Paradigm Debates, Turf Wars, and the Conduct of Sociocognitive Inquiry in Composition

Abstract

Most of us are familiar with the shifting figures of the goblet and profiles that one sees in psychology textbooks to illustrate the influence of perception on ambiguous figure/ground relationships. To bring one image into the foreground is to cast the other into the background. One cannot hold in dynamic tension the images of figure and ground simultaneously. Similarly, much of the recent theoretical work that appears in the journals in rhetoric and composition (Bruffee, Bizzell, Berlin) suggests that we cannot entertain cognitive and social perspectives simultaneously and that to foreground the individual writer/rhetor as an active, constructive agent of meaning is to ignore the myriad of social, historical, and ideological factors that permeate the contexts of writing. It is equally the case that foregrounding the material conditions of the culture in which academic writing occurs is to relegate to the background conceptions of the writer as agent. Yet, like the shifting configuration of goblet and profiles, the image of the constructive individual writer persists in a dynamic tension with social and cultural forces acting on that writer. In fact, the current buzzword, empowerment, evokes a view of the writer as an agent capable of recognizing the cultural situatedness of her language use in various discourse communities and acting upon that recognition. The purpose of this essay is to examine from historical, social, and methodological perspectives the roots of some disciplinary quarrels that have polarized our thinking in composition studies, and have thus acted as obstacles to reading and evaluating research and to training graduate students to conduct multimodal inquiry. 1 A number of researchers have expressed their discomfort with the dichotomy that has been created between social and cognitive perspectives on language learning (see, for example, Langer, Sociocognitive; Flower; Greene). Although there exists a fair amount of recent educational research that takes into account both the constructive acts of individual learners and the sociocultural factors which shape cognition, we still tend to conflate