Humanistic Aspects of Technical Communication

Paul. M. Dombrowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351865043
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book has two audiences and purposes. The first audience comprises teachers of technical communication and graduate and undergraduate students, commonly from English programs and without technical backgrounds. The purpose for them is to introduce technical communication from the avenue of humanities with which many are familiar and allied. The book serves them as an adjunct to conventional textbooks. The second audience comprises scholars and practicing professionals already familiar with technical communication. The purpose for them is to provide a handy collection, with introduction, of significant essays on recent humanistic developments.

CHAPTER 1

Humanism and Technical Communication

Technical communication seems to have two aspects, the technical and the humanistic. The technical aspect is concerned with specialized knowledge, conventional forms, and traditional products. It is the more obvious of the two and is specific to technical and scientific communication.¹

The humanistic aspect (to be defined shortly), brought to prominence by C. Miller’s landmark essay, A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing, is the less obvious and is not specific to technical communication, though it is no less operative [1]. It is vitally important because it deals with the humanity of the sender and receiver of the communication model and with the wide social impact of the communication. It is concerned, for example, with how people persuade each other and with how people decide the course of technological developments. It also deals with our common human nature as beings who continually re-define our worlds through language. The increasing development of this humanistic aspect yields a fuller, more balanced understanding of technical communication which includes the manifold social contingencies and ramifications of technical communication.

The thrust of recent developments of this humanistic aspect discussed in this book is to challenge the long-standing dualities of the sciences versus the humanities, facts versus opinions, and objectivity versus subjectivity, which are seen as no longer tenable absolutely. Instead, these dualities are seen conditionally as social constructions serving particular goals and purposes. Examples such as the charring of the O-rings of the Challenger space shuttle show that the meaning of technical information is socially constructed and shaped by opinion, not just by “the facts themselves.”

These humanistic developments also provide a framework for understanding how communication about science and technology occurs in a context of social responsibilities.² Thus we are faced with such questions as whether treating another person as an “object” of scientific study does not unfairly privilege the scientist observer over the relatively disempowered person observed.

The essays presented in the following chapters were chosen as important statements indicative of the tenor and the direction of developments regarding technical communication in each area: rhetoric of science, social constructionism, feminism and gender issues, and ethics. Each chapter begins with an overview of the topic accompanied by extensive critical analysis. These initial comments are meant to be informative, provocative, and useful bases for understanding and critically examining that particular topic. When they diverge from prevailing opinion, it is because I intend not only to describe current developments but also to offer constructive criticism and suggest future developments.

In this chapter, I will first discuss how these recent developments are humanistic. Then I will discuss two conceptual frameworks for understanding the relation between the humanism and technical communication, together with the view of language associated with each. This distinction indicates that technical communication is less a make-shift bridge between disparate enterprises than the intellectual common ground already shared by them.

The distinction between these frameworks is crucial for grasping the humanistic developments I will be discussing later. It is important to understand fully these frameworks and the ramifications of their differences, though initially the distinction might seem too subtle or abstract. These different frameworks amount to different world-views (especially the world of technical communication), not that the world itself changes but that how we see the world and what we understand as the world changes.

HUMANISM IN CLASSICAL AND MODERN SENSES

The four areas of recent development (rhetoric of science, social constructionism, feminism and gender issues, and ethics) are closely interrelated as different aspects of a single general frame of mind: humanism. “Humanism” is apt in two senses, classic and strict, and modern and loose.³

Classical and Renaissance Classicist Thought

In the strict sense of “humanism,” these four areas are recent expressions of the same frame of mind represented in the studia humanitatis of Italian humanism. These humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were the initiators of the Renaissance. They were students and teachers of the rhetoric, history, moral philosophy and other areas of ancient Greek and Roman thought, keenly interested in the resurrection and expansion of these classical ideas. Among these ideas are the constitutive power of language, the social responsibilities of citizens, and the advancement of civilization through free, critical discourse.

Their purpose was to apply these ideas in order to elevate and improve their culture. As G. A. Kennedy, the historian of the rhetoric, explains, these Renaissance humanists turned to classical ideas in order to revitalize their stagnant culture [4]. They worked to recover classical rhetoric, for example, because it was a noble, creative activity that acted as the well-spring of civilization.

The four contemporary areas of this volume reflect not only the same general interests of the studia humanitatis but also the act of resurrection itself, the cultivation not of something new but a re-birth of what had already been born but had become practically dead; thus the re-nasence or Renaissance.

Well before the Italian humanists of course, classical Greek thinkers originated the liberal arts and humanism in another strict sense. B. Kimball, a recent proponent of the re-unification of rhetoric and science, explains that what we know today as the “arts and sciences” began in ancient Greece as the seven liberal arts which constituted the enlightened pursuits of the free citizens of Greece [5].

The pursuit of these liberal arts was thought to be freeing in itself, elevating the practitioner above baser impulses while cultivating a noble, civic mentality. These were the three arts of the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and logic) and the four arts of the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music). ⁴ Indeed, many historians consider the statement of the sophist Protagoras to be the fundamental principle of humanism: “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras would feel right at home among contemporary social constructionists.

Thus from the earliest history of Western higher education, “humanistic” meant the liberal arts which embraced both the sciences (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and logic) and what we call today the humanities (rhetoric, grammar, and music and its allied arts). To be a humanist historically meant to be interested simultaneously in the specialized knowledge of the sciences and in the social context in which specialized knowledge was put into practice through rhetoric.⁵

Modern Thought

In a modern, looser sense, too, “humanistic” is apt for these developments. Broadly speaking, humanism is the emphasis of the human over the non-human. It involves studies turned more toward humankind itself than toward the physical, non-human world, for example, toward literature or ethics. This humanistic emphasis is reflected in technical communication studies as interest in persuasion, in psychological and sociological constructs, in human technological practices, and in gender-fairness—all of these emphasized over the objective, material, non-human things that are often taken as the basic subject of technical communication. Thus, from the perspective of humanism, the root subject of technical communication is always humankind.

The humanistic aspects of technical communication are not, let me reiterate, new additions to our field but only the growing recognition of previously unacknowledged aspects of what has always been there. The rhetoric of science, for example, reveals the paradoxical pathos of dispassion in science. As A. G. Gross explains, this apparent unemotionalness is only a disguise for high emotionality: “[T]he disciplined denial of emotion in science is only a tribute to our passionate investment in its methods and goals” [8, p. 179].

Feminist critiques of science are another example of making apparent what had been inapparent. The traditional view of science is that it is value-free, as though it somehow transcends moral values or is at least ethically indifferent. Some feminists (see Chapter 4 on feminist critiques of science), however, point out that some scientists view human behavior as principally determined by sex, a biological feature that can readily be studied scientifically. These feminists point out that an exclusively scientific perspective on questions implicitly denies the vitally important effects of culture and personal assent, effects which are highly amorphous and difficult to treat “scientifically.” The result has been a neglect (and often an implicit devaluing) of major factors in human behavior by those people, scientists, to whom the public turns for answers.

The thrust of recent humanistic developments, then, is to highlight otherwise obscured elements in technical communication. This highlighting shows the historical duality between the sciences and the humanities to be largely untenable. Gross points out that over the past two decades, the intellectual world has seen a “blurring of genres,” an intermixing of intellectual disciplines previously seen as disparate. More specifically, Gross explains that his own investigations of the rhetoricity of science are intended to mend the dualistic rupture (originating in Plato’s attacks on sophism and fostered by Cartesianism) between the sciences and the humanities by affirming “the permanent bond that must exist between science and human needs” [8, p. 183].

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS

In this section, I will discuss two conceptual frameworks for understanding the relation between technical communication and humanism: traditional dualism and contemporary holism. Each framework has a particular view of language associated with it. The traditional dualistic framework entails the transparency view of language, while the contemporary holistic framework entails the rhetorical view of language. Though many traditional technical communicators conceive of our field from the first framework, the humanistic developments I will be reviewing argue for a re-conceptualization of our field along the lines of the second framework. Depending on the framework, one sees technical communication as straddling polar opposites, or as the common ground between related enterprises that differ more in emphasis than in kind.

Traditional Dualism

In this section, I will describe the traditional dualistic framework, outline its history, and characterize the view of language which it entails.

Description

From the traditional perspective, technical communication has a unique nature with respect to the humanities. Though technical communication sometimes occurs between specialists within a specialized community, it also often occurs between specialists and nonspecialists, say, between technical experts and the nontechnical, nonscientific public. In this form, technical communication is the principal field bridging two realms traditionally thought of as separate and different, so radically different, in fact, that they are often seen as having little to do with each other. The usual names for these two realms are “the sciences” and “the humanities” and for the partitioning into separate entities is “dualism.”

Though technical communication is not the only field in which the sciences and the humanities co-mingle, it is unique in pointedly making accessible to non-specialists the specia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 Humanism and Technical Communication
• Chapter 2 Rhetoric of Science
• Chapter 3 Social Constructionism
• Chapter 4 Feminist Critiques of Science and Gender Issues
• Chapter 5 Ethics
• Contributors
• Index