In “Interrupting the Conversation: The Constructionist Dialogue in Composition”(JAC 11.1), Joseph Petraglia writes, “A problem has arisen in the field.., in that most of rhetoric-as-epistemic arguments have settled on a rather eclectic and politicized conception of the issue and its relevance to the teaching of writing” (38). He claims that composition theorists are engaged in a “closed dialogue” that neglects thought found in social psychol­ogy and speech communication. In an attempt to open this conversation up to the critiques found in different disciplines, Petraglia posits what he identifies as “the basic premises that seem to underlie composition’s concep­lion of social construction” and proceeds to challenge each (38). Petraglia then acknowledges that he, himself, is a criticwho finds social constructionism “lacking,” and he admits to having “streamlined” the constructionist argu­ment with his four positions. I agree that Petraglia has “streamlined” the constructionist position and, in my response to his essay, I take issue with his characterization. In the paragraphs to follow, I argue that Petraglia’s premises are not a fair description of social constructionism, and I will respond to his criticism of social constructionism from the pragmatist position as advocated by Richard Rorty.

Petraglia’s first premise states that, for social constructionists, “Real entities (‘reality’) include knowledge, beliefs, truths, and selves” (41). In one respect this statement is not unfair. Social constructionists consider con­structs in the non-empirical world to be as equally important as constructs that exist in the so-called natural world, objects that include rocks, micro­chips, gasoline, and other “entities.” However, it seems that Petraglia is trying to critique the social constructionist position with a PlatoniclKantian biased vocabulary. In citing evidence against social constructionists on this point, Petraglia argues that these theorists “conflate” epistemological and ontological issues. Petraglia concludes this section by arguing, “Lack of a clear distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘knowledge’ is what many writers have discerned as social construction’s most fundamental error” (42).

Social constructionists, including Rorty, are not concerned with abso­lute distinctions of “reality.” Pragmatists like Rorty do not agree that there is a philosophical distinction to make between “reality” and “knowledge.” For instance, Rorty explains that, within the “reality” that Petraglia distin­guishes, there exists both “texts” and “lumps,” or “things made and things found” (Objectivity 84). Neither entity has metaphysical significance, and both may be comprised of similar, if not identical, physical properties. What distinguishes texts from lumps is not their inherent nature or approximation to truth, but their classificatory status as prescribed by human social contin­gencies. Rorty explains, “Pragmatism treats every such division of the world into ‘subject matter’ as an experiment, designed to see if we can get what we want at a certain historical moment by using a certain language” (91). According to social constructionists like Rorty, there are no texts in and of themselves. Social models or morals are not dependent or sanctioned by anything other then the demands of human contingency. In other words, texts are contingent upon historical, temporal, and social processes. Texts represent a pragmatic history, and the meaning of those texts cannot be separated from that history.

Unlike Rorty, Petraglia imposes a philosophical distinction between texts and lumps. This distinction is evident in his statement, “The status of the knower to the known is indeterminate if one takes literally the Ifirstj premise” (42). To the extent that social constructionists assume Rorty’s position between “texts” and “lumps,” the status between the knower and the known can never be indeterminate (see Objectivity 78-92). As lumps become texts, that is, as they become known, they assume a position in a person’s “web” of beliefs and relationships. Rorty gives an example of this when he explains how “[fjossils are constituted as fossils by a web of relationships to other fossils and to the speech of the paleontologists who describe these relationships” (Consequences 199).

With Petraglia’s second premise, he characterizes social constructionism as believing that “All reality is arrived at by consensus” (42). He suggests that constructionists engage in a “denial of objective reality” (42). Petraglia writes that while “thoughtful constructionists do not deny that material reality ‘exists,”’ they fail to engage “the issue of representation versus materialism as philosophers of science routinely must” (43). For social constructionists, however, such realist-based concepts as “rationality,” “truth,” or “justice” do not represent anything other than social practices and have no inherent philosophical importance. Consequently, Petraglia’s second premise is an unfair requirement for social constructionists like Rorty, because representationalism is precisely the idea that social constructionists do not find useful to discuss.

According to Rorty, representationalism is a tool that, having lost its usefulness, ought to be discarded because “There is no such thing as an intrinsically privileged context” (Objectivity 96). In this light, the social constructionist practice of disengaging from the representational/material binary is not a weakness of its position, but a strength. Petraglia’s second premise is a misleading reduction of the social constructionists’ critique of representationalism. Social constructionists argue, as Rorty does, that “we can eliminate epistemological problems by eliminating the assumption that justification must repose on something other than social practices and human needs” (Consequences 82).

Petraglia’s last critique of his second premise is specific to Rorty. Petraglia writes that philosophers like Rorty hold “a belief in the significance of the interpretative act and the assumption that knowledge is not only constructed, but inevitably misconstructed insofar as language is rooted in idiosyncratic and unsystematic interpretation even as it is communalized” (44). According to Petraglia’s reading of Rorty, competing interpretations of reality may lead to misinterpretations based on the contingency of lan­guage. In this instance, Petraglia’s reading of Rorty is not supported by evidence found in Rorty’s text. Rorty cannot be read as supporting the idea that people can “misconstruct” their contingent selves or a social environ­ment.

For Rorty, and other social constructionists, there is no language-independent truth about “reality” to get right or wrong, nothing foundation­alto inadequately interpret. Rorty explains, “I do not think that there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language” (Contingency 173). The issue, for social constructionists like Rorty, is of a better orworse creation of a social communitywith the criterion being: “What works.” For example, Adolf Hitler did not “misconstruct” Germany’s notions of truth; he told a “bad story.” Hitler’s National-Socialism is a bad story because, in comparison to the other stories told at the same time, it did not meet the demands of human solidarity as well as it could have.

The pragmatist distinction between productive and less productive “stories” helps to clarify the social constructionists’ position on relativism. In short, social constructionists such as Rorty are not relativists in the ordinary philosophical sense of the word. In order to be a relativist, an individual has to belong to a particular language community or believe in a specific paradigm wherein realist notions of truth are important. In its technical sense, relativism can only exist in an antithetical relationship to absolutism or realism. Realists, for example, postulate ahistorical forces in which they ground their interpretations of the world. For these realists, relativists are those who deny these ahistorical factors. Social construction­ists, however, do not belong to this language community, and they do not try to ground their interpretations in anything outside of human contingency.

While within the language community of the realist, social construction­isIs may be considered relativists, such a label does not retain significance outside of that language community. Because Rorty and like-minded theo­rists are not looking for any extra-human “hook” on which to arrange the social world, questions of relativism and absolutism become unimportant. Rather, these theorists emphasize that human beings must cultivate human solidarity and use persuasion, rather than force, to achieve their ends. Questions and measurements of absolute truth are simply uninteresting and tangential to these theorists’ concerns. As Rorty explains, “Pragmatists say that the traditional notion that ‘truth is correspondence to reality’ is an uncashable and outworn metaphor” (Objectivity 79).

The difference between the relativist and the pragmatist can be illustrat­ed by Rorty’s example of the Nazi and the ironist (Objectivity). Within the Nazi community, there existed the belief that the “Aryan” was superior to the non-Aryan due to certain realist beliefs about the nature of people. These beliefs, however, were relative to their community and existed regardless of the beliefs of all other human communities. The Nazis were relativists in that they arbitrarily defined their own reality and invented their own history. Ironists, on the other hand, are people who say, “We are good because, by persuasion rather than force, we shall eventually convince everybody that we are” (Objectivity 214). Notice that the pragmatist does not attempt to slice the world in a particular way and then confuse that selection or interpretation for the totality of all experience, as the Nazis did. Therefore, in recognizing this difference between representationalism and pragmatism or, in Rorty’s terms, the difference between bad and good stories, the question of relativism becomes moot. Once the assumption that philosophical essences represent important distinctions is abandoned, it is easy to understand that, given the social practices of today, the story Hitler told of racial hierarchies is an example of an unuseful symbolic structure rather than an “inherent” misuse of symbols.

Petraglia’s third premise states that “Consensus/Knowledge is ‘discov­ered’ solely through public discourse (rhetoric)” (45). As in his earlier premises, Petraglia’s Enlightenment vocabulary is problematizing his por­trayal of social constructionism. Social constructionists work to avoid the biases inherent in Enlightenment vocabulary. In particular, the word “discovered” is troublesome. For anti-realists, nothing can be discovered because all knowledge is constituted primarily through vocabulary. Truth, for Rorty, “is just the nominalizaton of an approbative adjective” (“Femi­nism” 250).

More important, however, are the challenges to social constructionism that Petraglia draws from theorists such as Richard B. Gregg, Linda Rower, and John R. Hayes. Based on the work of these three theorists, Petraglia argues that “personal knowledge” is just as important as “social knowledge”; he writes that social constructionists privilege the epistemic function of social knowledge over, and at the expense of, personal knowledge. This “neglect,” he writes, obscures the notion that “knowledge is not always public . . . “ (47). In addition, he argues that knowledge is not always discursive. He concludes, “If constructionists concede that ~the above two] abilities count as knowledge, it cannot follow that all knowledge is socially constructed” (47).

Petraglia’s two arguments can easily be refuted from the position of the social constructionist. First, while social constructionists like Rorty make a distinction between private and public selves, they do not differentiate between personal and social knowledge, as all personal knowledge is socially derived. Social constructionists do not deny that individuals have experi­ence; they only warn that experience is mediated through a web of beliefs about the world. For instance, as infants burn their hands on hot stoves, that pain, as experience, becomes personal knowledge, but in only a limited sense. Experience of pain is not knowledge of pain until that experience becomes contextualized in the larger social community. “Pain” only exists conceptu­ally because it refers to some meaningful construct that human beings have created to operationalize a physiological condition. However, while physi­ological conditions exist, they maybe interpreted differently by different people. Human beings, for example, can, and have, learned to interpret the physiological condition of a medical incision as something other than “pain” in the sense that most people recognize “pain.” This point is illustrated by patients who undergo major surgery without the aid of an anesthetic or by Eastern yogis who undergo self-immolation as part of religious rites.

On the second point, social constructionists do not privilege discourse per se as the medium by which knowledge is created. Rather, knowledge derives from symbolic mediation. They recognize, however, that this can be nonlinguistic and perceptual rather than discursive. For instance, animals have perception, but the human capacity for constructing symbol systems enables perception to become experience and experience to become knowl­edge. Our experiences only have meaning because of our language, even if they are nonlinguistic, as illustrated by the example of a burned child. Even emotions can be better described as a contingent interpretation to stimuli based on cultural scripts than as a response to external stimuli. In response to Petraglia’s question, “What counts as knowledge?” the social construc­tionist would answer, “Whatever can be symbolically mediated.” Since this symbolicity comes from within the human, it follows that knowledge is nothing more than a relationship of beliefs.

In his final premise, Petraglia argues that, for the social constructionist, “Reality changes as consensus/knowledge changes” (50). Petraglia might be more accurate to write that knowledge changes as human contingencies change. Once again, it is not useful for Petraglia to introduce Enlightenment vocabulary into the social constructionists’ conversation; such an introduc­lion would interfere with the pragmatist’s distinction between two compet­ing and incompatible paradigms. More specifically, Petraglia writes that social constructionists cannot “explain how a minority’s knowledge can exist in the face of consensus, much less alter that knowledge” (50). He raises the question of how "inter—communal knowledge negotiates new consensus" (50). He asks, “From where do individuals derive unconventional ideas, and how can the expression of this ‘abnormal’ discourse be tolerated?” (50).

My response to Petraglia’s fourth premise is twofold. First, the issues surrounding the social constructionists’ critique of realism involve large social communities that have developed over significant amounts of time. Inter-communal knowledge interacts within the contingent world and its conditions; it does not compete with them, as Petraglia seems to suggest. Petraglia portrays social constructionism in almost combative terms, terms that portray epistemic rhetoric as a win/lose situation rather than a co-active strategy between majority and minority knowledge paradigms. However, from the point of view of social constructionism, the minority position does not need to be justified by the majority’s consensus, only tolerated.

Petraglia’s portrayal of social constructionism is one where the majority defeats the minority perspective under the principle of greater numbers. This view is divergent from the pragmatist position which does not seek a majority’s decree as an end in itself, but searches for a social mediation that considers the perspective of the marginalized or the minority position. Rorty argues that nothing good can come from any society that diminishes “our ability to leave people alone, to let them try out their private versions of perfection in peace” (Objectivity 194). Regardless of their status in the social, economical, or cultural power structure, all people should be treated equally with regard to their individual lives. In order for this to happen, minority views need to be particularly cultivated so that solidarity can be extended to them. In other words, pragmatists want to insure that people remain free to design their own vocabularies and to live by those standards no matter how many people disagree with them, as long as these people do not interfere with the ability of others to create their own private selves.

My second response to Petraglia’s fourth premise involves Rorty’s distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse. In his article, Petraglia does not recognize Rorty’s distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse, nor does he consider that abnormal discourse can be “tolerated” within the social constructionists’ consensus community (see Philosophy). More specifically, Petraglia challenges the social construction­ists to illustrate “how competing communities arrive at all-important con­sensus” (50). If they cannot accomplish this, he argues, social construction­ists should “acknowledge that consensus-building may not always be a progressive, ‘liberating’ process... “ (50). Instead, he reasons, “it could involve coercion instead” (50).

A key to understanding Petraglia’s legitimate concern involves his equation of “abnormal” discourse with irrational discourse. From a realist perspective, abnormal discourse is irrational because it represents a depar­ture from the grounding, essential principle of “normal” discourse. Thus, to engage in abnormal discourse is, for Petraglia, tantamount to circumnavigat­ing rational discourse by engaging in nonessential matters. This circumnav­igation of rational discourse is particularly problematic where education is concerned. As Petraglia explains, “[E]ducators have to assume they have some more or less stable knowledge worth imparting to their students...(45). From a social constructionist perceptive, however, “rationality” is not an absolutely privileged term and represents realist standards that social constructionists do not find practical to adopt. For them, there is no such thing as permanently “stable knowledge”; there is only the history of compet­ing interpretations. Rorty explains that there is “no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions” (Consequences xlii).

As social constructionists like Rorty explain, what matters most, in terms of human social development within the changing contingencies of history, are the instances of “abnormal” discourse from thinkers and poets who freed canonized interpretations of “reality” from being mistaken for foundational truths or essences. The point of the social constructionists’ argument is that abnormal discourse calls into question the assumptions of normal discourse which tends to perpetuate realist assumptions. Far from being tolerated, abnormal discourse is cultivated by social constructionists, as this discourse offers the vantage point from which the “majority” can learn to recognize the contingent nature of their beliefs and perhaps redefine those beliefs. According to Rorty, abnormal discourse takes “us Out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings”(Philosophy 360).

In the preceding paragraphs, I have critiqued each of Petraglia’s four premises that he argues characterize the basic tenets of social constructionism. I have shown how each, in turn, slightly, but significantly, misrepresents the social constructionist argument. While Petraglia’s article needs to be more sensitive to the distinctions between realists and anti-realists, his basic critique is valuable. He points out the need for less “insularity” among social constructionists in composition studies. Accordingly, he has “interrupted the conversation” among these theorists in order to remind them that they should not “side-step” the difficulties of their position by identi1~’ing their theory “as a vehicle for social, political, or pedagogical values” (52). The danger, he warns, is that “a refraining of the theory becomes [unnecessarilyj associated with a repudiation of those values” (52).

Petraglia is correct in asserting that social constructionists in composi­tion studies can benefit from, and be more open to, research being done in departments of speech and social psychology. The greater the participation by theorists in the social constructionist dialogue, the better that conversa­tion will be. Petraglia correctly argues that composition theorists need to be more responsive to work being done in different disciplines. However, it is more difficult to accept his arguments that social constructionists should avoid the social, political, or pedagogical realm. Rorty’s agenda, for instance, is political and social. Moreover, once realist and foundationalist arguments are no longer assumed, once humans stop trying to ground their experience in some essence outside of themselves, it will become evident that knowledge is socially and politically constituted.

In short, the social constructionist argues that there is no objective body of knowledge with which a theory of rhetoric can approach or justify itself. Consequently, as the distinction between theory and practice is reduced, the influence of political and social factors on rhetorically constructed social communities will be made more evident. The question of scholarship hinges not on the problems associated with bringing theory and practice closer together, but on broadening the dialogue among participants within a discourse community, which is what Petraglia is trying to accomplish. At the very least, to the extent that he has invited this response, he has succeeded.