TOWARDS A NEW COGNITIVE THEORY OF WRITING PROCESSES

Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction

TOWARDS A NEW COGNITIVE MODEL OF WRITING PROCESSES

TOWARDS A NEW COGNITIVE THEORY OF WRITING PROCESSES

Brigitte Römmer­Nossek

Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria

The prevalent cognitive models of writing processes are viewing writing as problem solving (Molitor­Lübbert, 1996). They remain firmly rooted in the cognitive sciences of the 1980ies. After a major theoretical shift starting in the 1990ies, cognition is now understood as embodied, situated, and extended. Its aim is no longer seen to be a faithful representation of the world, but viable behavior and sense­making in interaction with and in the world (Varela et al., 1999; Thompson, 2009). The Extended Mind Hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) proposes to see cognition not as happening solely ‘in the head’, but as a process of coupling between organism and artifacts to form an extended cognitive system. By augmenting the “ultimate artifact”, language, the mind extends into the environment: through the writing process the scope of our thinking is being expanded, fleeting thought and speech are becoming a durable co­evolving artifact. This allows for a fundamentally different understanding of writing as an epistemic practice and the role of the “task environment”. Instead of blaming writing problems on working memory limitations, we can analyze the role of the environment in off­loading cognitive load. Constraints can be understood as enablers, and the role of the text­written­so­far as constitutive part of the cognitive process. Feedback also provides social scaffolding in an enculturation process. Enactivism (Varela et al., 1999, in conjunction with Piaget’s concept of adaptation, provides a theoretical ground which allows for theoretically underlining the epistemic as well as developmental dimension of writing processes.

References

Clark, A., Chalmers, D., 1998. The Extended Mind. Analysis 58, 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7 De Jaegher, H., Di Paolo, E., 2007. Participatory sense­making. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 6, 485–507.

Molitor­Lübbert, S., S., 1996. Schreiben als mentaler und sprachlicher Prozeß, in: Günther, H. [Hrsg (Ed.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit : ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch internationaler Forschung. de Gruyter, Berlin ua, pp. 1005–1027.

Thompson, E., 2009. Making Sense of Sense­Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories. Topoi 28, 23–30. doi:10.1007/s11245­008­9043­2 Varela, F.J., Thompson, E., Rosch, E., 1999. The embodied mind : cognitive science and human experience, 7. print. ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.