Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991 Page: 63
244 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Writing as Social Praxis 63
political issues, then we marginalize ourselves as mere technicians of the
word. However, we should not be silenced by mistaken beliefs that social
science methodologies provide value-free ways of talking about writing
because such beliefs are in fact at odds not just with ethnography but with
progressive thought in the social sciences in general. For example, inHabits
of the Heart, Bellah and his coauthors have put forward an influential
argument for redefining the social sciences themselves as public philosophy:
"social science as public philosophy, by breaking through the iron curtain
between the social sciences and the humanities, becomes a form of social self-
understanding or self-interpretation" (301). For Bellah, as for Gadamer, this
new self-awareness comes from a renewed attention to tradition, in this case
the traditions shared by the humanities and social sciences: "Social science
is not a disembodied cognitive enterprise. It is a tradition, or set of traditions,
deeply rooted in the philosophical and humanistic (and, to more than a small
extent, the religious) history of the West" (301).
Hermeneutics' concern for the practical and moral significance of the
traditions of interpretive communities can help us avoid the mistaken belief
that one can study and teach writing in a value-free way by treating it as a set
of techniques, an emptyvehicle for information and a method for solving pre-
existing problems. Hermeneutics and ethnography offer useful strategies for
interpreting how traditions shape social practices like writing, and in our own
tradition we can see a model of practice that does not isolate the techniques
of communication from traditional values. The classical rhetorical ideal of
practical wisdom is not just compatible with contemporary strategies of
interpreting common sense in social action, it is a traditional ideal that serves
us well now. The ideal of practical wisdom links technical skill and moral self-
reflection by showing that one without the other is impractical because each
represents only a partial understanding of the shared knowledge of the
community. Values divorced from practical strategies for solving problems
are of limited social utility, but so are practical techniques divorced from
shared values and wisdom. Practical wisdom is particularly relevant to
studies of professional communications because they have generally been
dominated by a lack of awareness of tradition and a self-limiting concept of
what it means to be practical. The two problems are closely related. The idea
that writing is simply a technique of information processing (like the idea
that the information society is an apolitical technical matter) shows a lack of
awareness of history. This lack of awareness isolates technical knowledge
from the questions about value that arise when one examines a social practice
in the broader context of traditional values.
Information Processing and the Information Society
As we are well aware, the general relationship between professional
communications and the humanities has been problematic at best in the
modern academy. Some of our colleagues in English departments view
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). Journal of Advanced Composition, Volume 11, Number 1, Winter 1991, periodical, 1991; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28604/m1/69/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .