- Cognitive rhetoric ignores the question of ideology in teaching by “claiming that the rhetoric it [cognitive rhetoric] uses is based on an objective understanding of the unchanging structures of mind, matter and language” (492). Cognitive rhetoricians believe that writers make goals and work toward meeting those goals; the goals are individual and often unconscious. Because of this, Berlin asserts that the stance of cognitive rhetoric is easily aligned with capitalism: “the rationalization of the writing process is specifically designated an extinction of the realization of economic activity. The pursuit of self-evident and unquestioned goals in the composing process parallels the pursuit of self-evident and unquestioned profit-making goals in the corporate marketplace” (483).
- Expressionist rhetoric holds that “the existent is located within the individual subject. While the reality of the material, the social, and the linguistic are never denied, they are considered significant only insofar as they serve the needs of the individual” (484). Though expressionist rhetoric was formed in opposition to capitalism (particularly as capitalism encourages conformity), their ideologies is easily co-opted by capitalism because of their focus on the individual and on the individual being responsible for his/her own success.
- “Social-epistemic rhetoric attempts to place the question of ideology at the center of the teaching of writing” as they see all aspects of the rhetorical situation (as Berlin defines it) working together to make knowledge and determine reality (492). This means that students can look at the forces acting on them and thinking about how to change these forces.
The difference between psychological- and social-epistemic (489):
- Psychological-epistemic rhetoric grants that rhetoric arrives at knowledge, but this meaning-generating activity is always located in the transcendent self, a subject who directs the discovery and arrives through it finally only at a better understanding of the self and its operation – this self comprehension being the end of all knowledge.
- For social epistemic rhetoric, the subject is itself a social construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world. There is no universal, eternal, and authentic self that beneath all appearance is at one with all other selves. The self is always a creation of a particular historical and cultural moment.