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Foreword to “Rudiments ofCognitive Rhetoric”Randy Allen Harris aa Department of English , University of Waterloo ,Waterloo, Ontario, CanadaPublished online: 25 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Randy Allen Harris (2007) Foreword to “Rudimentsof Cognitive Rhetoric”, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37:4, 357-359, DOI:10.1080/02773940601173071

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Foreword to ‘‘Rudiments of Cognitive Rhetoric’’

Randy Allen HarrisDepartment of English, University of Waterloo,Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

This long overdue translation of Dan Sperber’s 1975 paper,‘‘Rudiments de rhetorique cognitive,’’ beyond its sheer quality ofthought, is important for three specific reasons. One is simple priority.The second is the scope of Sperber’s project. The third is its treatmentof figuration.

The phrase cognitive rhetoric has been used in at least four waysover the last several decades. Sperber’s is the earliest, but also the leastknown in the Anglo-American ambit. The most familiar of the remain-ing three, especially to rhetoric-and-composition scholars, comes out ofthe work of Linda Flower and her colleagues (especially psychologistJohn Hayes), work that contributed to the shift of focus in writinginstruction away from the products of writing and toward the processesof writing. Flower sees the fundamental move of this research as therecognition ‘‘that cognitive processes do not exist in the abstract,’’ thatthey exist rather in the planning and execution of activities, likewriting; and she sees the chief result of this research to be an accountof ‘‘how writing is influenced not only by the structure of the task butalso by the way individual writers represent the task to themselves,by social rules, by the ongoing interaction of people involved, and bythe wider social and cultural milieu’’ (Long and Flower 1996, 108; seealso Flower 1993, 1994). For clarity of reference, I will refer to thisdevelopment hereafter as cognitive writing theory.

The other familiar usage, especially to rhetoric-and-literature scho-lars, comes out of Mark Turner’s adaptation of cognitive linguistics tothe study of literature (e.g., Turner 1991; 1996; 1998). It builds on thefoundational research into conceptual metaphor by George Lakoff andMark Johnson (1980; see especially Lakoff and Turner 1989). Literarycritics who have taken up Turner’s work tend quietly, and appropri-ately, to call the framework cognitive poetics (e.g., Stockwell 2002, 8;Gavins and Steen 2003, 5; see Gavins and Steen 2003, 1–12 for anoverview), a usage I will adopt here.

Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37:357–359, 2007

Copyright # The Rhetoric Society of America

ISSN: 0277-3945 print=1930-322X online

DOI: 10.1080/02773940601173071

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The third program using the label cognitive rhetoric comes from yetanother set of disciplinary interests, those of theoretical logic. It is alsothe most eccentric use, at least from an Anglo-American point ofview. Coined by Witold Marciszewski in his Logic from a RhetoricalPoint of View, this use of the phrase signals ‘‘the task of applying someachievements of modern logic to the art of successful communication,especially in regard to argumentation’’ (1994, 4), although he datesthat approach mysteriously back to Socrates (1994, 28). For ease of ref-erence, I will call Marciszewski’s approach cognitive logic although theuse of cognitive in his work is extremely broad, based on little morethan the ‘‘realization that any theory of communication has to berooted in a theory of cognition’’ (1994, vii), with no recourse at all toany results of specifically cognitive research.

Sperber’s program, once again from outside the discipline of rhet-oric (indeed, willfully outside; check out his acknowledgments innote 1), is the most general. Sperber is something of a polymath, buthis background is in anthropology, and his widest influence has beenin pragmatics, a field at the intersection of linguistics, philosophyof language, and artificial intelligence (see especially Sperber andWilson 1995; and, for a higher rhetorical quotient, Sperber andWilson 1990).

In ‘‘Rudiments of cognitive rhetoric,’’ Sperber glosses rhetoric veryloosely, as ‘‘the study of discourse,’’ which he sees as comprising threeknowledge bases: grammatical (knowledge of linguistic structure),encyclopedic (knowledge of the world), and symbolic (knowledge ofthe organization of the encyclopedia, in a quasi-structuralist sense).It becomes clear, however, that he associates rhetoric most closelywith the symbolic component, and it is in this association that thecognitive dimensions of his approach are most evident.

Because of this association with the symbolic, and because of themore general purview of his approach, the phrase cognitive rhetoricfits his work rather more fully than it does the other research thattakes this label. On the one hand, Sperber’s use of the notion of‘‘cognitive environment’’ overlaps substantially with the ‘‘taskenvironment’’ of the Flower and Hayes model (1981, 369ff); on theother hand, his recurrent treatment of figuration as resolved by thesymbolic knowledge base overlaps just as substantially with Turner’sprogram. Both hands point us in a direction that suggests cognitiverhetoric (widely construed) encompasses both cognitive poetics andcognitive writing theory, to which I would also add cognitive logic. Iam, of course, fully aware that not everyone will be comfortable withsuch an observation, and I am not selling Sperber’s paper as a mani-festo for cognitive rhetoric, nor even claiming that he sees rhetoric in

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terms as capacious as I have laid out here (indeed, his later work sug-gests he sees pragmatics, via the notion of relevance, as dispensingwith rhetoric altogether—see especially Sperber and Wilson 1990,455, where the antipathy Sperber evinces toward the rhetorical tra-dition in his ‘‘Rudiments’’ acknowledgement below manifests as ‘‘Ifrelevance theory is right, then . . . rhetoric has no subject matter tostudy, or to teach.’’). But it remains a fascinating early blend of cog-nitive and rhetorical concerns, by a sharp-eyed and ecumenical scho-lar. It is pregnant with possibilities for that blend, possibilities thathave been partly realized in the independent research of people likeFlower, Hayes, Turner, and their various associates, and possibilitiesthat remain to be explored.

References

Flower, Linda. ‘‘Cognitive Rhetoric: Inquiry into the Art of Inquiry.’’ Defining the NewRhetorics. Eds. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown. Newbury Park, CA: Sage,1993. 171–190.

———. The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing.Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. 1994.

——— and John Hayes. ‘‘A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing.’’ College Compositionand Communication 32 (1981): 365–387.

Gavins, Joanna and Gerald Steen. Eds. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Lakoff, George and Mark L. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980.

——— and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Long, Elenore and Linda Flower. ‘‘Cognitive Rhetoric.’’ Encyclopedia of Rhetoric andComposition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Information Age. Ed.Theresa Enos. New York: Garland, 1996.

Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. ‘‘Rhetoric and relevance.’’ The Ends of Rhetoric. Eds.J. Bender and D. Wellbery. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.140–155.

———. Second edition. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell,1995.

Stockwell, Peter. Introduction to Cognitive Poetics. London: Routledge, 2002.Turner, Mark. Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.———. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996.

Foreword to ‘‘Rudiments of Cognitive Rhetoric’’ 359

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