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knowledge about learning, knowledge about teaching methods that promote learning

is more important than knowledge about the world outside of thought.

Do we (teachers) need a general concept of truth? Of course we do. In a

specific way, if there is a general concept of truth does it fall on methodological

processes or substantiative truth statements?Forming general concepts of truth

should fall on methodological processes, not on substantiative truth statements.

The word rhetoricwas once primarily the name of an important branch of

philosophy and an art deserving of serious study. Today the word is used chiefly in a

pejorative sense to refer to inflated language and pompous speech. Epistemology is a

philosophical term for the theory of knowledge, and is a major preoccupation of

modern philosophy.

Epistemic rhetoricis the body of rhetorical theory maintaining that the truth

conveyed by a text neither exists outside the rhetorical situation that generates the

discourse nor dwells immanently within the speaker or writer. Instead, epistemic

rhetoric holds that truth is forged via negotiation, is generated by the transaction

among the speaker/writer, the listener/reader, and the constraints of the particular

rhetorical situation.(Covino 49) Epistemology is important to rhetoric because rhetoric

involves communication between two people and, therefore, the exchange of

knowledge.

How do we know? Information wants to be free. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the

dramatic increase in popularity of the World Wide Web. The number of computers

serving information using the Web is doubling about every three months. This is an

unsustainable rate, but it is not impossible to consider that at sometime during my life