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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Atlanta, GA | Posted: September 4, 2015
The organizers have accepted the roundtable proposal that Brian Larson spearheaded for the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Houston in April 2016. “New/now cognitivism: Strategies for theory and ‘literate action'” will include presentations from five scholars: Deborah Rossen-Knill, University of Rochester; Erin Williams, University of Saint Francis; Airlie Rose, UMass-Amherst; Jose Gomez, University of Texas, El Paso; and Brian N. Larson, Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Peter Elbow, Professor Emeritus at UMass-Amherst, will chair the roundtable.
In his talk, titled “Relevance, cognitive environment, and audience,” he offers a cognitive model for analyzing rhetorical performance by explaining the writer’s and audience’s “cognitive environments.” As used here, this concept originated with Sperber and Wilson (1995) in linguistic pragmatics but retained rationalist assumptions that have made that field difficult to reconcile with rhetoric (Dascal & Gross, 1999; Liu & Zhu, 2011). Strassheim (2010) extended the model to account for goals as part of the cognitive environment. And finally, he extends the model further, accounting for writers’ and readers’ emotions, habits, and cognitive biases or “heuristics” (Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009). Relevance is the ratio of desired cognitive effects to cognitive effort in the cognitive environment: The greater the effect-numerator, the greater the relevance; the greater the effort-denominator, the lesser the relevance. Writers and readers seek increased relevance. The writer, reader, and researcher all can use the model of the cognitive environment and relevance for generating, interpreting, and explaining written texts as literate action.
