ABSTRACT
There are several reasons that the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences may have been on the minds of Wayne Brockriede and his colleagues in 1970. The fi rst had to do with the object of inquiry for these professionals. There was a growing sense of the limitations of traditional models for the understanding of rhetoric, occasioned by the fact that most speeches were heard, often in edited form, on television, changing some of the relationships between speaker and audience, and between situation and performance. In this technological environment, and in a fi eld that was widening from speech to the more global notion of communication, it was no longer clear how central the study of speeches would be to the fi eld. A second was a concern with methods of inquiry, given the expanding presence of social scientifi c approaches in the communication departments. At the time, the quantitative social sciences seemed destined to gobble up more and more of the terrain of the humanities. A third reason was the perceived gap between cultures of inquiry, represented by traditionalists and the empiricists in the fi eld.1
