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Peer Review: Pharmacy
Introduction: Discourse Communities and the Construction of Meaning
A discourse community is a specialized group -- such as pharmacists -- who share in a mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience. This mode is highly complex, and is frequently invisible to members of the community. After all, who can really understand the assumptions that create the world they inhabit? Fortunately, their are ways to "see" what is often invisible about how we make meaning. In this class, you will become better writers by understanding how discourse communities create, control, and evolve their knowledge.
When writers face the problem of formulating a public claim -- especially when the claim is about complex materials -- they often feel trapped between two options. The first temptation is to think of all claims as legitimate because they are all "opinion," and all opinions are equal. This paralyzes the writer and removes her/him from any sense of competency and "word-worthiness." The second tempatation is to divide information into "true" and "not true." Here, the writer becomes a robotic re-transmitter of prior "true" information. Because there doesn't seem to be any place for the writer's understanding of the limits of certainty, the prose often becomes lifeless. So, what else can go wrong when we accept either of these extremes?
- When we treat all claims as equal, we run the risk of ignoring the outer, material world (it's a bad idea to sleep on railroad tracks even if you s really, really, really believe it's ok). To shrug and say that everything is just a matter of opinion leads to ethically abhorrent stances, for example, that the ethics of Hitler and the ethics of Ghandi are simply two sets of opinions that can't be judged against each other.
- When we treat some kinds of information as true, we're ignoring the history of how we got to those conclusions. Often, we fail to understand that a good explanation fits itself into the other explanations that have addressed a larger problem. It's hard to see how knowledge is created within specialized communities by their strictly enforced methods, definitions, interests, etc. These discourse communities have both spoken and unspoken rules about what constitutes a "legitimate" question. Good writers/thinkers. Again, it pretends that we can ignore how any piece of information fits into the larger beliefs, needs, and communities of our culture (as we'll see in the case of Vioxx). In sort, to operate entirely within a set of practices, methods, and beliefs is extremely dangerous. For the discourse community, such an attitude forecloses the possibility of change.
In both cases, there's a failure to appreciate the history of our knowledge. If we don't know how knowledge was created, we won't have the tools for thinking inventively. We'll be doomed to endlessly repeating what we've been told. My argument is that everyone needs to think about the limits of what they "know" so that they can recognize opportunities to critique create.
This assignment asks you to participate in a miniature version of a discourse community . . . to write about the discourse of pharmacy. Below is a general description of the steps we will follow. The implementation of discrete steps for completion of the assignments will be given in class and are available at the class calendar.
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