Presentation given at the 2008 Conference on College Composition and Communication, New Orleans, April 2008.

1. THEORIZING RECURSION: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH Brian J. McNely Rhetoric and Writing Studies University of Texas at El Paso

9. Strange Loops <Video feedback loop> Hofstadter (2007) notes that “in the TV setup […] no perception takes place at any stage inside the loop. […] The TV loop is not a strange loop—it is just a feedback loop.” “ In any strange loop that gives rise to human [subjectivity] […] the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensible elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues a loop with ‘strangeness.’” Consciousness is a quintessentially strange loop. It is self-referential; it builds symbols and taxonomies.

10. Wittgenstein, L. (1999). Philosophical Investigations.

11. Recursive Hermeneutics In order to see both duck and rabbit, we engage in a complex, though deceptively simple and seemingly instantaneous interpretive gesture; for lack of a better term, lets call this recursive hermeneutics. Yet while this hermeneutic ability is essential to basic human pattern recognition, agency, and response, for my purposes here, I’m more interested in what comes after interpretation, how recursive hermeneutics is but one step in the formulation of new knowledge .

12. Recursive Heuristics Jeff Hawkins (2004) argues that “the brain doesn’t compute the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory […] the entire cortex is a memory system.” Further, he states that “our brains use stored memories to constantly make predictions about everything we see, feel, and hear […] what we perceive is a combination of what we sense and of our brains’ memory-derived predictions.” Perhaps most importantly, Hawkins suggests that “prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence.”

13. Rhetorical Invention Maureen Daly Goggin (2004), in surveying the history of needlework and sampler making as a conflation of visual and verbal rhetorics, argues that “sampler making served as a form of rhetorical invention,” that “early samplers served as the old from which the new can be fashioned.” While she doesn’t reference ideas from cognitive science and recursion theory, she makes a crucial (but tacit) point: Recursion is the fuel of rhetorical invention. By rearticulating the commonplace notion of recursion and highlighting its role in invention, we acknowledge the profound role that previous (often unconscious) knowledge plays in the production of new knowledge.