Core Theory
Paralogic Rhetoric Paralogic rhetoric is the foundational theory Thomas Kent developed across a decade of scholarship, beginning with his 1989 articles "Beyond System: The Rhetoric of Paralogy" (College English) and "Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric" (Rhetoric Review), and culminating in his 1993 monograph Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction (Bucknell University Press), which won the 1995 CCCC Outstanding Book Award. Drawing principally on Donald Davidson's externalist philosophy of language — especially the ideas of radical interpretation, passing theories, and triangulation — Kent argued that all communicative interaction is a triadic, situated process of hermeneutic guessing among a speaker, an interlocutor, and the world. Rather than following internalized rules, codes, or conventions, communicators continuously generate and revise "passing theories" — provisional, moment-by-moment hypotheses about what others mean — making every act of communication fundamentally unrepeatable and non-systematic.
Kent's concept of "paralogy," adapted in part from Jean-François Lyotard's critique of grand narratives, names the idea that communicative success always exceeds and escapes any system designed to explain it. In his 1991 article "On the Very Idea of a Discourse Community" (College Composition and Communication), Kent extended this anti-systemic argument to challenge the influential notion that shared discourse communities govern how writers produce meaning, contending instead that no set of community-internal conventions can fully determine interpretation. He revisited and condensed these claims in his 2002 chapter "Paralogic Rhetoric: An Overview" (in Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, ed. Gary A. Olson). Paralogic rhetoric became the philosophical engine behind post-process theory and has continued to influence scholars in digital rhetoric, posthuman composition, and — most recently — debates about AI writing, where Kent's insistence that communication cannot be reduced to a computable system speaks directly to the limits of large language models.
Core Theory
Post-Process Theory Post-process theory is the framework Thomas Kent named and consolidated in his 1999 edited collection Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm (Southern Illinois University Press), the most widely cited work in his career with over 430 scholarly citations. Building on the paralogic rhetoric he had developed since his 1989 articles "Beyond System: The Rhetoric of Paralogy" (College English) and "Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric" (Rhetoric Review), and elaborated fully in his 1993 monograph Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction (winner of the 1995 CCCC Outstanding Book Award), Kent argued that writing is a situated, interpretive act that cannot be captured by any generalizable process model. Drawing on Donald Davidson's externalist philosophy of language — especially the concepts of radical interpretation, passing theories, and triangulation — Kent maintained that every communicative exchange requires hermeneutic guessing rather than the application of learned rules or internalized systems.
The post-process turn challenged the dominant process-pedagogy paradigm that had shaped composition studies since the 1970s. Where process theory assumed writing could be taught through recursive stages of prewriting, drafting, and revision, Kent contended that no finite set of procedures could account for the contingency of real communicative interaction. Contributors to the 1999 collection — including Sidney Dobrin, Gary Olson, Joseph Petraglia, Barbara Couture, and David Russell — extended this critique into questions of pedagogy, public discourse, and disciplinary identity. Kent further explored these tensions in his 1997 chapter "The Consequences of Theory for the Practice of Writing" and his 2004 co-edited volume with Barbara Couture, The Private, the Public, and the Published. In the decades since, post-process theory has been taken up by scholars in digital rhetoric, posthuman composition, and most recently in debates about AI and generative writing, where Kent's insistence that communication is irreducibly non-systematic speaks directly to questions about what large language models can and cannot do.
Philosophical Foundations
Davidsonian Externalism Donald Davidson's philosophy of language emphasizing radical interpretation, passing theories, and the impossibility of a prior linguistic conventions fully determining meaning.
Philosophical Foundations
Hermeneutics Hermeneutics — the philosophical tradition concerned with the nature and methods of interpretation — is the interpretive backbone of Thomas Kent's rhetorical theory. Kent drew on this tradition most explicitly in his 1989 article "Paralogic Hermeneutics and the Possibilities of Rhetoric" (Rhetoric Review), where he recast the act of communication as an ongoing process of interpretive guessing rather than the mechanical application of learned conventions. In his 1993 monograph Paralogic Rhetoric: A Theory of Communicative Interaction, Kent argued that every communicative exchange is fundamentally hermeneutic: speakers and writers do not encode meaning into stable containers that audiences then decode, but instead both parties engage in continuous, provisional interpretation shaped by their prior theories about each other and the world. This view draws on Donald Davidson's concept of "radical interpretation" — the idea that understanding another person always requires constructing and revising hypotheses about what they mean, without any guaranteed shared code to fall back on.
Kent's hermeneutic framework also shaped his earlier work on genre. In his 1980 dissertation and its 1986 revision, Interpretation and Genre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts (Bucknell University Press), Kent examined how readers interpret literary texts not through fixed genre rules but through active interpretive negotiation with textual conventions — an argument that prefigured his later, more radical anti-systemic claims. By grounding paralogic rhetoric in hermeneutics, Kent positioned his theory within a lineage stretching from Schleiermacher and Dilthey through Gadamer and Ricoeur, but gave it a distinctly Davidsonian turn: interpretation is not the recovery of an author's original intent or the application of community norms, but a situated, fallible, and irreducibly creative act. This hermeneutic core is what gives post-process theory its philosophical force — the claim that no writing pedagogy, no set of rules, and no algorithmic system can fully capture what happens when two people try to understand each other.
Philosophical Foundations
Anti-Systemic Communication The claim that communicative interaction cannot be captured by any finite system of rules, codes, or processes — central to both Kent and Davidson.
Pedagogy
Composition Pedagogy The teaching of writing; postprocess theory challenges process-based pedagogies and raises questions about what writing instruction can actually do.
Digital / Posthuman
Digital Rhetoric The extension of rhetorical theory to digital environments; scholars like Arroyo and Hawk connect Kent's anti-systemic view to networked, electrate communication.
Digital / Posthuman
Posthuman Rhetoric Theoretical work that decenters the human subject in communication; Kent's rejection of individual cognitive process anticipates posthuman frameworks.
AI Era
AI & Generative Writing The emerging discourse on LLMs and AI writing tools; Kent's theory that writing is non-systematic resonates with debates about what AI can and cannot do in communication.