Page 12 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 5

specialized teachers and courses, concentrated programs, classroom
instruction, textbooks, journals, disciplinary jargon, and finished students
who are certifiable whether or not certificates are officially granted.
During professional preparation in some disciplines there are often
courses in "theory," which are often combined with the history of the
discipline, something that is apt because history can be effective in
making what had been taken for granted in a disciplinary perspective
problematical. Theory courses can include the purposes of the discipline,
its methods, its relations with other disciplines, its socio-historical
conditions, and the practices combined in it. Usually such courses
reinforce established orientations, but they can also be used to oppose
old ways and advocate new ones. Such reflections can be conducted from
a standpoint within the discipline or they can be conducted from outside
it. Thus the sociology of natural science is typically done by sociologists,
who are outsiders of the discipline reflected upon, as are philosophers
with respect to the special cultural disciplines. Since the affinity of
reflection from within and reflection from outside is great, they may both
be named with an expression formed by adding "meta-" as a prefix, e.g.,
metanursing, provided this exposes rather than hides the inside/outside
distinction within the affinity.^
Rather than the roles of trainees or apprentices and coaches or
masters, one can speak of "students" and "teachers," some of the latter
of whom are even professors. If there were need for a concise generic
title for the product of the disciplinary preparation process, there might
be difficulty because "disciple" appears too narrow easily to broaden.
"Professional" is too broad since there are also professionals on the craft
level. Although it might usefully foster reflection on the cultural
disciplines in general, a generic title does not seem needed by the
advanced-prepared or disciplined practitioners, who typically participate
in the particular disciplinary self-consciousnesses that not only produce
titles like "engineer" but even "hydraulic engineer" and "computer
engineer." Some leading film makers have earned doctorates in what it
is difficult in present terms not to call a discipline and indeed a cultural
discipline. To return to lawn mowing, it can be part of the combination
of practices called landscape gardening as a craft, and also be somehow
of concern to landscape architecture as a cultural discipline.

^ Cf. Lester Embree, "The Future and Past of Metaarchaeology," in Lester
Embree, ed. Metaarchaeology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), 3-50.