Different traditions

To speak as I do here about research publishing in general has obvious limitatons. There are many and very different traditions of publishing. Whatever I have described above will only apply to some traditions, there will be many others that do not fit in that pattern.

Some scholars have tried to summarise these differences. John B. Thompson focuses on the kinds of results different disciplines publish, while William Fusfeld points to different traditions of writing style.

In his study of the changes in the academic publishing industries of USA and Britiain, Books in the Digital Age, John B. Thompson discerns between different kinds of published material, or "forms of content" as he calls it. Most academic publishing falls into the large category he labels "knowledge," which in turn is divided into discrete results, aggregated knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and sustained argument.

Thompson acknowledges the many different traditions and the problems with generalisations, but points to a broad tendency: Journal papers with discrete results are typical of the natural sciences, and a form that lends itself easily to digital formats. Sustained arguments often call for book-length publications, and have been slower in changing to digital form, perhaps because it is a form that is less effective on screen (325-26).

William Fusfield also points to the existence of two different rhetorical styles of philosophical writing: demonstrative and declarative rhetoric. Demonstrative rhetoric is the classic argument, arguing point for point through logic, starting from established principles. This is the tradition of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Kant (143). Writers of rhetorical theory such as Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin have, however, pointed out that such arguments rarely fulfil the demands of formal logic.

Fusfield also traces another tradition of philosophic rhetoric from Plato through Bacon, Leibnitz and Lessing to Schlegel and Nietzsche, which he calls declarative rhetoric (136). This is view of science and scholarship where the writer through instinct suddenly realizes the truth, and then declares it in writing as best he or she can. Such writing can only be approximations of the original insight, so writers in this tradition state the insight as fact, and repeats it in different words to help the reader's understanding.

As Steve Fuller puts it, it is a difference in ideals: "a relatively short and focused speech (demonstrative) versus [situations where] a complex piece of writing (declarative] is the ideal of rhetoric".

To Fusfield, there are

"some striking similarities between early-romantic [declarative] and 'postmodern' epistemological and rhetorical assumptions. These inclued, among others, an emphatic rejection of all 'fundamentalism,' a predilection for 'immanent critique,' a celebration of 'paradox,' 'irony,' 'play,' 'dissimulation' (Verstellung) and 'polysemy' and a strong preference for 'dialectical,' 'conversational,' 'fragmentary,' 'combinational' and 'visual' discourse aimed less at monthesis justification than at the stimulation of plythetic 'discovery'. Indeed, it is a rather easy, if large, task to trace the mediate influence of romantic rhetorical conceputalizations deriving from Schlegel and his circle through […] Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Benjamin, Barthes, Valery and Derrida […]." (147)