Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Schemas and Enthymemes

I enjoyed the introduction to Strauss and Quinn because it gave such a clear (though long) description of the situation out of which their book arose. I also enjoyed the section on connectionism, which seemed very familiar to me (especially the discussion of how the brain works) though I don’t know where I have encountered those ideas before. Their ideas do a good job tying together all the different theories of the books we have read so far, accounting not only for the societal influences that impact learning and learning’s public characteristics, but it also accounts for how the individual is able to learn in relation to those societal factors.

In addition, connectionism supplies an additional way to study context as it impacts the individual learner. Perhaps it was the fact that the book was only preventing a single viewpoint that made its impact more clear to me, but I felt Strauss and Quinn gave a better description of how to study context than I found in Understanding Practice. Perhaps this opinion is based on a misreading on my part, but at the very least the different views provide more than one way to look at context besides the container model.

Theoretically, I was fascinated by the idea of schemas. Strauss and Quinn point out that schemas are the knowledge or structures that we keep in mind (or, in a connectionist model, the various weights of neural pathways that connect to each other) that help us to compensate for situations with missing info. They give the example of the beer ad, described not seen, and point out the way in which we tend to fill in—or flesh out—missing details. This seems to me to be an enthymematic process. Like an enthymeme, it leaves out part of the argument that is assumed to be shared or uncontestable. This seems to indicate to me that confusion in communication comes from assuming that schemas are shared, when they are not. I’m not sure that Strauss and Quinn have a method for making sure that schemas are communicated more clearly, but the connection would certainly be helpful for rhetorical studies, since it would give a cognitive basis for good and bad communication.

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