Getting Ready to Read

Before you read, try the following activity:

As you read, consider the following questions:

1

By early March, Janet is ready to set aside the notecards she’s been laboring over since midwinter. She begins to write:

This paper will define paternalism and discuss its justification. Paternalism is the action of one person interfering with another person’s actions or thoughts to help him. The person who interferes, called the paternalist, breaks moral rules of independency because he restricts the other person’s freedom without that person’s consent. He does it, however, in a fatherly, benevolent way, and assumes that the person being restrained will appreciate the action later.

Across town a few days later, Roger makes a similar decision. Setting aside his scrawled pages of notes, he, too, begins his text:

Consider the following situations:

Situation One: Mister N, a member of a religious sect which strictly forbids blood transfusions, is involved in a serious automobile accident and loses a large amount of blood. On arriving at the hospital, he is still conscious and informs the doctor that his religion forbids blood transfusions. Immediately thereafter he faints from loss of blood. The doctor believes that if Mister N is not given a transfusion he will die. Thereupon, the doctor arranges for and carries out the blood transfusion. Is the doctor right in doing this? [Two more cases are presented.)...

Sometimes paternalistic actions seem justified, and sometimes not; but always, paternalism seems at least to be a bit disquieting... The authors whose efforts will be reviewed here have undertaken the task of trying to spell out conditions which must be satisfied for paternalistic actions to be justified... [S]o a preliminary task is that of giving an account of what are paternalistic actions; that of settling on a definition in order to gain a clearer notion of what we are talking about, and of what, if anything, has to be justified.

The purpose of our study was to investigate how . . . differences in authority are played out in the academic sphere. We were particularly interested in how the lack of authority shapes the writing and reading practices students adopt.

2

The contrast between these two introductions is striking. Though they share a common focus on the definition and justification of paternalism, Janet’s text views the definition and justificatory conditions as established truths, while Roger introduces them as matters yet to be resolved. Janet’s text presents itself as a straightforward report about what paternalism “is” (“the action of one person interfering with another”) and what a paternalist “does” (“breaks moral rules of independency”). Janet’s only excursion into metadiscourse—discourse about the text itself and its context—is the opening noun, “this paper,” which, by its very depersonalization, locates the authority for its claims in a material artifact rather than its human author, Janet herself. Roger’s introduction, by contrast, makes no explicit claims about what paternalism is or isn’t, although eventually making such claims is clearly his intent. Instead, his text foregrounds human agents: doctors, patients, and others in paternalistic relationships, the authors of other texts on paternalism, and a “we” who share an upcoming task of exploration. Roger’s text only conditionally promises to arrive at a resolution to the “disquieting situation” upon which he and his readers have stumbled. Janet’s text promises the facts, with no acknowledgement that there are, or ever were, matters to be resolved.

3

Readers will not be surprised to learn that the differences between these two texts are rooted in differences between their authors’ circumstances. At the time of this study, Janet was a college freshman; Roger was completing his doctoral work in philosophy. Janet knew nothing about the study of ethics; Roger had become steeped in the tradition. Roger had accumulated knowledge of the domain, its issues and its customs; Janet had not. Roger knew how to write as an authority inside the conversation of ethics; Janet was an outsider looking in.

4

We had recruited Roger and Janet for our study of academic expertise because their respective positions in the academy place them in different relationships with respect to academic knowledge. The basis for this difference is complex. Roger has authority in this domain not only by virtue of his disciplinary knowledge, but also by virtue of the educational credentials through which he has earned the right to speak in this community.¹ The distribution of this knowledge and these credentials is, in turn, related to factors such as age and gender. Confidence in one’s own authority is assumed to increase generally with age, but gender may also influence this development. Recent studies provide strong evidence of contrasting epistemologies, one perspective valuing community and connection, the other emphasizing competition and separateness. What it means to be an insider in the academic domain has largely been defined by the objective, competitive stance of mainstream academic argument at the expense of the personal knowledge and connective goals in which feminist epistemologies are grounded.² In short, a number of complex variables are likely to have influenced the differing degrees of authority assumed by Roger and Janet in this context. The purpose of our study was to investigate how such differences in authority are played out in the academic sphere. We were particularly interested in how the lack of authority shapes the writing and reading practices students adopt. We expected that Janet’s position as outsider in the academic context would lead her to interact with academic texts in ways that would distinguish her from Roger, an insider, and further, that these process differences could not be explained simply by pointing to differences in topic knowledge.³