Pedogogy of Mixing Up the Epistemology

You could say it's a cop out that when asked whether I teach writing to emphasize subjective, objective, or transactional theories of knowledge of truth (as James Berlin categorizes them) that I say, All three. But it's more than just teaching them in balance, it's teaching them which style is appropriate when, and how to mix them.

I think the assignments in my English 110 class lend themselves to teaching a variety of approaches. Some of the assignments are implicitly subjective, some objective, and some transactional.

The memoir assignment is basically subjective. The student writes about how a personal event shaped who they are. The subjective approach captures inner knowledge and records it. The epistemic end of subjectivists would have the process of writing also be a process of learning, but at it's core, the knowledge is inside the writer and is transcribed. When I grade memoirs I look for students to express their feelings.

The annotated bibliography is basically objective. After researching a topic, the student creates a list of sources which summarize and evaluate the material in the source. Objective approaches use language to document external reality. The use of language is very similar to the subjective approach--language is fundamentally a passive medium used to record truth. But the truth is not based in the writer's psyche, it's based in the outside world. When grading bibliographies, I'm looking for sufficient information about the sources. The sources exist apart from the writer (I pretend that summary is not an act of interpretation), and the writer records what is in them.

The position paper is basically transactional. The transactional approach is not a mix of objective and subjective, but it is a bridge. Objective and subjective use language to record truth and secondarily to find truth, but in the transactional approach the truth that is found is not internal or external, it's in the exchange. The position paper requires the writer to set forth their opinion, based on a research of external reality, conveyed in a way to convince a reader. If the position paper was subjective, it would be an op/ed. If it was objective, it'd be a research paper. Instead it bridges the two and finds truth in the communication among writer, reader, and reality.

It's the mixes that can be an unexpected hangup. Students often want to take one approach and stick with it, but they can't. The I-search teaches students to cross boundaries within a single piece. It is a research paper (objective). But it also about the writer's experience with the research (subjective). The I-search isn't really transactional, though. Primarily the students are recording truth, they aren't using language to find truth.

I want my students to be able to do it all, because for most majors, they'll have to. We can say all writing outside the English department is objective, but that's not true. Subjective assignments are given by all kinds of teachers from art history to math. But even if my students only go on to write "objective" research papers, I want them to be able to do it without being boring. That involves moving your focus beyond recording external reality and thinking about how human beings actually interact with it.