Monday, June 11, 2007

Lauer-Berthoff, "Counterstatement" and "Response"

Lauer, Janice. "Response to Ann E. Berthoff, 'The Problem of Problem Solving.'" CCC 23.2 (1972): 208-210.

Berthoff, Ann E. "Response to Janice Lauer, 'Counterstatement.'" CCC 23.5 (1972): 414-416.

Lauer's "Heuristics and Composition" | Berthoff's "The Problem of Problem Solving"

Lauer's counterstatement to Berthoff ends with a call for tolerance and pluralism. She contends that we must be patient with the "recent and exploratory" development of heuristics from psychology, rather than waiting for a grand, penultimate conclusion from what is a heterogeneous field (more varied, she argues, than Berthoff has given credit for, as it includes "behaviorists, gestaltists, factor-analysts, information theorists, and so on).Lauer responds sharply to Berthoff's willingness to pile on her own dichotomies, such as where she sets psychology apart from creativity, where she opposes problem solving learning to knowing, and where she values articles in Teacher above three dozen articles in psychology journals. Berthoff's dismissal of psychology and "the technicians", according to Lauer, depends on lumping them all together and characterizing their collective work, varied though it is, as reductive and short-sighted--of relatively little value to rhetoric and composition: "Instead [Berthoff's] quarrels rest on the false assumption that psychology has one contribution to make, a contribution which she identifies with an overly narrow conception of problem solving" (209).

Lauer discusses the way Berthoff reframes Lauer's primary point about heuristics, instead calling it "problem-solving." This shift is cause for some concern, although Lauer agrees with much of Berthoff's commentary, especially on matters of "creative problem solving", only objecting to Lauer's criticism and polemical approach. Lauer even goes so far as to write off Berthoff's conflation of "science" and "technology" to be a non sequitur. Lauer acknowledges the source of alarm pervasive among humanists who feel threatened by the sciences, but we should be more patient, Lauer argues, before rejecting the possibility that psychology has anything to offer composition (210).

***

Berthoff answers yet again as she contends that the argument she has with Lauer's approach (and initial recommendations for reading heuristics through psychology) is non-trivial. One concern she has is that some psychologists tend to "reduce and limit the operation of imagination" (414). That is, in the pursuit of data, the reduce mentation to only "quantifiable results." Psychology, in and of itself, Berthoff argues, does not care to get at the complexities of meaning-making, particularly where information-processing theories reign. She invokes Susanne K. Langer's work as a few among many resources, such as the "notebooks and journals of artists and thinkers" that might help us "learn anew the sources and modes of the creative imagination" (415). Berthoff would have teachers assume their own expertise on creativity and imagination, rather than turning to technicians of mind whose approaches to language and meaning are too limiting. She introduces two statements on method and creativity that capture what she fears would be compromised in the over-use of psychological models:

Herman Melville: "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method."
Alfred North Whitehead: "There is a state of imaginative, muddled suspense which precedes any successful inductive generalization" (415).

"I believe that speculation taking these two wise sayings as a point of departure could lead us to understand, for instance, why the Formal Outline is properly the last step and not the first in composing; why it is so useful to keep options open, to keep freedom of choice alive, especially at first, by writing phrases, images, sets of oppositions, by thoughtful doodling instead of depending on the concoction of topic sentences; why it is that 'pre-writing' is so painful for those who have nor learned the uses of chaos; how it is that naming and re-naming, developing analogies and metaphors can lead us to discover 'the shape of content'; it could help us to understand what Paul Klee means when he notes: 'I begin with chaos; it is the most natural start. In so doing, I feel at rest because I may, at first, be chaos myself'" (415).

Finally, Berhoff asserts the fruitful pursuit of "speculation" before arguing for a frame of reference for heuristics that "exercises the means by which we come to discover and to understand" (415)

Posted by Derek Mueller at June 11, 2007 2:52 PM to