The Cognition of Discovery: Defining a Rhetorical Problem

Abstract

Metaphors give shape to mysteries, and traditionally we have used the metaphor of discovery to describe the writer's creative process. Its broad meaning has sheltered many intellectual styles ranging from classical invention to modern heuristics such as tagmemics to self-exploratory modes such as Pre-Writing. Furthermore, discovery carries an implicit suggestion that, somewhere in the mind's recesses or in data outside the mind, there is something waiting to be discovered, and that writing is a way to bring that something out. However, if we try to use this metaphor to teach or analyze the creative process itself, we its limitations.1 First of all, because discovery emphasizes the rather glamorous experience of Eureka, now I see it, it obscures the fact that writers don't meanings, they make them. A writer in the act of discovery is hard at work searching memory, forming concepts, and forging a new structure of ideas, while at the same time trying to juggle all the constraints imposed by his or her purpose, audience, and language itself.2 Discovery, the event, and its product, new insights, are only the end result of a complicated intellectual process. And it is this process we need to understand more fully. There is a second, practical reason for teachers to probe this metaphor. The notion of discovery is surrounded by a mythology which, like the popular myth of romantic inspiration, can lead writers to self-defeating writing strategies. The myth of discovery implies a method, and this method is based on the premise that hidden stores of insight and ready-made exist, buried in the mind of the writer, waiting only to be discovered. Or they are to be found in books and data if only the enterprising researcher knows where to look. What does one do when a ready-made answer can't be found in external sources? The myth says, look to your own experience. But what happens when a writer on this internal voyage of discovery still can't find something to say because his or her ideas as such are not actually formed? What is there to discover if only confused experience and conflicting per-