Texts Are Authored

7

As the excerpts from his introduction indicate, Roger saw his task as one of examining a set of alternative positions which had been put forward by prior authors on paternalism. This focus on the authorship of knowledge claims pervaded Roger’s reading, writing and thinking. In his notes, definitional features are organized by author; his introductory section explicitly acknowledges the role of author as claim-maker (“So each of our authors is forced in the nature of the case to perform two tasks—each first provides a definition... and each then provides an account of how paternalistic actions so defined are to be justified”); and the 74 references to authors in Roger’s final text each assert a relationship between author and claim:

First, nothing in [this definition] excludes actual consent at or before the time of action, though Gert and Culver clearly seem to think it does.

Komrad... sees the problem quite differently, and seeks to give what appears to be intended as a small-blanket justification of specifically medical paternalism.

In essence, the names of the authors provided Roger with the basic categories by which he organized his knowledge.

8

In contrast, Janet mentions none of the authors in her draft (although an occasional set of quotation marks indicates she did have some sense of borrowing). The sections of her text are organized topically, as indicated by topic sentences such as “Paternalism can exist between different kinds of people” and “Paternalism does not always include actions that restrict the same people who are being helped.” A transitional paragraph makes this arrangement explicit:

In the first part of this paper I gave descriptions of factors that make an act paternalistic. In this part I will discuss ways for a paternalist to determine if his acts are justified...

Janet’s notecards were labeled by topic (“morality”; “consent”; “impure paternalism”) and only sporadically included authorship information. In her tape recordings, author names were mentioned an average of 4.6 times per thousand words of transcript, only one-quarter as often as Roger (15.8 mentions/1000 words). The majority of these references occurred in the initial reading phase; once Janet began to write her draft, she rarely referred to either the authors or the articles.⁴

9

That Janet mentioned authors at all is significant. She occasionally used author names as identifiers in her early notes (e.g., “G-C [Gert-Culver] definition”) but began to pay more attention to authors around the time she read the third article in the corpus, in which James Childress explicitly attacks the positions taken in the preceding articles (Childress’ piece is subtitled “A Critique of the Gert-Culver Definition of Paternalism”). Reading the Childress critique seemed to sensitize Janet to the authorship issue; at this point in her think-aloud transcripts she began to demonstrate a sense of authors “speaking” in this literature. (Ellipses indicate pauses, not deletions.)

so Gert is saying that the only time that you can really call paternalistic... is when one person’s qualified...

so Childress, the Gert Culver critique... says that example... um... young child helping drunk parent...

This sense of conversation was not consistently maintained, however, and is clearly not a central theme in Janet’s transcripts. More typically, she referred to authors with a generic it (“on page twenty... it says...”) or they (“I don’t know what they’re talking about”), though only one of the seven articles is co-authored. She often referred to the Childress article as “the critique” (“so for the critique... says that...”). These generic references suggest that Janet saw the corpus of articles (collected in a loose-leaf binder) as a single definitive source rather than as a set of multiple voices in conversation. This perception was brought home to us most dramatically in her transcripts and interview comments, where she often made reference to “the book” rather than to individual authors or articles: “I suppose I could steal [an example] from the book”; “. . . and they don’t talk about that anywhere else in the whole book”; “I still don’t think [my paper] really is [interesting]... but it’s better than the book I read.”⁵