An approach commonly used to teach argument in English departments tacitly dichotomizes argument and persuasion, separates cognition from affection, and values the product over the ability to form concepts and to convey ideas with engagement. Yet contemporary texts like Annette Rottenberg's Elements of Argument indicate a growing concern that teaching argument as formal reasoning and excluding ethics and emotions fail "the complexity of arguments in practice" (v).This dissertation argues for a pedagogy of argument as "inquiry." While its intellectual roots trace to the Isocratean/Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, the interdisciplinary theories from which it draws all recognize the mind's power to create knowledge through the dialectic of the "knower" and the "known": the semiotic language theory of Peirce, the instrumental learning theory of Dewey, the legal theory of Holmes, and the composing theory of Berthoff.The current-traditionalist over-attention to form inhibits the natural composing process and constrains inquiry by ignoring social values and public opinion. In contrast, "jurisprudentialism" attends to the critical analysis and creation of argument by focusing upon a writer's active participation in the recursive process of exploration and justification. It operates by an informal logic in which the test of sound judgment is whether an audience of competent persons is willing to accept its truth.In exploring and justifying a jurisprudential pedagogy of argument, this study claims that the traditionalists' pedagogy of "right" writing in the modern academy traces to the elitist, positivist camp of Plato's academy. This pedagogy casts rhetoric as a medium of communication, not as a means of making knowledge. It employs "recipe" argument in which language is the "batter of thought." It comprises a "know-what" pedagogy that treats writers as "lesser souls, not as the "philosophers" that they can become if provided the "know-how."Additionally, the study shows how the Platonist and the Sophistic rhetorical traditions have emerged in modern education as current-traditionalism and jurisprudentialism. It traces the historical ties between law and rhetoric and the intellectual forces of science and philosophy that separated them, as well as those that are bringing them back together again. / Department of English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/175232 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Briscoe, Annette |
| Contributors | Hanson, Linda K. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | v, 394 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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