To the extent that one reads my essay “Interrupting the Conversation” as a critique of a perspective as broad and multi-faceted as social construction, I would not be surprised if my sketch of this perspective were characterized as simple-minded. That Omar Swartz seems to believe that I attempted just such a critique and yet refrains from using that kind of dismissive language attests to his civility. But in my reply to his “Pragmatist Response” I would like to convince Mr. Swartz and his readers that, read differently, “Interrupt­ing” needn’t be an exercise in tolerance.

The core of my reply to Swartz is less a refutation of his elaboration of constructionism than a restatement of the target of my critique, which is neither Rortian pragmatism nor social construction, but the packaging of social construction by a few writers in composition field who, I argue, did not do enough to encourage its careful consideration. My stated objective was “to suggest some of the basic premises that seem to underlie composition’s conception of social construction”; a conception I characterized, as Swartz notes, as “rather eclectic and politicized.” I refer readers back to the introductory part of the paper where I take pains (and perhaps try my readers’ patience) to identify my object of inquiry as the compositionist “dialogue” which relies upon “not the sum but a subset, a reduction of [constructionism’s] parts. It is this subset, these generalities, that have shaped the discussion of social construction in composition studies and which will be examined more closely” (41). Far from taking a swipe at social constructionism in general, I find it hard to imagine a contemporary rhetorician who is not a construction­ist in some important sense. Why would we devote our professional lives to the study of argument if we did not feel that discourse shaped our perceptions and knowledge of the world? For this reason, I criticized a dialogue that, I felt, promoted an unreflective and unresponsive variety of constructionism—a variety characterized more by its opposition to anything smacking of cognitivism or personal agency than by its cogency.

Of course, at points in the paper, I refer to some of the theorists invoked in the dialogue (e.g., Vygotsky, Derrida, and Rorty) to suggest why compo­sition’s dialogue has had an especially difficult time linking what I think are very “normal” pedagogical agendas to certain antifoundationalist claims. But at the time I wrote the paper (as now) I was less concerned about what Rorty (or any other pragmatist) thought than about how my discipline portrays and appropriates what pragmatists and other strains of antifoundationalists think. An example of how this parochial interest differs from the broader interests Swartz attributes to me is when he responds to my alleged claim that constructionists fail to consider that knowledge can be derived from any kind of symbolic mediation; he wishes me to know that they “recognize.. . that this can be nonlinguistic and perceptual rather than discursive.” To the contrary, I understand quite well that constructionist theories easily accommodate all sorts of symbol-using, and I use my third premise (“consensus, and thus knowledge, is discovered solely through public discourse”) to illustrate the peculiarity of the spin those in the writing field had put on constructionism.

I should note that on one point, I find Swartz’ criticism well-taken. He points out that I write that Rorty believes that we “misconstruct” knowledge and Swartz argues, correctly, that Rorty believes no such thing. Misconstruc­tion implies the possibility of accurate construction, and clearly this is not in keeping with the rhetoric of Rortian pragmatism. This stands out in my mind, for it is the only instance in Swartz’ response where I agree I attribute a view to Rorty that is clearly in error. Had I thought about my language a bit more carefully at the time, I would have seen my mistake, and Swartz is quite right to call me on it.

Although I think a sufficient reply to Swartz’s article might stop at pointing out where I think he misconstrues the object of my inquiry, I am tempted to respond to two other issues: certain specific ideas that Swartz wrongly attributes to me and problems with pragmatism as he presents it.

On this first score, I am frankly at a loss to why Swartz takes my paper as an assault on pragmatism. As I note on page 38 “almost as many variations of social construction exist as there are rhetoricians, philosophers, sociolo­gists, and anthropologists to promote them.” Pragmatism is only one of a number of perspectives that can be called constructionist. I mentioned the intellectual roots of constructionism can be traced to everyone from positiv­ists (e.g., Marx) to radical deconstructionists (e.g., Derrida) with a lot of social scientists and theorists scattered along the foundationalist spectrum. In addition, I would ask Swartz to consider the wealth of diversity within pragmatism itself. Although he speaks of a “pragmatist” embrace of/lack of interest in several tenets, it seems clear that Rortian pragmatism is hardly the pragmatism of Peirce which is quite unlike the pragmatism of Dewey, etc.

In a similar vein, Swartz writes that constructionists do not, as I claim, confuse issues of knowledge with issues of existence. This, too, is an overgeneralization; some who would label themselves constructionists do, in fact, conflate epistemological considerations with ontological ones. More importantly to my paper’s thesis, this conflation, while it may rightly strike Rortians as either simplistic or irrelevant, pervaded composition’s cons truc­tionist dialogue of the 1980s. The early efforts of Kenneth Bruffee come to mind as does much of the work of James Berlin. This being said, I recognize now, as I did then, that the dialogue’s looseness in this regard almost certainly did not reflect the considered opinions of any of its proponents. But the fact that the distinction between knowledge and existence was so commonly elided was symptomatic of the dialogue’s general quick-and-dirtiness.

Later, Swartz resists my “arguments that social constructionists should avoid the social, political, or pedagogical realm.” But I made no such arguments. I am well aware of my own social and political agenda both as a teacher and a researcher. But (as a self-confessed Western-liberal such as Rortywould certainly appreciate) lam also committed to a model of rational thought that requires me to pause when my formalizations are in conflict. This does not mean I jettison social or political values. It means I try to reconcile my values to a knowledge that sometimes seems hostile and/or incomplete. And I certainly do not warn cons tructionists away from pedago­gy; to the contrary, I would be very open to hearing some truly constructionist recommendations for rethinking educational practices in light of what many would agree is a fairly remarkable epistemological shift throughout the academy. I think the negative tone Swartz detects in my essay stems from my sense that, in the face of the Western conception of higher education in which we all participate, tinkering with classroom practices such as collaborative writing hardly seems an inspired or “radical” constructionist response.

On the second score—problems with Swartz’ pragmatist perspective—I wonder if Swartz shouldn’t temper his claim that “‘rationality’ is not a privileged term and represents realist standards that social constructionists do not find practical to adopt.” Untrue. Both Rorty and Swartz reserve the right to pass judgment on the logic or illogic of claims, and constructionists of all stripes seem to invest a great deal of energy in devising rational arguments and defending themselves against the charge of irrationality. Of course, Swartz might respond that a pragmatist only deploys a realist frame­work to critique realism and that I am resorting to the old “self-refuting premise” canard, but the question remains: how plausible is it to reason for arationality?

A related problem I see with Swartz’ pragmatism is reflected in his criticism of my inability to “get beyond” realist biases. Though I share his belief that knowledge is “socially and politically constituted,” this does not blind me to what Kenneth Burke calls the recalcitrance of physical phenom­enon. There are just some things that cannot be explained away as rhetorical artifacts—the idea that humans need food to live, that my kitchen light turns on and off when I flick a switch, and that (in a naturally-occurring terrestrian atmosphere, at least) water invariably flows downhill. Explanations of these phenomena are socially constructed, but our consciousness of such phenom­ena is not. I would argue that writing off as an intellectual hang-up what Swartz terms the “representational/material binary” is neither a useful nor a necessary condition for either constructionism or pragmatism.¹

Although there is much more to which I would like to respond, I will wind down by stating that Swartz cannot convince me that I have maligned Rortian pragmatism since to do so would have required some efforts on my part. Furthermore, I am not convinced that 1 have misrepresented the compositionist dialogue of the 1980s. I maintain that my snapshot of the dialogue’s version of constructionism did an adequate job of depicting a theory patched together to serve limited political and pedagogical objectives; a theory which proved unresponsive to the issues raised by others, including Richard Rorty. I use the past tense quite deliberately for the kairotic moment that compelled me to write “Interrupting” has passed. As a result of the discipline’s growing maturity and the work of several in the field (including those I identified as “dialogists”), earnest discussions of socio-cognitivism have pushed us beyond our initial hurried construction of both cognitivism and constructionism.

Although the genre of response-and-reply encourages the critiquee to conclude with an acknowledgment of the contribution made by the critiquer, I wholeheartedly follow this convention here. Swartz provides a very lucid, and in many ways appealing, Rortian perspective on social construction and rightly points out areas of my argument that are in need of clarification and refinement. By the end of “Pragmatist Response” lam more knowledgeable of Rorty’s position on a number of issues and quite convinced that the Rortian version ofconstructionism bears scant resemblance to the version of constructionism I believe dominated the writing field in the last decade. But then, I have never said otherwise.