Rhetorics of the Cognitive Vernacular: Blame Amid the Opioid Crisis

ABSTRACT

In public discourse, lay cognitive precepts are invoked at every turn. People regularly speak of believing, thinking, knowing, and so forth, ascribing those states to themselves and others alike. This essay identifies the cognitive vernacular as a discernible dimension of public discourse, one that includes such regularly deployed lay precepts as well as popularized psychological and neuroscientific ideas. The cognitive vernacular may find expression in focal texts (e.g., a self-help book on positive thinking), but also pervasively, and somewhat elusively, takes shape in discussions that are otherwise overtly concerned. This essay takes the public discussion regarding the discovery of a teenage heroin ring in Centreville, Virginia, in 2008, a single episode within the large-scale and enduring American opioid crisis, as a focal site to investigate the cognitive vernacular. In doing so, it discerns how lay precepts concerning choice and knowledge are wielded as rhetorical resources to both cast and mitigate blame.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• blame
• epistemology
• neurorhetorics
• opioid crisis
• vernacular rhetorics

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Jennifer Borda, Andrew Coppens, Lawrence Prelli, Rachel Trubowitz, and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous versions of this essay.

Notes

¹ The University of California, San Diego was home to the first ever Cognitive Science Department, founded in 1986, just about a decade after the formation of the Cognitive Science Society and the appearance of the inaugural issue of Cognitive Science. The field’s originating impulse was not dissimilar to the one that motivates this essay—recognition of both the intertwinement of different disciplinary approaches to cognition and the value of seeing them in relation to each other. The Cognitive Science field aimed to serve as a unifying intellectual hub for official purveyors of the cognitive (Boden 1; see also Lepore and Pylyshn).

² Because its precepts go largely unexamined, philosophers also sometimes refer to folk psychology as “naïve psychology.”

³ For a rhetorical project that considers lay conceptions of intent, see Woodward.

⁴ On media coverage of the opioid crisis more broadly, see, for example, McGinty et al.

⁵ For a rhetorical perspective on the justification condition for knowledge, see Lyne.