Writing center people prefer to use words like "teaching" instead of "pedagogy"; "tutoring," not "individualized instructional session"; "what works," rather than "effective educative strategies." This simple diction is one feature of our linguistic practice we have celebrated across the writing center community. However, behind this facade of pragmatism, of action over theory, we have been actively involved in debates concerning the epistemologies to which we as a community should pledge our allegiance and on which we should build our instruction. We have been involved because, as James Berlin reminds us in Rhetoric and Reality, "every rhetorical system is based on epistemological assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of the knower, and the rules governing the discovery and communication of the known" (4). While the academy has argued vehemendy about ways of knowing, with factions taking stands under such banners as structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, postmodernism, we too have been involved in much the same inquiry.