The State of Rhetoric of Science and Technology

A Special Issue of Technical Communication Quarterly

Alan G. Gross, Laura J. Gurak, Alan G. Gross, Laura J. Gurak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The ubiquity of the Internet and digital technology has changed the sites of rhetorical discourse and inquiry, as well as the methods by which such analyses are performed. This special issue discusses the state of rhetoric of science and technology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While many books connecting rhetorical theory to the Internet have paved the way for more refined and insightful studies of online communication, the articles here serve as a reflective moment, an opportunity to consider thoughtful statements from those who have published and been influential in the field.

Reception Studies in the Rhetoric of Science

Randy Allen Harris
University of Waterloo

This article encourages the increased attention to issues of reception in rhetoric of science, according with the sentiment but not the argument of Paul, Chamey, and Kendall’s “Moving beyond the Moment.” In particular, it offers two works as exemplary of the disciplinary maturity that has occasioned this focus on reception, Ceccarelli’s monograph, Shaping Science with Rhetoric, and Harris’s collection, Rhetoric and Incommensurability.

Danette Paul, Davida Chamey, and Aimee Kendall’s provocative recent essay, “Moving Beyond the Moment,” proposes a new direction for a tired old rhetoric of science: receptions studies. I welcome the proposal, but it is not as new as they believe, nor is rhetoric of science as infirm. As evidence for the vitality of rhetorical analyses of scientific discourse, but also to highlight the promise of Paul, Charney, and Kendall’s proposal, I will outline some relevant aspects of two books that focus on issues of reception: Leah Ceccarelli’s Shaping Science with Rhetoric and a collection of essays I edited, Rhetoric and Incommensurability.

RHETORIC OF SCIENCE AND RECEPTION STUDIES

Rhetoric of science, dating back to the 1970s, has attended mainly to the production of scientific discourse, and, in turn, to the role of that discourse in the production of knowledge. But reception issues have always been present at some level, as they must always be in rhetoric, which has an eye perpetually on the audience. Only Bazerman’s “Physicists Reading Physics” took up reception issues directly, but peer reviewing, shifting fora, and the shaping effect of audience were all taken up in various ways by pioneers like Campbell, Lyne, Gross, Fahnestock, and Myers. Still, reception has rarely been a central focus (though cf., in addition to Bazerman’s chapter, Gragson and Selzer; Paul and Charney; Crismore and Vande Kopple).

But that is changing—a development I applaud, and that Paul et al.’s “Moving Beyond the Moment” urges.

The pivotal moment for this change, in most estimations—certainly in the estimation of our editors in this special issue—was the publication of Gaonkar’s assault on the globalization of rhetoric generally, of which he took rhetoric of science to be an especially sorry example (“Close,” “Idea”). I respectfully (but, given space considerations, quietly) disagree. Both of the books I will now take up are better seen as natural outgrowths of early work in the rhetoric of science than as responses to the radical pruning program recommended by Gaonkar.

THE RHETORICAL EFFECT

Paul et al. (“Moving”) argue somewhat urgently for a need to move “beyond the moment.” We rhetoricians of science, apparently, have been unable and/or unwilling to get past “the moment when an article is accepted for publication by a journal and the history that leads up to acceptance” (372). This appeal is forgivable in context, since they are attempting to lead a (pardon the expression) paradigm shift, and it is often more persuasive to do so by way of uncovering flaws, even crises, rather than just exposing a gap. It is forgivable, but it is wrong.

A lot of work, good and bad, has been done without obsessing on the moment of publication. Take just scientific controversies. Long a focus of rhetorical investigation, their study inevitably involves attention to issues of reception, each side forming both a generative communal base for argumentation and a contrary receptive community for the arguments of the other side, which then feed into the generation of new arguments, in a kind of antagonistic feedback.

But here is the good part about Paul et al.: they make a number of very attractive suggestions for pursuing reception studies, many of which they have already put to work themselves. They are evangelical here as well, strongly implying that their methodologies are the only ones to lead us to the promised land beyond the moment. But their fervor is not only forgivable in this case. It is commendable. They are marketing good ideas; they just have not cornered that market.

Paul, Charney, and Kendall are interested in “the rhetorical effect” as a vaguely quantifiable (if not entirely unitary) phenomenon, and they propose several “methods that… consider and measure communal acceptance” (“Moving” 388), outlining four classes of heavily empirical instruments: correlational, observational, diachronic, and experimental. In addition, they include one more traditional methodology—textual study—which is tuned specifically to issues of reception. (If you have not read their paper, I encourage you to do so, but I am interested here exclusively in textual studies.)

There is, in fact, a recent stellar example of precisely the sort of work they urge in Leah Ceccarelli’s Shaping Science with Rhetoric, though she plows a much wider furrow than they recommend. Shaping Science explores three books that seek to rally widespread interdisciplinary collaboration towards specific goals— exemplars of a hortatory genre Ceccarelli calls the interdisciplinary inspirational monograph—in terms of both their textual strategies and the communal responses to those strategies.

It is this systematic attention to both primary- and secondary-receptive sources that marks her innovation. Let us see how she explores textual reception in terms of strategic multiguity—the sponsoring of several parallel readings. (Ceccarelli uses the term polysemy, but I am uncomfortable moving that word out of lexical semantics; I have borrowed Rupert Crawshay-Williams’s multiguity for the phenomenon [52]). One of her object texts is Erwin Schrodinger’s What Is Life?, a key rallying cry in the invention of molecular biology. Schrodinger’s motivation for bringing physicists and biologists together, he wrote, was that it was the only collaboration capable of bringing matter and life into a single explanatory matrix. “Living matter,” he wrote, “while not eluding the ‘laws of physics’ as established up to date, is likely to involve ‘other laws of physics’ hitherto unknown, which, however, once they have been revealed, will form just as integral a part of this science as the former” (qtd. in Ceccarelli 75).

Schrodinger’s richly multiguous phrase, “other laws of physics,” bore at least three different meanings for different subcommunities of physicists and biologists. Physics, though thoroughly quantum, still housed many scientists with classical deterministic allegiances (including Schrödinger), and within those groups were further variations. To physicists (mostly of a quantum cast) looking for new domains to subdue, Schrodinger’s book supplied one of near-religious depths, assuring them that their powerful methods could conquer all. To physicists either weary of or uncomfortable with all the quantum paradoxes (mostly of a determinist cast), Schrödinger served up the stabler phenomena of molecular research, with an apple in its mouth. Biology, for its part, was a just-amalgamating discipline of naturalists and geneticists, each group with its own range of interests, but both aware of the prestige gap their field suffered compared to physics. The program advanced in What Is Life? offered them the opportunity to partake of the exalted physics mantle while still allowing them to retain their unique provenance over the organic universe. To biologists (mostly of a genetics cast) who wanted to import not just the prestige, but also the powerful methods of physics, Schrödinger gift-wrapped them.

To all of these constituencies and their respective motives, Schrodinger’s phrase, “other laws of physics,” played very well. It is subject to at least three interpretations, all of which were assigned: (1) new complementary laws of physics might be discovered in biology; (2) new deterministic laws of physics might be discovered in biology; (3) other quantum mechanical laws of physics need merely be recognized in biology.

It would be hard to think of a textual attribute that serves multiple address so well as this kind of master ambiguity: as Ceccarelli charts in her reception studies, physicists read what they wanted, biologists read what they wanted, and both groups went to work.

The other example of this growing attention to issues of reception is a project I have worked on for several years, culminating in the collection, Rhetoric and Incommensurability (Harris). Incommensurability in science is a phenomenon noticed publicly by Paul Feyerabend in 1962, in a long technical paper devoted to removing two lynch pins of the dominant philosophy of science, logical empiricism, and somewhat more memorably the same year in a breezy, highly programmatic book by Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The notion is highly ramified, and somewhat different for each thinker (see Hoyningen-Huene, in Harris), but its kernel is that competing theories in the same domain cannot be objectively compared because there is no neutral theoretical language in which their claims can accurately be brought together. That italicized post-adverbial clause brings little more than a stifled yawn from us weary postmodems. Even the italicization looks naive these days. But the argument was rather alarming at the time.

Incommensurability has been attacked, defended, investigated, rejected, incorporated, reframed—pick a verb—over the subsequent forty-plus years. But, although incommensurability has profound implications for argumentation, and although it is the sponsoring idea behind Kuhn’s oft-quoted words “because it is asked about techniques of persuasion, or about argument and counterargument in a situation in which there can be no proof, our question is a new one, demanding a sort of study that has not been previously undertaken” (152)—although, that is, the notion of incommensurability led very directly to rhetoric of science—it has only rarely and passingly been brought into scholarly contact with rhetoric.

And incommensurability is as fundamental a reception issue as one might imagine. Among its implications are that, as rhetor, one cannot really speak, as audience, one cannot really hear, at least about some issues, because there is no common ground. In principle, there can be no common ground.

So I invited the cream of the rhetoric-of-science crop to work on this problem— I’m no dummy— and sat back to watch the fireworks. The results are impressive. As you would expect, most scholars chose controversies. Charles Bazerman and René Agustin De los Santos, for instance, test the notion of incommensurability in an interdisciplinary situation, rhetorically chronicling the ‘revolutionary’ emergence of ecotoxicology out of the social and intellectual resources of toxicology, a circumstance where Kuhn would lead us to expect tell-tale signs of incommensurability, but where signs of incomprehension and hostility are significantly muted, and the order of the day is the inverse. The two disciplines engage in profitably reciprocal communication, responsibly and successfully. They employ each other’s respective entities and measures as needed. They get along.

Carolyn Miller, on the other hand, finds the reverse. Like Bazerman and De los Santos, she looks to interdisciplinary developments, examining the debates over the nonthermal effects of nonionizing radiation that have developed over the past fifty years and gained recent steam from disputes over cell-phone tower sites and research linking brain tumors to cell phone use. Differences in worldview, Miller argues, derive in this case not only from different levels of commitment to a newly proposed explanatory framework within a single scientific community, but also from different long-standing and deeply engrained commitments in separate disciplines. Research in this area involves electrical engineers and physicists, as well as biologists and epidemiologists.

But while she finds a situation quite different from the one Bazerman and De los Santos chart, with deeply recalcitrant opponents, Miller does not find what she regards as incommensurability. “What Kuhn called incommensurability,” she argues, “can be understood alternatively as the result of … rhetorical dynamics, which involve a complex combination of both intellectual commitments and socio-political relations” (2005, n. pag.)—an admirable epitome of the thrust of this book overall. The authors are not uniform in their positions on incommensurability, and Alan Gross’s contribution amounts to a dissenting opinion. But they largely agree that incommensurability, to the extent that it usefully describes a cluster of phenomena manifest when some arguments clash, is tractable, and (while tractability may not be the goal of all the rhetors engaged in such clashes, or any of them, and may not even be always in the best interests of truth and knowledge) what guarantees that tractability is rhetorical pliancy. Incommensurability, in short, has a cure—rhetoric.

CONCLUSION

The driving theme of Danette Paul and her colleagues’ urgent essay is the prescription of desperately needed medicine to a sickly discipline. Rhetoric of science is not. The most compelling counter-arguments to their contention are the superlative critical work of Ceccarelli and the overall brilliance of the essays gathered in Rhetoric and Incommensurability

In contrast to Paul, Chamey, and Kendall, I simply wish to advocate for opportunities that currently exist without a revolution. The original focus of rhetoric-of-science scholarship on production would seem to originate with science’s culturally anointed epistemological efficacy and ubiquity as a universalizing language. The focus on the production of science may now be making room for more broadly receptive studies for three reasons. First, science depends heavily on public funds and cultural legitimation for its existence, and its future development, as the fate of the super-collider project suggests, may be increasingly a result less of its cultural reception than of its internal realization. Second, the disputes between scientists are, as the incommensurability collection aptly demonstrates, often resolved by the reception of individual scienti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• TCQ Reviewers
• Guest Editors’ Introduction
• Articles
• Review
• The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. David Freedberg