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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Stanley Fish Endorses the Fowler-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis; Writing Teachers Baffled
Eliminate content from composition, argues Fish. You must understand prescriptive grammar in order to be able to think thoughts worth having.
My theory about this column is that it was actually written by Avril Incandenza, who has instantiated herself into this world through the piscine medium. I’d like to extend Fish’s ideas a bit, however, and propose the content-free Introduction to Literature class. Before you can read literature, you must understand its theoretical grammar. I will now solicit recommended readings.
Comments
The Fish piece is parody, right? I’m just trying to figure out what it is a parody of. A certain kind of educational theory?
On the other hand, the exercise he proposes is a wonderful one. Doesn’t the students’ ability to construct an artificial language mean that they already know how to use their own? In other words, like a lot of good teaching, it’s a way for the students to learn what they already know.
How about an exercise in which the students had to come up with an artificial, content-free academic discipline? They would have to come up with rules: what kind of evidence “counts,” what kind of arguments are acceptable? That would be a very piscine exercise as well.
I dunno. I usually don’t order the Fish, myself. But I think he has a point here. The mechanics of the thing - language - are important and are probably something that most students are never formally exposed to.
Can’t imagine reading without what was brutalized into me during 12 years of Catholic school. Sentence structure searched into the cordage of my mental musculature.
How could I do the work on, say, FID in Flaubert, or Coetzee for that matter, if I didn’t “get” sentence architecture.
Perhaps he’s making up for what’s no longer taught. I don’t think this is (just) deliberate perversity - which Fish seems to me to engage in from time to time, surprised by sin as he is…
Anyway, like I said - I cringe when I see Fish in the NY Times or CHE (evidence on my site...) - but I was persuaded… Even though I taught my first and last comp classes this academic year, I could see thinking this way about certain things…
As Pullum says… it’s basically linguistics.
It’s not a parody, except insofar as Fish is incapable of unironic argument.
I see it as a sign that the cultural pendulum, having swung to a historically unprecedented extreme of emphasis on content to the exclusion of form, has begun to swing back in the other direction.
You linguists aren’t prepared to endorse the uninformed linguistic relativism in Fish’s argument, are you?
One item of theory-bashing I think is perfectly sound is that most of the influential Francophone theory has been completely ignorant of post-Saussurean linguistics. This could probably be said, m.m, for the neo-pragmatists as well.
Does this imply, then, that linguists are all accomplished prose stylists? Or that ineffective writing in college students is caused by ignorance of the formation of the plural with “s”?
By the way, as I construe it there’s nothing particularly Whorfian about Fish’s exercise. He wants the students to come up with a language that mirrors the relevant distinctions that English makes: aspect, tense, number gender, etc… It’s not to be a language designed to express some other vision of the world alien to that of English. I didn’t see any linguistic relativism, just the idea that there might be different ways of marking the plural, say. You could add a letter like ess or you could have a word meaning several that you put before a plural noun.
I would like to second Jonathan’s comment. Literary critics still cite Saussure all the time but generally show little interest in the things that actual linguists are doing today. This is partly because Chomsky is authentically hard to read, but it also reflects laziness. If one is serious about interdisciplinarity, one ought to figure out what is actually happening in the other discipline.
I read him as pretty clearly implying that knowledge of prescriptive grammar allows you not just to express certain thoughts but to have thoughts worth thinking.
That’s more Orwellian than Whorfian.
I don’t see any prescriptivism (or relativism) here at all. Fish wants the students to be able to describe the relationships and distinctions that English grammar makes. “How does English express agency?” is not a prescriptive question, for example. “Do not use the passive voice to express agency” would be a prescriptive rule. Once you understand how the system works, Fish argues, you will be able to use it more effectively. He never says you won’t have ideas without such understanding, but that you won’t be able to write clear and coherent sentences.
As a joke, I told my students last semester to write a paper in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön, which seems more pedagogically justifiable than this.
The Orwell-Whorf distinction is without a difference.
It’s hard to tell from the piece, but it sounds to me like Fish has, in his typical fashion, taken an interesting idea to absurd lengths. The interesting (and perhaps useful) idea here is that students will become more adept in recognizing and applying the techniques of good prose writing once they have a better conceptual understanding of how their language operates. This may or may not turn out to be true, but I guess like most things it is an empirical question that cannot be answered simply based on one’s intuition.
On the other hand, I wonder what else Fish has students do in a “composition” class other than construct an alternative English language. For instance, do they actually practice writing essays? If so, there has to be something that qualifies as “content,” no? If not, that sounds like a pretty crappy composition class.
On the third hand, isn’t Fish the same guy who wrote “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory”? You can’t become a good baseball player without practicing a lot, so why would he think writing was any different? It seems pretty absurd to banish content completely from a composition class.
Here is the meat of Fish’s argument:
The reason we don’t do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.
Wow! Fish reject content because it produces dull and cliched writing. If every instructor adopted Fish’s approach, students might never have to write another college essay again. Also, I wonder if it ever occurred to Fish that he could choose topics other than the usual hot button issues, ones on which students are unlikely to have any strong preformed opinions.
Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn’t have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else’s language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.
Doesn’t composition involve a lot more than simply understanding the language at the sentence level? And is it really the case that students could learn how to marshall arguments equally well by shooting the shit with other students? Seems pretty implausible.
Other than a few scattered comments, I haven’t seen much in the way of a positive reaction to Fish’s column. I will say that it’s clear that Fish is immensely gifted and that his students would learn a great deal from him no matter what type of pedagogical gambit he used.
Also, freshman composition is the most difficult class a college English professor can teach. Let me modestly suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant or a fool.
The Orwell-Whorf distinction is without a difference.
Wow. That sentence might never before have been formulated by anybody!
I think Orwell’s point in “Politics and the English Language” was not that one language was more suitable than another for certain types of thoughts, but that bad style in any language makes it more difficult to have thoughts at all. This is not the same thing as Whorf’s idea that grammar can weakly constrain thought by embodying metaphysics, in a way that is sometimes observable across cultures.
The much-derided urban legend version of Whorf—that there are some thoughts that can only be expressed in Hopi or Klingon—was actually proposed by Heidegger in an unrelated context. But I digress.
There is a joke here somewhere about Fish’s academic training being suited to content-free composition, but it’s not really that funny. Maybe it would work in Klingon.
Orwell didn’t come up with that idea, Pierre, though since “Politics and the English Language” is the most-anthologized essay in print, you can be forgiven for thinking so.
His idea assumes linguistic relativism because he’s not talking about the expression of thoughts but the ability to have them. Being able to describe a technical vocabulary for grammatical utterances does not allow you to have previously unthinkable thoughts.
I forgive you for mistakenly thinking I need to be forgiven. (There is a single Klingon word for that concept, by the way.) I’m sure Orwell wasn’t the first to notice what we’re talking about, but as you say, he’s responsible for the most-anthologized exposition of the idea which I understand to be as follows: bad linguistic habits make a person generally stupid, so that they lack enough oomph to think incisive thoughts. Ezra Pound seemed to be grumpy along similar lines, though he was unable to express himself so clearly as George. (Hmm.)
But surely this idea is meaningfully different from the idea that specific linguistic habits can make a person incapable (or possibly more capable) of thinking specific thoughts, independent of how much mental oomph they possess, which is the common understanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
I wouldn’t call the first idea “linguistic relativism”. But maybe we can agree on everything else and it just turns out I’ve been using the term “linguistic relativism” incorrectly all these years. I’ve been known to do worse.
My sense of “lingujistic relativism” is closer to that of Pierre than to that of the other Jonathan, which is why I have been so confused during this whole thread. (Maybe I should call myself the “other Jonathan."). What Orwell might share with the relativists, without being a relativist himself, is a certain idea of “determinism.” We can only have the thoughts our language allows us to have. That idea must also be part of the folk wisdom of composition teachers, since they keep including that damned Orwell essay in all their anthologies. Better politics through better prose style!
You know, if we checked 1984 I bet we could find a quotation from O’Brien, about the principles of Newspeak, explicitly saying that lack of specific vocabulary disables the capacity to have specific thoughts. But that was fiction.
I just checked “Politics and ...” real quicklike and found this:
“When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.”
Which means that Orwell believed abstract political thought took place independent of language. Therefore he could not have been a “linguistic relativist”. (Unless I still don’t understand what that means.)
Orwell’s point is much more practical and specifically looks at an intra-linguistic phenomenon. His point is that we can express our ideas more clearly and coherently by choosing language that is fresh, clear and precise. Conversely, lazy, muddled, and imprecise use of language often hides unclear or illogical ideas.
My vulgar understanding of the Whorfian hypothesis is that because different languages carve up the world in different ways, the language we learn to speak in will shape our understanding of the world. This could be fairly called “linguistic relativism” I suppose, but Orwell is more along the lines of practical advice with some political jabs thrown in.
This thread reminds me of many of the grad seminars I took at Duke, where it wasn’t uncommon to argue about a term for half an hour or more before people realized that they were actuall using the term in quite different ways.
When using a technical term that not everyone will know, perhaps it would help to state, up front, what you mean by it.
Speaking of Duke, I overlapped with Fish a bit (he left after my second year). There he used to teach freshman comp. classes that were the exact opposite of the course he outlines here. If the topic was “Affirmative Action” (and it often was—it was still the mid-90s), he would assign his freshmen a huge dossier of essays arguing pro- and con- from every conceivable angle, including law, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies. They would leave the course experts in the field as affirmative action-ologists!
It was about 5 times as much reading as we grad students generally assigned for those courses. All content…
So I wouldn’t take the prescriptions here about form too literally.
Sorry—try it this way: “They would leave the course as experts in the field, little affirmative action-ologists.”
he would assign his freshmen a huge dossier of essays arguing pro- and con- from every conceivable angle, including law, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies. They would leave the course experts in the field as affirmative action-ologists!
No wonder he is going cold turkey, he OD’ed on content at Duke. Most comp instructors can probably handle content with moderation.
Blah,
Another way of thinking about it is, if you commit absolutely to the material, your students are more likely to learn something than if you take the “usual” approach: some material on what makes for a good argument, some technical tips, and a lot of thematic paper-writing and in-class discussion.
It might be possible to do an adapted version of this class, in which one spends dedicated time on “form” as distinct from “content,” while still assigning the usual expository essays. It might work if one periodically stopped to think about the connections between the two.
Maybe in my next composition class (Spanish composition in the Fall), I’ll go all product and no process. In other words, I don’t care how you get to the product I’m looking for; figure it out yourself. I only care about the end result.
OR: I could go all process. I don’t care what the end result looks like: just show me how you got there.
Either way, the idea is to trick the brain into doing something it doesn’t think it knows how to do.
I’m teaching my first section of composition this fall, and at BU they really stress grammatical instruction and antiquated notions like imitation. I happen to think it’s great--I can’t wait to see my kids try to imitate the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
A little background here--I always had the aspiration to enter academia and teach on the college level but got certified for secondary ed. as well. Taught high school English for a while but with the intention of moving on. Went on for the Ph.D. Got it and decided to go back to teaching high school where, at least in some schools, both content and form can still be taught with all the benefits--present and future--that a balanced approach of that sort can provide (I will not detail it; you all (presumably) know it. Linguistic and literary theory, studied in a serious fashion (i.e., not just to invent new ways to get and keep tenure, reputation, etc.)is an important endeavor. It is not, however, when used for the sake of mere obfuscation as it sometimes seems to be used. (Any modern Swifts out there willing to imitate the current battle of theory in academia?)It seems to me that Fish has spun what would be a good project for high school or young college students into a full-blown semester course. I’m not sure that, as a parent, I would find that the best way of spending my money on my offspring’s education. Nor would I be happy about using my own cash on learning technique without content. Well, I suppose that, if it was good enough for Gorgias, Protagoras, Thrasymachus and others, it ought to be good enough for today’s professors, too.
Or could it be that Dr. Fish is tired of grappling with the ideas students may bring to class that might actually require intellectual exercise on the part of students and teacher alike?
OK, I’ve had my say. Thanks.