A – Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
Presentation TOWARDS A NEW COGNITIVE THEORY OF WRITING PROCESSES Brigitte Römmer-Nossek 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 1980s. After a major theoretical shift starting in the 1990s, 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 sense-making 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 an organism and artifacts to form an extended cognitive system. By augmenting the “ultimate artifact”, a 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 co-evolving 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 off-loading cognitive load. Constraints can be understood as enablers, and the role of the text-written-so-far as a 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. and Chalmers, D. (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis 58, 7–19. doi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7 De Jaegher, H. and Di Paolo, E. (2007) Participatory sense-making. Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 6, 485–507 Molitor-Lübbert, 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, 1005–1027 Thompson, E. (2009) Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories. Topoi 28, 23–30. doi:10.1007/ s11245-008-9043-2 Varela, F..J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1999) The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience, 7. print. ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mas
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