universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

204along the axis that links hard sciences such as chemistry in one extreme of academia to“soft” humanistic sciences, such as linguistics, in the other (Peck MacDonald, 1994:21),then economics, as a social science, can be expected to be placed midway along thisaxis: it combines the mathematical character of chemistry with the humanistic quality oflinguistics.6.1 Connections between disciplinary cultures and textIn academia there is a general underlying assumption that scholarship practices areorganized into disciplines. These disciplines are cultural frames in which newcomersneed to receive indoctrination about how knowledge production practices and particulargenres function in accordance with discipline-specific knowledge and linguisticconvention (Peck MacDonald, 1994; Backhouse, Dudley-Evans, and Henderson, 1993a;Craswell, 1993; Kusel, 1992; Spack, 1988).Researchers in different areas such as the rhetoric of science (Backhouse, Dudley-Evans, and Henderson, 1993b; Davis and Hersh, 1987; Rosaldo, 1987), and the sociologyof science (Myers, 1990; Bazerman, 1987, 1988) have focused on the question of howrhetoric reflects the epistemological organization and values of academic disciplines. Theassumption underlying these studies is that scientific knowledge encompasses a set ofdisciplines with distinct language, object domains, and methodologies.Such belief varies considerably from the positivist definition of science as a unified,indivisible whole with a number of uniform genres carrying out certain academic functionsirrespective of disciplinary cultures. In the past, examples such as that of the philosopherLeibniz, that tried to devise an ideal language that would synthesize the basic tenets of a