The excessive pragmatism of American librarians has thus far prevented them from formulating a defensible philosophy of librarianship because their knowledge problems cannot be resolved by action theory. Analysis of the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of librarianship shows that its realities consist of the invisible structure of thought,…

Viewing truth and knowledge as intertextual phenomena, the theory of rhetoric-as-epistemic presented in this paper defines the consensus model as unanimity and the "discourse community" model as involving primary texts (rather than people). A theory of intertextual reality and knowledge is developed, based on five major assertions: (1)…

A discussion of the development of Leonard Bloomfield's theory of linguistics focuses on the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure's "Cours de linguistique generale" on Bloomfield's thinking. The discussion begins with a characterization of Bloomfield's early position with regard to general linguistics, especially as found in his 1914 book…

This paper summarizes the theoretical basis of the relationship between preconceptions and the construct of mental effort in order to identify factors that researchers have shown to influence mental effort, and to suggest an agenda for future research in this area. It begins with a discussion of the theoretical bases of the relationship between…

Radical deconstruction holds the postmodern view that texts are open to endless interpretation and therefore do not reveal a preferred or stable set of valid meanings. This paper provides an analysis of some epistemological problems of reference that arise from this aspect of deconstruction, and explores ways in which access to the world's…

Robert L. Scott's article "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" exemplifies agonistic-transcendent rhetoric in that it sought to revalue "rhetoric." However, as Scott has already noted, his project was ultimately compromised by his not revaluing "epistemic" in conjunction. Scott's article is criticized with respect to…

Most developmental psychologists have encountered some version of the hermeneutic critique. Hermeneuticists assert that the traditional conception of social science research is fundamentally flawed in methodology, in its conception of the human person and human action, and in epistemology. Hermeneuticists maintain that hermeneutics should…

In order to demonstrate Walton J. Ong's continuing relevance to the field of rhetorical theory, a review of his intellectual contributions and development is conducted in three stages, covering not only Ong's books and major articles but also his Jesuit educational history and his reviews of other theorists. In the first period (1939-1950), Ong's…

An inappropriate epistemological realism continues to dominate cognitive science. Realism, the idea that there is a single, univocal world which exists independently of us but which we can come to know, is tacitly accepted by almost the whole body of cognitive science. The fatal flaw in any realist approach to cognition and perception is that the…

Taking a philosophical approach based on what Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes said about knowledge, this paper addresses some of the murkiness in the conceptual space surrounding the issue of whether prior knowledge does or does not facilitate text comprehension. Specifically, the paper first develops a non-exhaustive typology of cases in which…

Interest in the sophists has recently intensified among rhetorical theorists, culminating in the notion that rhetoric is epistemic. Epistemic rhetoric has its first and deepest roots in sophistic epistemological and rhetorical traditions, so that the view of rhetoric as epistemic is now being dubbed "neo-sophistic." In epistemic…

Investigators influenced by Anglo-American epistemology have frequently misinterpreted Piaget's genetic constructivism as an empirical psychology, seeing knowledge acquisition as a process in which representations of the world come into increasingly close correspondence with an ontologically unproblematic external reality. Both this interpretation…

Cognitive psychology has been considered to be at the vortex of a revolution in psychology. Schools of humanism and existentialism were originally needed as reactions to the narrowness of behaviorism. The "reactions" in psychology continue to be relevant and needed, particularly existential psychology. The qualities of consiousness in…

This brief paper argues that structural analysis--an extended form of cognitive task analysis--demonstrates that both domain dependent and domain independent knowledge can be derived from specific content domains. It is noted that the major difference between the two is that lower order rules (specific knowledge) are derived directly from specific…

Weaknesses in the structure, levels, and sequence of Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive domains emphasize the need for both a new model of how individual learners process information and a new taxonomy of the different levels of memory, thinking, and learning. Both the model and the taxonomy should be consistent with current research findings. The…