Spring 2016

WRTG 3020: What’s a Worldview?

Section 021: Paradigm Rhetoric

• note: full syl­labus doc­u­ment PDF

Introduction & Objectives

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, me­di­ated, 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 in­quiry for the course over­all con­cerns the tech­no­log­i­cal con­di­tions of the dig­i­tal net­work age: me­dia and rhetor­i­cal plat­forms for learn­ing, de­vel­op­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and per­form­ing re­spec­tive world­views. Two key ques­tions or themes for each unit in­clude me­di­a­tion and is­sues emerg­ing in these new tech­no­log­i­cal con­di­tions; as well, chiefly, the ques­tion of ex­pe­ri­ence both in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive.
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 top­ics stud­ied. 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.

Overview & Sequence

“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 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 (ap­plied in­sights) to pub­lic au­di­ences through a dig­i­tal nar­ra­tive (mul­ti­me­dia video) — pub­lish­ing with wide view­ing & cir­cu­la­tion in mind, us­ing tech­niques of genre (dig­i­tal sto­ry­telling) and social/public dis­course.

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. Your An­a­lytic Web­text — pub­lished for aca­d­e­mic read­ers on­line — will iden­tify and dis­cuss the con­ven­tions of spe­cial­ized dis­course rel­a­tive to your field: Infor­ma­tion, Knowl­edge, Exper­tise, Re­search, Argu­ment, Evidence/Proof, Dis­course Com­mu­ni­ties.

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.