don't know enough about science to speak responsibly about it.

I don't think those are fair statements. Composition scholars are fond of pointing out that you can't write writing. You have to write about something. So the study of composition becomes the study not only of the language used, but of its subject matter. The same holds true for the study of rhetoric. That's one of the reasons Quintilian called for rhetoricians to be knowledgeable about a wide variety of subject matters. If they knew nothing of the subject, they couldn't speak responsibly about it. It's also one of the reasons that the best doctoral programs in rhetoric today require many classes in subjects outside of rhetoric.

So what are we to make of rhetoric and composition scholars who do not, in fact, have advanced training in areas outside of rhetoric or composition? Do I have the right to analyze a book about race relations, or eighteenth-century chemistry, or the Holocaust, even though I hold degrees in none of those areas? I don't see why not. As an English major, I routinely wrote papers about novels, although I will never be a novelist. No one seemed to find that odd. For that matter, I once wrote a paper about the sexual power structure demonstrated in Huckleberry Finn, even though I had no real training in that area. The paper still got an A.

To study rhetoric is to study other subjects, as well. Sometimes rhetoricians are experts in those subjects. Sometimes they're not. Either way, their background in rhetorical criticism provides a filter that creates a different picture of the subject than anyone else would see. I think there can be great value in sharing those pictures.

DNA testing: proof beyond reasonable doubt

2006-03-27T14:39:00.000-06:00

A phrase in the March 2006 issue of Discover set off a train of thought that I'm surprised isn't more widely discussed. Instead of quoting the phrase right now, let me build the track for the train to reach it.

Almost everyone accepts that DNA testing can give proof of family relationships. If my sister and I each had a DNA test, the results would show that we're related--in other words, that we share a common ancestor. Indeed, we do: our parents. By the same token, if my cousin and I each had a DNA test, the results would again show that we're related, only more distantly. In other words, our common ancestors would be more distant. Indeed, they are: our grandparents.

This evidence is so strong that in a court of law, it overrides eyewitness accounts. If my father were to deny paternity (which he wouldn't, of course), and a DNA test showed otherwise, the court would accept the DNA evidence over my father's testimony. So far as I'm aware, nearly everyone accepts this procedure. As Gil Grissom has commented on CSI, people may lie, but DNA doesn't.

If a chimpanzee and I each took this same DNA test, it would show that the chimpanzee and I are related, only more distantly than my cousin and I are. In other words, our common ancestors are more distant. If a lemur and I took it, it would show that the lemur and I share an ancestor more distant than the chimpanzee and I have. If a grizzly bear and I took it, it would show that the bear and I share an ancestor more distant than the lemur and I have.

This is exactly the result that Charles Darwin would have predicted in 1859. Evolutionary biology, like all other legitimate science, allows scientists to make hypotheses, test them, and falsify or verify them. If anyone says, "Evolution isn't a science because we can't observe it," they're showing their ignorance of how science works.

Is the theory of evolution true? I would have to say that it is--not only by the standards of scientific proof, but by the American court standards of reasonable doubt. As Charles Siebert points out in the Discover article, evolutionary researchers use "DNA evidence as solid as that used to convict criminals" (37). It's unreasonable to ask for more than that.

The beginning

2006-03-27T11:49:00.000-06:00

In my first paper as a master's student in English, I argued that Herman Melville's view of reality could be better understood by comparing it with the view implied by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—that is, absolute reality cannot be known. The professor found only one flaw with the paper: much of it discussed a subject that wasn’t literature. “Physics seems to interest you more than fiction,” he wrote. C.P. Snow was correct in bemoaning the gap between the two cultures: science and the humanities.

To bridge this gap, I turned to rhetoric. Rhetoric is often studied in humanities departments. Aristotle points out, however, that “it is not concerned with any special or definite class of subjects.” It relates to all fields of human endeavor. Even in science--an area once thought to be free from rhetoric--rhetorical criticism has been growing.

In this blog, I'll be sharing my thoughts on science, literature, history, rhetoric, and anything else that comes to mind. You're welcome to join me. It will be a fascinating ride.