Cognitive rhetoric

Cognitive rhetoric refers to an approach to rhetoric, composition, and pedagogy as well as a method for language and literary studies drawing from, or contributing to, cognitive science.

History

Following the cognitive revolution, cognitive linguists, computer scientists, and cognitive psychologists have borrowed terms from rhetorical and literary criticism. Specifically, metaphor is a fundamental concept throughout cognitive science, particularly for cognitive linguistic models in which meaning-making is dependent on metaphor production and comprehension.

Computer scientists and philosophers of mind draw on literary studies for terms like “scripts”, “stories”, “stream of consciousness”, “multiple drafts”, and “Joycean machine”. Cognitive psychologists have researched literary and rhetorical topics such as “reader response” and “deixis” in narrative fiction, and transmission of poetry in oral traditions.

Composition

Rhetoric is a term often used in reference to composition studies and pedagogy, a tradition that dates back to Ancient Greece. The emergence of Rhetoric as a teachable craft (techne) links rhetoric and composition pedagogy, notably in the tradition of Sophism. Aristotle collected Sophist handbooks on rhetoric and critiqued them in Synagoge Techne (fourth century BCE).

In Ancient Rome, the Greek Rhetorical tradition was absorbed and became vital to education, as rhetoric was valued in a highly political society with an advanced system of law, where speaking well was crucial to winning favor, alliances, and legal rulings.

Cognitive Rhetoricians focusing on composition (such as Linda Flower and John Hayes) draw from the paradigm, methods, and terms of cognitive science to build a pedagogy of composition, where writing is an instance of everyday problem-solving processes.

James A. Berlin has argued that by focusing on professional composition and communications and ignoring ideology, social-cognitive rhetoric—which maps structures of the mind onto structures of language and the interpersonal world—lends itself to use as a tool for training workers in corporate capitalism. Berlin contrasts Social-Cognitive Rhetoric with Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, which makes ideology the core issue of composition pedagogy.

Language and literary studies

Cognitive Rhetoric offers a new way of looking at properties of literature from the perspective of cognitive science. It is interdisciplinary in character and committed to data and methods that produce falsifiable theory. Rhetoric also offers a store of stylistic devices observed for their effect on audiences, providing a rich index with distinguished examples available to researchers in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive science.

For Mark Turner (a prominent figure in Cognitive Rhetoric), narrative imaging is the fundamental instrument of everyday thought. Individuals organize experience in a constant narrative flow, starting with small spatial stories. Meaning is fundamentally parabolic (like a parable): two or more event shapes or conceptual spaces converge (blending) in the parabolic process, generating concepts with unique properties not found in either of the inputs. This process is everyday: anticipating that an object you are headed toward will make contact with you is a parable whereby you project a spatial viewpoint. Such narrative flow is a highly adaptive process, crucial for planning, evaluating, explaining, as well as recalling the past and imagining a future. Thus, literary processes have adaptive value prior to the emergence of linguistic capability (modular or continuous).

Related work

Rhetorical stylistics
Rhetorical figures
Perception
Brain imaging

Key terms

Cognitive instability
Conceptual blending
Conceptual metaphor
Binding
Projection

Notable researchers

Cognitive Rhetoric

Social-Cognitive

Linda Flower
John Hayes

Social-Epistemtic

James Berlin

Cognitive Poetics

Reuven Tsur

References