To associate the theory of rumour with the theory of problems may seem incongruous. And yet a rumour may easily be perceived as a solution, one that is quite circumstantial and wholly marked by mental improvisation, to a problem of collective relevance: to explain, for example, why one is right to be worried, to account for whatever reason one might have for showing hostility to an innovation, to show what face we should put on our uncertainties, to argue the distance which separates us from others unlike us and to prove, by this example, how hateful are our oppressors and those who exploit us. But there is more. Explicitly or otherwise, rumour ends up generating practical advice, an injunction to action or to refrain from action (‘don't do this’, ‘don't go there’, ‘don't eat that’, ‘watch out’, ‘check up on that …) which also links it to a concrete solution. Which goes to suggest that, antecedent to the rumour, there existed a need to know or to know how.

Such a way of looking at things permits an advance in parsimony, since there must exist fewer originating ‘problems’ than attested ‘solutions’. On the other hand, this point of view installs rumour in the function of a revelation or symptom of a social state which encompasses it. Finally, this perspective reconnects the production and development of rumours to the set of cognitive mechanisms of the computational type. One rediscovers therein the continuity of processes of social thought, and rumours cease to be confined to their status of monstrous singularities.