JAC Volume 4

American colleges and universities are currently being influenced by a movement broadly referred to as “writing across the curriculum.” Its proponents investigate the close relationship between writing and thinking, and emphasize the idea that in all disciplines, writing can contribute significantly to learning by aiding memory, promoting synthesis of ideas, and improving reading ability. Important to this movement is the view that the act of writing allows all of us, teachers and students alike, not only to communicate ideas to others, but also to discover and create ideas in the first place.

The contemporary writing across the curriculum movement parallels an intellectual development in various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, one that encourages an exchange of lines of inquiry that have been traditionally restricted to specific fields. Writing, in fact, not only parallels but also promotes interdisciplinary investigations when it is integrated with principal lines of inquiry. If writing is a mode of thinking, then the use of writing to explore basic approaches to inquiry in the human sciences should simultaneously develop the types of thinking characteristic of the disciplines studied.

To investigate the connections between writing and lines of inquiry across disciplines, we propose in this essay a continuum of lines of inquiry applicable to many of the human sciences. We begin by considering briefly the present status of disciplines in the human sciences, with a view toward suggesting the need for a scheme that goes beneath the surface of institutionalized boundaries to get at fundamental modes of thinking about human action. Next, we describe our continuum, illustrating its three lines of inquiry by discussing the approaches of three major social thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. Finally, we suggest briefly how this continuum might be used by teachers, researchers, and students as an aid to invention and as a method of analysis.’¹

Shifts in Disciplinary Boundaries

The trend toward shared lines of inquiry in various human sciences—history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and rhetoric, to name but a few—is of course controversial, but many scholars welcome such a shift. Literary studies and history provide examples that suggest a need for varied lines of inquiry. According to Edward Mendelson, current literary biographies tend to treat the author as a self-contained unit of inner psychological relations, much as the New Criticism directed attention to the autonomous text. Instead, Mendelson suggests, biographers should broaden their inquiry to include external matters such as the effects of economic conditions on publication, and social concerns such as relations between writer and audience and the relation of style to social history: “Recent biography has taken its theory of human nature from Freud; the results suggest that biographers ought to start looking elsewhere. The logical place to turn is not Marx as much as Weber, if the complex and changing role of the author is at last to be recognized (or recognized again) as a matter of equal or greater interest to a biographer than his subject’s childhood neurosis."²

History, too, may err if it fails to expand its avenues of inquiry. French historian Fernand Braudel argues that history cannot be adequate if it concentrates too heavily on the individual life or event. Methods traditionally associated with sociology, a discipline that developed by splitting off from history, can help historians to consider the collective life of society and the structures that influence individuals.³ Using diverse methods helps to eliminate errors or biases that may be endemic to one particular type of inquiry.

Historians have in fact acknowledged the advantages of diverse lines of inquiry. In 1969 Richard Hofstadter maintained that “There is no longer, if there was before, a single orientation underlying American historiography.”⁴ Some historians continue to emphasize the literary model of history, or what Braudel calls l’histoire événementielle, which concentrates on specific individuals and events. But historical inquiry has also been influenced by psychoanalytic methods, by collective biographical studies, and by quantitative analysis. Historians Frank Manuel and Charles Tilly have both studied the French working classes, using some of the same sources but different methods. Manuel dramatizes the personalities of individual French strikers and considers them in relation to nineteenth century values; Tilly does a computer analysis of the changing character of five thousand political disturbances involving collective violence in France from 1830 to 1960. Welcoming the diversity of these approaches, Manuel has asked: “Why cannot different people form different configurations?”⁵ Ideally, each method will explore different aspects of the subject under investigation, and the greatest understanding will be attained by a comprehensive view involving multiple perspectives.

In considering interdisciplinary lines of inquiry as they apply to writing across the curriculum, one need not be so extreme as to say that these disciplines are identical, or that they should merge. There are distinct differences, and these are certainly worth investigating, not only in research methodologies and patterns of thought and inquiry, but also in the written discourse that is integrally connected with research and inquiry. The study of writing across the curriculum may take either of two approaches. On the one hand, one may concentrate on the distinct methods of invention, judgment, and presentations unique to each discipline. This approach emphasizes the different forms and functions of writing within different disciplines. In the field of composition, for example, Lee Odell and others have been doing careful descriptive work to examine the writing in the separate disciplines and to analyze the conceptual demands that writing makes on student and professional writers, in academia and in the work place.⁶ An alternative approach analyzes writing and thinking to investigate strategies or methods that are common to numerous disciplines. The approach would be aided by theoretical structures that allow one to concentrate on what various disciplines have in common.

We are attempting to analyze writing and thinking across the curriculum from the latter perspective, with a view toward synthesis, by forming a theoretical continuum that may be used to investigate the many problems and questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. By applying this continuum to the study of social phenomena in the human sciences, we intend to explore this question: Despite differences in the content of various disciplines, are there lines of inquiry that are common among them?

This is a question one hears these days in various forums. But the fact that scholars in many fields are now calling for closer connections between disciplines by no means guarantees their success. Academicians have, after all, been calling for a synthesis for some time. In 1802 the philosopher Friedrich Schelling delivered a series of lectures, On University Studies, parts of which could be read without alteration on our campuses today:

Why, in the 182 years since Schelling called for a coming together of disciplines, has this failed to occur? Perhaps in part because we lack the theoretical perspectives that would help us to investigate the integration of lines of inquiry central to the disciplines.

The lack of convergence may stem from the absence of a theoretical framework that is at once universal, neutral, and flexible. A universal framework would apply potentially to all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. A neutral framework (or, since complete neutrality is no doubt impossible, at least a relatively unbiased one) would not presuppose or favor certain content. It would not, for example, bias an investigation in the way that Marxist doctrine does when it theorizes that history consists of a dialectical struggle between classes over ownership of the means of production, and then is quite naturally inclined to favor evidence of class struggles that supports its theory. Finally, the theoretical framework should, like Aristotle’s common topoi, be flexible in that it should be broad enough to include many disciplines, and at the same time capable of application within separate fields to permit specific goals to be realized.

The most useful theories will likely be ones that make “middle-level” assertions: assertions that are neither as general as the provocative but unsatisfying statement that “Writing is thinking,” nor as strictly operational as ‘Write for five minutes today at the start of history class to think about the topic to be discussed today.” Rather, we need something in between, to refine and amplify the generalization about writing as thinking in a way that easily informs practice without becoming too limited or trivial in the process.⁸

The search for a theoretical framework that is at once universal, neutral, and flexible has its precedents, both classical and modern. We see systems composed of patterns of discourse used for invention and analysis in the topoi of Aristotle, in the loci of Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and in the sources of argument classified by Richard Weaver.⁹ Such systems can be applied to diverse fields. They do not favor the content of one field over another. And they are flexible, suited for generalizations based on specific data or specific examples of discourse. Like these systems that have preceded it, the con­tinuum we suggest here applies to diverse topics and fields, and at the same time, permits specific principles in particular fields to be realized concretely, without favoring certain content. This continuum may be used as a heuristic for invention and as a framework for the critical analysis of research projects or dis­course. We do not claim to replace any of these existing schemes, nor do we believe that the one we present here is exhaustive. It does provide a way to put writers and researchers in touch with fundamental lines of inquiry that are common to the human sciences. This continuum may be used to integrate writing with the thinking and learning that are central to the various disciplines.

Exploration of diverse lines of inquiry is especially impor­tant in an academic world where disciplinary boundaries are, and perhaps should be, unstable. We should, Schelling says, resist the temptation to twist a phenomenon “so as to be explic­able, at all costs, upon principles that we have once and for all resolved not to go beyond . . ."; instead, he argues, our question should be "To what point must we enlarge our thought so that it shall be in proportion to the phenomenon. . . ?"¹⁰ In proposing here a systematic view of key lines of inquiry, we hope to promote an increasing awareness of the rhetorical and inventional strategies that various disciplines have, or could have, in common.

A Continuum for the Study of Social Behavior in the Humanities and Social Sciences

In this section we describe a theoretical continuum that can assist writers concerned with any of the human sciences, such as anthropology, communication, economics, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Using Max Weber’s broad definition of the term “social” to refer to action that “takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course,”¹¹ we discuss three dominant approaches to the study of human social behavior. Together they provide a structure that may serve to aid invention and analysis of discourse. This structure is intended to be a con­tinuum and not a set of categories; it is possible that more than one perspective may be used in an investigation. It would per­haps be ideal if we were to think of this not as an interdiscipli­nary but rather a transdisciplinary enterprise—one that defines its concerns as general social problems or issues and does not refer at all to conventional disciplines. But an interdisciplinary model will at present be radical enough for many to accept, and is likely a necessary evolutionary stage. So we present this continuum as a structure that allows one to cross traditional dis­ciplinary boundaries, and when we refer to examples from fields such as history, music, and political science, we do so to make the point that there are indeed commonalities among them.

Where does one begin when writing about social be­havior? Are there structures or methods that can guide one’s thought, help one to invent, and organize one’s presentation? To look at social behavior, a writer may choose to focus on the actions of a real person; or a writer may construct an ideal type and concentrate on the behavior of this theoretical configura­tion; or finally, a writer may look to the behavior of social collec­tives, autonomous entities brought into existence by the inter­actions of many individuals. The particular perspective that the writer chooses will guide him or her during analysis and composition.

To make these three perspectives along the continuum more concrete, we will associate each view with a prominent social theorist whose work represents the respective line of inquiry. Sigmund Freud attempted to reveal the secrets of social behavior by a detailed examination of individual human con­sciousness. Max Weber believed that the most productive path to the understanding of social behavior involves the creation of ideal type individuals. Emile Durkheim claimed that the inter­action of individuals gives rise to a supra-individual entity, the social collective, that is itself a primary influence on the ways individuals act, and that is, therefore, worthy of study. While these theorists have their homes in specific disciplines—psychol­ogy and sociology—we are suggesting that their views can be generalized into a prescriptive structure for writing in the hu­man sciences.

Sigmund Freud: The Individual as a Source of Social Knowledge

One way to acquire social knowledge—knowledge about social behavior and society as a whole—is to write about a real person. The goal is not to discover idiosyncratic details about the person but to arrive at a structure evidenced in the individ­ual and at the same time common to all members of the group. Here we have synecdoche: the part stands for the whole, in that the individual is a case study, a means for discovering truths about the entire social group. Fundamental to this view is the assumption that the regular patterns we see in social behavior are caused by innate structures contained within each of the individuals constituting the group.¹² To explain social behavior, the researcher/writer will focus on an individual actor, press beyond all the idiosyncratic traits, and arrive at the intrinsic structure that causes the individual’s behavior. That structure or mechanism, assumed to exist in all social beings, is seen as causing their behavior as well. Regular patterns of behavior in the group as a whole are thus attributed to a common structure in each of its parts.

The social thinker perhaps best known for this individual­istic approach is Sigmund Freud. Much of Freud’s work is based on case studies of real people, but these particular individuals are not his ultimate interest. For example, in Freud’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the emphasis is on the relationships be­tween artistic talent, childhood sexual experience, and fantasy. Leonardo is used as a case that exemplifies this relationship.¹³ Ultimately Freud is attempting to locate inner structures that are themselves generating the observed behavior. It is Freud’s con­viction that truths about human beings in general are best learned by studying individuals in particular.

What Freud learns from his study of individuals about the development and operation of the human psyche, he applies also to the broader context of culture. The starting point for this investigation, however, is the individual. Consider, for instance, Freud’s question about the origin of aggression, which he discusses in Civilization and Its Discontents: "What means does civilization employ in order to inhibit the aggressiveness which opposes it, to make it harmless, to get rid of it perhaps?” Answering his own question. Freud says, “This we can study in the history of the development of the individual. What happens in him to render his desire for aggression innocuous?”¹⁴

When using an approach similar to Freud’s, a writer will investigate social behavior by describing a single actor. Critical to the success of this approach is the writer’s ability to avoid the idiosyncratic and to focus on the structure or mechanism that causes the behavior. If we start by observing the individual’s behavior and trace it backward, at what source do we ultimately arrive? This is precisely Freud’s method in his investigation of the elements constituting the human psyche, the id, ego, and super-ego.¹⁵ By examining the behavior of individuals, Freud derived this inner structure; by noting shared aspects of the be­havior among all people, Freud generalized the presence of the structure to all social beings.¹⁶

We have chosen Freud because he is a particularly clear representative of this line of inquiry. Others, however, could have been chosen. Jeremy Benthem’s utilitarian ethic, Adam Smith’s free enterprise economics, Husserl’s phenomenology, Kant’s critical philosophy, and case studies done in many fields (e. g., in composition, Janet Emig’s detailed studies of individual writers) are examples based upon a similar assumption. In each case, a structure or mechanism located within the individual is said to be responsible for behavior that we recognize to be common to other social beings.

What is it, then, that the writer must do when using this perspective? Four steps are particularly important. First, the writer must observe and describe key elements of the social be­havior exhibited by a particular individual: what it looks like or sounds like; how it moves or functions; of what parts it is com­posed. Second, the writer must locate a structure within the person that appears to be responsible for this observed behavior. Third, the writer will argue that the social behavior exhibited by this person is similar to behavior engaged in by an entire social group. Finally, the writer contends that this similarity of be­havior is best explained by the presence of the same general structure within each member of the social group.

Max Weber: Creating Ideal Types to Explain Social Behavior

In inquiring and writing about social behavior, one need not confine the analysis to an individual. Instead the writer might choose to observe many individual cases, constructing from them an “ideal type” that is a composite of the traits most characteristic of the action being observed. The ideal type is not a mean or an average, but more like a mode in that it represents the features most typically seen. Most individuals in a group under study have some of the qualities seen in the ideal type, but no single person or instance has all of them. Once this ab­stract configuration is constructed, it is assumed to act in a way that is determined by the interaction of the traits and motiva­tions that have been built into it.¹⁷ The ideal type line of inquiry offers certain advantages. It allows one to develop a full view of a phenomenon without being restricted to what is observable in any one individual or instance just because that happens to be what is available to the investigator. Furthermore, by cutting through diverse features and focusing on those that are most characteristic, the ideal type may give a particularly clear picture of social behavior.  Social theorists frequently use ideal types. Economists have constructed an economic man with perfect knowledge of market prices and access to multiple buyers and sellers, who always attempts to maximize profits and minimize costs, and who values each additional dollar a little less than the one immediately before. Psychologists make profiles of criminals, such as that of the political terrorist, who is more committed to ideology than to personal safety, who believes innocent people may have to die to ameliorate social wrongs, who prefers wide­spread negative publicity to obscurity, and who sees himself or herself as oppressed by those who possess the legitimate sources of power. Other examples of ideal types include descriptions of diseases in medical textbooks, descriptions of birds in Audubon identification guides, and the popular satirical posters of a "nurd” or a "preppie." In each case the ideal type is composed of those traits that are most characteristic of the group under con­sideration.

The ideal type methodology is closely associated with the work of Max Weber. In his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber investigates the subjective motives that cause the ideal type Protestant, especially the Calvinist, to engage in relentless economic activity.¹⁸ Economy and Society describes ideal type social organizations founded on different kinds of authority: patrimonial, bureaucratic, and charismatic.¹⁹ Whereas Freud could make numerous discoveries based on the investigation of a single person—Leonardo da Vinci, for example—Weber, by contrast, would find any single individual too unique, too idiosyncratic to be the basis for social theory. For Freud, the whole is in some sense contained within each individual part, while for Weber, the whole is never contained within a single part. The task of the social theorist, Weber claims, is to observe numerous individual cases, abstracting the most typical characteristics. Consequently, the ideal type never really exists in reality; it is instead a “pure” theoretical configura­tion based on many “impure” specific cases.

Cicero’s ideal orator—one well-read in general and familiar with law and history in particular, who keeps in mind the needs of the audience and chooses a style appropriate to the subject matter—is an ideal type. Although Demosthenes came close to achieving Cicero’s ideal, Cicero states clearly the idea that the ideal type cannot actually exist in a real person: “It is not the eloquent person whom I seek,” he says, “nor anything sub­ject to death or decay, but that absolute quality, the possession of which makes a man eloquent.”²⁰

Other ideal type configurations include Plato’s recommen­dations for the perfect city-state in the Republic, Cohen’s portray­al of delinquent boys, Locke’s formulation of the social contract theory, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of the univer­sal audience, and Habermas’s ideal speech situation. In all cases, knowledge about social behavior is embodied in an abstract construct that cannot be said to exist in any specific instance. While some of the ideal types mentioned here have connota­tions of being admirable and valued, representing something one would aspire to in reality, the meaning of “ideal” here need not have that positive sense. According to Weber, “There are ideal types of brothels as well as religions.”²¹ The abstract construct is ideal in that it is a perfectly assembled composite of the most distinctive characteristics.

When a writer chooses the ideal type as a line of inquiry and a guide to invention, he or she must do several things. First, the writer will examine many specific instances of the social behavior that is to be explained; second, the writer must construct an ideal type composed of the most typical characteris­tics of the behavior; and third, the writer must argue that the features and actions highlighted in the ideal type give a particu­larly clear and pure picture of the much more diverse elements that appear in the full range of specific individual cases.

Emile Durkheim: Social Collectives as the Source of Social Knowledge

Instead of focusing on a real individual or an ideal type, the writer may choose to explain social behavior by analyzing the causal forces that come from a social collective. This line of inquiry is based on the assumption that the primary causes of social behavior originate not within the individual actor, but within the society which is itself a real, supra-individual entity emerging from the interactions of many individuals. ²²

In this view, when individuals come together, orienting their behavior toward one another and harmonizing their actions, they inadvertently give rise to a phenomenon larger than themselves, namely society. The social collective may have some of the characteristics of its members, or it may have none. As a whole, the social collective is more than the sum of its parts; it is a qualitatively different substance just as what we call “life” is thought to be more than the sum of its chemical elements interacting. Society comes from the interactions of individuals and simultaneously acts on these individuals with a force that channels their behavior in certain directions.

This explanation of social behavior has been clearly for­mulated in the writings of Emile Durkheim.²³ For Durkheim, the most important influence on social behavior comes from the society to which individuals belong. A social explanation, for Durkheim, does not concentrate on individually oriented elements such as motives, intentions, desires, emotions, or psychological states; it is instead concerned with the qualities or characteristics of the over-arching society.

Society, as Durkheim sees it, is a real yet immaterial entity that imposes specific forces on the members that constitute it. In Suicide, for instance, Durkheim claims that the key variable in explaining suicide rates is the manner and extent to which individuals are attached to their society. Individuals bound too closely to their society are susceptible to “altruistic suicide,” as evidenced in the case of a soldier who, upon order, charges the well-defended hill to a certain death. Individuals insufficiently attached to their society are in danger of “egoistic suicide,” which occurs, for example, in the case of an artist in complete isolation from family and friends who takes her own life. Finally, Durkheim discusses “anomic suicide,” or death result­ing from a lack of moral or disciplinary regulation. The contemporary rock star surrounded by an abundance of pleasures, who is subsequently driven to self-destruction because of the lack of ethical limits or structure, is a victim of anomic suicide. Durkheim attempts to show that suicide rates cannot be explained solely by reference to personal or psychological factors; a key element is the nature of one’s attachment to a larger social collective.²⁴

The idea that parts can combine creating a whole with dis­tinct characteristics of its own, capable of influencing its parts, is not unique to Durkheim. Other examples illustrating the regulative force that a collective exerts over its members include Le Bon’s study of crowd psychology, Marx’s notion of historical materialism, Janis’s social-psychological experiments concerning “group think,” Hegel’s treatment of the progressive realiza­tion of spirit, and T. S. Eliot’s notion of a “collective mind”—the mind of Europe, the mind of a poet’s own country—carrying the traditions of past writers and influencing living poets. In each case, individuals interact and create a collective with traits of its own that in turn influences social behavior.

A writer who attempts a collectivist explanation of social behavior in any discipline must first define the recurring pattern of social behavior that is to be explained. Second, the writer should describe the characteristics of the social collective: Does the collective emanate a powerfully dominant force, or is its influence more subtle? Does the collective permit dissent or rebellion? Does it encourage or discourage individuality? Is it constantly changing, or is its nature relatively fixed? Is its in­fluence stronger in some areas—e. g., political, productive, ethical—than in others? The answers to these and other ques­tions could be relevant to a description of the social collective. Finally, the writer should argue convincingly that the collective force makes a difference; that it has an effect; that it explains the behavior of a group of people in a way that cannot be adequately accounted for by merely looking at their characteristics as individuals. Different kinds of collectives—Catholics in contrast to Protestants, or upper middle class as opposed to working class—may be shown to cause different patterns of social action in individuals, and if that is the case, it helps to prove the efficacy of the collectivist explanation.

Conclusion: Uses of a Theoretical Continuum for Interdisciplinary Study

We are suggesting that the continuum presented here can serve as a structure to guide invention and analysis when it is applied to discourse or to research areas in the humanities and social sciences. Rhetors, researchers, and theorists can frequent­ly be located at or between the positions we have described here, and their location on this continuum will reveal a great deal about their assumptions about inquiry and their relationships to others. The continuum may reveal commonalities previously unnoticed, as theorists in different disciplines, working toward different goals, are found to be united by the same fundamental assumptions about the study of human beings.

As classroom teachers applying this continuum to prac­tice, we might teach it to beginning researchers and ask them to consider the appropriateness of one perspective compared with another pertaining to a particular research problem. Such com­parisons are in fact often a part of the work of academic research­ers. In literary theory, for example, Louise Rosenblatt’s research to develop her transactional approach to criticism led her to contrast certain lines of inquiry. Rosenblatt claims that her field has traditionally viewed the reader as a passive, invisible recipient, often “referred to under such collective rubrics as ‘the audience’ or ‘the reading public’":

Viewing Rosenblatt’s method according to the continuum pre­sented in this essay, we might say that she attempts to shift a research paradigm that has been dominated by either collective or ideal type approaches toward a new concentration on the study of individual readers and their responses to literature.

Studying and practicing the three lines of inquiry pre­sented here may help beginning researchers to identify the methods central to their own investigation and to explore alter­nate ways of inquiring. Beginning researchers should be en­couraged to learn various lines of inquiry, since it is largely by comparing one with another that they will discover the strengths and weaknesses of each. They may see that it is not necessary to restrict inquiry to one method alone just because it happens to be the only one they know, or the one they conven­tionally use in a given discipline. Applying the continuum to the field of composition research, one might choose to investi­gate the individual writer through case studies or by using personal testimony about the composing process; or one might construct an ideal-typical model of the “average” writer’s composing process; or one might conduct a study surveying writers in an organization to examine the influence of hierarchi­cal structure in the group on the stylistic choices made by writers. This continuum, then, may be used by researchers to formulate lines of inquiry or to analyze the perspectives of other researchers and scholars.

The continuum also serves as a heuristic to aid writers and speakers in invention. If the topic of study in a course is, for example, political language as reflected in speeches of the twen­tieth century, one can use the continuum as a guideline to sug­gest three different approaches: (1) What does an individual speaker or speech tell us about the use of political language? (2) What sort of “ideal type” speech might one construct that shows chief characteristics of the language of a twentieth century politi­cal speech? (3) If one compares a certain characteristic of the language from a series of speeches with the voting patterns emerging over that period, what does one learn? A student of eighteenth century music history might ask the following: (1) How did Mozart go about composing his works? (2) Consider­ing various eighteenth century composers, what ideal type figure might one construct to show the circumstances of the European composer? (3) How did social entities such as class structure and social status affect the work of eighteenth century European composers? A teacher might deliberately pose such questions for discussion or for written assignments to encour­age students to experiment with a variety of approaches. In this way students use writing to aid thinking in a matter that is clear­ly central to the work of the discipline.

Teachers who try to apply a continuum such as this to help students invent may want to know even more concretely how this theory can be put into practice. Just what do we tell students about how to describe elements of a political speech, or how to decide which elements are essential for creating an ideal type? Obviously these matters are influenced by such things as the perceiver’s pre-dispositions and purposes, and the con­straints exerted by situations and audiences. So even after teachers advise writers to inquire and invent with one or more of these perspectives in mind, there is still much work to be done to translate the broadly stated goal into specific practices. This is certainly an important concern for teachers and writers, but it is unfortunately not something we can resolve in this essay, which is intended to indicate general directions rather than to make detailed pedagogical suggestions. Our concern here, to borrow from Aristotle, is with general rather than specific topoi.

To some, extent, however, teachers and students can look to existing heuristics for help in figuring out ways to look at an individual’s behavior, or to single out characteristics for an ideal type, or to analyze the influence of a social collective. For instance, Jacqueline Berke’s “Twenty Questions for the Writer” and Richard L. Larson’s “A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Inven­tion" provide questions that are applicable to human problems and that may help to direct a writer’s invention.²⁶ At any rate, it may be an especially useful part of a course’s work for teachers and students in any field to collaborate to invent questions that will guide the development of their investigations.

Moving to more general concerns, we believe that a continuum such as this gives scholars and researchers a common way of investigating the similarities and differences that exists across disciplinary boundaries. Does one line of in­quiry, we might ask, seem to dominate a particular discipline? Does a traditionally defined discipline include advocates of all three lines of inquiry? If so—as seems to be the case in history, where the study of individual actors and events exists along with ideal-typical explanations and with computerized studies of aggregates of data revealing collective trends—then how do these varied approaches help or hinder research in that field?

The perspective offered by this continuum also raises questions about educational methods and goals. Should our curricula include courses that expose students to a balanced view of these lines of inquiry? Do certain approaches make unique conceptual demands on students as thinkers and writers? For example, will some individuals have difficulty abstracting from evidence to form an ideal type or model, but find it easier to study the individual person? If people do differ in their abilities or preferences regarding these methods, should we acknowledge such differences when we design placement tests or final examination essay questions? Should we expect a student with a liberal education to use these approaches equally well? If so, does a “major” in any discipline give the student a chance to become familiar with each line of inquiry?

Obviously these questions go beyond what this essay can answer. But if we as scholars and teachers are to continue to argue for an interdisciplinary approach to education, we must develop ways to think systematically about such a synthesis. We need to reassess the applicability of time-honored systems such as that of Aristotle, as well as more recent contributions. We should also consider developing new theories that permit movement through and beyond numerous disciplines, high­lighting similarities and differences. We must know where to look, and how to classify what we find. Any pursuit of knowl­edge requires structure; unfortunately, most of our previous structures have been discipline specific, and it seems clear that an interdisciplinary synthesis requires a structure that is univer­sal, flexible, and neutral. If we believe that there are certain commonalities—problems, procedures, or conclusions—that may be at the foundation of a range of academic disciplines, then we need the theoretical framework that makes such discoveries possible.

This continuum is but one example of the type of investi­gation we hope others will pursue in the future, a type that is not necessarily supported by the existing political and organiza­tional structures of the university. Even though certain disciplines are moving beyond the confines of traditional lines of inquiry, the institutional boundaries—reflected in, for instance, the divisions between academic departments, the pub­lication policies of professional journals favoring authors from one field over another, and the conservative selection policies of grant-awarding agencies—are still very much with us. Writers, and their teachers, need to have ways of thinking and inquiring and writing that allow them to cross boundaries even when their institutions don’t.