Moffett and rhetoric



Moffett’s conception, then, has more in common with Vygotskian notions of social constuctionism in
the making of meaning and the development of thought than with Piaget’s notion of an autonomous
biological entity being gradually socialized. And yet it is the Piagetian idea of increasing
abstraction
from the particular that provides the structuring of Moffett’s proto-theory, particularly as Moffett
believes “that development of symbolic expression depends on nothing less than general mental
growth” (p 18). This is not the chapter in which to debate further the cognitive psychology
allegiances of Moffett’s thinking (he seems to tend toward Piaget, as suggested also by the diagram
on p68 that has the ‘biological’ as the “largest or most universal context” for determining the
individual’s language), but it is worth noting that the peculiar concoction of his model is one
between dialogism on the one hand, and abstraction on the other. It is as if elements of Vygotsky
and Piaget are combined, from different perspectives. If we associate rhetoric more closely with
Vygotsky and public discourses, Moffett makes the connection between
two planes: between the I-
you
dimension of ‘talking with someone...’ and the I-it dimension of '...about something’. The notion
of abstraction emerges from the
I-it dimension. Abstraction is not the aspect of the conception that
we will pursue in the rest of the present chapter. Rhetoric is more interested in the
I-you
perspective.

Nevertheless, the process of abstraction in Moffett leads us to a deeply rhetorical place: the
classification of types of discourse based on the dual perspectives of the distance between people in
the
I-you relationship and the abstractive distance between particularities in space and time at the
lowest level of verbal abstraction and generalities and theorization at the highest levels. To
compress the argument and with a self-acknowledged “tautological transforming” (p 35), the
formula comes out as:

what may happen - logical argumentation - theorizing             ɪ

what happens - exposition - generalizing

what happened - narrative - reporting

what is happening - drama - recording                                    ”

This formula, once it is arranged as a curriculum sequence, sees drama as the ‘lowest’ level of
abstraction and the starting point for all discourses and educational exchange. The natural move is
‘upward’ from there to narrative, and thence to exposition and logical argumentation. I have re-
arranged the categories to depict the relative levels of abstraction. But the movement is also the
other way: higher categories subsume lower ones and frame or bring meaning to them. Hence the
arrows move in both directions. I stress that this arrangement, and the addition of the arrows, is my
take on Moffett and not his own representation of the relationship and sequence of the different
categories; but their mutual relationship needs to be represented by such a depiction.

The advantage of the two-way depiction, with the notion of ‘what is happening’ as the basis of the
relationship, is not only that various elements of Moffett’s emerging theory are brought together,
but also that the pattern as a whole, at the whole-text or whole-discourse level at which it operates,
is revealed as rhetorical in the positive sense. We must assume a dimension in which the audience is
present in every engagement, whether manifested in other people or in terms of an interior
dialogue. What is evident, once we have assumed this dialogic dimension, is that “something of



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