Forward to the past (or something like that)

Gotta get back in time... (I couldn't NOT make the reference.)

There was a big connection going on among Vico, Locke, and Hume, that of the knowledge that comes from experience.

Vico: "Knowledge of oneself is for everyone the highest encouragement to bring rapidly to a conclusion the study of the entire cycle of learning" (4). Knowing yourself and your capabilities is directly tied to your ability to know more or apply your existing knowledge.

Locke: "For though he that contemplates the operations of his mind cannot but have plain and clear ideas of them, yet unless he turn his thoughts that way and considers them attentively, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations of his mind..." (427). You must know your own mind to know your thoughts and what you think about your own thoughts. Pretty meta.

Hume: This is the shift in my observation, where Hume claims that those who read primary historical texts "wou'd attain but a very confus'd idea of the transactions of that period" (285). Hume's contemporaries needed him because no matter how much they knew themselves and their thoughts, they just weren't enough like Hume that they could contextualize and simply understand the purpose of a past text. Knowing yourself may have been all well and good for Hume, but you need to know more than yourself and your immediate surroundings; you must know what came before you and how to interpret it.

It seems that Hume is bridging the gaps left by Vico and Locke. A person can not be so self-involved, there needs to be a thread from the ether that binds our experience with knowledge. In other words, things have led us to be where we are. Things have occured that make us believe what we believe. Hume felt there is a need for people, like himself, to analyze and interpret history to provide the needle and thread that may sew our experience together. Hume, as Marilyn pointed out, expanded Locke's idea of empiricism: all original knowledge comes from experience.

The more contemporary comp./rhetoric folks take that a step further: we gather knowledge from our experience of trying to gather knowledge (as convoluted as that sounds). Faigley and Flower both explore the process of transcribing thoughts. Fish looks to the self as the subject of study, not the text that the self "experiences."

The connection between experience and knowledge seems to have survived scrutiny but the analysis of that connection has not successfully proven empiricism.

Johanna's discussion with Faigley that revealed that Faigley knew little of Vico was interesting, considering that both are wrestling with the same essential question: Does knowing oneself (be it the mind, the self's experience, or the mind's process) equate to simply knowing?

Life in the slow lane

Enos addresses an important question: Why so critical?

"[We] can use the tools of criticism and interpretation to understand [new material] evidence and, if needed, to develop new methods to refine our theories and analyses" (12).

But he also mentions a problem with getting that new material evidence; some scholars believe "that dirtying one's hands through actually going to see what was at Troy was something scholars should not do" (15). "Troy" is referenced because Enos is talking about rhetoric and its origins and discovering new facts about it. But anything can be "Troy." A scholar's "Troy" can be an author's archive at a university, or a living person that could provide a wealth of knowledge but who has remained an untapped resource. Enos notes that some scholars would be against this search for new information to be critical towards because some are comfortable with where their research is and where it is going without new physical findings, without true progression.

This is like Plato's "pure" vision of the nature of the solar system that Maxine C. Hairston discusses: "To this kind of Platonic temperament, rhetoric is anathema because it necessarily means becoming involved in all those areas of life that the reclusive mind, which would rather grapple with the abstract than the concrete, despises and fears" (68). In other words, rhetoric demands that you be active rather than passive, progressive instead of static.

Hairston's citation of Arthur Koestler made a vague connection that I wish to define a little more here. It seems to me that, in the study of math and science, you are always building on previous knowledge. Numbers are not very malleable things so you discover, say, an equation, and use it. You can't explore the nature of the equation once it has been explored to the point of making the equation. You use it. You use the equation to find new equations and cut into the earth of mathematicians' Troy.

So we have our "equations" in rhetoric. We have found texts and lessons and applied and examined them. We have looked at what we have of the history of rhetoric so much that it has gone through its stage of alienation and dismissal (and since we're just starting this class, I'm assuming I'll learn exactly where rhetoric is at now, later) so what are/were scholars afraid of? Reading these pieces about rhetoric and its place in education and history makes me wonder what academicians are waiting for or, more accurately, what they fear from this new information. I'm left with these questions because I don't think the articles we've read explain why there was/is a sedentary movement in research (unless I missed it, and if I did, please point it out, it's driving me bonkers).

Trust...in theory.

"Reading a report, like driving over a bridge, is an act of faith--faith that the other fellow has done his job well" (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, Schoer 193).

I feel if my pedagogy is not well defined then those who are subject to it are learning in a foggy environment.

I wish there was an answer to my questions that have come up in the construction of my pedagogy. I look to some research from "Research in Written Composition" for a light: the discussion on the mode of discourse. There is narration, description, exposition, argument, or criticism.

My pedagogy is full of criticism of my own beliefs, sprinkled with argument (primarily over what students are capable of when trusted), and looking over the precipice of description and exposition. I'm on my way.

But something that "Research in Written Composition" says is a little disheartening for someone, like me for one, who is developing his pedagogy: "...a colleague wrote on page 196, 'What is the sense of attempting an elaborate empirical study if there is no chance of controlling the major elements in it?'" Of course, this unhappy "colleague" is referring to bodies of students and their instructors, but his/her concern can be extended to what constitutes a pedagogy.

Granted, a pedagogy isn't empirical. This is what I think I believe, after all. But I'm talking more about how I take what I believe and make it work in a class. I'm asking myself the same question that the colleague asks in a different slant: not what is the sense in applying my pedagogy but how the h-e-double toothpicks do I do it? How do I account for those "major elements?" There is, after all, no way of controlling them.

That's precisely the problem, I discovered. I can't and shouldn't control variables. I can only trust that things will work out the way they should, like, as the introductory quote tells us, crossing a bridge. I trust the students to do what they should (like pay attention and be accountable) because I can't "make" them do anything. I can ask, suggest, and they should follow through. The only things I can "make" are assignments. They make their grades.

I should clarify that this is not promoting a de-centered, student run classroom. That's impossible. And if it were possible, it's irresponsible. But how much more responsible is it if you don't know how to take what you believe and make it happen in the class? The students trust me as much, or more than, I trust them to do what they should. The students are taking a class from someone that they trust is doing his job well. My pedagogy should help me refine exactly what I mean to communicate to students while defining exactly how I feel about the whole shebang, elements, variables, and all.