Making the Implicit Explicit: the Grammar of Inferential Reasoning in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Kathy Luckett

doi:10.13189/ujer.2016.040510

Abstract

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give 'disadvantaged' students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to theorize the nature of knowledge in the Humanities, and also on Brandom's analysis of inferential reasoning. It uses elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse student texts. The empirical work reported on here is work-in-progress and represents no more than an indication of the approach advocated. The approach is illustrated by examples from comprehension exercises designed to promote students' inferential reasoning. Selected findings are presented to illustrate the extent of the challenge entailed in facilitating access to Humanities texts. The paper concludes by suggesting that mastery of ways of working with texts in the Humanities entails attending to the acquisition of both recognition and realization rules for reading and writing.

Highlights

This paper reflects on what might be an appropriate approach to education development for students (ED) in the Humanities in South Africa – a country where an impoverished public schooling system means that the participation rate in higher education is only 13% for black students compared with 60% for white students [1]
The limited results of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) analyses are presented in detail in Appendix D and summarized in the tables below
These tentative findings suggest that the discrepancies between the strong and weak scripts may lie in their use of ideational metaphor

Summary

Background

This paper reflects on what might be an appropriate approach to education development for students (ED) in the Humanities in South Africa – a country where an impoverished public schooling system means that the participation rate in higher education is only 13% for black students compared with 60% for white students [1]. ED practice in South Africa has picked up on arguments made by the social realist school in Bernstein’s tradition of the sociology of education on the importance of ‘bringing knowledge back in’ and avoiding the ‘blind-spot’ of more constructivist approaches that tend to emphasize the learning experiences of the knower [26, 27, 28] This school argues for the importance of recovering knowledge as a real object with its own causal powers and properties - resisting reducing knowledge to knowing. The term ‘epistemological (or epistemic) access’ [29, 30] was introduced, in contradistinction to ‘social access’, to capture the emphasis of according knowledge an ontologically real status independent of its knowers (to varying degrees) This approach aims to make explicit for students the specific demands of the ‘grammars of inquiry’, ‘epistemic values’ or gazes and lenses of the disciplines [31, 32]. Despite an exclusive focus on ‘epistemic access’, the paper concludes by recognizing that, because all knowledge claims are structured by both epistemic and social relations 4 pedagogic strategies that attend to both epistemic access (unpacking and mastering the knowledge) and social access (developing the knower) are required to meet this educational challenge

The Quest for an Adequate Theory

Application and Further Analysis Using SFL

Findings