ABSTRACT
In this study I will examine three schools of rhetoric in contemporary composition studies as demarcated by Lester Faigley (1986) and James Berlin (1988)––expressivist, cognitivist, and social-constructivist-–and their claims about knowledge production, pedagogical goals, and the presuppositions undergirding each. The focus of this inquiry is to establish the model of reality each school presupposes. I use “presupposes” because every epistemology implies a particular ontology and vice versa. Thus, these schools’ claims about practice and pedagogy will be contrasted to their presupposed models of reality in order to locate their respective theory/practice inconsistencies. I will be interested in discovering which pedagogical claims, if any, are apparently denied by the ontology used to support the epistemology of each rhetoric.
