Rhetoric of Science and Inquiry
The rhetoric of science studies how scientific and scholarly knowledge is made persuasive through argument, style, and appeals, treating even technical discourse as rhetorical.
Definition
The rhetoric of science and inquiry is the study of how scientific, technical, and scholarly texts persuade their audiences, analyzing the argumentative and stylistic means by which knowledge claims gain acceptance.
Scope
This topic covers the rhetorical analysis of scientific and scholarly communication. It includes the rhetoric of science associated with Alan Gross and others, the broader rhetoric of inquiry movement examining argument across the human sciences, and case studies of how landmark texts persuade across disciplines. It treats the claim that knowledge production involves persuasion without reducing science to mere rhetoric.
Core questions
- In what sense is scientific writing rhetorical?
- How do research articles construct authority and assent?
- Does rhetorical analysis threaten the objectivity of science?
- How do persuasive strategies differ across disciplines?
Key concepts
- rhetoric of science
- rhetoric of inquiry
- scientific ethos
- accommodation of science
- productive ambiguity
Key theories
- Science as rhetorical
- Gross argues that scientific texts are thoroughly rhetorical, employing arrangement, style, and appeals to gain assent, so that the apparent transparency of scientific prose is itself a persuasive achievement.
- Rhetoric of inquiry
- The rhetoric-of-inquiry program holds that argumentation pervades all scholarship, including economics, history, and the human sciences, making rhetorical analysis central to understanding how knowledge is communicated.
History
Emerging in the 1980s alongside the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies, the rhetoric of science applied rhetorical criticism to scientific texts. The 1987 volume The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences launched the broader rhetoric-of-inquiry program. Gross's 1990 book offered systematic analyses, and later scholars such as Ceccarelli examined how individual works persuaded across scientific communities.
Debates
- Does rhetoric undermine scientific truth?
- Critics worry that calling science rhetorical implies relativism; proponents reply that analyzing persuasion in science describes how consensus forms without denying that evidence and reality constrain it.
Key figures
- Alan G. Gross
- Leah Ceccarelli
- John S. Nelson
- Deirdre McCloskey
Related topics
Seminal works
- gross1990
- nelson1987
Frequently asked questions
- Does studying the rhetoric of science mean science is just opinion?
- No. The field examines how scientists persuade colleagues and the public through argument and writing. It describes the communicative side of knowledge-making rather than denying that evidence and the natural world constrain scientific claims.