College English Mar 1979

Thomas Kuhn, Scientism, and English Studies

Patricia Bizzell

Abstract

IN The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn elaborates the concept of the a comprehensive theoretical model that governs both the view of reality accepted by an intellectual community and the practice of that community's discipline. This concept has increasing interest for English studies because new demands on our composition courses, along with new developments in literary theory, have contributed to a hot debate over the premises of our discipline. Maxine Hairston, for one, has explained in an address to the 1978 convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication that we should understand this debate as the sort of profound revolution in accepted thinking that accompanies a new paradigm, rather than as an unrelated group of local disagreements over critical tastes and pedagogical methods. Professor Hairston wants to dignify our debate as a debate because she fears, with good reason, that its beginnings in literary theory and composition pedagogy have allowxved too many practitioners in English studies to regard it as tangential to their main business. Therefore, Hairston emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the as Kuhn explains it. Having characterized our situation as a debate, however, Hairston goes on to support her own candidate for our new by an appeal to evidence. But it is Kuhn's most striking point that a determines the identification and interpretation of empirical in a given discipline. Empirical makes sense only when considered in light of a paradigm; therefore, evidence cannot be imported to establish a above debate. Hairston and others (Janet Emig and E. D. Hirsch, for example) have sought, however, to establish a based on such evidence, under the misapprehension that only a so established can raise English studies to the status of a truly rigorous discipline. On the contrary, Kuhn argues that a is established, even in the natural sciences, not because of compelling evidence, but because of a rhetorical process that delimits the shared language of the intellectual community governed by the paradigm. Indeed, he suggests that he has derived his concept of paradigm for the sciences from a study of the theoretical models that govern the humanistic disciplines. In following Kuhn, we should not be misled into a scientistic faith in evidence as compelling. Instead, the special province of our new may be indicated in his analysis of the ways in which any is constituted by language.

Journal
College English
Published
1979-03-01
DOI
10.2307/376299
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Open Access
Closed
Topics
modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism writing pedagogy argument literary studies
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (3)

  1. Raucci (2021)
    A Replication Agenda for Composition Studies
    College Composition and Communication
  2. Charney (1998)
    From logocentrism to ethocentrism: Historicizing critiques of writing research
    Technical Communication Quarterly
  3. Allen (1991)
    Thematic Repetition as Rhetorical Technique
    Journal of Technical Writing and Communication

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