Fall 2015

WRTG 3020: What’s a Worldview?

Sections 021 & 015: Paradigm Rhetoric

 

• note: full syl­labus doc­u­ment PDF

 

Introduction

Belief, Proof, Expe­ri­ence. Story, Infor­ma­tion, Aesthetics.

Group, Mind, Net­work. Oral­ity, Lit­er­acy, Electracy. 

What’s a Worldview?

“First, we must deter­mine the nature of knowl­edge; that is, what does it mean to say that some­one knows, or fails to know, some­thing?” “Sec­ond, we must deter­mine the extent of human knowled ge; that is, how much do we, or can we, know? How can we use our rea­son, our senses, the tes­ti­mony of oth­ers, and other resources to acquire knowledge?”

—Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Philosophy

 

Besides, and less a study of “world­views”: we will exam­ine how these dis­tinct forms of know­ing are con­veyed, ana­lyz­ing highly famil­iar top­ics in crit­i­cal ways less famil­iar. This is the key dis­tinc­tion from a study of epis­te­mol­ogy in a phi­los­o­phy course, for instance; while ours will be a philo­soph­i­cal approach and per­spec­tive, as a writ­ing & rhetoric course our pri­mary inter­est is less about “what we (can) know” and more about “how we know” and more­over how forms of knowl­edge are cre­ated and conveyed—oral, writ­ten, image/media, quan­ti­fied, non-linguistic, sensory.

In this way, rather than learn­ing for “con­tent mas­tery” (aca­d­e­mic con­ven­tion of exams), we will apply the insights learned—both about the top­ics stud­ied as well as the con­ven­tions of com­mu­ni­cat­ing espe­cially. With a focus par­tic­u­larly on insti­tu­tions and forms (or “struc­tures”) of knowl­edge, we will explore sev­eral “par­a­dig­matic” world­views to enhance our under­stand­ing; besides famil­iar dis­tinc­tions and inter­sec­tions, we will con­sider as well gaps or exclusions—like expe­ri­ence, sen­sa­tion, intu­ition. One main approach to the course over­all con­cerns the tech­no­log­i­cal con­di­tions of the dig­i­tal age: media and rhetor­i­cal plat­forms for learn­ing, devel­op­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and per­form­ing respec­tive world­views. Two key ques­tions or themes for each unit include “Dataism” and quan­tifi­ca­tion issues of this tech­no­log­i­cal par­a­digm; also, chiefly, the ques­tion of expe­ri­ence both indi­vid­ual and collective.

Overview & Objectives

Our course involves sev­eral learn­ing strate­gies and out­comes, ask­ing you to study, ana­lyze, dis­cuss top­ics in new ways plus apply con­ven­tions in respec­tive forms of com­pos­ing. To be clear, this means in favor of “argu­ing about” or “against” world­views we will instead demon­strate the crit­i­cal per­spec­tive of rhetor­i­cal under­stand­ing, specif­i­cally by con­vey­ing insights through the form/genre con­ven­tions of our object of study. This com­pos­ing approach gen­er­ates new and fur­ther under­stand­ing in reflec­tive ways, both about the “con­tent” stud­ied as well as the writ­ing and rhetoric involved—across spheres per­sonal, pub­lic, aca­d­e­mic, pro­fes­sional, and hybrid.

“As the study of knowl­edge, epis­te­mol­ogy is con­cerned with the fol­low­ing ques­tions: What are the nec­es­sary and suf­fi­cient con­di­tions of knowl­edge? What are its sources? What is its struc­ture, and what are its lim­its?” “Under­stood more broadly, epis­te­mol­ogy is about issues hav­ing to do with the cre­ation and dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge in par­tic­u­lar areas of inquiry.”
—Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Philosophy

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Begin­ning our study with the par­a­digm (or “appa­ra­tus”) of Belief, con­veyed in the mode of Story (Oral­ity): we will first exam­ine the belief of some­one other than our­selves and how that is com­mu­ni­cated through story. Then, we will con­vey this obser­va­tion (applied insights) to pub­lic audi­ences through a dig­i­tal nar­ra­tive (mul­ti­me­dia video)—pub­lish­ing with wide view­ing & cir­cu­la­tion in mind.

 

Sec­ond, con­sid­er­ing what counts as Proof and Infor­ma­tion, evi­dent in the Argu­ments of aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional writ­ing (Lit­er­acy). We will inter­ro­gate this famil­iar ter­rain through Rhetor­i­cal Analy­sis of the dis­ci­pli­nary dis­course unique to your aca­d­e­mic major or intended career field. After gen­er­at­ing ideas indi­vid­u­ally, we will com­pose a class Web­text for aca­d­e­mic read­ers online.

 

What hap­pens when indi­vid­u­als or groups try to trans­form Belief into Infor­ma­tion for Argu­ments, or con­vert Proof into Nar­ra­tive? We will reflect upon and dis­cuss this after con­sid­er­ing dis­tinctly the first two par­a­digms. Option­ally, you might also try com­pos­ing for this mud­dled imag­ined rhetor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion for fur­ther under­stand­ing (extra credit exer­cise).

 

Finally, the par­a­digm of Expe­ri­ence. In one exer­cise, we will con­trast “Dataism”—the reduc­tion of phe­nom­ena to quan­tifi­ca­tion (often used for decision-making as “analytics”)—with sen­sory and affec­tive dimen­sions of expe­ri­ence, cat­e­go­riz­ing for enhanced per­spec­tive. After exam­in­ing this swiftly chang­ing cur­rent of net­worked media, we will test first-hand how aes­thetic expres­sion can sup­ple­ment and per­haps bet­ter con­vey our sense of expe­ri­ence and self, in the tech­ni­cal par­a­digm of medi­a­tion: dig­i­tal devices, inter­faces, net­works, behav­iors, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, identity—culminating in the “Screen Self Por­trait” per­sonal web­site project.

 

In this last unit we will thor­oughly exam­ine dig­i­tal rhetoric and the emerg­ing appa­ra­tus of Elec­tracy, a shift beyond oral­ity and lit­er­acy (per­haps a hybrid). Gre­gory Ulmer explains that Elec­tracy “is to dig­i­tal media what lit­er­acy is to alpha­betic writ­ing: an appa­ra­tus, or social machine, partly tech­no­log­i­cal, partly insti­tu­tional” (Net­worked 2009). The effects of this shift impact not only com­mu­ni­ca­tion and iden­tity for­ma­tion, but cul­tural forms and social expe­ri­ence as well—a per­spec­tive guid­ing our study of world­views and their rhetoric.

 

Ulti­mately, we will develop and enhance an under­stand­ing of the con­ven­tions respec­tive to (and exem­pli­fied by) cer­tain world­views, or “par­a­digm rhetoric,” as well as the com­po­si­tion forms employed by each to cre­ate and con­vey knowl­edge. Our expe­ri­en­tial and exper­i­men­tal learn­ing will gen­er­ate both “world­view insights” (top­i­cally) and sharp­ened spe­cial­ized discourse—particularly ways of describ­ing how we think, per­ceive, behave, decide, under­stand, expe­ri­ence, com­mu­ni­cate, express. By apply­ing crit­i­cal per­spec­tives and com­pos­ing strate­gies, stu­dents will come away with rhetor­i­cal aware­ness, writ­ing skills and crit­i­cal think­ing enhanced and transferable.