Towards a Hermeneutic Understanding of Programming Languages

1. Composition teachers--and theorists--have recently begun to turn to post-process theory to discuss how people communicate (Kent, Post-Process). In a nutshell, post-process theory postulates that language is not inherently systematic and cannot be taught or analyzed as a system. That's quite an about-face for composition pedagogy, in which one theory after another has laid out a systemic understanding of communication. For instance, composition teachers in the early half of the twentieth century taught a rather rigid system of grammar and syntax that James Berlin later labeled "current-traditional rhetoric." In the 1980s, sociocognitivists began to discuss language in terms of a system of processes and schema. And later in that decade, social constructionists theorized a system of social language conventions that included not only syntax and grammar, but also expressions, tropes, and other characteristics of languages used by particular discourse communities. These theories of communication, although they differed radically from one another, are all rooted in the notion that language is inherently systemic. Post-process theory questions this notion, and thus questions how rhetoric has been taught since Aristotle.