"Nothing hath an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side."
Samuel Butler II

Abstract:

Can we achieve a true convergence among fields, with science and the humanities working in tandem to produce knowledge? This paper attempts eight rhetorical and two political strategies in a "gedanken experiment" to assess which among them might meet with greatest success in achieving that congruence. Some of the strategies will be adaptations of prominent writers, including theorists in Technical Communication. The question whether science and the humanities should, in fact, operate from the same attitudes and assumptions will be addressed in a final section.

Bridging the gap between science and the humanities has to count as the rhetorical equivalent of an Everest ascent. Even this metaphor, extravagant as it sounds, is poor. While many excursions to the top of Everest have succeeded despite harrowing moments, no efforts to conquer this rhetorical task in the realm of Technical Communication have so far met with success, to my knowledge.

C.P. Snow may be the first to have identified the problem in 1957, causing a stir when he noted of the divide between science and the humanities. He writes, "This polarisation is sheer loss to us all. To us as people, and to our society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and creative loss" (17 ). Since Snow, humanist scholars' widespread embrace of post-modernist views of science have perhaps made the gap only wider, the ascent to convergence more treacherous.

More recently, Edward O. Wilson has offered a unified theory of knowledge in his book, Consilience (1998). He takes the term "consilience" from William Whewell, himself a scientist and philosopher, who in 1840 offered this term to be, "literally a 'jumping together of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation"(8). In a complex case spanning disciplines from physics through art and religion, Wilson argues that "There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides." (126)

As one might expect, Wilson engendered kudos and criticism from predictable sides of the divide. However, his effort may yet succeed, given the lag time in acceptance of three of the world's greatest rhetorical efforts, which were met with initial derision yet widely embraced later on. Connie Missimer (1995) has written about these three rhetorical successes. Given the eventual success of a rhetoric in favor of a theory of motion that Newton himself declared "absurd," and in the 19^th century an improbable theory of evolution that the leading physicist of the day called "ridiculous," and in that same century Mill's laughable case that women were the intellectual equality of women--- in Wilson's case it is still too soon to know the full impact of Wilson's equally counterintuitive effort, at least counterintuitive in the minds of many humanists.

Assuming that Wilson's Consilience does not meet with rhetorical success, however, it may prove fruitful to ask what other rhetorical strategies might be offered to traverse the slippery ice of mis-characterizations, both regarding the humanities and science. I will, in this paper, offer a number of rhetorical strategies by first naming a type of approach, then presenting a thumbnail sketch in the form of a representative paper title and abstract by way of illustration. Each type of rhetorical approach will be followed by a brief evaluation of its strengths, weaknesses, and needed further direction.

First Approach Type: A straightforward, well-supported rhetoric of urgency

The thoroughly supported rhetorical approach Davida Charney offers in her "Empiricism Is Not a Four-letter Word" (1996) is an example of this strategy. Charney argues against some common misconceptions about science that she has found in a number of technical writing researchers, including that empiricists are positivists or absolutists (570); or that the objective methods of science are sexist (571). An hypothetical example of this type of rhetoric by Charney might be written with the title:

Empiricism is Necessary for the Growth of Knowledge

Its abstract might read:

It has been over twenty years since Carolyn Miller, in her highly influential "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Communication," proposed that "if we revise the understanding about technical communication that underlies our teaching, we may be able to reconceptualize our entire discipline in a more systematic way" (616). Why has no systematic conceptualization emerged after all this time? This paper will offer an explanation showing that our current lack of this new paradigm has nothing to do with personal or political faults of our discourse community. Instead, a number of arguments will be offered, along with abundant supporting evidence, that only through "testing the world" using up-to-date evidentiary tools will the discourse community of technical communicators drive knowledge in our field. Evidence will be offered from the history of ideas showing that purely intuitive claims, no matter how plausible, will not lead to the sorts of empirical "surprises" that have enabled knowledge to grow across fields.

While the abstract here has a more positive-sounding title than does Charney's more embattled-sounding "Empiricism Is Not a Four-Letter Word," this abstract has its roots in Charney's approach, which is to respond to other theorists who misunderstand, and therefore avoid, a straightforward empirical approach. However, I envision this abstract to deliver a softer message than the one Charney delivered. She pulls no punches when she argues against the mischaracterizations of science, for instance:

I will argue here that critics of science often conflate methods and ideologies in simplistic ways that have been challenged by other sharing their political commitments. It seems absurd to assume that anyone conducting a qualitative analysis or ethnography must be compassionate, self-reflecting, creative, and committed to social justice and liberation. Or that anyone who conducts an experiment is rigid and unfeeling and automatically opposes liberatory, feminist, or postmodernist values. But such assumptions underlie the current critiques. (568)

In contrast, my hypothetical paper would seek to show the positive side of Charney's complaint that institutionalized evidentiary practices don't exist (590), by showing instead the rewards that such practices might bring.

Strengths

This strategy ought to work for most readers who have a background in empirical subjects. Such readers might think, "Of course! Discourse communities can't, by mere discourse alone, come up with a systematic reconceptualization of technical communication without trying various possible reconceptualizations against the world in some way. Otherwise, technical communicators fall--- have fallen--- into permanent divisions, for or against audience-invoked vs. audience-addressed, or for the-reader-as-known versus the-reader-as-unknowable. Miller's desire for a generally accepted systematization can only come from answers to empirically posed questions; discourse communities should lead with tests and follow the data."

Weaknesses

Among those in the audience who may be open to the proposition that a humanistic empiricism need not be an oxymoron, there is a large sub-set who are unsophisticated in empirical methods. Further, they are caught in the sealed black box of other rhetoric that casts science asitselfnon-empirical in any epistemically robust sense. This viewpoint is highly seductive to many humanists, who are attracted to the idea that science, for all its vaunted achievements, is "no different than" --- entails the same approaches as--- the work done in humanistic fields. A chief architect of this view is the superb rhetorician, Thomas S. Kuhn, whoseStructure of Scientific Revolutions has artfully convinced generations of humanistic scholars of this view (1962). Miller's influential work relies heavily on the Kuhnian account of science:

My real point here is that although our thinking about technical writing seems to be heavily indebted to the positivist view of science (and of rhetoric), this view is no longer held by most philosophers of science or by most thoughtful scientists. ...A new epistemology, based on modern developments in cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and sociology, has challenged the positivist conception of knowledge. This new epistemology makes human knowledge thoroughly relative and science fundamentally rhetorical....Scientific verification requires the persuasion of an audience that what has been "observed" is replicable and relevant. And logical procedure, as Thomas Kuhn hasshown[italics mine] is inadequate to account for scientific growth and change. (615-16)

John Hagge has recently tried to untangle this knot of misperceptions in his "Ethics, Words, and the World in Moore's and Miller's Accounts of Scientific and Technical Discourse" (1996). He notes:

The relativists' reliance on Kuhn, on whom Miller (616-17) and allies rely for support....is undercut by the less-than-universal acceptance of his views (Harre 192), by charges that his work is based on understandings of developments in science some historians find unconvincing (O'Hear 75-81), and by Kuhn's own repeated insistence that he is not a relativist (Kitcher 274n63). (465)

Thus, Strategy #1, the straightforward, well-supported rhetoric in support of empiricism, is bound to hit strong head-winds from those postmodern perspectives. Postmodernists and deconstructionists as well would turn a blind eye to it, given their dismissal of "the Enlightenment narrative," a narrative that Wilson takes up in his recent work on the unification of science and the humanities. Wilson has a pithy way of putting this divide:

Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical post-modernists believe we can know nothing. (40)

Consilience met with the accusation that Wilson's views were "naive," despite his having offered both an account of deconstruction along with the olive branch that writers in this vein help to keep other fields on their toes (44, "a salute to the postmodernists"). Still, for anyone wavering in the deconstruction camp, the straightforward empirical approach would probably assume too much.

Possible Synthesis: Take account of these weakensses to craft Strategy #2

Perhaps one could try out a rhetoric showing humanists what scientists, in fact, do, along with what they believe about what they do.

Strategy #2: Rhetoric about science from the scientific discourse community

The paper might be titled:

How Science Works, According to the Scientific Discourse Community

Abstract

Most humanistic accounts of scientists depict them as following the practices of discourse communities in other fields. But is this so? An account of the nature of science from one of its premier journals,Nature, will be described along with the work of two social scientists' research on the public understanding--- and misunderstanding--- of science. This research will then be analyzed with an eye to any discrepancies between accounts by the scientific discourse community, as exemplified in this research, and those by discourse communities in the humanities.

Strengths

This rhetorical approach would appeal to readers interested in what the scientific discourse community has to say about itself. The article, "The Public Understanding of Science," was published in one of the world's premier science journals,Nature (1989). This strategy, to employ claims from within the field of science itself might persuade readers who believe in the integrity of discourse communities. James Zappen well illustrates this technique in his "Discourse Community in Scientific and Technical Communication: Institutional and Social Views" (1989). Zappen notes:

A large body of work in composition research, literary theory, and the sociology of knowledge...establishes the locus of communication in various disciplines and organizations within thediscourse community. (1, his italics)

Further in that article, Zappen argues that "Researchers might also study more substantive aspects of scientific journal articles such as the criteria or standards of evaluation that apply to different kinds of research." (9) As this article fromNature defines standards for the scientific endeavor overall and is clearly approved by the discourse community or it would never have achieved the prominence it did, it should prove an especially valuable article to these researchers. The paper outlining this article for the reader could point out that humanists would be provoked if scientists characterized their work in ways they considered distorted or incorrect. Therefore, the argument might run, by a "rule of charity," those in a given discourse community ought to be able to best characterize what it is they do in precedence over others from outside their discourse community.

Weaknesses

Among the readers who are open to the proposition that a humanistic empiricism need not be an oxymoron and who accept this "scientists' " account of science, there may well be a large sub-set who still conclude that there is no way they can negotiate in that world. While helping readers out of the black box of misconceptions about science, this rhetoric doesn't offer them any way to conceptualize how their interests might be in any remote way "empiricized." Furthermore, it does not make empiricism seem advantageous to them as individuals.

Possible Synthesis: Take account of these weakensses to craft Strategy #3

Perhaps one could fashion a rhetoric that offers a picture, an aerial view if you will, of the field of Technical Communication were it to become empirically driven in a way that would appeal to this audience.

Strategy #3: A Rhetoric of "Vision and Its Promise for Technical Communication"

This is a rhetoric offering a perspective that could accommodate theory and testing.

Technical Communication Circa 2010?

Imagine a field with one group creating robust theories. Eventually, another group joins the theorists, creating experiments that would further or amend some theories as well as serve to shelve others for which evidence cannot be found. The theorists would obviously be highly creative; the experimentalists in their way would be no less creative, having to figure out clever stratagems to test the theories. Over time, the theories begin to dovetail with findings from other fields, further strengthening that field. The description is of cosmology in the 20^th century. It could also describe Technical Communication in the 21^st century. Instead of a congeries of viewpoints, what two or three dominant theories would emerge. Over time, experimental evidence would point to the likelier view and help to amend it.

Strengths

This is a rhetoric of potential, of how most professionals currently in practice could still have a prominent place in a new order, still as leading theorists, while at the same time encouraging newcomers to arrive in the field equipped to formulate hypotheses and consider ways of testing them. This paper could further point out that instead of a bewildering congeries of viewpoints, testing could serve the vital role of eliminating less likely theories, freeing people to concentrate on two or three. Over time, experimental evidence would point to the likelier view and suggest ways that theorists could amend it. This view would be a less confrontational theoretical partner to the work of Hagge, who speaks to the advantages of the empirical and the hegemonic disadvantages of constructivism:

A number of philosophers and scientists have argued that using a rational, empirical methodology in which claims are based on factual evidence that is susceptible to revision in light of further empirical investigation makes scientific practice open and noncoercive, as opposed to constructionist methods, which rely on what often is the self-validating consensus of groups with special interests. If unchecked by external facts, such groups may use rhetorical special pleading to advance their positions and may force compliance with group consensus by threatening expulsion from the group. (473)

Weakness

Among those in the audience who may be open to the proposition that this is a humanistic empiricism they could accept because they would not, personally, have to do any sort of testing but rather leave that part to others in their field, the fearful question would still be for many, "How do I, as a humanist untrained in science, theorize differently from the way I have been? Or do I have to theorize differently? What, exactly, would I have to do?"

Possible Synthesis: Take account of these weaknesses to craft Strategy #4

Create a rhetoric that offers models for the sort of theoretical questions that could be testable.

Strategy #4: A Rhetoric Offering Models that Produce Testable Opportunities

How Some Theories Could Prosper in the Lab

This paper will offer a number of models of the way that hypothesis and testing can go hand in hand in Technical Communication. Ten theories from the literature will be described, along with corresponding suggestions how one might set about testing them under laboratory conditions. Among the hypotheses will be that of David Farkas's "Procedures with Personality." The hypothesis will be described, then two avenues for testing that hypothesis will be described in detail; this method will be repeated for all ten theories.

Strength

This approach helps readers by modeling the kind of theory as well as the kind of testing that could help drive knowledge about issues which are currently the source of interested speculation in Technical Communication.

Weakness

Readers might be offended by the specificity of the models, or mistake these models for "exactly" the methods they would have to employ. Or they would not know in their specific case if they were doing their research correctly, whatever that means.

Possible Synthesis: Take account of these weakensses to craft Strategy #5

This strategy is the rhetorical one of advertising for mutual assistance. It would entail creating an incentive among scientists and humanists for partnerships. Humanists, particularly those in Technical Communication, are for the most part expert writers, and scientists often need help in this area. For their part, scientists, used to thinking in terms of testing, could be of great assistance to those in the humanities holding a theory but unsure how to turn it into an experiment.

Strategy #5: Advertise for an Exchange of Knowledge

Possible E-Mail to Science Departments from a Humanities listserv:

Subject: Make E.O. Wilson Proud!

The great sociobiologist, in his bookConsilience, counsels that we should "view the boundary between scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides."

So, will you help heal the divide by joining us for a luncheon, our treat, in the Faculty Club at noon this Friday? We would like to discuss some of our theories and seek your advice about testing strategies; in turn, we cordially offer any writing assistance you might need. Let us be partners in growing knowledge!

Strengths

Each group immediately discovers sympathetic, even helpful professionals on the other side of "the divide," with a chance at rapprochement. Even those too busy to attend a luncheon might offer quick advice via e-mail.

Although this approach is not consonant with Dorothy Nelkin's rather cynical view of the selling of science, her chapter, "The Public Relations of Science"in Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology (1987) does include a claim about the importance of public relations in the form of translating science for non-specialists: "....The need [exists] for "the skillful interpreter who can translate scientific results and findings into language that the average reader can understand and appreciate" (136).

Another strength of this approach is its unencumbered shock value, as described by Jean-Francois Lyotard (I imagine he would deplore his strategy used to this end). Lyotard notes:

Each language partner, when a "move" pertaining to him is made, undergoes a "displacement," an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee and referent, but also as sender. These "moves" necessarily provoke "countermoves" --- and everyone knows that a countermove that is merely reactional is not a "good" move. Reactional countermoves are no more than programmed effects in the opponent's strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the balance of power. That is why it is important to increase displacement of the games, and even to disorient it, in such a way as to make an unexpected "move" (a new statement). (16)

An e-mail inquiry sent as a bolt from the blue by an anonymous listserv titled, for example,humanities@u.washington.edu, would constitute such an unexpected move and throw the balance of power onto those humanists testing the waters for empirical partners in the sciences.

Finally and most importantly, this approach to scientists would fulfill the prospect of a vastly enriched technical communication field. This promise is offered in a dramatic way by Mary B. Coney at the close of her "Technical Communication Theory: An Overview":

There is a tendency to borrow theories from other fields and graft them onto technical communication. While one might argue that some theories "take" less well than others (and each theorist has a favorite candidate), this trend is good for a number of reasons, and there's no reason for (or sign of) change. This borrowing keeps technical communication in tune with the larger world of scholarly research and keeps fresh ideas flowing into the field; it provides insights not always evident from a practical point of view and suggests methodologies by which these insights can be tested; and most important, it is in keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of technical communication. (12)

Weakness

Scientists and humanists are extremely busy people. Outside of altruism on both sides, there is no incentive for professionals to do extra work of this sort. In other words, there is no institutional sanction, much less mandate, for this good deed by humanists and scientists. And it might embarrass both camps, scientists because they often feel week in communication skills, and humanists, who may feel that if they are going to get empirical, even though they were not trained for it, they should somehow justknow how to do it before talking to experts. The e-mail would be tantamount to a public show of ignorance that some in both camps might find humiliating.

Possible Synthesis: Take account of these weakensses in crafting Strategy #6

One could put out a carrot for such collaboration in the form of an economic incentive program. It could come into being only after a highly rhetorical behind-the-scenes political effort to convince university administrators that such a humanities/science partnership were vital to the growth of knowledge at the university.

Strategy #6: Convince university administrators to fund a humanities/science partnership program and offer it to professionals

If one were so lucky as to be successful, then use this type of rhetoric to attract participants:

Humanities/Science Partnership Program

The University is offering a $20,000 stipend for faculty to participate in research assistance with a "partner" from a different field; in all cases a scientist will partner with another faculty member in the humanities. The partnership will last one year. Duties will include bi-monthly three-hour weekday meetings to discuss research or other matters for which the partner could further the other researcher's work. Every other month the partners will meet for a full day to explore research alternatives and/or the effective dissemination of such research.

Interested faculty may apply to the Office of Partners in the Sciences & Humanities, 999 Smith Hall.

Strengths

Charles Bazerman might well say to his fellow scientists, "Seize the day!" For any scientists (and there are many) who feel that their writing is clunky, this could prove a golden opportunity. Bazerman sensibly asks: "It seems enough to ask a physicist to learn physics and the symbol system of mathematics. Should we then also demand competence in the other symbol system of words? And how much competence?" (331) I imagine Bazerman counseling any faculty member with worries about his/her writing to join a humanist in mutual support. He could quote himself by way of argument:

We need to understand what kind of social reality the text becomes, so as to pursue the conversation of knowledge to the best advantage. Sometimes this may mean buttressing arguments, closing loopholes, and clearing up misunderstandings. These acts in themselves may lead to new discoveries or more powerful formulations. But often responses can teach us new contexts which generate new meaning for the work. Interaction with new realms of ideas, problems and data can transform the claims. (330)

Weaknesses

Would the money prove sufficient for all that work? Would the faculty have the courage it takes to bare their souls to one another, especially if they must do this to a person from a foreign discipline?

What if the partners didn't get along? Worse, what if self-doubt and insecurity on both sides creates a hopeless aversion to partnerships of this sort?

No Synthesis for this eventuality

Nothing came to mind for reorganizing failure at this juncture into a new, related strategy. Instead I will move to an entirely new set of approaches for the final three rhetorical strategies. The tenth strategy will be political.

Strategy # 7: Rhetoric on the Dark Side

This would be a rhetoric that takes the offensive, as Lyotard advised above. But in this strategy it alsoisoffensive; at least it appears to deliberately offend adherents of the point of view being lampooned. An example of this rhetoric is that of Alan D. Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper to the humanities journal,Social Text, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". This postmodern journal accepted the article and it was published in 1996. Once Sokal announced the hoax that same year, in the journalLingua Franca, he was met with a firestorm which is still taking the form of debates up to the present. Among the journals which contained debates on this hoax, as well as the humanities/science divide, are Lingua Franca, Dissent, Tikkun, Liberation, Le Monde La Recherche, Physics Worls, and Physics Today (For a complete list, go tohttp://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers ).

Sokal submitted a sequel, explaining his motives, toSocial Text. Once burned, that journal refused to publish it, but Sokal was successful in having it published inDissent in the fall of 1996. In this article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword", Sokal does not spare postmodernists in his rhetoric:

But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. (If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be ``true'', why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it? I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory. (2)

This kind of dark rhetoric could also take the form of a cartoon series. The cartoon could harpoon one side, or it could take no prisoners on either side of the humanities/science divide. Consider, as an example of the latter, the following cartoon captions:

Valley Girl Humanist: "This thing between the humanities and science, it's so Cain and Abel."

Nerd Boy Scientist: "Yeah......Who's Cain?"

Strength

It is novel, and as a cartoon series it would be extremely simple.

Weaknesses

Unless carried by student papers at universities across the country, I cannot imagine a venue for this type of rhetoric. Perhaps a website that became popular through word of mouth? And if it merely harped on the divide between the humanities and the sciences, how would that close the gap?

Perhaps if the characters could offer details about their work, and readers could diescover some account of an empirical humanities in action, this sort of cartoon project would succeed.

The rhetoric of Alan Sokal did not go towards healing the divide. While for Walter Ong (1975) the audience is always a fiction, Ong still counsels looking to successful precedents before proceeding in a particular style:

If the writer succeeds in writing, it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know not from daily life but from earlier writers who were fictionalizing in their imagination audiences they had learned to know in still earlier writers.... (11)

Outside possibly extrapolating from Gary Trudeau on politics, there is no precedent for using cartoons in such an endeavor as uniting the sciences and humanities. And the Sokal example suggests that another send-up will not garner any rapprochement due to readers' enlightenment, as it were, as a result of the view satirized.

Strategy #8 and #9: Meta-Rhetoric

Rather than doing any direct persuading, as all the foregoing strategies prescribe, another tack might be to discuss the process of changing one's mind about a significant issue.

Strategy #8: A meta-rhetoric derived from decision science and psychology

Bynot concentrating on the humanities/science divide, this strategy would entail proceeding to offer details about how people change their minds and showing evidence from the fields of decision science and psychology that this is how change of view occurs. One fruitful starting point might be the work of Jennifer S. Lerner, an experimental social psychologist, who is conducting sustained empirical inquiry into the relationship of emotion to reason, examining specific mechanisms through which emotion and thought interactively shape judgment and choice. As technical communication professionals, we are at the fulcrum of myriad decisions by readers and users. We could mine the results of this research to construct text that would take account of the role of emotion to enhance readers' judgment and choices.

This approach might have the ironical effect of moving technical writing away from the "windowpane" style of writing that Miller dislikes, but divorcing it from a type of science that Miller seems to doubt exists (616 ). The approach might also help to drive theorists of technical communications more clearly in one of the directions outlined by Coney in her "Technical Readers and Their Rhetorical Roles" (1992). Which of these roles results, in anemotional sense, in the most "compatible melding of all the various personae that come into play on the page," requires a great deal more exploration. If research can really plumb the connection between emotion and reasoned judgment as played out on the page, that would surely be a breakthrough for technical communicators as well as psychologists.

Strengths

Empirically-minded technical communicators could kill two birds with one stone: Findings of this sort could have bearing on practical output such as online help and manuals. The findings could also further acculturate people in the field to empirical methods and results in this area, as well as offer hints for those of us who want to change humanists' decision patterns towards a greater empiricism.

Weaknesses

This approach would likely be too oblique to create differences in attitudes (although if the habit of reading empirical results just might drive a change of attitude over the long run). It would take considerable dedication to mine the results coming out of this field and translate them into workable hypotheses for technical communication.

Strategy #9: A meta-rhetoric derived from the history of past successful rhetorical approaches

Elsewhere Missimer has argued thatthree of the most successful pieces of rhetoric in the history of ideas are Newton's theory of motion, Darwin'sOrigin of Species, and John Stuart Mill'sOn the Subjection of Women, a treatise on the intellectual equality of women. These are non-trivial arguments: Physics, biology, and the social sciences would be incomprehensible without these powerful rhetorical efforts. What is perhaps surprising is that despite the fact that they underlie disparate fields, these arguments share a number of common features:

All three went against the intuitive grain of their time

All contained a great deal of supporting evidence

All were greeted with enormous skepticism at first

All contained some significant flaws

Their authors were frightened to publish their ideas for fear of a punishing ridicule, which did ensue

It was precisely because the authors knew that their views would prove unpopular that they presented every bit of evidence they could. Why not just take on this approach, then, and build a rhetoric with a great deal of supporting evidence showing that unity between the sciences and humanities is preferable to the current state of affairs?

Strength

It has worked. It has not always worked immediately, but with the accretion of more evidence over time, this approach has succeeded in creating long-term, deep theoretical change. It took a humdred years of argumentat before Newton's theory of motion was accepted; fifty years each for Darwin and Mill to win the day. Of course, the mistakes the original pieces all made had to be corrected (a central lemma for Newton, the basis of inheritance for Darwin, and some very odd views about the brains of men and women for Mill), but the corrections came with further empirical work.

This paper outlining several rhetorical strategies is an attempt at such a meta-rhetoric, a pastiche of differing approaches to the Everest of convergence and consequent discussion of them as strategies rather than a full-bore argument. (If you would like to cast your vote on one of these strategies--- or suggest your own!--- please e-mail me atmissimer@u.washington.edu ).

Weakness

While there is evidence that a rhetoric for a deep change of belief (from what is intuitively assumed to what seems highly counterintuitive) must itself contain abundant evidence, with Newton, Mill, and Darwin heavy on external evidence, light on sustained quotes of other theorists, this sustained appeal to external evidence is foreign to much of the humanities. The very meaning of "evidence" has been corrupted in philosophical and humanist circles, at least from an empirical point of view. TheBlackwell Companion to Epistemology defines evidence as "either internal states such as beliefs, or the believed propositions themselves." (120)

It might be helpful to see the point about rhetoric containing evidence corresponding to some sort of external state in contrast to a rhetoric of intuitive plausibility. In the latter case, the writer assumes her audience to be in general agreement (beliefs congruent) with the outlines of her case. And so, in contrast to the harsher first audience of a Darwin or Mill, the rhetoric of intuitive plausibility invokes neutral and trusting inquirers, and may contain a number of supporting authorities yet little to no evidence. While illustrative examples will help in the comprehension of the author's meaning, they do not necessarily, in this case, further belief.

Strategy #10: Nobel Prize (Pulitzer or Lasker Awards would also do) for advances in Empirical Humanities

While the Nobel estate might not allow for a new prize, the idea is the same: Create a highly visible award for this category and expect that humanities departments, including many in Technical Communication, will put new academic talent in place in hopes to winning this prize and enhancing their reputations.

Strength

It is not coercive, yet it is enticing.

Weaknesses

Postmodernists would probably complain that it is coercive in the sense that it holds a great carrot out in front of discourse communities, heretofore purely non-empirical, to change. Stanley Fish has argued approvingly of theoretical change as occurring only within a given discourse community. A big prize for empirical humanities would signal huge influence from outside that community.

The argument that consilience is coming in any case

A final question I would like to touch upon is the question whether it is necessary to work on a rhetoric of convergence between the sciences and humanities, since, the argument might run, this convergence is going to take place in any event. Findings from reading research in Educational Psychology and related disciplines will (continue to) find their way into the thinking of our discipline.

Another avenue of "natural consilience" might be the increasing use by humanists of scientific findings. Consider a recent book by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum,The Intelligence of Emotions. Called "a staggering feat of synthesis" by a reviewer, this work merges Nussbaum's expertise in philosophy, law, divinity, classics, as well as recent developments in cognitive psychology and other fields. This could be a model intellectual strategy of a more passive sort than actually "going empirical."

I see two drawbacks to this more passive approach. First, it does not solve the "welter of viewpoints" problem that allows most people to concentrate on, and further progress on a few promising views while eliminating those that do not correspond to reality. The second drawback is one of pride: Why can't we be the ones to make discoveries, to pass surprising new theories back to our confreres in the sciences? This complaint ties into the concern often voiced that our field does not get the kind of professional respect that we wish it did. Powerful results would certainly go a long way towards earning us that respect.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles. "Writing Well, Scientifically and Rhetorically: Practical Consequences for Writers of Science and Their Teachers," inShaping Written Knowledge. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Charney, Davida. "Empiricism Is Not A Four-Letter Word."CCC47: 4 (1996): 567-93.

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