Rhetoric of Science

Abstract

Before we begin, please take another look at the title; in particular, please notice that, open-ended and swollen though it is, it manages to avoid three words, one big, one mid-sized, and, in the most important side-step of all, a potent little article. The title avoids prolegomenon (the big word) and towards (the mid-sized word), because both terms are far more hesitant than we need be about rhetorical investigations of science. Although the field is rather new, it has proven remarkably successful, and there are abundant signs of a healthy future. As for the stout little article, the epigrams should indicate that it is missing because neither rhetoric nor science is stable enough to bear the immense burden of specificity that the definite article brings with it. Certainly there is no such thing as the rhetoric of science. But there is, carefully denuded of specificity, rhetoric of science. In fragmented form, it goes back as long as the two fields have existed, and it makes various appearances throughout the history of each. Aristotle, for instance, was a seminal contributor to both fields, and he occasionally speaks about them in the same breath-as when he says that dialectic and rhetoric are employed by the sciences, but are not sciences themselves (Rhetoric 1359b). Bacon's many writings on induction include a great deal of rhetorical and scientific commentary in concert, such as his discussion of invention in science and rhetoric (Advancement, XIII). And Priestley's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism contains a wide range of rhetorical advice directed explicitly at his fellow scientists, like Lecture IX on the analytic method. Still, the development of a specific genre of rhetorical analysis directed at scientific discourse is a quite recent phenomenon, only now beginning to flower. The first few steps of the new genre were rather hesitant. Rhetoric is, after all, a shabby little weasel word in most circles, and science is a god-term; putting the two words together, only a slim little preposition between them, was not an act for the faint of pen or keyboard. Fortunately, scholars in other fields did most of the groundwork for us. Polanyi argued that sciences are knowledge-