Rhetoric and the Social Construction of Cognitivism

Abstract

Making use of analytic devices recently introduced into psychology from rhetoric, cognitive psychology is criticized in a number of ways: (i) for reflexively failing to take into account its own rhetorical strategies in its social construction of its research `tradition'; (ii) for failing to guard against the textual creation of a set of problems, said to be real and to do with people's mental activities, but which are in fact imaginary; and (iii) for rendering many other important aspects of people's everyday psychological knowledge rationally-invisible as a result. Central among the invisibilities of cognitivism is people's first-person sense of their own being. Social constructionists feel both (i) that the kind of Self we are depends upon the form of our social relations, and (ii) that our ways of knowing depend upon the kind of Self we are. However, if a way of being is something that is only subjectively sensed or felt, how might different ways of being be characterized? A new non-theoretical, descriptive way of talking, one which provides us with a way of seeing ourselves `in' what is said, would seem to be required.