This article was downloaded by: [Nanyang Technological University] On: 03 March 2015, At: 21:30 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Quarterly Journal of Speech Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20 Review essay: The rhetorical turn in science studies John Angus Campbell a & Keith R. Benson b a Professor of Communication Arts , University of Memphis , b Professor of Medical History and Ethics , University of Washington , Published online: 05 Jun 2009. To cite this article: John Angus Campbell & Keith R. Benson (1996) Review essay: The rhetorical turn in science studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 82:1, 74-91, DOI: 10.1080/00335639609384141 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384141 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 82 (1996): 74-109 BOOK REVIEWS John Louis Lucaites, Editor THE RHETORICAL TURN IN SCIENCE STUDIES John Angus Campbell and Keith R. Benson I s science a rhetoric? Though on its face this question would seem oxymoronic, a growing number of recent works have taken it to be quite serious, and in so doing they signal a profound and growing concensus that a fundamental shift in the history and philosophy of science has emerged in the past several decades.1 While it is often difficult and risky to "predict" intellectual shifts taking place during one's own career, there is strong evidence pointing to the advent of a fresh epoch in our understanding of science, an epoch that may become as important in its own right as the original scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. This new epoch promises to redefine not only our understanding of science qua science, but also the relation of science to language, culture, the academy, and democracy.2 Indeed, many scholars now question whether science actually delivers the reliable and positive knowledge free of human taint promised by Augusie Gomte and his positivist followers. Nevertheless, the import of this humanizing and inevitably politicizing turn in our ideas of scientific knowledge has yet fully to reach us. The literature in the burgeoning academic subfield of rhetoric and science, amply represented by the nine volumes under review in this essay, opens a way to understand and assimilate this momentous shift. The "rhetoric of science" is far from a unified or unitary movement, though neither would we call it simply another peasant uprising or bothersome guerrilla attack on conventionality. It is rather a robust field that engages scholars in speech communication, the history and philosophy of science, and English. Using the texts in this review as exemplars of the emerging rhetoric of science movement, we discriminate four distinct emphases which, for sake of simplicity, we schematize as representing radical, moderate, literary moderate, and political postures. Before we examine the detailed and sometimes nuanced differences among these positions, we will explore some preliminary points on which all are agreed. T H E FUNDAMENTAL CONSENSUS Different as are the positions in the works before us, all of them agree that a major change has occurred recently in the history and philosophy of science. In the introduction to Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric, William R. Shea describes the situation well when he identifies how the two central features that have defined science since the seventeenth century, epistemology and methodology, have changed. On the epistemological side, received tradition has assumed that scientific knowledge rested on two pillars, "(a) the facts . . . disclosed in observation and Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 75 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON experiments, and (b) the abstract ideas that govern . . . the rules of logical inference." On the methodological side tradition has focused on "the cognitive strategies" by which science gains access to facts or "justifies] the theories that bring the facts under laws that explain why, where and how facts occur" (viii). But over time the discarding of earlier theories that were once thought amply confirmed has tended to work against the credibility of science. The only reliable prediction from the next scientific proclamation of "truth" statements concerning natural phenomena is that a subsequent interpretation will soon replace it. Philosophically, the belief that hard facts were certainly "there" for all to inspect is no longer tenable and, as a result, the much advertised "objective" method of science now appears indefensible. As Shea notes, the "investigating mind" (supplying conceptions) and "investigated nature" (supplying perceptions) have provided the two poles of our conventional view of science. While science has long been criticized as inferior to religion or aesthetic intuition, and while rhetoricians have always been skeptical of it, what is new about the current critique of science is the widespread belief "that science [does] not provide genuine knowledge and that its methods and its results [are] mere social conventions" (viii). It is on this last point that the debate is met and the epistemic radicals part company with the moderates. What all the authors considered in this review share is the recognition that scientific perception is not immaculate; that scientific method is diverse, social, argumentative, and suasory; and that the boundaries separating and defining the various disciplines that study science must shift. Where our authors differ is over what, if anything, remains of science when all of this is accomplished. The dissolution of the classical modern view of science raises in turn the issue of the extent to which new disciplines must take the place of the history and philosophy of science, as well as to what extent science itself must be democratized and politicized. T H E RADICAL PROGRAM Alan Gross's view in The Rhetoric of Science is at once classical and contemporary, philosophic and sophistic. Following the contemporary philosophy of science, Gross breaks with Aristotle's foundationalism and substitutes in its place a conventionalist or consensual view of truth that he identifies with the sophistic tradition. Aristotle's foundationalist "limitation" on science, Gross urges "must be removed; the spirit of the first Sophistic must roam free." (3) Initially, Gross focuses on reclaiming key terms of the classical rhetorical tradition for the analysis of science. So, for example, Chapter One explicates the central analytic categories of the rhetorical tradition, including stasis, logos, ethos and pathos, and arrangement and style. In the final section of the chapter Gross seeks to update Aristotle's conception of rhetoric in an even-handed and innovative way. Thus, just as he uses rhetoric to update our understanding of science, so he uses the insights of Perelman, Propp, Freud, Habermas, Husserl, and others to inform contemporary rhetorical analysis. In the chapters that follow the thread of classical rhetoric is sometimes more overt than at others. Chapter Two, "Analogy in Science," is organized around an unmistakably traditional category, while Chapters Three and Four on "Taxonomic Language" and "The Tale of DNA" follow the updated version of rhetorical analysis signaled at the end of Chapter One. Part Two of the volume, "Style, Arrangement, Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 76 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 and Invention in Science," begins with chapters on "Style in Biological Prose" and "The Arrangement of the Scientific Paper," both organized according to traditional rhetorical categories. The remaining chapters in this section and those in Part Three, "Science and Society," follow the spirit of the classical rhetorical tradition without the traditional categories. Gross's formidable insight as a critic is manifest in the way he continues the classical rhetorical impulse through his case studies. Chapter Three, for example, begins with the deliriously outrageous claim that "A complete rhetoric of science must avoid this accusation: after analysis, something unrhetorical remains, a hard scientific core" (33). In the course of the chapter an examination of a taxonomic article on hummingbirds is followed by an analysis of the philosophic status of the very idea of an "evolutionary" taxonomy. Where familiar rhetorical categories are appropriate, Gross uses them. But he is no less informed by the spirit of classical rhetoric when he abandons its terms and critiques the explanatory fiction at the heart of evolutionary taxonomy. In "Newton's Rhetorical Conversion" Gross shows how the very elements of Newton's thought that seem most clearly to remove his achievement from the realm of opinion are the very things that illustrate opinion most. With the exception of the conclusion, which presents the case for Gross's rhetorical reduction of science, no chapter is merely philosophic, or merely a case study in the history of science. Each is an insightful rhetorical study that uses an historical case to make a philosophical and theoretically grounded point about the rhetorical character of science. Our only serious reservation about Gross's project is not the consistency of rhetorical method in his book but the consistency of his commitment to the rhetorical as opposed to the scientific way of knowledge in his work since. His more recent positions lead us to fear that his prolonged and intimate exposure to the enemy has made him positivist positive. In his response to Dilip Gaonkar's critique of the rhetoric of science movement, Gross makes an astonishing admission.3 Having dismissed Gaonkar's comments on his reading of particular texts as "without substance," he then concedes that at "the level of method . . . [they] have considerable bite." He continues: "The contestability of current rhetoric of science has been bought at a price no discipline whose aim is general knowledge can afford: its claims are confined to particular texts in particular historical circumstances. As a result of this limitation, robust generalizations across cases, ordinarily called 'knowledge,' fail to materialize."4 Here, Gross asks rhetoric to produce a form of knowledge that looks suspiciously like a formal science. Not only does he call for "robust contestable generalizations," but for a style of scholarship that would provide "comparisons so well focused and so tightly structured [that they] imitate the constraints of experimental control" (304). This is not the faith once delivered to the sophists, nor is it going to be persuasive to any neo-Aristotelian capable of distinguishing her episteme from her phronesis. Indeed this is a strain of critique not heard in our field since the dark days when John Waite Bowers wrote "The Pre-Scientific Function of Rhetorical Criticism."5 The core of the rhetorical mode of thought is the hard nosed, clear minded, and rigorous understanding that there are kinds of knowledge that are not systematic (e.g., kairos, to prepon, krisis, phronesis) and that there are fields of activity ranging from law, politics, and ethics to parenting, pastoring, and professing, and indeed, Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 77 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON most radically, science itself, where the reign of this supple form of knowledge is extensive—even absolute. The impulse to want something better is understandable. Because rhetoric perpetually reenacts the tragedy of "knowledge," Gross's insistence on making a science of the rhetoric of science is a loss of rhetorical nerve. His position suggests that a consensual view of truth is not the best test of rhetorical radicalism. As his response to Gaonkar shows, a radical social constructivism is easily compatible with a rhetorical positivism that refuses to recognize the status of rhetorical judgment as knowledge until it is certified by scientific method. If rhetoric is not sovereign within its own house, but must await certification by science—any science—then the project of a rhetoric of science is groundless and Gross's rhetorical radicalism has yielded to rhetorical scientism. Greg Myers's Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Science shares Gross's aim to reveal the many-layered social dimensions inhabiting the objectivity of scientific texts. What makes Myers radical is the reductionist aim of his analysis rather than his method. Similar to the "Strong Programme" in the Edinburgh School's sociology of science, Myers seeks to show that the allegedly empirical part of science is merely social.6 In other words, science may not be reduced to anything but its social dimension and, therefore, what science really produces is information about culture under the guise of information about nature (20). Myers's radical turn makes use of literary and historical methods to ask a sociological question, "in what way do texts contribute to the social authority of science" (14)? In his dissolution of the technical issues negotiated between referees and authors in journal submissions or grant proposals into naked relations of power, Myers's work marks the nadir of the reductionist impulse in the rhetoric of science. And it is over this philosophical position—Can science be reduced completely to its social dimension or does it provide knowledge about nature?—that the radicals and the moderates separate. One need not endorse the sociological reductionism in Myers's work to find it highly instructive. In our view Myers is a splendid reader, alike of scientific texts and contexts. The historical dimension in Myers's work is evident in his care to establish the context for his readings; the literary and rhetorical dimension is clear in his close attention to language and the shifting strategic alignment of authors, audiences, and arguments. His fusion of historical and literary perspectives is evident in the ease with which he goes from the microanalysis of a specific grant or essay proposal to his examination of macrodisputes spanning decades and entire books. Myers carefully documents the delicate and unmistakable social negotiations that are the very bone and marrow of scientific funding and publication. So, for example, he sets forth the cash explanatory value of such standard rhetorical foci as a writer's persona, her crafting of strategy, audience adaptation, and even diction in determining the acceptance or rejection of a research proposal by a funding agency. Through such analysis one sees the strategic character of the audience adaptations necessary to "scientific" success. T H E MODERATE PROGRAM In contrast to Gross's radical position, which pursues The Rhetoric of Science, Lawrence Prelli's A_ Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse (our emphases) is cautious and pluralistic. Prelli's aim is not "to argue that everything in science is rhetorical, without remainder," but to inquire "whether inspecting the principles Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 78 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 according to which scientific discourse is created and judged can reveal significant aspects of scientific endeavors that might otherwise remain concealed" (8). Despite the modesty of his aim Prelli pursues the adventuresome agenda of showing how a system of rhetoric, deeply classical in its inspiration, can place the traditional claims of science on a foundation of reason that is both solid and flexible. That Prelli is mining a rich and suggestive thematic vein is shown not only by his own work but by the detailed case studies in the Pera and Shea volume discussed below, which similarly examine classical resources to remedy the epistemological ills of the contemporary history and philosophy of science. No other author has sketched so precise a system of informal logic for science or made such strong classically grounded claims for how and why that logic is specifically rhetorical. Complementary as Prelli's project is to analogous moves in the history and philosophy of science, only a rhetorician could possibly have written this book. A Rhetoric of Science is divided into two nearly equal and symmetrical parts. Part One, "Rhetorical Invention" is an original theory of rhetoric; Part Two, "Rhetorical Invention in Science" is an application of that theory to science. Part One begins with the core notion that rhetoric is "effective expression," a construct containing five concepts that constitute the conceptual spine of the book: the role of language, the nature of audiences, the nature of situations, the criteria for evaluating material for expression, and the methods of finding these materials. Subsequent chapters explore the relation between "reason" and audience expectations, and present the four traditional stases (conjectural, definitional, qualitative, and translative) as unavoidable and recurrent points of decision in philosophy and daily life. In the final chapter of this section Prelli provides a thoroughly detailed, yet remarkably unboring exposition of the distinction between general and particular topics, thus rounding out his claim that rhetoric has a specific heuristic logic of its own. Part Two begins with a discussion of the "Rhetorical Dimensions in Scientific Discourse." Starting with Kuhn's notion of a "disciplinary matrix" Prelli points out the indelibly discursive elements in science (symbolic generalizations, models, values, and exemplars) and adapts the five constructs of effective expression to their analysis. This is followed by a discussion of "Rhetorical Invention in Scientific Discourse," which builds on the discussion of reason and audience expectations by identifying the special topoi (problem-solution, evaluative, and exemplary) that establish scientific reasonableness. Prelli exemplifies these topoi in his analyses of the challenge of parapsychology to establish itself as a science, and of the case of researchers claiming language status for ape communication through the education of KoKo. The core of Prelli's original contribution to the rhetoric of science comes in Chapters Eight and Nine, "Deciding What the Issues Are" and "Discovering Lines of Argument." In Chapter Eight he presents a stasis table that functions as a formidable 4x 4 rhetoric machine for analyzing science. Running along the horizontal axis are the four "Superior Stases": evidential, interpretive, evaluative and methodological; along the vertical axis are the four "Subordinate Stases": conjectural, definitional, qualitative and translative. So, for example, reading across the top line of this chart we get the four, subordinate-conjectural questions: Is there scientific evidence for claim X? Is there a scientifically meaningful construct for interpreting evidence? Is claim X scientifically significant? And is procedure X a viable scientific procedure in this case? Prelli exemplifies the key concepts of this Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 79 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON chapter in his insightful analysis of the "memory-transfer" controversy in planaria research. Chapter Nine, "Discovering Lines of Argument," addresses the question of whether scientific topoi are universal or particular to fields. Here Prelli identifies numerous sub-topoi as field invariant. When we add the winches and grappling hooks of the twenty six topoi of scientific argument set forth in Chapter Nine to the engine of Chapter Eight we have an all-terrain vehicle, a rhetoric of science that is classical in design yet adapted for the special topography of scientific argument. Chapter Ten then tests this critical machinery through the analysis of the creation science controversy in MacLean v. Arkansas, and the famous DNA paper of Watson and Crick. The obvious objection to Prelli's project is that it illustrates the two worst features of the classical rhetorical tradition: the tendencies to generate overly elaborate topical schema and to impose a false series of stock questions on fields which have peculiar field-dependent topics of their own. While we cannot here give a full answer to these objections, two features of Prelli's book rebut them: the case studies in which the relevance of the categories are clearly exemplified, and the clear insistence that the heart of the stasis approach consists in locating relevant questions, not simply in applying topical answers. As Prelli makes clear in his discussion of the topoi, rhetorical invention is a methodized search for "sayables" appropriate to their subject, occasion, and intended community. As he points out in his reading of Robert Nisbet's Sociology As An Art Form, one can even have a topical system without any classical terms whatever! (Here is real methodological humility.) The central lesson of Prelli's book is thus how to trace the presence of rhetoric in the informal logic already operating in science. In identifying the spontaneous intelligence of the situated mind as the well spring of rhetorical reason, Prelli has underscored how rhetorical analysis will always be an art, its best insights particular, even as it expands its scope to include the discourse of scientific fields. Marcello Pera and William R. Shea's Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric represents what might be called a neo-Aristotelian approach to the rhetoric of science by professional philosophers and historians of science. Though not all the essays in this volume invoke Aristotle, all are united in affirming an historically chastened form of realism, a belief in the reliability of scientific knowledge, as well as the belief that the best interests of the philosophy and history of science will be served if science is placed on rhetorical foundations. Like the theory-practice organizational schema in Prelli and Gross, the Pera and Shea volume is divided into two sections "Science and Persuasion" and "Rhetoric in Action." Again, as with Prelli and Gross, the difference between the two sections is more a matter of degree than of kind for all but two of the essays in the theoretical, first part of the volume are tied to case studies, while the essays in the more practical second part, identify and address theoretical implications. For their particular relevance to this review, the essays by Philip Kitcher and Pera deserve special comment. Kitcher's opening essay is a strong case study of Darwin's rhetorical practice informed by an equally strong theoretical rationale.7 Indeed, while we identify all of the essays in this volume as "moderate" because of their friendship with realism, Kitcher illustrates that if this is moderation, one cannot have too much of it. The capacity of this position to generate interesting issues is particularly well illustrated Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 80 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 in Kitcher's defense of Darwin's lying to his audience about his religious position. According to Kitcher, the interests of scientific naturalism take priority over cultural traditions of biblicism that block or impede science. Hence, Darwin's lies were justified. Kitcher's strong dialogical view of rhetoric fits oddly with his belief that science-based naturalism will prevail, or ought to prevail, over beliefs that have strong cultural grounding. It is safe to say that as analytically excellent as is this essay, Kitcher is no epistemic democrat. His view of rhetoric is informed by an elitism that holds the values of the general public in undisguised contempt and welcomes rhetoric as a way of deceiving the public for its own good. Curiously, all the humanistic rhetoricians under review make a point that if science is rhetoricized it will be democratized. With the exception of Steve Fuller, not one of the professional philosophers of science seems to note this point or reflect on its probable implications for the practice of science, the understanding of its history, or science education, let alone its capacity to challenge the reigning metaphysic of scientific naturalism. Though Kitcher's essay ably leads off the volume, the lead position might equally have been given to Pera's "Role and Value of Rhetoric in Science." Pera clearly captures the combative spirit of the neoclassical school of the rhetoric of science in the gauntlet he throws down to "methodological dogmatism" and "sociological or post-philosophical mannerism" (29). His approach compliments Prelli's by demonstrating the claim that a serious and thoroughgoing classical rhetoric of science is not limited to applying rhetorical categories to science, but is an inventional resource capable of developing categories that elucidate science as a mode of reason. In a series of diagrams Pera provides an instructive interpretation of the central methodological and epistemic turns that have separated science from rhetoric since Aristotle. Pera explains how, particularly since Galileo, method, once part of the norms for generating hypotheses, became part of the norms of proof or conclusion, thus filling the gap between "experience" and "knowledge." Paralleling Walter Ong's argument concerning rhetorical theory, Pera shows the seventeenth-century triumph of method as intimately connected with the banishment of dialogue from science. In the modern methodological model, Pera observes, the truth about nature is won through a game with two players: nature and the single or collective subject whose inquiries shed light on it. But in the older dialogical model, which the modern mathematization of science replaced, "there are three players: nature; the inquirer, who asks the questions; and he (or those) who, by questioning nature, too, and disputing, decide(s) about the right or most acceptable answer" (33). The crucial point is that the methodological and the dialogical perspectives belong to two different views of science, indeed, "to two different views about knowledge and rationality." He thus underscores the claim that whether we look to Galileo's "mathematical calculus," Leibniz's "logical calculus," Descartes' "rules for the direction of the mind," or to Karl Popper's or Imre Lakotos' "demarcation criteria," proper scientific method was thought to be the unique guide to truth, both "prior to knowledge and independent of its growth." Pera identifies four elements from the ancient dialectical view of science that he believes necessary to developing a contemporary rhetorical view of science: forms of persuasion and reasoning, accepted opinions that will be considered persuasive in adjudicating disputes, ways and rules for rebutting opponents, and appreciation of Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 81 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON the force and value of dialectical argument. Not one to shrink from daunting tasks, he proceeds to sketch the steps necessary for a complete "basis of scientific rhetoric." The key point of philosophic interest in Pera's program is how this rhetorical view of scientific reason allows him to save scientific rationality. By a timely concession to relativism Pera is able to redeem a modest form of realism and a robust, if broad, view of reason. By arguing that each historical epoch has "its own configuration of factors" that identify its program of scientific reason, he is able to rebut the reductionist argument "that each [scientific] epoch has its own [rational] standards." Some standards endure, almost unchanged, others are modified, and some are replaced. In Pera's rhetorical vision science is a continuous dialogue in which a dynamic but durable rational structure is consistent with epochal shifts in emphasis and focus. In his conclusion Pera is sanguine about the persuasive potential of his "middle way" position. Featuring himself as a kind of Willie Loman, he takes his goods to the methodologist's shop and is told by the storekeeper proud of his wares, "Sorry, sir, we do not need any rhetoric." At the counter-methodologist's shop he is met with untroubled unbelief and told that in science "anything goes" and so should he. Making his appeal to scientists directly he is met with that serene methodological incoherence that allows some scientists to say scientific method is secure and in case of problems one should check one's work, others to affirm that science has many methods (all of them right), and still others to grant his premise but dismiss his claim. The political problem that the middle-of-the-roader faces is well captured in Pera's observation that "the methodologist sees him as an infiltrated anarchist; the counter-methodologist takes him to be a methodologist in disguise; the scientist simply believes he is incompetent" (48). If Pera offers us the image of a professional philosopher of science jealous of his craft yet open to the potential of rhetoric as a mode of reason, Charles Bazerman's Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science offers us the image of a professional rhetorician for whom science is a case study in writing and composition that retains its status as science. Bazerman's case studies are generally notable for their variety, thoroughness, and theoretical insight, and in this volume he examines individual scientific essays, provides a lengthy and meticulous case history of the experimental report, examines specific controversies in science, reports the reading and writing practices of specific scientists, and draws implications from his analyses for our understanding of science. For example, in one chapter Bazerman examines three instances of technical composition: a literary analysis, a sociological essay, and a scientific research paper. The differences in subject, audience, explanatory ambitions, and writing traditions of each essay is noted, and the distinct argumentative structures and diction of each compared and contrasted. Bazerman establishes the constructive foundation for his subsequent analyses by showing how the social, linguistic, and rhetorical aspects of each essay is a function of the differences in the objects under consideration. In coming to understand the different rhetorical features of an act of literary criticism, sociology, and natural science, the reader is led to understand how different objects are uniquely accessible through different genres and cognitive acts. While the effect of Bazerman's analysis is to relativize the pretensions of science to exclusive or superior knowledge, his professional standpoint as a teacher of composition reafDownloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 82 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 firms the dignity of scientific writing, even while robbing it of its unwarranted pretensions. In showing the reader that rhetoric is relative to the audience, to the tradition of writing, and to the nature of the questions posed, he avoids the "post-philosophic mannerism" of which Pera complains, while robustly demonstrating the scholarly value of rhetorical analysis and composition. Moreover, he does this without destabilizing science, and thus provides us with a reflexive and unaffected critical realism that refuses to grant ontological privilege to his own analysis over the science he studies. Whereas the volumes reviewed thus far examine a wide range of subjects, adjusting their methods to the varied perspectives of the objects under consideration, Joan Dietz Moss's Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy offers a sustained analysis of a single subject from a perspective that is at once historical, rhetorical, and critical. Moss's work is notable not just for the lack of any polemical positioning of her approach vis-a-vis science studies, but for the subtle and nuanced argument she adopts in evaluating the rhetorical style through which Galileo did battle with the Catholic Church in his attempt to win the day for Copernican astronomy. Her book represents an implicit program in the rhetoric of science in which she exercises disciplinary freedom, borrowing from historians and philosophers of science to understand Galileo's skillful use of language in both his astronomical works and political statements. Equally impressive, and from the opposite perspective, her work represents an implicit program in the history of science, a program in which she uses her own training in rhetoric to illustrate to historians and philosophers of science how important it is to evaluate the rhetorical dimensions of Galileo's work. Perhaps because she does not aim to stake out epistemic turf and because of her formidable erudition, Moss does not restrict her rhetorical approach to any one disciplinary matrix. Instead, she carefully weaves the scholarship of historians, philosophers, Galilean scholars, and rhetoricians to produce a wonderfully exciting perspective on Galileo's achievements and, at the same time, to provide another perspective for his troubles with the Church. As she states in her preface, [Galileo] was the most imaginative in his use of [rhetoric] and in his reliance on it when proof by the canons of the time eluded him. It was also ultimately to be one of the most important factors in his problems with the Church. Had he been less vigorous in wielding the weapons of rhetoric, he might have saved himself from the wrath of Pope Urban VIII (xi). Certainly such an argument is of interest to both the history and philosophy of science communities, both of which have exerted considerable energy examining Galileo's position in western science. Additionally, it should illustrate to both historians and rhetoricians of science, along with their anxious publics, how vigorous the hybrids of their parentage may be. Indeed, in many ways, Moss's book is a paradigmatic exemplar of how a rhetorical perspective may yield new insights to fields of investigation that have been well plowed by others. LITERARY MODERATES We identify Peter Dear's The Literary Structure of Scientific Arguments and Jack Seltzer's Understanding Scientific Prose as "literary moderates," for the vast majority of Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 83 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON the essays in these edited collections focus on rhetorical or literary method in the study of science, rather than on questions of epistemology. Of particular interest to scholars in speech communication is Thomas H. Broman's essay, "J.C. Reil and the 'Journalization' of Physiology" in the Dear volume. At times speech communication scholars seem so preoccupied with epistemic questions that they overlook or undervalue the true larger contribution of their tradition to other fields. Broman's essay is a good antidote to this epistemic megalomania, for it is interested primarily in the craft of the historian of science. Whatever rhetoric's value to philosophy, one of the oldest disciplinary alliances of rhetoric has been with history. If the more philosophically inclined historians find rhetoric attractive for its flexible logic, those focused on the details of their craft find in rhetoric a hardware store of the mind—a democratic warehouse where even the specialized professional can find the exact part or instrument required for a challenging job. Early on Broman notes that "historians of science have found it difficult to show how given ideas are rooted in particular historical circumstances" (13). From this he turns to a consideration of genre as "a device for situating ideas in their historical context." The concept of genre is attractive, he argues, because it both "serve[s] identifiable social functions and act[s] to structure the material they present in characteristic ways" (14). Genres thus commend themselves to the attention of the historian for the way they link mind and world in the process of change. Broman finds Ralph Cohen's account of genre too formal, favoring instead Frederick Jamieson's notion that a genre is a "contract between writers and their intended public that regulates various aspects of the literary product" (15). While Jamieson's pragmatism is useful, it is in the essays of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Caroline Miller, and Lloyd Bitzer that Broman finds a view of genre that is at once functional, flexible, and detailed. Indeed, Broman offers a very persuasive answer to Gaonkar's question concerning what, if anything, the rhetorician has to contribute to scholars of science in other fields: From the historian's perspective, the great advantage held by rhetoricians in this business is that they deal with nonfictional literature, and the social functions of such writings are far more accessible than those of fictional literature. Thus when we speak of rhetorical genres as establishing a bridge of communication between writer and audience, the circumstances that guide the construction of that bridge can be conceived with standard historical tools (16). If Dear's volume takes us to the world of the historian interested in the explanatory potential of literary and rhetorical methods for enhancing our understanding of particular discursive objects, Seltzer's volume returns us to the world of rhetorical analysts interested as much in the sharpness of their knives as in any object that they might be used to carve. In introducing this book he celebrates the health and promiscuous methodological diversity of rhetorical criticism, commending his individual authors for the way their diverse perspectives reveal science to be "thoroughly human—messy, unpredictable, and inevitably colored by its social and political circumstances" and as much "competitive" and "agonistic" as cooperative (13). Three things separate Seltzer's volume from the other works in our review. First, each essay in the collection is written from the standpoint of a different method. The volume is thus not only methodologically self-conscious, but also demonstrates a Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 84 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 wide variety of rhetorical analytical perspectives, ranging from narratology and deconstruction to classical rhetoric, cultural studies, Burkean criticism, feminism, and reader-response studies. Second, and this is what lends the volume its special place in the literature of the rhetoric of science, is that all of the authors focus their critical and analytical attention on Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin's much celebrated essay, "The Spandrals of San Marcos and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme." Third, at the end of the volume Gould responds to his rhetorical critics. This essay is of patent interest to rhetoricians of science for Gould is superior in depth, breadth, and humanistic vision to his nineteenth-century counterpart, Thomas Henry Huxley. Whereas Huxley helped to spearhead the Darwinian revolution in the 1860s, in our time Gould has been a leader in the Darwinian counter-revolution, confronting Darwinian orthodoxy with its own limitations by combining critique and a return to Darwin's own eclectic standpoint. Because of the unity given the volume by its focus on one essay, the reader is able to see each version of rhetorical method as a facet of a complex but coherent alternative perspective to understanding science. As one reads the essays in Understanding Scientific Prose one cannot help but be struck with its difference in tone and focus from the other volumes under review. Historians and philosophers, at their most literary-rhetorical, remain historians and philosophers interested in science—in a period of its development, in an author, a movement, or a truth. As we move to the critics, we move not just to a different perspective on the object under consideration, but inevitably to a different object. With the exception of the essay by Bazerman and John Lyne, and various of the other earlier essays that locate the object essay in one or another context, the Gould and Lewontin essay becomes simply an example of writing (hence the fuller implication of the volume's title). Once the scientific object is placed in a rhetorical context, or simply in the ubiquitous context of prose, the effect of even friendly rhetorical analyses differs only in degree from the effect of the unfriendly analyses of the reductionists. In either case the ontologically privileged moment of classical modern science is broken. Science now becomes not so much a mode of truth, but a mode of writing with the same problematic and contestable relation to truth as all other writing. Despite the playfulness of various essays in this volume, the telos of rhetoric, and especially the rhetoric of science, is not writing per se, but to become a genus or family under the species "politics." T HE RHETORIC OF SCIENCE AS EPISTEMIC POLITICS The one author who understands without illusion that a rhetoricized science means politics without remainder is Steve Fuller. Fuller's Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge is not a book that exemplifies the rhetoric of science through case studies, but a work that thematizes the rhetoric of science in a large and fluid disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and political matrix. What is particularly unique about Fuller, however, is not just his sure philosophical and historical grasp of the rhetoric of science movement, but the political vision that informs his exposition and arrangement of its parts. In Fuller's view the advent of the rhetoric of science marks not only the end of an era in the epistemology of science, but signals the beginning of a new day of democratic politics in science policy. That epistemologically Fuller would agree with much of Gross, and be at one with most of Myers and the Strong Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 85 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON Programme, is not as important as how he (playfully) interjects political seriousness into the apolitical constructivist position. Fuller stanches the endless epistemic hemorrhage of constructivist relativism plaguing science studies by prescribing a strong dose of political realism to help his patient regain normative standards and political will. Fuller makes academic politics interesting by linking it to what he calls "social epistemology," the positioning of knowledge democratically across society and not just in specialized informational elites. One way to understand Fuller's project is to see it as an academic Jeffersonianism that counters the corrupting, anti-democratic influences of Hamiltonian Big Science Positivism by making it accountable to a nation of small citizen epistemologists: "[T]he democratic impulse aims to maximize the distribution of knowledge-and-power, even if this serves to undermine the autonomy and integrity of current scientific practices. .. . if I can't justify my knowledge claims to you, then you have no reason to believe them" (27). Whereas Gross and the Strong Programmers reduce reductionism to a purely academic turf battle of epistemic "outs" seeking to become academic "ins," Fuller would have the constructivists live out their creed, become real politicians, and form coalitions to decide what kinds of science, i.e. what kinds of physics and biology, we will have (13). Precisely because the politics of the book are reliably neither right nor left (despite Fuller's own implicitly progressive liberal views), the book spells out with stark clarity whence we have come and whither we are tending. While Fuller is nothing if not an advocate, his advocacy gains much of its persuasiveness from positioning his project in specific historical traditions that are political from the start. His ability to incorporate and transform each intellectual tradition he examines gives his project at once the sense of familiarity and the indelible allure of novelty. His case for why Science and Technology Studies (STS) should become the successor discipline to the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is at once an argument and a history. Fuller's turn to political and rhetorical realism begins with his account of the founding, development, and disciplinary fragmentation of HPS. The founders of HPS saw themselves as advocates of and brokers for the kind of science or science policy that society ought to pursue. From this tradition Fuller takes his own normative sense of what the philosophy and history of science ought to be: it ought to offer good advice, it ought to be listened to by professional policy makers and ordinary people, it ought to be persuasive, and it ought to make a difference. He traces the demise of the grand nineteenth-century tradition in the HPS to its success, the fragmentation of science and its philosophy and history into twentieth-century disciplines that complicated evaluation, divorced science from the larger culture, and encouraged political quietism. Fuller argues that positivism was essentially right in its conviction that scientific theories should be tested by whether or not they make a difference. But it was wrong in its "thin" philosophy of language and in its elitist view of what constituted acceptable standards for making a difference. In their very different ways, Fuller sees Popper and Paul Feyerabend as accommodating the robust positivism of nineteenth-century philosophy of science to our contemporary world of Big Science. By insisting on judging science in terms of the consequences of its theories rather than on the rigor or purity of its methodological foundations, Popper and Feyerabend represent a salutary recovery from the Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 86 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 narrowness of the logical positivism of the 1930s and 1940s. But Popper and Feyerabend are only philosophers of science, and there Fuller finds the rub. While they have the sharp analytic tools of their trade, they have only a philosopher's understanding of the dynamic interaction between the history of science and society. On Fuller's analysis HPS has degenerated into a kind of philosophic aestheticism, a second sophistic in which the historian declaims about the path reason took or ought to have taken, but has nothing to say about what course it should follow in present circumstances. What it needs is normative rehabilitation, a way back into the real game of offering real advice. Here is where STS comes to the rescue. In one of the numerous fascinating historical vignettes in his book, Fuller points out that from the very beginning and until the Strong Programme of the Edinburgh School in the mid 1970s, attempts by sociologists to study science suffered from a radical failure of methodological nerve. Time and again sociologists were so taken in by the scientific method that they failed to study science scientifically, that is, by the methods of sociology. Fuller points out that Vilfredo Pareto actually treated science as though its development could be understood by the laws of physics! Even Karl Mannheim's understanding of science was grounded, not in sociology, but in anecdotes taken from the received self-understanding of science at the time. However skeptical one might be of the one-upmanship reductionism of the Strong Programme, the Edinburgh School should probably receive a Jefferson medal for its professional enmity toward the tyranny of "the scientific method." On Fuller's account, and to bring history full circle, "the scientific method" ends up among Bacon's Idols of the Mind; and indeed, it may well be the most subtle idol of them all. The imposture was discovered only when at last the sociologists quit serving as the impostor's acolyte and woke up to the fact that he had been abusing them for years. In light of the sociological breakthrough in explaining science practice, STS is now equipped to make good on part of its claim to rescue HPS from connoisseurship of the rational structure of past controversies and give it the honest and socially productive job of explaining how the embeddedness of science in culture explains how science actually works. Clearly, however, a program of sociologically informed studies of science would fall far short of recovering for STS the normative policy-making and advice-giving role enjoyed by Whewell and Comte. Here is where language and eventually rhetoric enter the picture to complement and complete the work begun by sociology. Fuller distinguishes the perspective of "Deep Science" (DS) from that of a "Shallow Science" (SS). Those of the DS persuasion assume that the scientist is well equipped by professional training to represent reality and that "science works well as long as scientists do not complain" (13). The SS perspective, by contrast, assumes "that scientists are no better equipped than lay people to represent reality" and no more able to examine critically their own practice (13). On this account the celebrated "tacit dimension" in science represents DS's thin view of language and stands in contrast to the thick view of language of the SS perspective. Through the notions of "embodiment" (the goal of speech is communicated by the conduct of the speaker as social actor) and "embeddedness" (that language is not a universally distributed type possessed equally by all but an object possessed by different members of the community in different degrees) Fuller proposes to thicken the thin Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 87 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON DS language perspective and bring science practitioners and their philosophic representatives into dialogue with the broader community. The normative dimension of Fuller's enterprise is provided by rhetoric. The task of rhetoric is to facilitate the making of reasonable decisions under constraint. Since the decisions required of science involve the allocation of scarce resources, knowledge policy operates under conditions of contingency and freedom. In mediating among these various constraints and contingencies rhetoric becomes not an irrationalist, second best for something that a formal method could have done better, but ". . . the exercise of rational freedom" (19), or what Bitzer as developed by Michael McGee and Lyne means by "exigence." That is, human reason is always conducted under situations of limit, and a permanent exigence in a world defined by Big Science is the confrontation between the mutually incomprehensible languages of technical science and popular common sense. The dethroning of technical science's epistemic privilege, realized on the level of theory and practice by sociologists, must now be carried forward into democratic social practice. Rhetoric hence becomes the rationale for the practice of the "social epistemologist" whose mission is to carry forward under modern conditions of Big Science the mediating and normative role of the original founders of HPS. Given this introduction, one might suppose that Fuller would favor pluralism. But this would be to mistake him for another bored, live-and-let-live postmodern academic. Fuller is no man of peace. His brand of epistemic cutlery makes him dangerous and thus interesting. What Fuller wants to do is to create coalitions between the academy and specific groups beyond the academy. The general idea is that the Popperian neo-positivist notion of "falsifiability" should be revived but subject to real political tests. Conventional disciplines, that the prevailing pluralism will not and probably cannot critique, end up defining the essentially static knowledge enterprise of the contemporary academy. Fuller's model of change through university-culture coalitions is both Machiavellian in the ordinary sense and potentially redemptive, both pedagogically and socially. Since deans think only politically and economically, not academically, let the successful coalitions recommend themselves to the dean's choice on grounds she can understand. Hence an intellectually revived and culturally supported university (cross-discipline and cross-community coalitions being the germ of new disciplines) would remedy the defects of a promiscuous pluralism by weeding out those disciplines that had culturally and politically failed. Fuller would improve science education by linking it to democracy with hoops of steel. He thus tellingly contrasts the traditional goal of civics courses—to prepare students for political life by making them aware of the political mechanisms at their disposal—with contemporary science courses that present technical science and science research as normal and unproblematic features of the world. "Education of this sort," he notes, "for all its distribution of facts and figures, is akin to indulging a high-calorie diet without vigorous physical exercise: the citizenry's epistemic energy is converted to an acquiescent adiposity" (31)! By attempting to replace the academic games of the social constructivists with a real political program capable in principle of transforming both the academy and society, Fuller has moved the rhetoric/sociology of science debate beyond a mere contest of disciplinary king-of-the-mountain. The exposes of "science" or "the Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 scientific method" become not esoteric pieces of information, but urgent social facts with broad, deep, and unforeseen implications—both good and ill—for science, society, and the academy. Indeed, after Fuller, as one of his own subheadings puts it, the question becomes "Has Science Outgrown Democracy?" One might well wonder what kind of science the epistemic democracy Fuller has in mind would produce. At the very least one can be confident that it would be quite unlike science as we have known it and, for ourselves, it is not at all clear that it would not be preferable. CONCLUSION Gaonkar argues that the project for a rhetoric of science has stalled.8 As an explication of Gaonkar's singular vision of what a robust and dynamic project should look like, his comment commends attention.9 As an observation about the reality of rhetoric of science studies, this claim, and the companion claim that the thinness of the rhetorical lexicon prevents it from commanding serious attention in the academy, is demonstrably false. Whether we consider the work of speech communication scholars such as Prelli and Gross, or the work of colleagues in English, such as Bazerman or Myers, or the recent work by traditional historians and philosophers of science in the Pera/Shea and Dear volumes, interest in the rhetoric of science has never been greater. And it is growing. The flexible terms of the rhetorical tradition, with its license to invent new terms or to invest old ones with new meanings, provides the kind of "lesbian rule" necessary for the analytic-historic task of building solid, rhetorical studies out of the diverse local materials of various scholarly traditions.10 Under the term "persuasion" in Kitcher, or "genre" in Broman, or under the systematic neo-Aristotelianism of Pera, the nomenclature of post-positivist reason in the history and philosophy of science is taking a distinctly classical rhetorical turn. The turn to rhetoric in science studies is succeeding because it addresses a need for a topical logic, a logic that, in the words of Walter Jost, allows one to conduct an inquiry without predetermining the outcome." What for Gaonkar is the "thinness" of rhetorical terms, is the thinness of an analytic wedge, the open terms of which gain determinacy, density, and explanatory power as inquiry proceeds. As the present small selection of a large and burgeoning body of work suggests, the rhetoric of science is recovering a level of critical experience deeply repressed alike by modernism and postmodernism. What Cartesian modernism could never abide was the very idea that "common sense" or "practical reason" was, in any serious sense, reason. The premodern impulse at the heart of the rhetoric of science is the recovery of that supple form of reason Aristotle called "phronesis." The common effort to reclaim common sense or practical reason as intelligent explains the classical flavor of so many rhetoric of science studies, particularly those by professional historians or philosophers of science. The architectonic project of reevaluating the western tradition of thought in light of practical reason is perhaps best thematized in Eugene Garver's vision of a history of prudence.12 While Garver does not include science as part of his project, the rhetoric of science is showing that one of the richest illustrations of the good practical use of reason is the history of science. The architectonic project of a history of prudence provides one way of understanding how the rhetoric of science is deeply grounded in the western intellectual 88 Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 89 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON tradition while simultaneously dedicated to challenging what has been the dominant intellectual tendency of that tradition. Whether the educational and political agenda of the rhetoric of science movement will succeed, particularly as expressed by Fuller and as echoed most notably by his colleagues in speech communication, remains an open question. It seems clear that should Fuller's political program show signs of success, or should Gross and Prelli pursue seriously the political hints in their own projects, the rhetoric of science will invite the hostile attention of traditional academics for whom the lecture hall and the seminar room are to be protected from the larger culture, not shaped by it. It is curious indeed that while virtually all of the academic debate on the rhetoric of science has focused on questions of epistemology, the deepest and most potentially unsettling implications of the rhetoric of science movement are the political and pedagogic ones; and on these the affinities among Fuller, Gross and Prelli are far greater than their differences. While it is too soon to say that Big Science is being disestablished by a rising academic subspecialty, it is not too soon to say that what German higher criticism was to religion in the late nineteenth century, the rhetorical criticism of science is fast becoming to the science of the late twentieth. One way of characterizing the program of the rhetoric of science is to say that it aims to reverse George Steiner's poignant observation that after Milton, "the stars burn out of reach of humanistic judgment."13 In explicating how topoi, phronesis, kairos and to prepon condition reason and deliberation in science, the rhetoric of science seeks to bring science within the sphere of humanistic judgment both in academic theory and in cultural practice. BOOKS REVIEWED A RHETORIC OF SCIENCE: INVENTING SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE. By Lawrence Prelli. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989; xi + pp. 321. $34.95. NOVELTIES IN THE HEAVENS; RHETORIC AND SCIENCE IN THE COPERNICAN CONTROVERSY. By Jean Dietz Moss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; xiv + pp. 352. $49.95; paper $17.95. PERSUADING SCIENCE: THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC RHETORIC. Edited by Marcello Pera and William R. Shea. Canton, MA: Science History, 1991; xi + pp. 224. $39.95. PHILOSOPHY, RHETORIC, AND THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: THE COMING OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES. By Steve Fuller. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; xxii + pp. 446. $54.00; paper $22.50. SHAPING WRITTEN KNOWLEDGE; THE GENRE AND ACTIVITY OF THE EXPERIMENTAL ARTICLE IN SCIENCE. By Charles Bazerman. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988; xi + pp. 400. $40.00; paper $17.50. THE LITERARY STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENT. Edited by Peter Dear. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991; vi + pp. 224. $32.95. THE RHETORIC OF SCIENCE. By Alan Gross. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990; vi + pp. 248. $34.95. UNDERSTANDING SCIENTIFIC PROSE. Edited by Jack Seltzer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993; xv + pp. 406. $60.00; paper $19.95. WRITING BIOLOGY: TEXTS IN THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE. By Greg Myers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990; xvi + pp. 256. $37.50; paper $15.75. Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 90 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH FEBRUARY 1996 NOTE S John Angus Campbell is Professor of Communication Arts, University of Memphis; Keith R. Benson is Professor of Medical History and Ethics, University of Washington. 1 John A. Campbell, "Darwin and the Origin of Species: The Rhetorical Ancestry of an Idea," Speech Monographs 37 (1970): 1-14; "Charles Darwin and the Crisis of Ecology: A Rhetorical Perspective, " Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 442-49; "Nature, Religion and Emotional Response: A Reconsideration of Darwin's Affective Decline, "Victorian Studies 18 (1974): 159-74; "The Polemical Mr. Darwin," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 375-90; and "Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture," Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 351-76; Paul N. Campbell, "Poetic-Rhetorical, Philosophical and Scientific Discourse, Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 1-29; and "The Personae of Scientific Discourse," Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 391-405; Philip C. Wander, "The Rhetoric of Science," Western Journal of Speech Communication 40 (1976): 226-35; Herbert W. Simons, "The Rhetoric of Science and the Science of Rhetoric," Western Journal of Speech Communication 42 (1978): 37-43; John S. Nelson, Alan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey, eds., The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument In Scholarship and Public Affairs (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987); Alan G. Gross, "Analogy and Intersubjectivity: Political Oratory, Scholarly Argument and Scientific Reports," Quarterly Journal of Speech 69 (1983): 37-46; Trevor Melia, "And Lo the Footprints . . . Selected Literature in Rhetoric and Science," Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 303-13; Herbert W. Simons, ed., Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (London: Sage, 1989). Some of the best recent work is coming from the youngest generation of rhetoricians. See in particular Leah Ceccarelli, "A Masterpiece in a New Genre: The Rhetorical Negotiation of Two Audiences in Schröedinger's What is Life?" Technical Communication Quarterly 3 (1994): 7-17; "A Rhetoric of Interdisciplinary Scientific Discourse: Textual Criticism of Dobzhansky's 'Genetics and the Origin of Species,' " Social Epistemology 9 (1995): 91-111; Charles A. Taylor, "Defining The Scientific Community: A Rhetorical Perspective on Demarcation," Communication Monographs 58 (1991): 402-40; "Of Audience, Expertise and Authority: The Evolving Creationism Debate," Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 277-95; and The Rhetorical Ecology of Science: Rhetoric, Practice, and Demarcation (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, in press). Documenting early efforts to address the rhetoric of science in the philosophy and history of science must be highly subjective, for any philosophic or historical study attuned to language, time and events suggests "rhetoric." Among the philosophic works important to the rhetoric of science are: E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modem Science (New York: Doubleday, 1954); Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor Books, 1964); Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962); Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972); Joseph P. Gusfield; "The Literary Rhetoric of Science: Comedy and Pathos in Drinking Driving Research," American Sociological Review 41 (1976): 16-34; Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973); Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. (London: Verso, 1975); Frederick Suppe, ed., The Structure of Scientific Theories. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977). Particularly influential in recent years are the sociologists of science, including, most prominently: David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Routledge: London, 1976); Harry M. Collins, "The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks," Science Studies, 4 (1974): 165-86; Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987). Historians whose work associates them with the rhetoric of science would include Charles Coulston Gillispie's Genesis and Geology (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959) and The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960); Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (New York: Vantage Books, 1959); Richard Young, "Darwin's Metaphor: Does Nature Select?" Monist 55 (1971): 442-503; Edward Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Cycle Circle (Dordrecht: Holland, 1978); Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of A Scientific Fact, Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn, trans., (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979); Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning: Rhetorical Foundations of Logic and Scientific Method, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 61 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980); Dov Ospovat, The Development of Darwin's Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982); John F. Cornell, "Analogy and Technology in Darwin's Vision of Nature," Journal of the History of Biology 17 (1984): 303-44; Martin J.S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985); Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985); David Hull, Science As A Process (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988); Timothy Lenoir, "Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue Between Theory and Experiment," Science In Context 2 (1988): 3-22; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994). What is distinct in the recent works we examine here is the degree to which "rhetoric" is explicitly evoked as a positive and self-conscious framework for understanding the social, audience-centered, and suasory dimensions of science. 2 One sign of this vigor is the increasing degree to which rhetoricians, historians, and philosophers of science—sometimes even scientists themselves—are beginning to collaborate and converse in their consideration of common problems. The 1995 Annual Meeting of the History of Science and Society featured a panel on the "History of Science and the Rhetoric of Science" that included both rhetoricians, historians, and philosophers of science. The Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) at the University of Iowa and the inauguration Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015 91 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CAMPBELL AND BENSON of the Ph.D. program in the rhetoric of science at the University of Pittsburgh are other examples. For a specific example of the collaboration between scientists and rhetoricians see the efforts of Henry Howe and John Lyne on the rhetoric of biology in "Genetalk in Sociobiology," Social Epistemology 6 (1992): 109-64. 3 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science," The Southern Communication Journal 58 (1993): 258-94. 4 Alan G. Gross, "What if We're Not Producing Knowledge? Critical Reflections on the Rhetorical Criticism of Science," The Southern Communication Journal 58 (1993): 304. 5 John Waite Bowers, "The Pre-Scientific Function of Rhetorical Criticism," Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Thomas R. Nilsen (New York: Random House, 1968) 126-45. 6 For an account of the "Strong Programme," see Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery; and "The Strengths of the Strong Programme," Philosophy and the Social Sciences 11 (1981): 199-213; Barry Barnes and David Bloor, "Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge," Rationality and Relativism, eds. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1982). 7 Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986). 8 Gaonkar, 266-76. 9 For a critical response to Gaonkar see the essays by Michael Leff, Alan G. Gross, Steve Fuller, John Angus Campbell and Lawrence J. Prelli in The Southern Communication Journal, Vol. X, 1993, pp. 255-327. See also Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, ed. Alan Gross and William Keith (Albany, NY: SUNY P, in press). 10 Carpenters on the Island of Lesbos used a flexible ruler made of lead designed to bend and conform to the material being measured. Walter Jost, Rhetorical Thought in John Henry Newman (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1989) 15-20. Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987) 3-25; Aristotle's Rhetoric: An Art of Reasoning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) 6-7. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961) 320. Downloaded by [Nanyang Technological University] at 21:30 03 March 2015