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JAC Volume 9 |
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Editor: |
Applying Martin Greenman’s Concept of Insight to Composition TheoryRosemary L. GatesJames Britton’s theory of the development of writing ability provided the forestructure for other cognitive theories of composing, such as Janet Emig’s reflexive and extensive writing and Linda Flower’s concept of writer-based and reader-based prose. His theory also formed the theoretical foundation for the writing to learn across the curriculum movement (Fulwiler 23, 24). But two important issues in learning are not accounted for by Britton’s theory. One is that it cannot predict whether writing actually helps a student learn the field of study correctly, that is, in line with the knowledge of the disciplinary community. The student writer may arrive at all sorts of information, but there must be a way to guide him or her toward what is relevant to the field of study. Any given knowledge may be personal, but how can the personal be sorted from that which is also the knowledge to be learned? The second problem is that Britton’s theory only places a matrix of ideas at the starting point of learning. What about the outcome? May we not speak of a matrix there as well, one that is richer, deeper, and fuller for the learning, and one that is closer to an “other”—a community—than to a “self”? Without a theoretical base for these concerns, research and pedagogy will remain limited to the cognitive domain, with learning regarded as a kind of problem-solving activity occurring in linear stages. Cognitive theory has not been able to encompass the intuitive domain of thought that figures so centrally in both learning and writing. This domain of operation lies outside of conscious awareness, making it difficult to study; yet, if we listen to the testimony of writers, this area seems particularly pertinent to understanding the writing process. And this area is most pertinent to writing to learn, which concerns the acquisition of new knowledge and which happens in moments of insight—moments that writing itself can help facilitate. The question is: can the steps of the intuitive movement of mind be identified for study, and can something of value for composing theory and practice be retrieved from such study? The work of Martin Greenman offers a conceptual model that combines cognition and intuition and might well provide a model for composing theory, research, and practice. Greenman’s theory is based on the psychology of invention, drawing heavily on Graham Wallas’ The Art of Thought.1Greenman is concerned with philosophical insight, but such insight is philosophical due to the conceptual structure that is yielded, not to the nature of the insight process. The process of insight mirrors the creative process in general, and, thus, Greenman’s work suggests a theory of writing as coming to know, which is another way of saying writing to learn or writing to create new thought. This is the central claim of those who talk about “writing to learn"—that writing aids the creative process and helps the writer create new thought (Fulwiler 21-25). It is also the central claim for the importance of revision as the circling closer to one’s focus. And it is what is claimed for writing as a method of arriving at knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, where new knowledge is “made” (“created”) during the process of writing (Fulwiler, Raymond). In Greenman’s view, the creation of new thought is identical to the intuitive process that leads to new, relevant insight. He begins with Wallas’ four stages of the creation of new thought: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The preparatory stage consists of whatever is done to gather material
and experience—whatever will become relevant to creating new thought.
In schools, this stage may consist of reading, attending lectures, and
engaging in laboratory work. But, Greenman stresses, Two points are important here: the material for insight is not limited to the material in the field of study; and the more material available for insight, the richer the thought that results. In terms of mastering a discipline, certain kinds of material are necessary as a base for further knowledge, and material can carry over from one discipline to another. The most insightful thinkers have a rich preparatory base for the intuitive movement of mind. The preparatory stage is marked by conscious activity. The unconscious activity that follows—that works in and around the ongoing conscious absorption of the preparatory material—is the incubation stage. This stage of the intuitive process is unseen. Greenman likens the relationship between preparatory material and incubation to “the relationship between the latent and manifest content of the dream [that] is concealed within the process that forms the dream” (126). The process remains hidden, but it is the process that holds the key to the relationship between conscious (manifest) and unconscious (latent) content. It follows, then, that the process of writing should hold the key to the formation of new thought that proceeds from the writing process itself. The stage of incubation, the unconscious activity following the preparatory stage, ends when illumination is achieved; illumination, or insight, is defined as the movement of material from the unconscious into consciousness. Greenman calls it “an immediate seeing of something that one has not seen before” (126). Seeing is perception—one facet of cognition or conscious thought. The fourth stage, Wallas’ verification, is also conscious activity, one which seeks “to explicate what it is one sees and to incorporate it into a larger body of insights” (126). Greenman prefers the term “validation,” because “verification” tends to refer to a specialized procedure, whereas “validation” more accurately denotes the thought process of seeking to make an insight fit with other knowledge, though that insight and process might indeed include discipline-specific knowledge and procedures. Validation, in contrast to insight, takes time, and it focuses on fitting the insight to some body of knowledge; “validation is,” according toGreenman, “discursive, coherential or pragmatic or existential” (126). The personal knowledge that the thinker possesses may, of course, be of any field, at any level from beginning to advanced. As students progress in learning a field, they will increasingly test whether their insights are new only to them or new to the field as well. The stages of incubation, illumination, and validation are marked by “kairotic thinking,” to use James Kinneavy’s term. The process of incubation, though unseen, is closer to the activity of dream than to linear thought. The illumination that results is often multi-faceted, may be imagistic, and has a fitness, a “right timing,” that must be tested for its “fit” with other knowledge. The validation stage is essentially an attempt to achieve this “fit” and to find its “proper measure”—both aspects of kairos.2 This is not to say that all thought in this stage is kairotic; most of it isn’t. But validation is an essentially kairotic activity that uses linear, conscious thought to achieve the sought-after fit. It is important to remember that this four-stage process of the creation of new thought is recursive, in that validation may become preparatory for further incubation and insight. Indeed, preparation and incubation are ongoing processes of everyday thought. These stages have significant implications for writing and learning. With respect to the preparatory base, the richness of material to “feed” the incubation process is essential to rich insight. This richness of insight cannot be adequately specified by cognitive content—that is, the content that is articulated and thus available for epistemic judgments (126). Much of the content remains latent, in the same manner that a rich dream life has rich latent content that is never specifically epistemic. Therefore, it is never possible to specify fully the content that enters into a piece of writing. This model allows us to define method and technique as kinds of knowledge, and as that knowledge that is necessary to the use of “propositional” knowledge, which is the manifest and latent content of thought. Greenman calls these "ways of encountering" the preparatory material. The example he mentions is that in order for insight in philosophy to occur, one must steep oneself in philosophical texts and also develop ways of encountering those texts, which may, for example, be a variety of techniques of reading and interpreting. Deconstruction originated as one of these techniques, as did, of course, structuralism and the New Criticism. The ways of encountering material are the processes that turn latent content into manifest content. In these processes, then, are clues to the latent content and clues to the processes themselves that have transformed the material into insight, for the way the material is formed becomes content. In writing, the process is the domain of style, which is the processive activity that spins from the structural bed (latent content) the web of manifest content. The stylistic artifacts are all that remain in the text, but the study of style ought to be a productive area of processive theory. In writing to learn, the ways of encountering that must be learned
are the methods of a discipline and its ways of thinking. The same is
true for learning any profession. The mesh of method and content in
solving a particular problem in a discipline is an art, not just a skill. Grasping knowlcdge that is old in a field but new to the learner is, for Greenman, to bring into being (to “actualize”) for oneself the conceptual structure of propositions yielded by a theory. A theory is defined as a matrix capable of yielding many propositions (128). If the knowledge grasped is new to the field, then it may be added to the total of knowledge in the field (or it may revise the field’s knowledge); whereas knowledge new to the person but not to the field has only personal value. Learning a field requires recapitulation ontogenically of at least the essential knowledge of the field. Writing allows the knowledge—what is grasped—to be judged, or “validated,” against the knowledge of the field. Such validation is fodder for the preparatory stage, which in turn feeds the incubation stage, leading to new knowledge. The fact that there is a growth of insight into concepts (that is, a growth of new knowledge about concepts) rather than a growth in concepts themselves helps determine which new knowledge in the field is the deeper, richer, and hence more valuable (13 1-32). Thus, new insight into a philosophical text is valued over a “correct” reading (one that reifies the author’s meaning) because grasping a textual meaning that has already been grasped by the author only duplicates an insight, whereas to comprehend a new insight is to gain knowledge new to the field. Though Greenman is speaking specifically of the growth of knowledge in philosophy, the statement is true of most disciplines. To grasp the meaning of a text, or the “correct” way of looking at a system according to a specific program of research or study, may be an essential step for the researcher in continuing on to other insights. But for the field. it is the new insight that is valuable. The degree of its value is determined by its capacity to help further the discipline’s research program. Like Greenman’s theory matrix, which has the capacity to generate many propositions, the scientific insight that is most valuable is the one that is able to generate the most research activity, and, importantly, the most hypotheses.3 Though only researchers working within a field’s research program need consider the value of their knowledge to the field, Greenman’s work on the value of concepts may also be applied to students’ learning. His work suggests that we ought to pay much more attention to concepts on which the knowledge of other fields is based. Furthermore, it supports what writing theorists, following Paulo Freire, have claimed about learning being “acts of cognition,” not the memorization of information. In writing to learn, assignments need to be designed to help students comprehend those concepts which are most important to their learning the subject area. Thus, subject area teachers should isolate the concepts that students need to learn and then develop writing assignments and provide necessary preparatory material (reading and experience) relevant to these concepts; students then would have the requisite preparatory base plus a way of encountering the material to bring it to actualization (insight). The difficulty lies in identifying the requisite material base and the processes for relating concepts in the base. Greenman’s model can provide a structure for sorting what needs to be learned according to manifest, latent, and processive content. Furthermore, Greenman’s theory provides a way to judge depth and nature of insight through validation. Validation in a field is determined by the degree to which the intuitive process that yielded the insight actualizes (makes concrete, realizes) a theory through the set of propositions and their interrelationships. The theory’s propositions are ways of thinking and are the processes that in turn forge the propositions of manifest content from the latent content of the theory. This set of relationships means that the manifest content, present in a piece of writing, may be validated according to its processes and its internal laws (its theory) by tracing the propositions in the manifest content to the processive propositions and its theoretical matrix. An advantage of writing to learn is that the writing may be used to judge the comprehension of underlying processive concepts and theories. Depth of insight may be specified by the extent to which the insight actualizes the matrix of a concept plus the insights which were arrived at by other thinkers or researchers. The thinker who actualizes more of other thinkers’ ideas about a particular subject has a richer insight. We can apply Greenman’s view of “actualizing insight” in philosophy to any area of study. The degree to which a particular insight is valid is determined by the intuitive process that yields the insight. The degree of validity “depends on the richness of the conceptual matrix available to the intuitive process” (Greenman 132). In a subject area, or in writing, the degree to which the insight is valid depends on the degree to which the student’s insight actualizes the discipline’s collective knowledge of that subject area, including the actualization of the intuitive processes that produced the insight. In addition, the conceptual matrix that limits and makes possible what can be thought includes everything the person has ever thought and done; but if the insight pertains to a particular field of knowledge, the insight needs to be validated—reformed, in a sense—according to the methods (processes) of the discipline. This process of gaining, from partially personal matrices, an insight which is then submitted to validation by the knowledge in the field constitutes the process of learning itself—for it is gradual and partial, as its valid insights are joined bit by bit with others to render a view of the matrices of the field. Just as material from outside the subject area of study may be brought to bear in insight, it is also true that whatever a person does not know obviously cannot be brought to bear. If we want a student to grasp a concept in writing, we need somehow to supply material from which to form the concept. This may seem too trite to mention, but it is easy to overlook what a student might need to know. For example, the research of James Gee, Sarah Michaels, and Michaels with James Collins on discourse style of elementary students demonstrates how we have overlooked a most basic part of writing pedagogy. Educators have assumed all students have the same understanding of the words “staying on topic” and “sticking to the point.” In fact, these concepts mean quite different things to students who use what Michaels calls a “topic-associating style” and students who use a “topic-centered style” of organization. Furthermore, understanding does not come for these children by way of explanation and memorization; the material must be provided for students to acquire all of the complex forms and strategies of the topic-centered style that schools and businesses use. Greenman proposes that building an experiential base is critical because it increases intuitive power, which is a product of a relational structure of two concepts that are part of a conceptual matrix. Intuitive power and intellectual imagination are the same (133-34). Writing is important to the preparatory stage because it feeds the incubation stage by drawing in related material from experience. Writing then assists the movement from preparatory material to incubation by promoting the relating of ideas. These relationships produce insights. In the fourth stage, validation, writing may be necessary in some fields in order to explicate and accommodate the insight to other knowledge. Writing makes possible the advanced rhetorical processes that James C. Raymond suggests are the methodology of the humanities. At least some social scientists admit that they need the methods and processes of rhetoric and writing to think through (validate) and work out (explicate) the research data they collect. This process of validation and explication can itself become fodder for a preparation for further insight. Insight can happen at any time, and what was preparatory becomes defined by the insight. Writing itself can produce insight—the so called “eureka” experience. What does become actualized is a concept that includes a relationship of at least two other concepts. The act of writing pins the concept down in propositional form (subject and predicate) and allows that proposition to be used as material for further insight. If more insight occurs, a deeper and richer learning has been achieved. One attempts to explicate what one sees during illumination in order to fit it into a larger body of insights (Greenman 126). Writing greatly assists such explication. For example, the writing of the early scientific letters and journals was probably more a search for insight than a communication of findings. It would be worth studying these texts for evidence that ideas were actually developed during the act of writing. Britton’s matrix of ideas in expressive writing seems, in light of the psychology of creation of new thought, to fit the preparatory stage if we add to Britton’s theory a knowledge base of content. His concept of revision as a movement towards an “other, distanced” audience, however, is suitable for describing communicative writing in disciplines; it is inadequate for describing writing to learn and writing to know because it does not account for a move past personal insight to the knowledge of the field. It is important, then, to design writing assignments in which students validate their personal insights with knowledge in the field. The most obvious way is to offer them a set of concepts which they must fit together with their insight. Or, they can be asked to select two or more concepts and write about how they are related. This experience may become a preparatory stage for another insight. According to Kinneavy, an accurate way to evaluate whether writing to learn actually works still does not exist (“Writing” 377). Perhaps we can evaluate knowledge learning in content areas according to the number and levels of insights, by combinations of relational structures and concepts. It may be possible to specify a matrix set, perhaps from working with the discoverable concepts in a set of essays. We can determine the depth of thinking by the number of concepts from the matrix the writer used, and perhaps the frequency of use, with the lowest frequency signaling a more valuable insight. We might also judge the importance of the concept by the degree to which it actualizes the accepted knowledge of the field or, alternatively, the class material and its propositions (both process and content). Such a detailed analysis could best be used to study learning through writing. The development of writing ability requires much use of intuitive power, which may be said to produce the acts of cognition that will render as learned what cannot be taught directly. James Moffett aligns his writing program with Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. He recommends that students write only in dramatic and narrative modes until age thirteen. At that age, having reached the stage of formal operations, students are ready to handle exposition and theorizing, both of which require powers of abstract thought. Both cognitive and writing maturity need, then, to be considered when planning the instruction that will provide the preparatory base. But always, the richer the base, the better; students need to encounter many kinds of writing and many ways of encountering writing tasks and whatever problems are addressed in writing. As a way of developing the distancing of writer from audience and subject, there is no better way than to move students through a wide range of approaches that are “ways of encountering” writing, others, and the world. This kind of learning requires and leads to the creation of new thought. It is learning of a rich kind, and far superior to a step-by-step problem-solving approach. Insight doesn’t happen that way anyway; it is far better to spend time providing rich material for learning and let the mind do what it will do. With a way to think about process and technique as kinds of knowledge, it is easier to plan and support (that is, “justify”) a curriculum based on processive knowledge. The process, if you will recall, was essential for relating the deeper knowledge (latent) which provided the surface knowledge (manifest) that appears in the writing. Finally, Greenman’s model clarifies the activities of the writing process. Prewriting is of course the preparatory stage, though it may assist incubation by helping bring to consciousness ideas that otherwise would not form or that form and are lost. Exploratory drafting (the “zero” draft) is also largely preparatory. Once there is a guiding topic, which would be the result of an insight (best when it’s the writer’s, but that’s not always the case), drafting is largely validation. As is characteristic of this stage, the writing here may cycle back into the preparatory stage. That, at least, would be ideal in writing to learn, and it is the ideal for process instruction that emphasizes revision as re-seeing. In this view, writers are not so much circling closer to their ideas as they are writing to discover whether their insight works out as expected, or perhaps whether it has potential for generating more ideas. They are writing to fit the idea with others and to explicate the insight. The theory of creation of new thought adds theoretical support to the claim that writing not only aids thought but makes possible thought that would not have occurred otherwise. As a theory of the creation of new thought, the four-stage model presented here provides a way of seeing, not permitted, derived as they are from language functions. As such, the model ought to fill a gap left by the existing array of composition theories. Catholic University of America Washington, DC |
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