FUTURE CONVERGENCES: TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AS COGNITIVE

SCIENCE

ABSTRACT

Cognitive scientist Andy Clark (2008) has argued, “the study of mind might […] need to

embrace a variety of different explanatory paradigms whose point of convergence lies in the

production of intelligent behavior” (p. 95). This article offers up technical communication

research as just such a paradigm. It describes technical communication research past and

present to argue that our disciplinary knowledge of tools, work environments, and

performance assessment is a necessary complement to a more robust science of the mind.

INTRODUCTION

In Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, cognitive scientist Andy

Clark (2008) argued that “the study of mind might […] need to embrace a variety of different

explanatory paradigms whose point of convergence lies in the production of intelligent

behavior” (p. 95). I would like to take Clark at his word and offer up technical communication

research as just such a paradigm. As a cognitive scientist, Clark wants to treat external,

nonbiological elements as part of the human mind. As Clark acknowledged, though, cognitive

scientists typically treat the brain as their primary object of study, and so they often lack a

theoretical and research methodology for understanding many of the nonbiological elements

that are part and parcel of the human mind. Clark has spent nearly two decades developing,

defending, and refining his extended mind model. Describing the act of writing in relation to

thinking, for example, Clark argued, “I would like to go further and suggest that [the individual]

was actually thinking on the paper” (p. xxv). The physical task of writing—the pencil and the

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paper—“reliably and robustly provides a functionality which, were it provided by goings-on in

the head alone, we would have no hesitation in designating as part of the cognitive circuitry” (p.

xxv). Moving further in developing his model of the mind as extended, Clark concluded, “the

local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head” (p. xxviii). Additionally,

Menary (2010) wrote that in the extended mind model “some cognitive processing is

constituted by active features of the environment” (p. 2), which Clark sees as comprised of

brains, bodies, cultures, and tools. The extended mind model (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Clark,

2003; Hurly, 2010; Logan, 2008; Menary, 2006, 2007, 2010; Ross & Ladyman, 2010; Sutton,

2010; Wheeler, 2010; Wilson, 2010) stands in stark contrast to a vision of human cognition as

brainbound. Rather than seeing us as brainbound, Clark (2003) posits humans as “creatures

whose minds are special precisely because they are tailored-made for multiple mergers and

coalitions” (p. 7).

Clark’s model necessarily challenges how a science of mind ought to look and which

disciplines are allowed to participate in it. I position technical communication research as a

necessary complement to cognitive science so that our discipline might imagine future,

mutually beneficial points of convergence with cognitive science, and to see what this

relationship does for us and how it draws on our methodological strengths and theoretical

sophistication. Clark’s work confronts the historical, theoretical, and empirical obstacles to his

model: Technical communication research provides a rich understanding of that model in

practical and rhetorical terms. That is, technical communication research helps us ask, how can

we describe and explain particular extensions of mind, and, most importantly, cultivate and

assess these extended minds?

After briefly summarizing the key elements of Clark’s extended mind model and the

history of technical communication research from which these points of convergence emerge, I

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mark three points of future convergence to demonstrate how technical communication

researchers describe, explain, cultivate, and assess extended minds. The first point of

convergence addresses the role of tools in the extended mind model. Clark persuasively

demonstrates how tools are often part and parcel of the human mind; however, his model lacks

the paradigmatic power to say why this or that tool and not another. Researchers focused on

usability (Van Ittersum, 2009; Whittemore, 2008) provide the requisite explanations for

particular, tool-driven extensions of minds. The second point of convergence deals with

environment and the role it plays in scaffolding and cultivating extended minds. If minds are

necessarily extended across cultures and environments, then the ability of technical

communication researchers to document, describe, and discern the operation and impact of

environments (Winsor, 2001) as well as theorize and enact institutional change (Porter et al.,

2001) within those environments is crucial.

The third and final point of convergence centers on the thorny question of performance

assessment. One of the common concerns raised in response to Clark’s model is that of

evaluation or attributions of responsibility. Because the human mind—and, by extension,

human motivation and behavior—are extended across, bodies, brains, cultures, environments,

and tools, the argument goes, it will become difficult to assess or hold individual persons

accountable for their actions. Researchers exploring alternative methods of

workplace/performance assessments (Henry, 2010) and rhetorics of decision making (Miller,

1990) provide ways of addressing these concerns.

I conclude by pointing toward ways that we can facilitate such convergences through

interdisciplinary endeavors. Interdisciplinary convergence is not without its difficulties and

pitfalls, however. To locate the interdisciplinarity of this project within technical

communication scholarship, I rely on Johnson’s (2004/1998) reading of Klein’s (1990) caveats

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about interdisciplinary work. I do so both to demonstrate my awareness of such complications

and to explicate how the present project avoids the pitfalls identified by Klein, which often

haunt what Johnson called, “the practice of interdisciplinary borrowing” (p. 27):

1. distortion and misunderstanding of borrowed material;

2. use of data, methods, concepts, and theories out of context;

3. use of borrowing out of favor in the original context (including an overreliance on

“old chestnuts”);

4. “illusions of certainty” about phenomena treated with caution or skepticism in their

original disciplines;

5. overreliance on one particular theory or perspective; and

6. a tendency to dismiss contradictory tests, evidence, or explanations. (p. 88)

Meeting what Klein (1990), borrowing from Lauer, has called “the burden of

comprehension” (p. 88), and confronting if not exorcising such demons, I have followed several

courses of action. I have corresponded with Andy Clark and Maarten Derksen to insure the

validity of my claims and to cultivate precisely the interdisciplinary relationships I suggest

here. Although I draw primarily from Clark here, our field’s use of Hutchins’s work as well as

the traces of Hutchins in this work are insurance enough from “overreliance on one particular

theory or perspective” (p. 88). Additionally, our field’s comfort and familiarity with Hutchins

means we are not deaf to other voices in cognitive science. I would argue, as well, that Clark’s

work itself is a constant contextualization of itself. He builds his arguments around challenges

to the extended mind model.

In overcoming such hurdles, however, the reward is more than merely meeting the

burden of comprehension. Like Johnson (2004/1998), I likewise aspire to “the promise of

interdisciplinary research that in its best of circumstances leads to what Klein calls ‘an

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inductive openendedness’ (p. 93): that interesting space in the world of research when we end

up with more—and even more interesting—questions” (p. 28). A convergence between

technical communication researchers and cognitive scientists, along the lines I suggest here,

will ask new questions and expand the list of those qualified to answer them.

ACCEPTING CLARK’S INVITATION

Distinguishing Clark’s Project

For nearly two decades, Clark (past director of the Cognitive Science program at Indiana

University and the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University

and currently a Professor of Philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of

Edinburgh in Scotland) has wrestled with the human mind—a task made all the more difficult

given his position that the human mind exists beyond the confines of skin and skull. Moving

beyond the homunculus vision of cognition where a “tiny man” in the brain controls and directs

human thinking and acting, Clark (2003) sees the brain emerging as “a new-style business

manager whose role is not to micromanage so much as set goals and to actively create and

maintain the kinds of conditions in which various contributing elements can perform best" (p.

135). This, for Clark, defines the distinctiveness of human intelligence. Extended minds explain

“how we humans can be so very special while at the same time being not so very different,

biologically speaking, from other animals with whom we share both the planet and most of our

genes” (p.10). It is not just that we can use tools to solve problems out in the world, but that

those tools and that world are always part and parcel of the mind itself.

To those in technical communication cognizant of Hutchins’s (1993, 1995) work, this

model of the mind might sound familiar. In Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins (1995) argued, “in

watching people think in the wild, we may be learning more about their environment for

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thinking than about what is inside them” (p. 169). There are, then, many commonalities across

their work. However, we should see Clark’s model as more ambitious than Hutchins’s in the

boundaries it imagines for what counts as mind. In Clark’s words,

Distributed cognition often names a less ambitious thesis, that cognition involves many

neural areas working in parallel, or it can name work that shows how tasks are spread

around within groups etc, as in Hutchins’ work on ship navigation. Many fans of

cognition as (in those senses) distributed still think all of an individual’s mental

equipment is in the head. (Clark, personal communication, April 14, 2010)

Describing the employment of navigation charts, Hutchins wrote, “No navigator has ever had,

nor will one ever have, all the knowledge that is in the chart” (p. 111). Going further than the

distributed cognition model, Clark’s (2003) extended mind model holds that, “There is no

informationally constituted user relative to whom all the rest is just tools. It is […] tools all the

way down” (p. 192). Clark argued, “we must never underestimate the extent to which our own

abilities as artists, poets, mathematicians, and the like can be informed by our use of external

props and media” (p. 77). Using even stronger language than “inform,” which suggests the

possibility of art, poetry, and math without props and media, Clark wrote, “the sketch pad is not

just a convenience for the artist […] Instead, the iterated process of externalizing and re-

perceiving turns out to be integral to the process of artistic cognition itself” (p. 77).

This is not to argue, at least in the context of this article, that one model is more

accurate than the other. We should avoid both “illusions of certainty” and the “tendency to

dismiss contradictory […] explanations” (Klein, 1990, p. 88). I argue only that Clark’s model

draws our attention to the ways in which external elements such as tools and environments are

not simply employed by our minds but actively constitute our minds. This raises the stakes for

both cognitive scientists and technical communication researchers.

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Converging with Clark’s Project

Beginning with his earlier work Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again,

Clark (1998) has tacitly understood the (inter)disciplinary implications of his work. First, Clark

himself draws on various scientific disciplines as well as social sciences, science studies, and

philosophy (pp. xvii-xix). Second, his model of the mind creates challenges for those scientists

studying cognition and the brain. Clark (2008) explicitly confronted the problem in this way:

“For the wider applicability of the [extended mind model] […] requires us to be open to treating

more transient external props and aids, assuming they are at least typically available in some

problem-solving contexts, as aspects of human cognitive processing” (p. 113). Moreover, “the

neural innovations and the structured cognitive niches are both differences that make a

difference. The proper foci of our cognitive scientific attention are thus multiple and

nonexclusive” (p. 149). Sutton (2010), also in cognitive science, has explicitly called for

interdisciplinary efforts in much the same vein. First asking, “what would cognitive science be

like, how could it continue, if its objects include notebooks, sketchpads, and tattoos as well as

embodied brains” (p. 214), Sutton concluded by arguing that “[extended mind] can thus tap and

in turn influence the enormous and diverse scholarship on memory, perception, emotion, and

so on in humanities disciplines, to see what might happen if we try to study cognition

scientifically and culturally at once” (p. 215).

Clark (2008) and Sutton have both acknowledged that this requirement opens up a

huge can of methodological and disciplinary worms, in particular, for those cognitive scientists

who take the brain as their sole object of study. Addressing just such a resistant audience, Clark

wrote, “the sciences of the mind, it thus seems, simply cannot afford to identify human

cognitive processing with the activity of various short-lived coupled systems comprising

neural, bodily, and worldly elements” (p. 113). In responding to such resistance, Clark created

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points of convergence between the work that technical communication researchers do with

“external props and aids.”

Additionally, Clark (2008) argued that not every external prop or aid works to forge

“larger hybrid wholes” (p. 115), and that such nonbiological elements are sometimes integrated

and sometimes not. This also creates a space for those who study precisely those moments

when and where nonbiological elements transit the boundary of skin and skull to extend the

human mind. Framed this way, technical communication researchers do more than draw on

models of distributed cognition; they contribute to the ongoing study of human cognition itself.

In seeking to understand, for instance, why and when and how some graduate student writers

employ EndNote or WordPad, Van Ittersum (2009) (discussed in the following section) adds

not just to the field’s body of knowledge but, in Clark’s words, to a “nascent science both of the

recruitment (of sets of neural and extraneural resources) and of the fine-tuned unfolding of

activity in just such heterogeneous ensembles” (p. 121). In my own collaborative efforts with a

colleague in psychology (described later), it has become increasingly clear to both of us that

technical communication researchers both can and should contribute to this understanding.

Technical communication research that seeks to describe and produce (more) intelligent

behavior on the part of individuals and organizations is informed by as it informs cognitive

science. This article is thus strongly focused on interdisciplinarity and the work we (can) do for

others and ourselves.

A Brief History of Convergences

The points of convergence I here identify are neither without precedent in the literature of

technical communication research nor are such research projects the only ways we converge

with cognitive science. There is a rich history of employing cognitive science in technical

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communication research, and the research I treat here have emerged from several corners of

technical communication research and from related fields such as composition.

Technical communication researchers and researchers in related disciplines have a

longstanding relationship with cognitive science. Flower and Hayes (1980) suggested that the

process of “discovery” is not finding some “hidden stores of insight and ready-made ideas” but

is instead “a complicated intellectual process” (p. 21). Such language has more than faint

echoes of the cognitive science perspective represented by Clark and Hutchins. Flower and

Hayes (1977, 1980, 1981, 1994) and Flower (1989) have explored writing and cognition as

complex activities. It is this focus on activity that resonates with Clark’s and others’ arguments

that cognition is not some biological object or possession but is instead a complex interaction

among brain, body, and world. Subsequent critiques of Flower and Hayes (Bizzell, 1982; Brand,

1987; Faigley, 1986) have added nuance to the application of cognitive science to the study of

communication.

Advances in cognitive science have continued to be articulated within technical

communication research (Geisler, 1994; Freedman & Smart, 1997; Medway, 1996; Mirel, 1992,

1998; Mirel and Olsen, 1998; Prior, 1998; Richardson, 2005; Witte, 1992). Haas (1996)

addressed writing and technology, arguing that they are “inextricably linked” (p. xii). The

evidence that she marshaled marks a strong point of convergence for technical communication

researchers and cognitive scientists. Equally valuable is her assertion that “cultural tools and

cognitive activity constitute one another in a symbiotic relationship” (p. xiii). In tune with this

assertion is the robust set of research methods Haas employed, which would be equally

valuable for cognitive scientists to adopt and adapt: “videotaped writing sessions,” “textual

analysis of written artifacts produced with pen and paper and with computers,” “interviews

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with computer writers,” and “longitudinal participant-observer studies” (p. xiv). In the context

of Clark’s extended mind model, all such methods are desirable.

Although not treated here as a point of convergence, activity theory is yet another

strength that technical communication researchers bring to the table. Spinuzzi (2003); Russell

(1997a, 1997b); Haas (1996); Mirel (1992, 1998); Winsor (1996); Medway (1996); Prior

(2004); Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman (1991); and Bazerman and Prior (2004) have all

incorporated activity theory (or its antecedents) and often in concert with cognitive science to

describe literate activity, its development, operation, and assessment across a range of contexts

including both the classroom and the workplace. Russell (1997a, 1997b), in particular,

provides a comprehensive survey of how activity theory has been employed by technical

communication researchers.

Spinuzzi (2003), in light of the research projects I describe here, provides a treatment of

activity theory particularly employable in this work of convergence. Spinuzzi’s genre tracing

marks how workers innovate within their work environments to improve their work lives. Any

cognitive scientist embarking upon a study of intelligent behavior would do well to trace what

Spinuzzi called “ephemeral, invisible, ubiquitous innovations” (p. x). Sounding like a cognitive

scientist himself, Spinuzzi wrote, “genre tracing seeks to forefront [these innovations] as

organic and necessary ways that workers adapt information to support their own efforts” (p.

x). Clark’s interest in “cognitive niches” likewise resonates with Spinuzzi’s claim that “Genre

tracing provides a way to highlight users’ experiences with official and unofficial genres and to

compare them across communities or workplaces” (p. 22). This methodology, Spinuzzi argued,

“allows us to produce more complete and nuanced understandings of human activity” (p. 57). It

is easy to see how a cognitive scientist interested in how particular nonbiological elements

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extend cognition would be interested in how different genres, official and unofficial, extend the

minds of users.

I will continue to foreground both Clark’s project and technical communication research

methodology throughout this article. Our methodology—which Sullivan and Porter (1997)

defined as “an explicit or implicit theory of human relations which guides the operation of

methods” (p. 11)—of counting as equally valuable the often-disparate elements (e.g., tools,

environments, document design, discursive practices, and methods of assessment) that

cultivate intelligent behavior is applicable and possibly generative of new research methods. In

suggesting points of interdisciplinary convergence, I necessarily admit that although technical

communication research provides a necessary complement to the study of intelligent behavior,

it certainly will not be the whole show. Clark’s work will continue to appear in the article side-

by-side with technical communication research rather than purely prior to or after it. My hope

is that this structure allows us to imagine what technical communication researchers and

cognitive scientists working together might actually look like.

CONVERGENCE #1: TOOLS

In an early formulation of the extended mind model, Clark and Chalmers (1998) proposed

criteria for when some artifact would count as a part of the mind. One of these is whether the

artifact has “been consciously endorsed at some point in the past” (p. 17). How this

endorsement proceeds, however, is not quite explained. Most of the studies Clark has drawn on

are of individuals using tools selected for them by the experiment, so it is often difficult to

understand this process of endorsement as it works outside of the lab. Even an important

exception, the study of Tetris players and their use of the controls of the game itself to think

about the game, is silent on why individuals play Tetris in the first place. What goes

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unexplored, then, is why someone would, for instance, endorse a small notebook or an iPhone?

This section surveys two recent studies of memory tools and practices to sketch how such

questions could to be asked and answered.

Like the field of technical communication, Clark has a flexible definition of “tools,” which

for him can include language, pencils, notebooks, virtual worlds, and the internet. In focusing

this first convergence on “tools” rather than “technologies,” I am following Haas’s (1996)

definition of technology “as a complex of objects, actions, people, motives, and uses. A

technology is not an object, but rather a vital system that is bound to the world of time and

space” (p. xii). Clark’s project is a particularly strong point of convergence between technical

communication research and cognitive science because his understanding of tools and

environments is similar to our own. I think we are bettered attuned to the rhetoric (and thus

ethics) of technology, but Clark nevertheless sees tools and environments as integral to human

activity and intelligent behavior.

Van Ittersum (2009) precisely articulated what technical communication researchers

bring to an increasingly interdisciplinary understanding of human cognition at the level of

tools. Rather than focusing on “whether a writer knows how to use discrete features specific to

a software program,” Van Ittersum claimed it is more profitable to “ask about the properties of

functional systems that allow writers to flexibly meet the demands of their literate activity” (p.

259). This distinction is important given that, “not all physical goings-on […] are plausibly cast

as parts of the machinery of mind” (Clark, 2008, p. xxviii). If not every tool can or is cast in such

a way, then it is necessary to ask why not and how might they be altered to be made right for

the part.

Van Ittersum (2009) investigated “the ways writers made use of computer technology

for their memory work” (p. 263). For instance, participants were observed as they used various

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note taking software (p. 264). Clark necessarily treats such interactions, once started, as

relatively seamless, which they often are. Van Ittersum is interested in the seams, the tradeoffs:

“writers seeking to integrate these tools into their existing writing practices often require

significant costs not mentioned along with the touted benefits” (p. 264). What are the reasons

behind and driving particular endorsements and, thus, potential extensions of mind?

Drawing on research in distributed memory and software design, Van Ittersum (2009)

pointed to

the conscious effort and commitment that writers and computer users must make when

they delegate some of their memory tasks to software programs. Rather than a knack

(having a ‘good memory’) or automatic recall (the ‘encyclopedia in the sky’), a

computer-supported memory […] constitutes a complex activity requiring careful

analysis in order to trace what, exactly, is done by people and artifacts engaged in

memory work. (pp. 260-261)

Many factors influence the endorsement of tools and the complex activity of memory that they

enable. Positioning memory this way, Van Ittersum echoes much of Clark’s arguments about

the extended mind. The only caveat we might add is that something more than “delegation”

could be at work here. Clark suggests that rather than “delegation,” we are discussing

potentially intimate “mergers,” an extension of the mind beyond the confines of the skull.

“What we already are,” Clark (2003) argued, is “creatures whose minds are special precisely

because they are tailored made for multiple mergers and coalitions” (p. 7). And with mergers, the

influence cuts both ways. “We create these supportive environments, but they create us too”

(Clark, p. 11). Regardless of the level of intimacy we are willing to grant to any such “merger” or

“delegation,” it is imperative to understand why and how such choices or endorsements are

made in order to create better tools.

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 Van Ittersum’s (2009) discussion of the work of Mary using EndNote is instructive in

two regards. First, there is the time and energy she devoted to using EndNote usefully. Second,

there is Mary’s desire to usefully incorporate EndNote into her memory practice. Trade-offs,

time, and desire, Mary’s story suggests, impact the endorsement of tools as part of the extended

mind. Mary, who took two months to learn EndNote, now uses the program without “having to

think about” it (Van Ittersum, p. 267). Van Ittersum argued that this outcome is predicted by

Hutchins’s model of distributed cognition. I would add, drawing on Clark (1998, 2003, 2008),

that it is not so much that Mary is not thinking but rather that her mind has been extended

through the tool and that tool is now where part of her thinking takes place. The results of

Mary’s work likewise sync with Clark’s extended mind model, which accounts for the skill and

activity involved in such extensions. Like Van Ittersum, Clark (1998) suggested that such

extensions are not automatic and that work, practice, and skill are important factors: “[The

brain] must learn to interface with the external media in ways that maximally exploit their

peculiar virtues” (p. 220).

Van Ittersum (2009), however, treating tools as rhetorical and contestable, explored the

interaction between user and tool in terms of both the usability of the tool and the skill of the

user. Whereas Clark studies only the work of the user, the cognitive agent, technical

communication researchers likewise address the tools themselves—“the extraneural

resources” described by Clark (2008, p. 121). In this vein, Van Ittersum identified features of

the user’s experience and their goals that designers should account for in assessing the

constraints and affordances of tools. “These different goals,” he wrote, “led them to respond

differently to its affordances and to the constraints that arise when coordinating their writing

activity to EndNote” (p. 269). In addressing the goals of the writer in relation to the constraints

and affordances of the tool itself, Van Ittersum productively augments Clark’s own treatment of

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the mergers minds make: “These writers were all aware that coordinating their citation work

with EndNote required that they commit to working within the affordances of the program”

(Van Ittersum, p. 274). “[Stacey’s] commitment to EndNote,” Van Ittersum observed,

“constrained her to figuring out a fix in the program, rather than simply abandoning it and

returning to working in Word alone” (p. 274). Thus, Van Ittersum complicates Clark’s assertion

that humans, as canny cognizers, “[tend] to recruit, on the spot, whatever mix of problem-solving

resources will yield an acceptable result with a minimum of effort” (Clark, 2008, p. 13). Humans

often work quite hard to endorse and incorporate a tool. The minimizing of user effort is often

the end result of much effort on the part of the user.

What is important here is that endorsing tools is difficult and often driven by desire,

goals, and the affordances of the tools themselves. We are drawn as canny cognizers, in any

particular instance, by a complex mix of usability and desire, and, even, as one of Van Ittersum’s

participants indicated, “the colors, and the design” of the program’s interface (p. 270). As

Clark’s use of “endorsement,” as a placeholder of sorts, can only imply, there is rhetoric afoot in

such extensions of mind. Canny cognizers are users, audiences, and desiring individuals with

work to do.

Fleshing out Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) flat notion of endorsement, Van Ittersum

(2009) argued, “writers face several questions as they interact with new rhetorical situations:

when and how should new technologies be created, selected or adopted” (p. 276)? Following

his lead, I would argue that any moment of mind extension, of augmenting human cognition

artifactually and environmentally, is a rhetorical situation. Extensions of mind are necessary

but not automatic: This means that arguments are being made by users and designers about

how our minds ought to be extended. Van Ittersum likewise concluded that such situations, as

rhetorical, are not irrevocable or deterministic. He thus gives tools their due without making

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users merely subject to them. “More research into the ways writers work to integrate new tools

into their processes (acting with these technologies rather than simply acting on them or being

acted upon by them) will help dispel fears that new tools require all-or-nothing irrevocable

commitments” (Van Ittersum, pp. 277-278). Such research also serves a more pragmatic

function: “it could eventually be developed into a heuristic that would suggest fruitful

questions to ask before adopting new tools” (Van Ittersum, p. 278).

Whittemore’s (2008) treatment of how visualizations can improve memory in order to

aid writers working in content management systems (CMS) likewise demonstrates technical

communication researchers’ ability to not only describe and explain particular extensions of

the minds but to cultivate and assess them as well. Connecting the rhetorical canon of memory

to studies in memory, Whittemore has enacted the generative articulation of technical

communication research and cognitive science that I here propose. Along with Van Ittersum,

Whittemore’s rhetorically grounded understanding of technical communication as it relates to

memory allows us to argue just how the tools with which we extend out minds ought to be

designed in order to produce intelligent behavior. To return to the question of why people

choose which tools, Whittemore suggested how CMSs might be designed to account for

extended minds in more generative ways. Specifically, Whittemore was “concerned with the

ways in which memory can be enhanced to aid the tactical retrieval of stored knowledge during

acts of composing” (p. 95). This system of “artificial” memory, to which Cicero “ascribes the

power of the orator” (Whittemore, p. 95), comes quite close to the edificial, scaffolded cognition

described by Clark.

As we see from the treatment of endorsement, not just any tool or scaffold will do the

job. Whittemore’s (2008) own employment of cognitive science (many of his sources are

likewise Clark’s sources) demonstrates how the brainbound models Clark rejects are exactly

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those models that undergird the CMSs that plague many technical communicators. Whittemore

addressed the phenomenon of single sourcing—where “writers compose granular chunks of

text, which are stored in a content database before being repurposed and reassembled to

create a variety of information products” by someone other than the technical writer (p. 89)—

as “[sources] of difficulty in content databases” (p. 89). Whittemore argued that metadata

(“data about data”) is crucial to the work of a technical writer: For instance, “what type of

information the text constitutes,” “how large or small each chunk of the text should be,

depending on its potential for reuse,” and “how the potential audiences might interpret this

text” (p. 93).

This metadata is important for invention, but access to it is hampered by CMSs that are

predicated upon single sourcing (Whittemore, 2008). Having access to only one chunk of text at

a time impairs acts of composing because it divorces the writer from the metadata necessary

for invention. Whittemore frames this as a problem of memory. Rather than retrieving the

necessary metadata (from the text in context) as they compose, writers are assumed to be (or

forced to be) able to have memorized (in their head) such metadata. Either that, or it is

assumed that such metadata is not strictly necessary. The technical writer must then struggle

“just to keep track of her own goals and purposes for her text-in-progress in an essentially

decontextualized writing interface” (p. 94).

In decontextualizing the composing process, single sourcing presumes memory and

cognition to be brainbound, with negative consequences for many technical writers. In this

way, Whittemore’s (2008) research not only adds value to the extended mind model, it adds

weight to critiques of competing models by demonstrating their pernicious effects on users.

CMSs of the stripe Whittemore would like to change very much assume the human mind, and

thus the composing process and memory, are trapped within human skin and skull.

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Whittemore thus bolsters Clark’s argument by demonstrating the negative consequences of the

brainbound view of cognition.

Whittemore (2008) inquired “what sorts of visualization tools should future CMSs offer

in order to help writers make connections among content and engage in truly inventional

activities” (p. 101). The important thing is that any such method should “leverage human

visual-spatial sense-making capabilities” (p. 101). Instead of browsing folders and searching

through file names (See Figure 1), a writer could take advantage of the kinds of visualizations

available in, for instance, Second Life, which would allow her to see the image, in the case of an

arrow icon, along with other collected icons (See Figure 2). Additionally, the spatial aspects of

Second Life would allow her to “narrow the scope of search based on her ‘place learning’” (p.

102), a concept Whittemore borrows from Barres and McNaughton and which indicates the

location where she encountered the icons. Additionally important, the writer should be able “to

interact and reorganize those visualizations as needed” (p. 103).

Insert Figure 1 here.

Insert Figure 2 here.

Drawing on Quintilian’s argument, “For a person’s memory will always be assisted by

certain circumstances upon the very face of the paper itself” (as cited is Quintilian, 11.31, p.

439), Whittemore (2008) argued that memory is continually aided by the writing surface.

Writers refer back to their own texts as they write to track “metadata about [their] own

immediate goals and purposes” (p. 104). Whittemore additionally draws on Flowers and Hayes

(1981) in making this argument: “Writers need to be given larger design views of their texts-in-

progress so that they can keep track of their larger discursive goals through exploration and

consolidation and so that they can meet the needs of real users in real situations of use” (p.

106). Whittemore, as a model technical communication researcher, follows this line of thought

18
and then proposes enactment based on the work of particular individuals engaged in cognition

with and through tools.

Whittemore’s (2008) recommendations demonstrate how technical communication

research complements Clark’s model. Not only his recommendations for but also his

orientation to cognition strike me as necessary additions to current cognitive science

endeavors. What is it about extended cognitive networks that help us act intelligently in the

world? As Clark (2003) argued, nothing purely on board and brainbound can explain this

ability. “We exist, as the thinking things we are,” Clark argued, “only thanks to a baffling dance

of brains, bodies, and cultural and technological scaffolding” (p. 11). It is, as Whittemore

reminded us in the context of composing, “’ad-hoc structures’ […] that enable writers to

interact with the texts-in-progress in flexible yet temporary ways’ (p. 106).

CONVERGENCE #2: ENVIRONMENTS

Whittemore’s (2008) work obviously blurs any neat boundary between tool and environment:

Tools can become environments and environments can work as tools. Additionally, tools often

work (or do not) within an environmental and cultural context. That is, environments and

cultures can work to enable the effective use of tools. Winsor’s (2001) study of newcomers at

AgriCorp, a pseudonym for the company Winsor studied, adds nuance to Clark’s treatment of

environmental and cultural scaffolds—a term Clark (2008), drawing on Vygotsky, has used to

describe external structures we exploit in extending our minds (pp 43-47)—as vital elements

of a necessarily extended mind. Winsor’s work also demonstrates that combining workplace

ethnographies and distributed cognition provides a powerful conceptual tool for studying

intelligent behavior. Workplace ethnographies on technical communication and literacy in

general (Doheny-Farina, 1986, 1989, 1992; Lutz, 1989; Rose, 1989, 2004; Smart, 2000; Winsor,

19
1996) add value to Clark’s extended mind model in their attention to the locations and

activities that constitute, in part, human cognition and behavior. This section likewise positions

Porter, Sullivan, Blythe, Grabill, and Miles’s (2001) methodology of institutional critique as a

practice of this model of mind. Given what we know of the human mind as extended and of the

environments it is extended through, how might we treat environments practically and

rhetorically as part and parcel of our minds?

Winsor (2001) investigated “some of the specific means by which [newcomers at

AgriCorp] gained access to knowledge in this workplace” (p. 6). As Van Ittersum (2009)

explored why individuals chose certain tools with which to extend their minds as writers,

Winsor explored how individuals integrate themselves into larger cultural and environmental

scaffolds to successfully do their job. If, then, as Clark has argued, human minds are made

possible by a baffling dance of tools, environments, and cultures, then how are the processes by

which people are incorporated, managed, and organized? How do we gain or facilitate access to

the environmental and cultural scaffolds that make minds as we know or need them to be

possible? Workplace ethnographies such as Winsor’s address just these questions.

Winsor’s (2001) findings suggest that there are a few primary ways that newcomers

gain necessary access to workplace scaffolds. Formal training is not one of these. Workplace

knowledge cannot simply be loaded into the brains of newcomers as data. As with the CMSs

critiqued by Whittemore, such an educational model presupposes a mind bounded by the

brain. Knowledge, instead, is out in the workplace itself. Indeed, AgriCorp seemed to recognize

this and offered formal training “only when no more experiential way of learning was

available” (p. 12). Mentoring, hands-on learning, and “fiddling around,” all endorsed by the

company, proved better access points for newcomers.

Hands-on learning is allowing newcomers to understand something by “literally

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touching and manipulating the technical objects they worked with” (p. 14). As Winsor (2001)

argued, “The extent to which both interns and regular employees value hands-on learning is a

sign of how cognition was distributed into their physical surroundings rather than taking place

solely in their heads” (p. 15). Just as important, placing value on such learning promotes its

enactment, which, in turn, develops cognition in meaningful and work-directed/required ways.

Fiddling around, though very similar to hands-on learning, marks not the mastering of an

object but of experimenting with it. Although Winsor did not mention it explicitly, fiddling

around is more invention than discovery oriented.

What is important about these aspects of on the job learning is that they are not simply

about mastering work once and for all—of storing it all onboard the biological brain as a

complete catalogue and representation of the work environment and the tasks to be completed

there. Winsor (2001) argued that newcomers are instead “learning to learn, a process that lead

to their having access to the distributed cognition in effect at the AgriCorp engineering center”

(pp. 16-17). Everything cannot and should not be brought on board if minds are extended.

Environments and tools are part and parcel of cognition, and what becomes important is

learning to access and manipulate scaffolds in order to think and work through them. As

Winsor observed, “Plugging into this system is a difficult task because the system is in constant

flux so that even more-experienced employees spend a great deal of time learning” (p. 25).

Again, the mind is necessarily but not automatically extended. With minds made for mergers

and coalitions, we must still actively foster such extensions.

Winsor (2001) offered a practical, rhetorical fleshing out of the theoretical implications

of Clark’s model. Clark (1999) has moved in this direction, for example, in a chapter he

contributed to the collection The Biology of Business, where he wrote, “the immediate task in

such new knowledge-intensive and information-driven ventures is to create the internal

21
conditions that allow the creation and maintenance of multiple collaborative endeavors” (pp.

58-59). Although focused on collaborative work in technology-driven entrepreneurial efforts,

Clark clearly envisioned what Winsor is able to deliver: a set of practices that make manifest

the scaffolding potential of work environments.

AgriCorp is engaged, as all organizations necessarily are, in building (better) people. We

can by all means question and subsequently challenge to what end and who is building people

in any given organizational context, but we need not ignore the challenge and responsibility to

do so. Clark (2003) argued that we “resist the temptation to define ourselves in brutal

opposition to the very worlds in which many of us now live, love, and work” (p. 142). This focus

on access becomes a necessary articulation of technical communication research and those

scientific disciplines that confront questions of workplace ethics and assessment, which is the

third point of convergence.

Building towards a discussion of workplace assessment within the present discussion of

environments, the work of institutional critique provides yet another point of the convergence

between technical communication research and cognitive science. Institutional critique,

described below, asks us to consider what we might do with Clark’s model and its implication

that we are, more or less, building “the kinds of people we choose to be” (Clark, 2003, p. 195).

For Clark, there is no way around this question: “we were always hybrid beings, joint products

of our biological nature and multilayered linguistic, cultural, and technological webs” (p. 195).

Scaffolds necessarily work to enable cognition; however, it is vital to treat them as contestable,

negotiable, and changeable. If we are indeed building people as Clark suggests, and if we hold

the basic tenets of democracy as valuable, then we must have complementary rhetorical

strategies not just for discerning and describing environments but for changing them as well.

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 “Institutional Critique: A Rhetorical Methodology for Change” provides just such an

understanding of human environments as contestable. Porter et al., (2000) stated their core

argument this way:

Though institutions are certainly powerful, they are not monoliths; they are rhetorically

constructed human designs (whose power is reinforced by buildings, laws, traditions,

and knowledge-making practices) and so are changeable. In other words, we made ‘em,

we can fix ‘em. Institutions R Us. (p. 611)

The playful expression “Institutions R Us” resonates strongly with Clark’s case for the vital

importance of scaffolds in human cognition. Complicating Clark’s model, however, Porter et al.,

implicitly weave into it questions of rhetorical effectiveness and power by treating institutions

“as rhetorical systems of decision making that exercise power through the design of space

(both material and discursive)” (p. 621). Human decision-making always occurs in the context

of designed space, which, Porter et al., remind us, is also always an exercise of power. Who is

choosing the kinds of people or employees to build and why?

It is through their formulation of institutional critique that we see rhetorical action as

the way that the institutions and scaffolds within and with which we are cultivated can be

changed. As Porter et al., (2000) argued, “institutional critique is unabashedly rhetorical

practice mediating macro-level structures and micro-level actions rooted in a particular space

and time” (p. 612). The macro focus “is one way to discuss how our public lives are organized

and conducted (both for us and by us)” (p. 620). The macro focus thus corresponds nicely to

Clark’s use of scaffolding to describe external support systems. Porter et al., added the micro

focus to prevent “a view of institutions as static, glacial, or even unchangeable” (p. 621). The

macro view could foster the belief that change requires “large-scale action” that few can enact

(p. 621). The micro focus allows us to see institutions and Clark’s scaffolds, “as also operating

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locally” (p. 621). The mediation of macro and micro as a way of critiquing institutions provides

an important conceptual tool for understanding scaffolds. It allows us to envision how

particular scaffolds operate locally, which further allows for local actors to work towards

changing them.

Clark (1999) argued, “The goal of management is not to draw up detailed blueprints for

performance or change but to foster decentralized adaptation and create the broad conditions

necessary for deriving maximum benefit from multiple sources of environmental order and

opportunity” (p. 59). Clark’s approach to management makes sense in the context of his work:

create an environment that scaffolds creative activities an organization desires. Developing the

rhetorical wherewithal to make manifest these goals in the macro-level structures and micro-

level actions of the organization is another question entirely. What Porter et al., (2000)

proposed is a method of intervention into the scaffolds that promote or undermine particular

modes of thinking and acting. For instance, Porter et al., told of Mary Dieli, the usability

manager at Microsoft who successfully integrated the term “usability” into the design process

(p. 610). Although a simple “graphic revision,” this change was “an important political move,

establishing users and user testing as a more integral part of the software development

process” (p. 611). This rhetorical work consists of exploiting the spaces, within institutions, for

“reflection, resistance, revision, and productive action” (p. 613). With this methodology for

institutional change, Porter et al., implicitly pointed to a vision of technical communication

researchers informed by an awareness of the extended and emergent qualities of the human

mind.

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 CONVERGENCE #3: PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

In the conclusion of Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark (2003) presented a list of potentially serious

concerns highlighted by his argument. Namely, that with extended minds there arise questions

of, for instance, inequality, intrusion, uncontrollability, overload, alienation, deceit,

degradation, and disembodiment (p. 167). These “specters that haunt," many of which revolve

around the thorny issue of judgment, are not challenges to his thesis but questions Clark argues

are raised by it (p. 167). How do we hold one another accountable? How do we attribute

responsibility? How do we discern or assign motive? How do we assess, in other words, minds

extended across brains, bodies, cultures, environments, and tools? In this third and final point

of convergence, I argue that technical communication researchers, while not offering solutions,

provide ways of acting, deciding, and adjudicating within the world of extended minds. I resist

the language of “solutions” because for the questions raised by Clark’s model there are no

definitive answers, only strategies and techniques for negotiating the complexity of human

cognition. As Rivers and Tirrell (in press) have argued in a recent attempt to articulate the

extended mind model and rhetorical theory more generally,

We do not claim that rhetoric solves these problems. What rhetoric offers is the means

to reinterpret such strife [a word used here to designate the extended nature of the

human mind] as a productive element of a generative agonism, allowing us to navigate

through the world that moves through us, in and out of the body and mind.

To this indefinite end I forward Henry’s (2010) repurposing of performance appraisals.

Henry’s posthuman critique and refiguring of performance appraisals generates a form of

assessment less focused on objective, after the fact analyses of discrete and autonomous

agents, and one more invested in generating supportive, improvable work environments.

Henry argued that assessment should be ongoing and oriented toward improving the scaffolds

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and tools through and with which individuals do their work. Henry took technical

communication researchers’ established relationship with distributed cognition further, using

it to address not only “the interactions that distribute cognition” but also “the evaluation of

work accomplished qua organizational performance” (p. 12). Henry thus tacitly addressed

concerns about the extended mind to which Clark only gave voice. To Henry’s treatment of

performance appraisals I add Miller’s (1990) critique of decision science. I incorporate Miller

because her early intervention into decision science problematized any attempt to resolve

issues of judgment or assessment from within the bounds of science and its discourse of

objectivity. Miller implicitly revealed extensions of the mind as always value-laden processes

by reintroducing rhetoric to the science of decision-making.

Before deploying Henry (2010) and Miller (1990), it is worthwhile to examine just how

Clark himself has addressed such concerns in order to see where exactly within his work the

possibilities for convergences lie. Clark’s treatment of the skinbag as a tenuous and problematic

boundary for what ought to count as part of the mind is not without its critics (Adams &

Aizawa, 2001; Preston, 2010; Rupert, 2004). Ostensibly critiquing Clark’s argument from the

standpoint of ethics, Selinger and Engströ m (2007) argued “that when agency no longer ends

‘at the skinbag,’ then neither do attributions of responsibility and irresponsibility” (p. 579). To

drive the point home they imagine “A future Clarence Darrow might be able to mitigate the

sentence of a guilty client by arguing his or her pathological profile is the result of her

dispositions being shaped by faulty or maliciously used data miners, the conditions of which

the agent was unaware at the time of influence” (p. 579).

Clark (2007) responded frankly: “I agree” (p. 586). Clark persuasively acknowledged

what should be obvious: “Such attributions are already contested. It is surely no more

problematic to hold an extended cognitive agent responsible for their actions, choices and

26
desires than it is to hold a skinbound one” (p. 586). Accountability has always been hard. Clark

continued, “And just as a bare biological agent (if there ever was such a thing) can be coarsely

manipulated by external interests or agencies in ways that absolve her of blame for some

specific act, goal, or desire, so might the augmented or otherwise extended one” (p. 586).

Incorporating Clark’s persuasive point about the difficulty of any such attribution, we could

easily argue that any defense attorney today worth his or her salt could make this defense with

no knowledge of Clark (and would be justified in zealously representing his or her client). All of

which is to argue that Clark’s model of the mind only makes salient problems as old as the

human species itself.

What I find problematic is that Clark (2007) himself seems to beg the question. Clark

rightly argued that such attributions are always already contested. However, in acknowledging

that his model makes it difficult to imagine attributions of responsibility in the context of the

extended mind, he still counted as given that we have only a post hoc mechanism for doing so.

Rather than reimagining or developing a method of assessment better in tune with the

extended mind model, Clark maintained the extended mind in a system of adjudication

predicated upon the bare biological agent.

Henry’s (2010) appraisal system, which does not wait until the end to adjudicate who

did what and under whose influence, does not beg the question: It examines the work of

embodiment and extended mind in process so as to intervene before the rapacious data miner

shapes individual dispositions for criminal ends. The problem with Selinger and Engströ m’s

(2007) argument by analogy is that it envisions a legal system still working with an

understanding of the human agent as discrete and autonomous in the way that Taylorist

management science, to which Henry traced many contemporary work appraisals, also does.

Within these systems the extended mind is a tough nut to crack: A system that waits until the

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end to pass judgment (pseudo)objectively on the “bare biological agent” will necessarily have a

hard time with agents that are far from bare. If we were, however, to confront Selinger and

Engströ m with Henry’s model of performance appraisal as a loose analogue for the legal

system, Clark’s (2007) limited response is now persuasively augmented.

Henry’s (2010) system of continuous feedback is better attuned to the performances of

an individual as an element of larger, more complex “set of relations” (p. 22). In the model of

assessment Selinger and Engströ m (2007) assume, such relations must be treated as noise

rather than as integral, constitutive components of agents themselves. Not having waited until

the end of the year to sort through who is responsible for what and why, such a system would

be in place throughout the performance of work. Henry’s posthuman performance appraisal

would not put the case in the hands of Clarence Darrow after the fact; it would entail

representation and recourse throughout the process. Workers and managers alike would

continually be attuned, via feedback loops, to the conditions of the mergers and coalitions from

which work actively emerges. Clark’s treatment of the skinbag shifts the focus from objective,

after the fact assessment to continual feedback and efforts to promote better mergers and

coalitions in media res.

Equally important, the appraisals Henry (2010) critiques assume what Clark (2003) has

called the bare biological agent. As with Whittemore’s (2008) critique of single sourcing CMSs

and Winsor’s (2001) evidence of the ineffectiveness of formal workplace training, Henry’s

critique of workplace appraisals bolsters Clark’s efforts by demonstrating the trouble with the

brainbound model made manifest. In Henry, assessment becomes not a problematic tool for

measuring agency but a productive (and, perhaps, still contested) tool for generating (new

forms of) intelligent behavior. By all means hold nefarious agents accountable for their actions,

but by all other means acknowledge and address the conditions that cultivate such activity.

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 Having confronted the humanist subject and how the Taylorist model sought to assess

its performance, Henry (2010) makes an argument for just how, in the context of the work

environment, we might achieve a more feedback-oriented, posthuman appraisal system.

Instructively following key tenets of posthumanism, Henry sets out to remake the appraisal in

the spirit not just of reflecting upon autonomous agents but of actively improving “technical

communicators’ work lives” (p. 13). The first move concerns embodiment over and against the

traditional view of the body “as a support system for the mind” (p. 19). Rather than treating the

body as mere container, Henry argued that we should acknowledge that “embodiment implies

a human with a history, a gender, an ethnicity, an age, and so forth—a culturally shaped agent

who performs in difficult sites and from varying statuses in discursive formations” (p. 19).

Henry called on embodiment so that we might attend, in assessment, to the “educational

systems [in place at any organization] shaping human bodies and minds” (p. 19). When we

ignore the body of the worker we counterproductively leave un-appraised the cultural and

technological scaffolding that cultivates that worker’s embodiment, and, hence, their

performance. Henry’s repurposed appraisal would thus acknowledge and generate continual

feedback for bodies as integral to the work of extended minds.

Henry (2010) argued that technical communicators should “monitor performances

while in the midst of them rather than accounting for them after the fact” (p. 19). The benefit of

acknowledging human cognition as distributed or the mind as extended is that first it

acknowledges the complexity of work, agency, and products. Second, and more importantly,

Henry argued, “this new accountability would enhance the distribution of cognition

significantly” by incorporation or “building feedback mechanisms throughout the system” (p.

20). Such feedback would work to continually assess the activities of these loops themselves

rather than waiting to examine the end results of such looping.

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 There is an opportunity here to extend cognition other ways given that the human mind

is necessarily extended and the human subject is a less secure, discrete, and autonomous

starting point. Rather than shunning the complexity of assessing such a cognitive agent, Henry

(2010) runs with it, following implicitly the leads created but not developed by Clark.

Addressing fears that his model will lead to, for instance, disembodiment (that the body will no

longer matter) or social isolation (fears that online environments move us farther and farther

apart), Clark (2003) wrote that he “anticipates multiple embodiment and social complexity” (p.

194). Clark argued that rather than rejecting outright the conditions of humanity as he

described them, which is, quite frankly, difficult to imagine, “the task is to merge gracefully, to

merge in ways that are virtuous, that bring us closer to one another, make us more tolerant,

enhance understanding, celebrate embodiment, and encourage mutual respect” (p. 194)—we

can “actively structure the kind of world, technology, and culture that will build the kinds of

people we chose to be” (p. 195). Although sounding pie-in-the-sky to some and downright

terrifying to others, these are precisely the issues we always already have before us (hence the

persuasive and pervasive prophylactic around the humanist self). If Clark is right and human

cognition and embodiment are necessarily extended and cultivated, then we simply cannot

avoid building people.

This necessarily changes the goals and value of performance appraisals. Rather than

what Henry (2010) called “the (pseudo)objectivism of the performance appraisal,” his

repurposed version would enact a “reflexive epistemology” (p. 21). This epistemology would

aim to operate “from the perspective of any system’s imbalance in the ways in which it

distributes—and collects, filters, and archives—cognition” (p. 21). Individual agents are not

measured against an (pseudo)objective standard but within a reflexive epistemological

appraisal that would locate agency (and here Henry borrows from Herndl and Licona [2007])

30
as, “the conjunction of a set of social and subjective relations that constitute the possibility of

action” (as cited in Herndl and Licona, p. 135). “Performance appraisals from such a

perspective would entail ongoing monitoring by technical communicators and their allied

agents of this (remarkably complex) set of relations to perceive more possibilities for action

and to question constraints on agency” (p. 22).

Once the need for a reflexive epistemology is recognized, as I think it very much is in

technical communication research, then we can begin to flesh out the implications of Clark’s

arguments: to describe how humans inhabit and navigate mergers and coalitions that extend

the mind. Our field’s attention and orientation to communication, organizations, and tools as

well as our grounding in rhetorical theory, situates us to contribute in these ways. Henry

(2010) argued that technical communicators at work in these mergers and coalitions style

themselves as ethnographers who can leverage “their embodied experiences and their histories

as culturally shaped agents” and collaborate “with technical communication specialists from

the academy to enhance an organization’s performance “(p. 23). Henry argued, “as the sole

academic discipline probing organizational performances, cultural performances, and

technological performances simultaneously, we can begin to marshal our knowledge […] to

reveal vital powers (and perils) of discourse in forums that perhaps only we, collectively, can

discern” (pp. 23-24).

From his place within the discipline of cognitive science, Clark (2003) ends his

generative and provocative works with arguments like, “The possibility thus exists for an open-

ended variety of new and potent forms of swarm intelligence [a dramatic metaphor for

extended mind], with meta-feedback reconfiguring our filtering routines to suit the different

types, of moods, of users” (p. 189). Technical communication researchers can write and

generate what comes next: namely, repurposing genres and shaping performances to ensure

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that such forms of “swarm intelligence” are made manifest. The extended qualities of the

human mind surely raise the stakes of rhetorical performances of any kind.

Speaking in terms of stakes brings us squarely to Miller’s (1990) critical response to

decision science. Miller confronted those who would offer the firm ground of science to

adjudicate decision-making by revealing the assumption of pre-existing values that operate in

such approaches. Miller responded to a move, which continues to this day, by some social

sciences to conceive “of decision making as a science rather than an art, as apodictic procedure

that imports the force of necessity into the realm of the uncertain” (p. 163). An example of this

would be only debating the economic feasibility of a corporate move and eschewing a

discussion of whether the move ought to be made at all. This move, Miller claimed, “reverses the

rhetorical turn” (p. 163), by which Miller meant “the extension of uncertainty to matters other

than Athenian civic affairs—beyond ethics and politics to philosophy, science, and the academic

disciplines in general” (p. 162).

Decision science, like those unsettled responses to Clark, presumes a certain orientation

to values (inasmuch as it assumes a transcendent set of values) that is problematic both for

Clark’s brand of cognitive science and for technical communication research. Miller (1990) first

applied Booth’s charge of motivism—an inability to reason about values—quite persuasively

here. In discussing the extended mind, given the consequences or stakes of tools and

environments it highlights, we must be fully prepared to reason about values, which are

implicit in the tools we build, the environments we construct, and the modes of assessment we

create. Miller next applied Perelman’s claim that “problems of action [are] sometimes reduced

to problems of knowledge” (as cited in Perelman, 1982, p. 7). In terms of extended minds, this

means asking if this or that tool works to extend the mind rather than asking should this or that

tool be incorporated given the possible outcomes of such an endorsement? Whereas Porter et

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al. (2000), underscored the rhetorically constructed and contested features of institutions,

Miller drove home the still larger argument about the values that underscore any environment

or tool, and thus any extension of the human mind. It is in this vein that Miller, quoting Garver,

reminded us that it is rhetoric that “is concerned with the ‘essentially contestable’” (p. 162).

One of the reasons Henry’s (2010) piece is so persuasive is that his proposed system of

accountability seems designed to avoid motivism. To wait to the end to assess a presumably

discrete and autonomous individual is to both ignore how that individual works through the

organization and the resources it makes available, and it is to pass up opportunities to improve

how this reciprocal and emergent relationship functions. This is not simply about recognizing

the posthuman in the work of technical communication; it is about reorganizing work in ways

that improve it. Clark (2003) wrote, “As feedback links become richer and more varied, our

experience will rather become one of multiple ways of being embodied” (p. 194). To wait until

after the fact of activity is likewise to leave unexamined the values that motivate it: It is to

replace the question is this how we ought to have worked? with did you accomplish this or that

task?

The long and short of it, then, in response to the challenges Clark’s brand of cognitive

science confronts, is that we must make arguments, and we must make them persuasively and

continually. If the human mind is no longer brainbound, then it can longer be arhetorical either.

Once the mind is more than neurons and gray matter and is instead comprised of neuronal and

extraneuronal, nonbiological, and cultural elements, decisions must be assessed in terms of

values and effects and made in ways that promote and provide constant feedback designed to

continually (re)assess and (re)cultivate. With no biological-cognitive core to appeal to, we have

to assess continually and constantly: It is such activity that produces the very things that (will)

matter to us. This is what Clark grapples with and what Miller, Henry, and many other technical

33
communication researchers are willing and able to supply: the means to rhetorically and

productively engage uncertainty through theory and practice and with research methodologies

grounded in the lived experience of beings possessed of extended minds.

CONCLUSION: MOMENTS OF CONVERGENCE

These three points of convergence suggest that the work I propose for technical

communication researchers is already under way. The field of technical communication, with

its robust research agenda and sophisticated array of theoretical perspectives, cannot help but

contribute to related and complementary disciplines. The framework for interdisciplinary

work created by Klein (1990) and advocated for by Johnson (1998/2004) is more than a rubric

for assessing interdisciplinary efforts after the fact. It is an action plan for generating particular

kinds of interdisciplinary projects—spots of “inductive openness” (Klein, p. 93). Additionally,

the work I describe here is not the only way forward for technical communication researchers;

it is also no longer the case that we need always speak of ways forward. The field, as I

experience it in journals, on litservs, and at conferences, is healthy and robust (even in the

agonism we find in all three). Neither do I wish to suggest that our legitimacy must come

through articulating ourselves with other, apparently more prestigious disciplines. I offer up

this argument as part of our continual tweaking of technical communication as a discipline and

as a field, and to suggest that all disciplines owe it to one another to talk to each other. The

future I propose is one of continuing our traditional work but doing so in new places and with

new people, and with an understanding that such work, while ambitious, must also be cautious

and patient.

First, several conferences exist around intersections of the humanities and cognitive

science and provide new places for our work. Clark was a plenary speaker at a neuroscience

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and humanities conference at Bucknell University in the spring of 2007. During many of the

Q&A sessions it became increasingly clear that neither side was fully prepared (even while

being committed) to talk to one another. They lacked a perspective that might have allowed

them to more fruitfully engage each other. Technical communication researchers, existing as

they do in a liminal space between technology, science, and the humanities, are uniquely

positioned to mediate such paradigmatic differences. Indeed, a recent techrhet discussion

centered precisely around how the field of technical communication sees itself in such

intersections as the humanities and digital technologies and new media. What better venue to

share our unique position than conferences dedicated to constructing such bridges? As Knievel

(2006) has argued, technical communication’s unique relationship to both technology and the

humanities affords the opportunity to make the case for “taking anticipatory, developmental

responsibility for tools,” a view that often “seems incongruous with the humanities’ notion of

self” (p. 77).

Second, several journals exist around these issues, for instance Janus Head. These

outlets, often dealing with an area of scholarship known as “philosophy of mind,” make it clear

that there are publishing venues friendly to scholars interested in asking questions about

cognition and the human mind from within paradigms previously ignored by the sciences of

mind (Rivers & Tirrell, in press).

Finally, such convergences can productively engage individual scholars from

complementary disciplines. As I mentioned in the introduction, I am currently collaborating

with the psychologist Maarten Derksen in creating a theoretical framework for understanding

experimental psychology, cognitive science, and communication as all implicated in complex

rhetorical ecologies rather than as secured in discrete, bounded situations. This is relevant in

psychology, for instance, for those interested in understanding the dynamics and ethical

35
implications of the placebo effect and the use of priming in experimental conditions, both of

which require deception on the part of the experimenter. It is also of value for those in

cognitive science exploring how beliefs come to subtly (re)constitute human cognition. In

terms of technical communication research, this project necessarily confronts issues of

usability and the persuasive work of securing endorsements on the part of users. It is also work

that draws equally on all three disciplines. Such collaborations bring technical communication

research to other disciplines in mutually beneficial ways.

Clark’s work implicitly and explicitly calls for the kind of broad convergence I have

sketched here. Motivated and marshaled in the ways I describe, technical communication

researchers are uniquely positioned to participate in a still-emerging and largely unsettled area

of the study of intelligent behavior. Cognitive science, which for decades treated minds in a

vacuum, has turned to treat cognition in the wild. Once the mind is recognized as necessarily

extended into a messy and complex world, paradigms already engaged in such environs must

be included: Clark makes this call explicit. I argue that our discipline offers just such a

paradigm, and that in the spirit of interdisciplinary discourse and committed to the goal of

improving tools, environments, and methods of assessment, we should make it available to

others in the future to come.

36
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to both Andy Clark and Maarten Derksen for their generous feedback throughout

this project. They helped my thinking about specific aspects of my argument, and, more

importantly, they convinced me with their collegiality that such convergences are indeed

possible.

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Nathaniel A. Rivers is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. His current

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Writing and Communication, Kairos, and Janus Head.

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