Berthoff, Hariston, Reither...For Feb 27

Yes, I know this is a touch late; I have been quite ill lately but here it goes anyway. I'm not even going to lie; I completely missed the point of the piece by Berthoff. I found "The Intelligent Eye and the Thinking Hand to be extremely difficult to read and also to comprehend. "Let me offer a polemical summary. Positivism is a philosophy with a fundamentally associationist epistemology." Honestly, I don't understand 3 of the terms used in that last quote and those three are rather essential to understanding what this work is about! So like a good student I looked them up...still don't understand how they work in this context. But rather than sit here and complain about what I didn't understand, I'll move on to what I did read...and like. The piece by Hariston on Thomas Kuhn's writing helped me understand the concept of paradigm shift. As Kuhn's book relates it to sciences (the "hard sciences") that I how I came to "learn" of the concept. I did not actually understand what that term meant in the context of the sciences, but when it is related to the composition process it made sense (and now that I reflect upon it, when applied to a scientific process, it also makes sense). Without summarizing the whole chapter, I think one of the questions (and it is not directly related to the text but just something I began to think about while reading) would be, what caused the paradigm shift within the area of composition? Why did teachers suddenly fall away from the process idea? The next essay, "Writing and Knowing..." had a few parts that really bothered me (and by bothered I mean provoked a mental response). "That is, writers do not need to know what they are talking about: they can learn what they are talking about as they compose; they can write their way out of their ignorance." Yes, because I can write a paper on astrophysics (a topic I know NOTHING about) and as I write, I will "write my way out of my ignorance." Okay, I'll believe that I can gain knowledge by writing a paper on Astrophysics. I will in fact have to do research, which in turn will allow me to learn something about the field; however, I maintain, as do numerous others in the field, that when students understand the material they are writing about (maybe not so much enjoy, but at least comprehend) the quality of writing and the rhetorical relationships developed are of a much higher quality.