Priming Terministic Inquiry: Toward a Methodology of Neurorhetoric

Abstract

Rhetoric-composition's recurring captivation with emergent brain research is sustained not only by the persuasive visual rhetoric of neuroscientific research but also by the conceptual and terministic overlaps that exist between the fields of rhetoric-composition and neuroscience. While these overlaps suggest ways research in brain science can usefully contribute to work in our field, they also instigate seductively simple “solutions” to the “problem” of epistemological uncertainty. Our neurorhetorical methodology preempts the reductive uptake of neuroscientific research while simultaneously motivating a cross-disciplinary reciprocity conducive to the goals of rhetorical inquiry and responsible writing pedagogy.

Notes

¹We thank RR reviewers James Zappen and Michael Zerbe for their thoughtful and productively critical responses to an earlier version of this article.

²While this article was under review, a special issue of RSQ titled “Neurorhetorics” was published. While most of the articles included rhetorically analyzed discursive constructions of neurological difference, Jack and Appelbaum's article provides directions for conducting neurorhetorical research that mirror the kind of cross-disciplinary exchange we both advocate and model in our article. That we landed on the same term, neurorhetoric, at approximately the same time further evinces our conviction that the field's interest in brain research is cyclical, reemerging every ten years or so, and, further, that arguments against engaging such research reductively are not enough: We need a methodological shift that enables us to conceptualize and work with brain research differently.

³Some rhetoricians have begun to point out inconsistencies between Lakoff and Johnson's theories and those embraced in rhetoric-composition. Amy Vidali, for example, highlights another problem with Lakoff and Johnson's claim that metaphors originate in “universal” embodied experience: namely, the fact that human beings are not universally embodied. Vidali convincingly argues that Lakoff and Johnson's theory privileges—both in culture and in language—the “normal” body through which primary metaphors are formed.

⁴For an early example of this cross-disciplinary appropriation, see Eubanks.

⁵For an expansive yet succinct summary of key debates pertaining to rhetorical agency, see Miller 142–45.