Rethoric of Science

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The idea of rhetoric in the rhetoric of

science
a
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
a
Assistant Professor of Speech Communication , University of
Illinois , Urbana‐Champaign, IL, 61801
Published online: 01 Apr 2009.
To cite this article: Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (1993) The idea of rhetoric in the rhetoric of
science, Southern Communication Journal, 58:4, 258-295, DOI: 10.1080/10417949309372909
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I The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric
of Science1
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
A striking but insufficiently examined feature of the current revival of interest in rhetoric
is its positioning primarily as a hermeneutic metadiscourse rather than as a substantive
discourse practice. When one invokes metadiscourse to account for a discursive practice,
what one hopes to achieve is minimally a "redescription" of the latter. Rhetoric has entered
Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 05:35 05 November 2014
the orbit of general hermeneutics. This essay, divided into three parts, examines the cultural
identity of rhetoric, the interpretive turn and rhetorical criticism, the politics of repression
and recognition, the rhetoric of science as a discursive formation, communitarian and
epistemic strategies, and the inventional strategy and humanist paradigm. The works of
Michael Leff Allan G. Gross, John Angus Campbell, and LawrenceJ. Prelli are critiqued.
DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR is Assistant Professor of Speech Com-

munication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801.
A striking but insufficiently examined feature of the current revival of interest

in rhetoric is its positioning primarily as a hermeneutic metadiscourse rather
than as a substantive discourse practice. Today we frequently invoke rhetoric
as a metadiscourse to describe and to interpret discursive practices of various sorts,
including those that are subsumed under "science." When one invokes a metadis-
course to account for a discursive practice, what one hopes to achieve is minimally
a "redescription" of the latter. Under ideal conditions, an agile reader might wish
to dissolve a discursive practice into the interpretive medium of a preferred metadis-
course (be it Marxism, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, or rhetoric). A perfect
interpretation is one in which the object of interpretation loses all of its recalcitrance
and becomes transparent. Such is the dream of interpretation and we have been
seduced by that dream. Rhetoric has entered the orbit of general hermeneutics
(Eden, 1987,1990; Hernadi, 1989; Hyde and Smith, 1979). Even our culture appears
to promote this hermeneutic impulse in rhetoric. It is a habit of our time to invoke
rhetoric, time and again, to make sense of a wide variety of discursive practices that
beset and perplex us, and of discursive artifacts that annoy and entertain us, and
of discursive formations that inscribe and subjugate us. Rhetoric is a way of reading
the endless discursive debris that surrounds us.2 What does it tell us about a culture
that it finds interpretive solace in rhetoric rather than in religion or in economics
or in science?
PARTI
RHETORIC AS HERMENEUTICS AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
Contemporary rhetoric differs from its classical counterpart in two important
ways. First, we have extended the range of rhetoric to include discourse types such
as scientific texts that the ancients would have regarded as falling outside its purview.
258
RHETORIC OF SCIENCE 259
To be sure, there were two opposed conceptions of the range of rhetoric in antiquity.
While Aristotle promoted a "restrained" view of rhetoric as confined to the civic
realm, the sophists viewed rhetoric as ranging over the whole of human affairs. But
despite the sophists' attempt to promote an enlarged vision of rhetoric, it remained
as a cultural practice bound to the civic realm and later, with the erosion of the public
sphere in the classical world, rhetoric migrated to the realm of art and aesthetics.
Here, once again, rhetoric failed to establish its hegemony as the generative grammar
of artistic prose. Gorgias may have imagined a rhetoric that would become the
privileged site for a festival of language where, to borrow an image from Geoffrey
Hartman, "the words (would) stand out as words . . . rather than being, at once,
assimilable meanings" (Hartman, 1981). But such a festival never did take place.
Rhetoric after Quintilian, now domiciled within the pedagogical institutions and
driven by changing cultural needs as mediated by those institutions, found itself
progressively reduced in scope from an idealized medium of "general culture" to a

regimen for training of bureaucrats for the state and the church, and then, to a
technical study of stylistics and finally ended up as a brittle taxonomy of tropes and
figures. According to an account popular among certain European writers of "struc-
turalist" persuasion—Barthes, Gennette, Ricoeur, and Todorov—taxonomically os-
sified rhetoric finally died in the early nineteenth century with the emergence of
the Romantic aesthetics that privileged genius and spontaneity as opposed to the
classificatory order and stylistic conformity characteristic of rhetorical instruction
(Todorov, 1977). Whether we accept or reject this engaging historical narrative about
rhetoric as an "incredibly shrinking discipline," one thing is certain: rhetoric today,
whether "revived" or "reborn," presents an exactly opposite spectacle of an "incred-
ibly engulfing discipline." Rhetoric is everywhere. Never before in the history of
rhetoric, not even during its glory days of the Italian Renaissance, did its proponents
claim for rhetoric so universal a scope as some postmodern neosophists do today
(Leff, 1987b). The rhetoric of science is simply one manifestation of this contempo-
rary impulse to universalize rhetoric.
How does one universalize rhetoric? This brings me to the second key difference
between contemporary and classical views of rhetoric. We have reversed the priority
the ancients accorded to rhetoric as a practical/productive activity over rhetoric as
a critical/interpretive activity. As academics, we are more interested in rhetoric as
interpretive theory than as a cultural practice.
The ancients were not entirely unaware of these two aspects of rhetoric. They
distinguished between rhetorica utens and rhetorica docens. The former refers to rhetoric
as practice in a sense not dissimilar from its contemporary usage. But the latter
refers to rhetoric as a pedagogically motivated network of critical terms, practical
devices, prudential rules, and semi-theoretical formulations regarding a set of inter-
related topics: practical reasoning, figurative language, compositional structures and
strategies, psychology of audience, and sociology of opinion. Rhetorica docens has
little in common with our contemporary sense of rhetoric as an interpretive theory.
Rather it is cast in the spirit of handbooks. Although the boundary between rhetorica
utens and rhetorica docens is rather unstable, it is not very difficult to establish that
the ancients privileged the former over the latter. This is evident in the orator perfectus
tradition (inaugurated by Isocrates, developed by Cicero, and canonized by Quintil-
ian) that dominated rhetorical instruction in the West up till this century. Unlike
Plato and Aristotle, the ancient proponents of the orator perfectus tradition were not
concerned with the troubled epistemic status of rhetoric: Is rhetoric an art or a mere
routine as Plato insisted? Isocrates, for instance, viewed rhetoric as a civic force
rather than as a mode of understanding. His interest in theory extends only to the
extent that it has some immediate bearing on practice, that is, oratory in the service
of the polis. Similarly for Cicero, the governing ideal of rhetoric is not to achieve
self-grounding as an art but to strive for a union of wisdom and eloquence in
260 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL
ministering (guiding and sustaining) the republic. Thus, "theorizing" among the
ancients was dominated by a pedagogical interest in performance rather than by a
"hermeneutic" interest in understanding.
The fact that the ancients had a sharply different estimate of theory than we do
frequently escapes our attention because our understanding of rhetoric—both its
history and its current possibilities—is mediated almost exclusively by Aristotle rather
than by Cicero and Quintilian. Aristotle's text, perhaps uniquely in the entire Greco-
Roman rhetorical canon, permits us to entertain a distinction between theory and
practice, with the former in some sense regulating and rationalizing the latter. Aris-
totle's Rhetoric may be briefly identified by its functional stress on the concept of
"persuasion" and by the tripartite structure with which it disciplines the unwieldy
discourse of persuasion. Within this scheme, rhetoric is preeminently a means to an
end.3 It enables its practitioners to act upon an audience so as to instill in them
desirable attitudes and beliefs and when appropriate to incite them to action. With
so clear a vision about both the function and structure of persuasive discourse,
Aristotle was able to theorize about the "rationality" of the rhetorical enterprise,
systematize its resources and prepare it for the status of an "art" (techne). While in
other texts, even in Cicero's philosophically inspired De Oratore, it is practice that
constantly interrogates the utility of the "art." Cicero is decisive in his insistence that
"inborn talent" and "practice" are infinitely more important than the knowledge of
"art" in the preparation of an orator. This Ciceronian claim was to become a pedagog-
ical commonplace (and hence a governing principle) in the institutionalization of
rhetoric that followed the collapse of the Roman Republic.
It is now an accepted bit of scholarly lore that in the classical world and in the
subsequent history of rhetoric, the orator perfectus tradition has been far more influen-
tial than the Aristotelian tradition. But in this century Aristotle has virtually domi-
nated rhetorical studies.4 The two major texts in contemporary rhetorical studies—
Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric and Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives—
attest to this domination.5 It is well beyond the scope of this essay to analyze how
and why rhetorical studies in this century, especially within the disciplinary matrix
of speech communication, became Aristotelianized (Leff, 1993). However, the links
between the interpretive turn and the Aristotelianization are fairly deep. In fact,
the interpretive turn initially appeared in the guise of neo-Aristotelianism. And as
we shall see in the next section, the interpretive turn in contemporary rhetorical
studies, even as it seeks to break free from a "restrained" vision of Aristotle, remains
fatally bound to an Aristotelian vocabulary.
The Cultural Identity of Rhetoric:

In this section I will spell out the implications of what it means to privilege theory
over practice in contemporary rhetorical studies. I must begin by removing two
possible misunderstandings. First, in my view, neither Aristotle nor his contemporary
followers view rhetoric as anything but a practical activity. But a contemporary
Aristotelian (if not Aristotle himself) is prone to view rhetorical practice from an
interpretive axis rather than from a performative/pedagogical axis. Second, our
propensity to adopt an interpretive stance does not imply that we are any less impli-
cated than fifth and fourth century B.C. Athenians in rhetoric as a cultural and
material practice. If we allow ourselves a simple equation between rhetoric and
persuasion, we will find a staggering amount of rhetoric in our daily life. The
twentieth century is marked by a proliferation of practical activities and discursive
artifacts that one can characterize unproblematically as persuasive. In McGee's words,
we experience "the brute reality of persuasion as a daily social phenomenon" (McGee,
1982). The extraordinarily rhetorical character of our daily discursive practices is
self-evident so long as we allow ourselves a simple equation between rhetoric and
persuasion. But, therein lies the rub. The equation between rhetoric and persuasion
does not enjoy the sort of cultural currency that would give rhetoric a distinct identity.
Aside from a common and continuing usage of rhetoric to mean "mere rhetoric,"
we do not have a more refined and culturally accessible notion of rhetoric based on
its relation to persuasion. Our sense of rhetoric has become so attenuated that even
the ancient connection between rhetoric and oratory has lost some of its taken-for-
granted character. In the absence of a clear cultural sense of what is a rhetorical
practice or a rhetorical artifact and in the absence of a developed cultural appreciation
of rhetoric as a mode of understanding certain expressive and communicative social
fields, a putative rhetorical analyst is required to discharge a double burden: she
must simultaneously make the practice/artifact under scrutiny intelligible (either
imminently or contextually or by some combination of the two) and also specify how
the intelligibility of her reading is grounded in a theory of rhetoric. This, I believe,
is evident in our critical practices.

However, what is not so evident is the two radical consequences which are implicit
in our critical practices: First, what is rhetorical in any given case is invariably an effect
of one's reading rather than a quality intrinsic to the object being read. Second, if what is
rhetorical is an effect of one's reading, then a master reader can produce such an effect in
relation to virtually any object. Hence, the range of rhetoric is potentially universal. Thus, it
turns out that the interpretive turn in rhetoric is inextricably linked to an impulse
to universalize rhetoric. They are two aspects of the same tendency in contemporary
rhetorical studies.
It is interesting to note that some critics, especially Michael Leff, have openly
resisted this tendency. While remaining within the interpretive orbit, Leff attempts
to blunt the impulse to universalize rhetoric. His strategy is as follows: Leff claims
that the double burden that a putative rhetorical analyst must discharge is not
necessitated by our impoverished sense of rhetoric but is intrinsic to rhetoric as an
embedded art and the radical particularity of its manifestations. For Leff, the peculiar
nature of rhetorical art can be understood only in and through its local discursive
manifestations. As a global process (conceived either as figuration or argument),
rhetoric is susceptible to theoretical abstraction and formalization. But to do so
beyond a certain point is impractical because rhetoric so conceived becomes purely
taxonomic, and hence, trivial. In Leff s words, "rhetoric is a universal activity that
finds its habitation only in the particular" (1987b, p. 7). Whatever one might make
of Leff s maneuver and the accompanying program of "textual criticism," it does
point to a fundamental and unresolved tension within the interpretive paradigm
constituted under the authority of Aristotle. This tension can be formulated in the
form of a question: Is it possible to translate effectively an Aristotelian vocabulary initially
generated in the course of theorizing" about certain types of practical (praxis) and productive
(poesis) activities delimited to the realm of appearances (that is, "public sphere" as the Greeks
understood it) into a vocabulary for interpretive understanding of cultural practices that cover
the whole of human affairs, including science? This question cannot be profitably addres-
sed in an a priori fashion. It must be addressed in the historical context of our
disciplinary practices.
The Interpretive Turn and Rhetorical Criticism:

The interpretive turn coincided with the constitution of "rhetorical criticism" as
a sub-field of study in our discipline. The original program for rhetorical criticism
as enunciated by the members of the Cornell school, especially in Wichelns' inaugural
essay, was based on a certain reading of Aristotle that sought to translate his theory
of praxis into a method of interpretation. But this translation did not occur in a
vacuum. Wichelns' attempt to formulate a method was deeply informed by what he
took to be the privileged object of critical study, namely, oratory. It is Wichelns' view
of oratory—its fragility and temporality, its connection to power, its location in the
public sphere, its preoccupation with leadership—that led him to posit a "historical
critical method." "Oratory," according to Wichelns, "is intimately associated with
statecraft; it is bound up with the things of the moment; its occasion, its terms, its
background, can often be understood only by a careful student of history." Thus
Wichelns, like Aristotle, kept rhetoric confined within the public sphere although
his view of orator as a culture hero—who must periodically tame that "Leviathan,
the public mind," lest he "threaten civilization"—has a distinctly Ciceronian flavor.6
The resulting critical paradigm known as neo-Aristotelianism sought to integrate
a critical vocabulary derived from Aristotle with a program of historical research.
The practical results were dismal in two respects: First, the transformation of
Wichelns' broadly conceived critical injunctions into a rigidly codified methodology
produced a spate of mechanical and unimaginative critical studies. Second, the critical
enterprise was overwhelmed by historical research with some critics such as Nichols
openly admitting that a study of oratory was only ancillary to a study of history.7
Neo-Aristotelianism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own massive failure.
But the privilege of writing its obituary belonged to Edwin Black who, in his influential
book Rhetorical Criticism, offered a brilliant diagnosis of how its critical failure stem-
med from a flawed conceptual apparatus. While Black's critique of neo-Aris-
totelianism has been fully absorbed into the disciplinary consciousness, his detailed
discussion of Aristotle's Rhetoric and its relevance for conducting rhetorical criticism
has been largely ignored. It is not possible here to examine the details and merits
of Black's interpretation of Aristotle's conception of rhetoric "as a faculty that realizes
its end in the act of judgment (krisis)," a judgment arrived at in accordance with a
normative procedure (Black, 1978, p. 108). But the conclusions that Black draws on
the basis of his reading of Aristotle command our attention. Black flatly states that
the Aristotelian vision of rhetoric is far too narrow, far too normative, and far too
rationalistic to be of use in modern times, especially in the appraisal of rhetorical
discourse, because it excludes certain types of discourses and certain types of audi-
ences and the formation of certain mental states (beliefs and convictions) from the
purview of rhetoric. He traces the failure of neo-Aristotelianism back to Aristotle
himself. In questioning the usefulness of Aristotelian principles and vocabulary, is
not Black also implicitly questioning the utility of the whole of the classical tradition
and its network of rules and terms in the critical appraisal of rhetorical discourses?
For some reason, this bold provocation failed to elicit a response within the critical
community.
The collapse of neo-Aristotelianism was followed by a period marked by both the
globalization of rhetoric (greatly facilitated by the works of Kenneth Burke) and the
pluralization of critical methods. Two types of critics and critical studies came into
prominence. What distinguished the two types is their respective attitude towards
theory. One group of critics scrambled to replace the discredited neo-Aristotelianism
with a variety of competing theories: phenomenological, structuralist, dramatistic,
etc., all of them generally committed to the view of rhetoric as "symbolic inducement."
But critical studies inspired by those theoretical perspectives were as a whole no
more insightful than an average neo-Aristotelian study. Even studies inspired by
Burke's dramatistic theory of motives failed to leave a decisive imprint. And soon
the talk of conceptual innovation gave way to a certain a form of anti-theoreticism.
In the second group, it became fashionable to view the critic as a sort of bricoleur,
who exemplified Burke's dictum that a critic should "use all that is there to use" in
making the critical object intelligible. Black himself endorsed this view of critical
enterprise when he came out in favor of emic criticism against etic criticism (Black,
1980). The progressive globalization of rhetoric also reinforced the atheoretical
stance. Now that rhetoric was seen as something so immensely rich and complex
and coextensive with humanity itself, it was assumed that only a flexible system of
theoretical perspectives and critical procedures employed on an ad hoc basis could

do justice to it. What this pluralist critical stance actually concealed is the persistence
and the recuperation of classical rhetoric. (The situation in rhetorical theory is quite
different; from Bryant through Bitzer to Farrell, the dominant influence of Aristotle
in rhetorical theory is explicit.) A critic might eschew theory as constricting and
cumbersome, but can hardly do without a critical vocabulary. A language of criticism,
however diffuse, is always already in place in the conduct of criticism. It would not
take a great deal of ingenuity on my part to show that an allegedly atheoretical
critical study is suffused with a critical vocabulary that is not simply derived from
everyday language (Swanson, 1977a, 1977b). The question is not whether but which
vocabulary is in play. And it is my contention that, by and large, our critical studies
are sustained by the vocabulary of classical rhetoric, a vocabulary primarily fashioned
for directing performance rather than facilitating understanding. The question re-
mains unanswered as to whether this vocabulary of performance can be adequately

translated into a vocabulary of interpretation. As I indicated earlier, this question
cannot be answered in an a priori fashion. It calls for reflexive critical engagement.8
A putative translator will have to keep three things in mind: First, one must
realize that the translation involves not simply a technical vocabulary but an ideology:
a view of speaker as the seat of origin rather than a point of articulation, a view of
strategy as identifiable under an intentional description, a view of discourse as con-
stitutive of character and community, a view of audience positioned simultaneously
as "spectator" and "participant," and finally, a view of "ends" that binds speaker,
strategy, discourse, and audience in a web of purposive actions. How should our
translator deal with this particular ideology of human agency? Should it be discarded
or be allowed to be reinscribed in the new interpretive vocabulary? The choice one
makes will depend on one's sense of the historical conjuncture—the postmodern
condition—in which the translation is being attempted. (In the final section of this
paper, I will offer an extended critique of the "humanist paradigm" and its view of
agency.)
Second, the refashioned interpretive vocabulary must be adequate to accommo-
date a wide range of objects that are now subsumed under universal rhetoric. There
is no way to deglobalize rhetoric from within the interpretive paradigm.
Third, the "thinness" of the current productionist vocabulary would have to be
"deepened" and made more specific. By "thinness," I am referring to the abstract
quality of the traditional vocabulary as illustrated, for instance, in the tripartite
scheme of proofs (ethos, pathos and logos) that enables one to find its presence in
virtually any discourse practice. In disciplinary politics, the more refined and specific
a language of criticism becomes (be it deconstruction, psychoanalysis, or reception
theory), the greater attention it gets and by the same token the more vulnerable it
is to falsification. In its current form, rhetoric as a language of criticism is so thin
and abstract that it is virtually invulnerable to falsification, and for that very reason,
it commands little sustained attention.9 I am prepared to concede that a "thin"
rhetorical lexicon may have certain advantages when it functions heuristically as an
aid to performance, but it is inadequate for a critical reading of what gets "said" (or
"done") in performance. Here I am already presupposing a certain view of interpre-
tive process, i.e., that it is not a simple reversal of the process of production (Jaffe,
1980). I cannot here rehearse Gadamer's well-known arguments against the romantic
hermeneutic view that one could move from expression (Ausdruck) to experience
(Erlebnis) by an operation called Verstehen. (The basic assumption is that understand-
ing involves a process of psychological reconstruction.) Besides, even if we were to
abide by the assumptions of romantic hermeneutics, the classical vocabulary of pro-
duction (structuration of discourse practice) does not give us sufficient resources to
apprehend how a speaker imagines and fills out a project conceived in the face of
an exigency. We don't have to invoke a skeptical reading of Wittgenstein to remind
ourselves that "rules" and "practices" are not linked in a manner that one can
unproblematically "read off the latter from the former. Cicero reminds us of this
fact in a more gentle tone quite frequently. Between precept and performance, there
is talent and practice, the regimen of the body. Rhetoric is like dancing, says Quin-
tillian.
Keeping these challenges in sight, can we translate the current rhetorical lexicon?
Once again, there is no point in soliciting a speculative answer. The translation is
already underway. The practical critics are already struggling with the problem. It
is only in their critical labor and struggles that one can glimpse the translative process.
The critic's blindness to the translative process that is underway in their work does
not necessarily devalue the insight that they are transforming rhetoric in the course
of illuminating some text or practice. We place (somewhat frantically these days)
things under the sign of rhetoric more to make rhetoric intelligible than the things
subsumed under it. The emergence of the "rhetoric of science" as a new and increas-
ingly prominent sub-field of study in our discipline presents us with an extraordinar-
ily fertile site to study the unfolding translative process, a veritable cultural semiosis
through which rhetoric struggles to reconstitute itself as a nomadic metadiscourse.
The Politics of Repression and Recognition:

One might wonder why our allegedly rhetorical culture lacks resources for spon-
taneously recognizing what is and what is not "rhetoric." This question has exercised
the minds of some of our scholars. We have three explanatory hypotheses: linguistic
(the lacunae thesis), sociological (the differentiation thesis), and historical (the repres-
sion thesis). Since the third hypothesis is central to any discussion on the rhetoric
of science, I will briefly identify the first two and elaborate on the third.
Donald C. Bryant once suggested that our difficulty in discerning clear and
distinct instances of rhetoric may be due to a simple lack of an appropriate term
(Bryant, 1983). While in the realm of poetry we have a set of three differentiating
terms for artist (poet), art (poetics), and output (poetry), we have in rhetoric equiva-
lent terms for only artist (rhetor) and art (rhetoric) and none for output. Con-
sequently, while we can easily identify Homer's epic as well as Shakespeare's sonnets
as instances of poetry, we cannot with equal ease identify Lincoln's speech and Paine's
pamphlet as instances of "rhetory" because there is no such word. But this linguistic
lacuna merely makes us aware of the problem of recognition without explaining
it. What makes one recognize an epic or a lyric or a sonnet as an instance of poetry
is not simply that we have an appropriate word. Rather, the recognition is made
possible by a cultural tradition within which it takes place. Obviously, rhetoric lacks
a tradition that would enable an average but literate person to unproblematically
identify at least the paradigm cases of rhetoric as rhetoric. This raises a question:
why do we lack such an identity-bestowing tradition? (An answer to this question
will be furnished by the third hypothesis.)
The sociological differentiation thesis pertains to the character of modern/post-
modern society. On account of the functional complexity and structural differenti-
ation of modern society, activities and artifacts that were once allegedly legible as
instances of rhetoric no longer signal those marks or carry those traces by means of
which one can recognize their ancestry. Manifestly persuasive activities such as polit-
ical oratory, litigation, advertising, and public relations have evolved in the modern
age according to their own inner logic, developed their own distinctive institutions,
and formulated their own professional norms. In carrying out their practical ac-
tivities, the participants in those spheres of life do not feel the need for a comprehen-
sive theory of persuasion that rhetoric professes to deliver. Hence, those agents and
institutions no longer invoke rhetoric either for self-understanding or for social
legitimation. For them, rhetoric represents a nostalgia for a lost myth of origin and
unity. This perfectly plausible explanation is tacitly acknowledged in the institutional

arrangements of the modern University. We make no attempt to subsume the study
of advertising, public relations, litigation, and empirical research in persuasive pro-
cesses (within our own discipline) under the rubric of rhetoric.
While Bryant's "linguistic" explanation never got off the ground (and rightly so)
and while the "sociological" explanation is tacitly acknowledged, it is the "historical"
explanation that dominates our self-understanding as a discipline. The historical
explanation comes in the form of a dialectic between repression and recognition.
There are many versions of the repression thesis, but the basic ingredients are the
same. It is generally cast in the form of a narrative that begins with a certain reading
of the quarrel between philosophy (the Platonic Socrates) and rhetoric (the older
Sophists) for cultural hegemony in ancient Greece. It recounts the birth of rhetoric
in litigation and its rise to political prominence during the Periclean enlightenment,
its clash with philosophy and its cultural marginalization by the victorious philosophi-
cal reason, its subsequent confinement within the educational curriculum after the
collapse of democratic politics in the classical world, and finally after centuries of
attenuation (except for one or two brief revivals) its rapid disintegration and dispersal
in the modern world under the double onslaught of subject-centered reason and
romantic aesthetics (Bender and Wellbery, 1990). Despite the glaring historical inac-
curacies in this narrative, repeatedly corrected by professional historians like Conley,
Kennedy, and Vickers, the moral of the tale survives intact, i.e., the current dispersed
character of rhetoric and the attendant lack of cultural recognition are not intrinsic
to rhetoric but the result of a historical deformation (Conley, 1990; Kennedy, 1980).
While rhetoric as cultural practice continues to exist because its materiality cannot
be erased, the requisite vocabulary to recognize it as such has been suppressed and
maligned. This gives us a decisive motivational clue as to why contemporary rhetoric
so insistently positions itself as an interpretive metadiscourse. The repression of
rhetoric is only partial; it survives and goes about its business under a series of
pseudonyms and misrecognitions. Such a shadowy existence will continue so long
as the vocabulary of recognition and legitimation remains fragmented.10 Thus
rhetoric, in order to disclose its presence in discourse practices, must reconstitute
itself into a second order discourse, an interpretive metadiscourse. Hence the her-
meneutic turn in rhetoric is inextricably caught up in a politics of recognition.
It is precisely within the conceptual framework of a historical dialectic between
repression and recognition that a new formation called "the rhetoric of science" is
located. In the following section, I will try to show how this new and increasingly
prominent formation in rhetorical studies best exemplifies the interweaving of the
three components I have identified so far: the interpretive turn, the globalization
of rhetoric, and the politics of recognition.
My choice of this particular formation to illustrate some of the general problems
in rhetorical criticism may seem a bit ironic but it has certain strategic advantages.
First, science is generally viewed as that discursive space in which rhetorical consid-
erations are least relevant or welcome. The very idea of the rhetoric of science
suggests that we are now turning our attention to the furthest outpost in rhetoric's
quest for universal hegemony. Thus, we might here observe the perils and possibilities
of globalization under conditions of determined resistance. Second, it is also here
that the dialectic between repression and recognition gets played out with the greatest
clarity. If science is that space where rhetoric was traditionally viewed as utterly
irrelevant, it could only mean (for the champion of rhetoric) that here the suppression
of rhetoric was carried out in the most thoroughgoing manner. Hence, an unpacking
of the dialectic between repression and recognition would have visible consequences
for self-understanding of both science and rhetoric. As for science, it would have
to refunction its epistemological anxieties in a manner that does not involve a simple
refusal to recognize the consequences of its textuality. On the other hand, a successful
recuperation of rhetoric in science would shift the presumption, once and for all,
in favor of the proponents of universal rhetoric. If science is not free of rhetoric,
nothing is. Third, the repressed rhetoricity of science could be brought to light only
through an interpretive redescription of science. Science, like religion or finance,
does not offer itself as a rhetoric. It must be reread against considerable resistance
from those who are committed to other readings or descriptions of science. And the
fate of universal rhetoric will turn largely on the efficacy of those rereadings.
PART II
THE RHETORIC OF SCIENCE AS A DISCURSIVE FORMATION
The "rhetoric of science" (referred to hereafter as RS), as I understand it, refers
to the work of those who study science from a rhetorical perspective. This body of
literature is scattered over several disciplines: speech communication, English (the
disciplinary host to composition programs), sociology, and history and philosophy
of science.
My paper concentrates on work produced within the discipline of speech com-
munication, with a few references to works by scholars in composition programs.
This rather narrow focus calls for an explanation. I am, as the title of this essay
indicates, primarily interested in analyzing what happens to our understanding of
rhetoric when it is placed in a contested interpretive relation to a cultural/material/dis-
cursive formation such as "science." It is not that I am uninterested in the enterprise
undertaken by some of my colleagues of illuminating "science" by recourse to
rhetoric, but my current reading strategy (whatever its strengths and weaknesses)
places me once removed from the discourse of science per se. I begin by thematizing
the ways in which rhetoric is deployed and positioned in RS literature.
What is the purpose of such a reading? A brief answer to this query is this: In
less than two decades rhetoric—a discipline that has been routinely pronounced
dead at regular intervals (as if to make sure it was really dead) since the middle of
the last century—has suddenly risen in prominence in scholarly discourse. A striking
and commonly noted feature of this renewed interdisciplinary interest in rhetoric
is the sheer promiscuity with which the term "rhetoric" is deployed. Such a promis-
cuous usage makes a traditionalist like Brian Vickers uncomfortable. In his recent
book, In Defense of Rhetoric, Vickers finds himself in an unenviable position of having
to defend rhetoric not only against its old enemies (Plato and the usual suspects)
but also against its new friends (de Man and the faceless horde of post-modernists).
Vickers believes that rhetoric, despite its historical mutability, has a recognizable
traditional core and that core must be kept in view in our contemporary uses and
extensions of rhetoric. While Vickers is not exactly an essentialist, he regards the
manner in which, say, Burke or de Man deploy rhetorical lexicon, especially the
lexicon of tropes, as having little in common with its traditional usage. Further, he
avers that such a radical departure from tradition is fatal to any genuine and lasting
recuperation of rhetoric. Thus, Vickers's response to today's promiscuous uses and
invocations of rhetoric is normative. He wants to bridle (mis)uses of rhetoric through
some sort of mediation of tradition (Vickers 1988). This view has a considerable
appeal among speech communication scholars such as Farrell and Leff. Unlike Vic-
kers, Farrell and Leff are genuinely receptive to the current interdisciplinary excite-
ment about rhetoric, but they do insist on recovering and rereading traditional texts
as a point of necessary resistance to the postmodern habit of treating rhetoric as if
it were a free-floating signifier. The strategy of vertical integration while admitting
a modicum of horizontal dispersal is fairly common. This strategy, however reason-
able, is also motivated by a deeply felt anxiety that promiscuous invocation of rhetoric
and exaggerated claims on its behalf will only succeed in trivializing rhetoric.11
My own response to and readings of promiscuous uses and invocations of rhetoric

is rather different. I am inclined to descriptively map the ways in which the term
rhetoric is deployed and try to ascertain what sort of hermeneutic burden it is made
carry. Instead of regarding promiscuity as an indication of a failure of scholarly
scruples or of a disregard for tradition or of a lack of commitment to rhetoric (all
of which it may very well be), I am inclined to view it as the very object of cultural
analysis. When the use of a term such as rhetoric becomes culturally so fervid, it
hardly makes sense to bemoan its illicit deployment. I begin instead with two assump-
tions: First, the practice of "invoking rhetoric" is a culturally significant phenomena
and that practice is symptomatically related to the crisis in the human sciences marked
by the demise of "foundationalism" in philosophy and of "high modernism" in art
and literature. Second, the seemingly careless and ubiquitous uses of rhetoric deflect
our attention from its strategic deployment. Sheer multiplicity of its usage that
stretches from the inane to the idiosyncratic makes an overwhelmed reader abandon
the hope of ever finding what motivates and steers rhetoric. It is precisely in this
state—fatigue combined with a traditional distaste for rhetoric—that one is prone
to overlook its strategic deployment in criticism and interpretation.
This being my proposed reading strategy, I believe it is appropriate to start with
that body of literature on science generated primarily by scholars in speech communi-
cation and in composition programs that consciously and explicitly employs a rhetor-
ical perspective. However, it will not be possible to keep my analysis securely confined
within the boundaries of that literature because RS as an intellectual enterprise
stands in an embattled relationship to two established traditions of scholarship:
rhetorical studies and "science studies." To a certain measure, my own analysis of
RS mimics that embattled situation. In the first part of the essay, I examined how
RS is positioned vis-a-vis certain trends and concerns within rhetorical studies, espe-
cially in rhetorical criticism. I approached RS (without really entering into it) from
the standpoint of rhetorical studies as a whole, and further, I projected certain
broader disciplinary anxieties, especially those pertaining to recognition, interpreta-
tion, and globalization, onto this emergent sub-field. But those anxieties function
differently within RS because its proponents are exposed to yet another and arguably
more immediate set of anxieties that stem from the position of RS as a "latecomer"
in the game of "science studies" dominated by historians, philosophers, and
sociologists. The two sets of anxieties in their complex interplay rise to the surface
as soon as one begins to specify the boundaries of RS.
The RS literature is not extensive. It is scattered and largely unreflexive. There
are no programmatic statements, nor detailed critical reviews of existing literature
in print.12 Therefore, I will begin by identifying what I regard as the salient features
of the RS literature in terms of its programmatic goals, primary audience, analytic
and critical methods, and preferred objects of study.
The general aim of the RS project is to show that the discursive practices of
science, both internal and external, contain an unavoidable rhetorical component.
Internal here refers to those discursive practices that are internal to a specific scientific
language community; external refers to the discursive practices of that scientific
language community in respect to its dealing with other scientific (or nonscientific)
communities and society in general. Although the slippage between the two is recog-
nized, the distinction is carefully maintained. If we arrange the existing RS literature
along an external/internal continuum, we will find the following thematic types of
rhetorical studies of science: how and with what effect science is made accessible to
the general public through popularization; how and with what effect science inter-
venes in deliberation and decision-making of public policy; how and why science
differentiates and dissociates itself from what it regards as non-science or pseudos-
cience; how and why and with what effect "findings" in one discipline are analogically
translated into "premises" of another discipline (generally from "a natural science
to a social science" as from biology to sociobiology, or from a "harder" science to a

"hard" science as from genetic biology to paleontology); and finally, how scientific
controversies involving theory choice or paradigm shift unfold and get resolved in
terms of norms, resources, and practices that are internal to a given scientific com-
munity. This list of types of studies is not exhaustive, but it does illustrate how
capacious is the range of RS. Further, a quick survey along such a continuum reveals
that in the recent years rhetorical analysis of science has moved decisively towards
the internal pole. This is predictable. The proponents of RS have long recognized
that an attempt to read science rhetorically encounters greater resistance as one
moves from the external to the internal. Further, they also believe that their collective
endeavor can become fully legitimate in the eyes of the "science studies" establishment
only when they have shown how rhetorical considerations are relevant and unavoid-
able in understanding discourse practices that are inscribed and framed strictly by
the internal constraints and dynamics of a specific scientific community. That is to

say: science is rhetorical all the way, or in Gross's vision to offer a rhetorical reading
of science "without remainder" (Gross, 1990, p. 33). In this regard, RS hopes to
secure for the "rhetorical in science" the same sort of recognition that SSK (the
sociology of scientific knowledge) has sought to secure for the "social in science."
However, the difference between RS and SSK are striking and instructive. Al-
though both started roughly at the same time in the 70s, SSK has developed into a
complex empirical research program that displays considerable internal variation in
theory and methodology, while RS remains little more than an uncoordinated re-
search initiative carried out by a handful of committed individuals. While SSK has
problematized right from the start the internal/external distinction to open up con-
ceptual space for innovative empirical research, RS tenaciously clings to that distinc-
tion, even as it increasingly slides towards the internal pole, because studies conducted
around the external pole, when viewed as critical explorations in public discourse,
are easily assimilable within rhetorical studies as currently constituted. Further, while
SSK and its allies (SSK-like approaches: laboratory studies, discourse analysis, the
ethnomethodological approach, reflexivity, actor network theory) have reached a
level of disciplinary consolidation that they have put into question the very category
of the "social" in science studies, RS has yet to turn its reflexive gaze back on to the
idea of the "rhetorical." Even in the study of scientific controversies, a topic eminently
suited for rhetorical analysis, the work of Harry Collins at the University of Bath
exceeds anything RS has to offer both in terms of conceptualization and empirical
work. These are disconcerting facts about RS. One could go on in this fashion
comparing RS unfavorably with SSK and generate sufficient ammunition to dismiss
the current state of scholarship in RS as inconsequential. But such dismissals miss
the point. The fact is RS, like so many other research projects based on a revived
interest in rhetoric, has stalled after a promising beginning. There are two possible
explanations as to why the RS project has stalled: first, it has misread science; second,
it has misappropriated (not in the normative sense) rhetoric. While I am not qualified
to pursue the first explanation, I am interested in entertaining the second for the
light it might shed on the predicament facing not only RS but every other proposed
contemporary extension of rhetoric into the zone of interdisciplinarity.
Two Types of Studies

RS literature is made up of two types of studies: the general essays and case
studies. Typically, a general essay explains what RS as a scholarly project signifies
by specifying the conditions of its possibility, by providing a rationale, by identifying
research programs and trajectories, and most important, by describing how it is
positioned in relation to the received traditions in science studies. A case study
typically takes some structured episode (say, a controversy) or some specifiable dimen-
sion (say, writing) of scientific practice and analyzes it from a rhetorical perspective.
The two types of studies are closely related. The general essays invariably conclude
by calling for more case studies insofar as only the latter can disclose through interpre-
tive redescription the presence of rhetoric in science. And yet the case studies them-
selves display a palpable anxiety about redescribing a given scientific practice or
artifact as an instances of rhetoric on a purely ad hoc basis lest such redescribing
turn into a Sisyphean task. Hence, one can always find that hesitant gesture towards
generalization, so very characteristic of case studies, about the inward connection
between science and rhetoric derived from a certain version of philosophical an-
thropology (the tedious stuff about homo symbolens) that makes rhetoric simultaneously
unavoidable and erasable.
A prototypical general essay discloses how the proponents of RS as latecomers
position themselves vis-a-vis the existing body of discourse on science which, meas-
ured by any contemporary standard of scholarship, is formidable. This positioning

involves, among other things, making certain choices about how to characterize and
understand science, both historically and in the present, as a mode of producing,
representing, and deploying knowledge claims about the natural world. At the most
general level, a putative rhetorical analyst must choose between competing "descrip-
tions" of science and such a choice involves an additional set of contested choices
(about the relation between theory and observation, the constitution of scientific
facts, the representation of scientific practice, etc.) In short, rhetorical analysts have
to position themselves in relation to the ongoing internal dynamics and debate within
science studies. This is what any latecomer to a new language game has to do and
the proponents of RS have done just that. They draw their theoretical inspiration
from the works of Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Toulmin and situate themselves within
the conceptual and interpretive space opened up by their pioneering work in the
history and philosophy of science. They recall and reiterate an ensemble of historical
episodes (the Galileo affair, Newton's Optics, Darwin's Origin, DNA, the Royal Society's
English prose) that allegedly testify to the unavoidably rhetorical character of scien-
tific enterprise. Further, they rehearse the social character of science by noting how
it is both interest-ridden and audience-bound at every conceivable level from training
neophyte scientists to writing grant proposals to preparing scientific papers for
journal review and publication to resolving scientific disputes and making theory
choices. This sort of positioning activity might vary from one essay to the next in
terms of focus and detail but the general orientation is rather routine and predictable.
What is interesting, however, is the common framing (prefigurative) strategy we
find in most of these general essays for showing how science and rhetoric are linked.
An analysis of this framing strategy gives valuable clues as to how the idea of rhetoric
is deployed in RS. Moreover, the three larger disciplinary concerns pertaining to
interpretation, globalization, and recognition discussed earlier become salient here.
This strategy takes the form of a narrative that goes something like this: Under
certain descriptions of science, and so long as those descriptions were dominant
(leaving aside the question "among whom?"), it was difficult to conceive of how science
could have anything to do with rhetoric. These descriptions (variously identified as
objectivism, foundationalism, and logical empiricism) were allegedly dominant in
science studies till the beginning 1960s and under those descriptions a research
project such as RS was unthinkable. Then came Kuhn and everything changed. A
new set of descriptions of science (variously identified as post-empiricist, Wel-
tanschauungen, and constructivist) became available and made it possible to articulate
a connection between rhetoric and science. Thus, RS in its very inception becomes
immediately implicated in a politics of recognition. The image is clearly one of
visibility: under one description rhetoric is invisible and under another it is "dimly"
visible. The interpretive problem arises from the fact that even under the new
description the visibility of rhetoric is not self-evident. One still has to recuperate it
through further redescription and such redescription is seen as the distinctive task
of RS.13
In RS literature one finds three basic recuperative strategies: communitarian,
epistemological, and inventional. The first strategy focuses on the communal charac-
ter of science and foregrounds the notion of rhetoric as "situated and addressed."
The second strategy focuses on the revised epistemic status of science in the post-
positivist framework and foregrounds the notion of rhetoric as "reason-giving" activ-
ity and more narrowly as "argument." The third strategy, analyzed in the next part,
focuses on the discursive dimension of knowledge production in science and fore-
grounds the notion of rhetoric as an inventional system for constructing socially
intelligible knowledge claims. In the following pages, I will analyze a series of general
essays and case studies to flush out more fully the idea of rhetoric deployed in each.
Although all three strategies are profiled in most of the essays, usually one of them
is privileged.
Communitarian Strategy
Philip C. Wander's "The Rhetoric of Science" (1976), one of the earliest general
essays, has a certain charm. It is devoid of that haunting, self-conscious positioning
that marks the discourse of "latecomers" to a new language game. According to
Wander, given the aura of infallibility surrounding science and "its place in the
deliberation of public policy," rhetorical critics have an obligation to review its influ-
ence and interventions in civic life. After a swift anecdotal review of how the technical
language of science is increasingly invoked to intimidate the laity and to elevate the
expert by disenfranchising the citizen's voice, Wander reiterates that "science or use
of science in public deliberation begs rhetorical investigation" (229). Wander here
operates with a traditional view of rhetoric: Anything that significantly impinges on
public deliberation is by definition susceptible to rhetorical analysis. It is the character
of the scene that marks a given activity as rhetorical. Next Wander turns to the
internal rhetoric: "The archetypal speaking situation for the scientist occurs in ad-
dressing an audience of fellow scientists, and the archetypal form of discourse is the
research report. This too may be examined rhetorically. A scientific research report
is not just a giving of information; it is a persuasive act as well" (230). After another
swift review of phenomena such as "peer group review," deliberate use of jargon,
and excessive use of statistics, Wander concludes that communication between scien-
tists is also amenable to rhetorical analysis.
Two points are worth noting: first, although there are traces of Burkean influence
in Wander's attention to linguistic mystifications, he does not significantly depart
from a functionally driven deliberative model of rhetoric one finds in Aristotle.
"Rhetoric is like a knife," writes Wander, "in the hands of a thief it can kill, in the
hands of a surgeon it can save" (233). Second, Wander does not have a distinctive
theory of science. While he does occasionally invoke a communitarian view of science,
Wander does not attempt to link rhetoric and science systematically by recourse to
that particular view of science. Wander's claim that the scientific "research report"
is a persuasive document addressed to a historically specific audience is based on a
mundane view of how scientists (like any other mortals) communicate rather than
fashioned out of a special theory of scientific knowledge production.
In Overington's (1977) essay, published a year later, one can notice a major shift
in the way the link between rhetoric and science is articulated. Overington wants to
extend "rhetorical analysis and criticism to the process of knowledge production in
science" (143). To justify such an extension, he begins by giving an account of
"science as a community" drawing on the works of Polayni, Ziman, and Kuhn. He
discusses topics such as the training of young scientists and how they are admitted
to an "invisible college," the "practical art-" like character of scientific investigation,
processes of consensus formation, the role of journal articles, the use of exemplars,
etc., to highlight the communitarian character of science. Once that description of
science is in place, for Overington, the link between rhetoric and science becomes
obvious. One has to simply translate that description of science into a corresponding
rhetorical terminology. The key move in this translation is to substitute "audience"
for "community," and lo and behold, the scientists becomes licensed speakers, re-
search situations turn into rhetorical situations, and research reports become persua-
sive arguments. Thus, Overington mechanically reads off a rhetorical view of science
from a communitarian view of science. When Overington, armed with this reading
strategy, attempts to analyze the scientific discourse of sociology as a case study, the
results are predictably dismal. What we get is a catalogue of rhetorical techniques
and a typology of arguments (derived from Perelman) that are routinely present in
sociological discourse. The only lesson one can extract out of Overington's essay is
this: scientific knowledge production is a communitarian audience-bound activity,

and hence amenable to a rhetorical analysis. This is simply neo-Aristotelianism in a
communitarian garb. One does not find in Overington's essay an attempt to fashion
a rhetorical approach that takes into consideration the distinctive features of scientific
practice.
Epistemic strategy
The idea that science is distinctive, especially in its privileged epistemic status, is
precisely the target of Weimer's (1977) polemical essay, perhaps the most influential
philosophical brief for RS in the 70s. Weimer's rhetorical reconstruction of science
begins with a critique of what he calls the "justificationism" that has allegedly domi-
nated Western epistemology since the Greeks became fascinated with Euclidean systems
and equated scientific knowledge with mathematical derivation. Within the jus-
tificationist framework, according to Weimer: "knowledge has been identified with
proof and certainty: genuine or 'valid" knowledge became proven assertion. Knowledge,
proof, and truth became definitionally fused concepts: knowledge is truth which is
proven (assertion)" (2). With the subsequent emergence of logic as a formal system
of valid proof procedures, it became imperative to state any knowledge claim, includ-
ing those of science, in an appropriate logical form. And in due course, "(s)cience
became the epitome of logic and vice versa." Within such a framework rhetoric was
not only subordinated to logic, it was also completely removed from any connection
with scientific endeavor. Rhetoric dealt with doxa, logic and science with episteme.
However, according to Weimer, the justificationist framework is now in complete
disarray and the attempts by "neo-justificationists" to salvage it have also failed. So
Weimer sets out to reconceptualize logic, rhetoric, and scientific rationality within
an alternative framework called "nonjustificationism."
For Weimer, science is an explanatory endeavor. Drawing on the works of Karl
Buhler and Karl Popper, Weimer contends that "explanation is dependent upon
the argumentative function of language" (3) and "to explain a phenomenon is to
conjecture a tentative theory" (5).14 At this point, Weimer goes through the usual
routine a la Hanson about how there is no "natural" separation between observed
"facts" and explanatory "theories," how "pure description fails to provide a sufficient
specification of factual data," how the same "optical sensibilia" stimulated by a figure
(as in "Mexican on bicycle, or approaching missile?") is represented differently de-
pending on one's perceptual schema, how one cannot see a fact as such without
reference to a constitutive conceptual framework and so on. This routine leads to
the following conclusion: "Theories are arguments because they are conceptual
points of view that organize observations or 'data' into meaningful patterns. Theories
argue for a particular pattern or way of seeing reality. . . . Not only do scientific
theories represent phenomena... but insofar as they are explanatory they simultane-
ously argue for the correctness of their way of seeing the domain in question " (5,8).
Thus, having arrived at the conclusion that "theoretical explanation is . . . intrin-

sically argumentative," Weimer draws out two more specific implications. First, the
characteristic inferential form of a theoretical/explanatory science is the adjunctive
conditional characterized by "since-necessarily" as in "since my theory is true, the
world is necessarily this way." Second, the characteristic communicative form of such
a science is injunctive rather than descriptive: "Communication in science is primarily
a matter of commands: correct description will not be attained unless an injunction
is obeyed. Both scientific articles and research training given to novices enjoin their
audiences to behave in a certain way. In this regard science very literally is a 'cookbook'
endeavor. . . . 'Do this, and you will experience the world correctly!' (12).
Now the stage is set for a reconceptualization of "science as a rhetorical transac-
tion." And here is the key passage: "Since scientific discourse is inevitably adjunctive
at its theoretical base and injunctive in its specification, a theory of scientific discourse
must not be based upon traditional logic. To understand science as an ongoing

endeavor requires a theory of rhetoric of adjunctive argument and injunctive tuition.
What is required is a theory which explains the rhetorical nature of the various uses
of the argumentative mode of discourse, which is literally the essence of science "(13).
What is disappointing about this reconceptualization is that here, as in Overington,
once a new description of science is in place it is assumed that the link between
rhetoric and science is already made evident. However, this maneuver is carried out
differently in the two essays. While Overington's rhetorical view of science is simply
a mirror image of his communitarian view of science, Weimer simultaneously gen-
erates out of his "nonjustificationist" framework new descriptions of both science
and rhetoric. But the two descriptions turn out to be virtually inseparable. "Adjunctive
claiming" and "injunctive tuition" are rhetorical practices, pure and simple; one
need not recuperate them as instances of rhetoric. In place of the justificationist
equation of knowledge, proof, and truth, we now have a new equation of knowledge,
argument, and rhetoric. In a later essay, Weimer actually states that the claim—"all
knowledge is rhetorical"—is analytically implied in the "nonjustificationist" perspec-
tive (Weimer, 1983, p. 65, n. 6). That is, to view science from a nonjustificationist
framework is already to view it as a rhetoric. The fate of rhetoric turns on the
viability of a metatheoretical framework, a precarious opening for rhetoric given
the idiosyncratic character of Weimer's framework.
What is interesting about Weimer's view is the sharp break he effects between
rhetoric and any mode of arguing that is still caught up with proving or justifying.
Weimer charges that the contemporary proponents of rhetoric, despite their avowed
opposition to the positivist quest for certainty, are still committed to a diluted form
of justificationism. They distinguish between logic and rhetoric by distinguishing
between their respective modes of proof: the apodeictic and the probable. In
Weimer's view, rhetoric has little do with probabilistic assertions. Rhetoric operates
in the realm of contingency and so does science. The knowledge of contingent
disciplines can be articulated only in the form of warranted assertions open to
criticism and the rationality of such assertions cannot be secured by tests of consistency
(as Popper proposes). The exposure to criticism is the very condition of rationality
of warranted assertions. Weimer calls this approach "comprehensive critical
rationalism" that employs a concept of criticism that has "no fixed, a priori definition:
what constitutes criticism, or better, appropriate criticism, can be determined only
in the given case.... (C)riticism can never be justified but only defended by adducing
good reasons, which is to say, arguments in its favor" (17). From such a perspective,
theoretical/explanatory discourse in science turns out to be a set of warranted but
contingent arguments and its rationality rests in its openness to criticism. This discur-
sive mode in which scientific rationality is articulated is precisely the link between
rhetoric and science. But the link is mediated through an equation of rhetoric and
nonjustificationism: "In a nonjustificational framework that acknowledges the ar-
gumentative nature of theoretical explanation and understanding, logic and dialectic
are facets of rhetoric and have no independent existence apart from the rhetorical transaction.
Rhetoric has as its domain all aspects of the argumentative mode of discourse includ-
ing logic, dialectic, and the methodology of science " (84). Thus, rhetoric goes global
and science becomes sub specie rhetoricae.
The disenchantment with epistemically driven RS is evident in two essays pub-
lished by Melia (1984) and Bokeno (1987). In a brief but perceptive review essay,
Melia examines the fluctuations in the philosophical understanding of science and
how those fluctuations appear to alternately open and close the space for RS. In a
compact narrative, Melia explains how, starting from Hume's destabilization of
"cause" to Kuhn's now-familiar thesis about paradigm shifts, there has been a series
of assaults on the privileged epistemic status of science and how each new assault
has produced a recuperative countermove by philosophers. For example, Kant's a
priori categories of mind sought to "provide an alternative source tor the fundamental
intuitions of science" as an antidote to Hume's skepticism; Popper's "falsificationism"

sought to "tackle the problem of induction and to some degree refurbish the empirical
foundation of science" after the four key developments in the twentieth century—
"Gauss' non-Euclidean geometry, Maxwell's field theory, Planck's quantum theory,
and Einstein's relativity theory—had shaken the foundation of the Great Newtonian
synthesis" (304). From Melia's narrative, it is clear that at least for now the assaults
have significantly breached the fortifications and the epistemic case for RS rests
precisely in sustaining and widening that opening. After reviewing the erosion of
certainty in science, Melia concludes: "[I]f the proper concern of rhetoric is with the
merely probable, plausible, or contingent, then it seems plain that a great deal of
ground has been surrendered to what might with justice be called the 'rhetorical
point of view'" (304). In addition, Melia makes two basic points. First, (and this is
implicit in Melia's narrative), while certain crises in science and the philosophy of
science have opened a space for RS, rhetoric appears to have had no discernible
role in precipitating those crises. RS as an epistemic construct is largely an effect of
a crisis in the philosophy of science. Second, after favorably reviewing three books
by Kline, Munevar, and Weimer respectively, Melia notes that they have "established
the possibility, in the most fundamental sense, for a rhetoric of science. Along with
Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hanson, Polanyi, Bohm, et. al., they breach the once impene-
trable wall of hard science. Inside these walls lies terra incognita for rhetoric. And no
amount of debate about the work of philosophers of science, whatever its merit, will
secure scientific territory for rhetoric" (311). Thus, Melia expresses serious reserva-
tions about following the philosophers along the epistemic trail and concludes by
calling for case studies in RS.
R. Michael Bokeno (1987) mounts a forceful critique of the epistemic strategy
in RS. He begins by showing how that strategy is grounded in the so-called Wel-
tanschauungen philosophy of science (referred hereafter as WPS) as articulated in
the works of Kuhn, Hanson, and Feyerabend. Bokeno follows Suppe's characteriza-
tion of WPS as holding the view that "science is done from within a conceptual
perspective which . . . provides a way of thinking about a class of phenomena. . . .
Such a perspective is intimately tied to one's language which conceptually shapes
the way one examines the world" (289). Bokeno identifies the emphasis on theory
(how "theory-dependent" everything is, from the meaning of descriptive terms to
scientific observation itself and even the objective facts) as a key feature of WPS and
goes on to critique it from a neo-realist perspective. Bokeno's critique consists in
showing how WPS involves a radical form of "conceptual relativism" such that "it
cannot supply an acceptable account of the nature of scientific knowledge and the
progress of science" (297). WPS questions the basic assumption that "science deals
with a common world," and thus makes it impossible to formulate criteria "for
comparing the empirical adequacy of rival theories or competing knowledge claims
. . . " (297).
Having stated his general critique of WPS, Bokeno turn J to RS. Here his critique
may be divided into two parts: First, RS suffers from the same weakness as its source,
WPS. Recalling how the proponents of RS habitually invoke Kuhn's celebrated ref-
erence to "persuasion" in relation to "theory choice," Bokeno writes: "Kuhn's recourse
to persuasion as the means by which theories are changed and scientific knowledge
grows becomes largely infeasible on the basis of conceptual relativism. Persuasion
requires at minimum some common basis for mutual comprehension of opposed views,
but this commonality is precisely what conceptual relativism disavows" (298). I will
not critically pursue this line of Bokeno's critique that charges Kuhn (and by impli-
cation his followers in RS) with an apparent inconsistency for entertaining the pos-
sibility of persuasion while subscribing to the "incommensurability" thesis. An in-
formed evaluation of this critique would involve me in a detailed examination of
Kuhn and WPS which is well beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I will pursue
Bokeno's second line of critique, which although closely aligned to the first, can be
examined independently. Here Bokeno describes how RS, like WPS, by emphasizing
"theory" related issues generates a series of loose connections between facts, mean-
ings, theories, symbolic constructs, conceptual schemes, cognitive processes, persua-
sive languages etc., that makes rhetoric virtually indistinguishable from science: "The
claim that science is a rhetorical process, then, apparently ensues from the idea that
any process conducted via some conceptual scheme or framework is rhetorical, be-
cause language, meanings, and interpretations are inherent in that framework. In-
deed, within the current rhetorical understanding of science, "rhetoric" seems to be
conceptually inseparable from most if not all scientific processes, including observa-
tion, description, theoretical understanding, and theory change" (301). Further, such
"global identification of rhetoric with the inherently suasive nature of language and
influence provided by conceptual contexts" (301) does not shed any light on the
actual scientific practice.
Bokeno's critique is often sharp and compelling. Even if one were to reject
Bokeno's neorealist critique of WPS, there is considerable merit to the way he unpacks
the global pretensions of RS. What is disturbing about Bokeno's essay is not his
diagnosis but his remedy. Bokeno makes three recommendations on how to use the
term rhetoric. First, make the term rhetoric conceptually precise: "If one prerequisite
for a rhetorical view of science is more important than others, it is a communal,
unambiguous, and consistent use of the term "rhetoric" either in theoretical or
operational definition" (309). Second, restrain the scope of rhetoric: "If rhetorical
study is to contribute to a new understanding of science, then a conception of rhetoric
which is smaller than a conception of human conceptual activity is a minimum
theoretical requirement" (306). Third, Bokeno has a specific suggestion on how to
make rhetoric precise and to narrow its range—return to the classical model: "(A)
more traditional conception of rhetoric—intentional persuasion involving canons of
logical, ethical, and emotional proof—may remain the most useful theoretical and
methodological tool we have: perhaps rusty from disuse, but nevertheless sturdy
and proven worthy" (309).
In my view, Bokeno's first recommendation is unrealistic, the second unjustified
and the third retrograde. The normative recommendation to make rhetoric concep-
tually precise flies in the face of the history of the term. Rhetoric is preeminently a
cultural construct and what it means varies according to time and place. However
frustrated a traditionalist might feel about the promiscuous deployment of rhetoric
as an interpretive term, a program to bridle its uses is unlikely to succeed. At one
point Bokeno suggests that the need for conceptual precision is all the greater because
rhetoric now has a high interdisciplinary profile. But it is precisely the arrival of
rhetoric on the interdisciplinary scene that has made it radically promiscuous. The
"use value" of the term rhetoric is quite astounding. I will have more to say about
this vexing problem later when I discuss the phenomena of "co-articulation," that
is, how rhetoric is discursively linked to a variety of entities. For now it should suffice
to note that Bokeno's recommendation opts for an easy way out. Instead of mapping
what sort of hermeneutic burden rhetoric is made to carry in RS, Bokeno proposes
to collectively legislate how the term ought to be used.
Bokeno's second recommendation about narrowing the scope of rhetoric seems
reasonable, especially in light of his effective deconstruction of the global pretension
of the epistemic strategy. But that deconstruction does not foreclose other strategies
for realizing the hermeneutic aspirations of RS which remain global. As I have
indicated earlier, there is no way to effectively deglobalize rhetoric so long as it
remains within the interpretive orbit.
Bokeno's third recommendation, about reviving the classical model of intentional
persuasion, strikes me as a retrograde move. I do not see how such a model, deeply
implicated in the ideology of human agency, has the requisite interpretive resources
to illuminate contemporary science in all its material, cultural, and discursive man-
ifestations as RS aspires to do. Moreover, the idea of reviving the classical model is
a little confusing because it is already very much active in the case studies, and in
my view, adherence to that model is more frequendy a source of weakness than strength.
PART III
THE INVENTIONAL STRATEGY AND THE HUMANIST PARADIGM
In the remaining part of this paper, I will try to show how untenable Bokeno's
recommendations are by examining the critical practices of three key figures in
RS—John Campbell, Alan Gross, and Lawrence Prelli. I focus on Bokeno's recom-
mendations because they represent in a nutshell the traditionalist's admonitory
critique of RS. If one adds to Bokeno's threefold recommendations Melia's sensible
call to avoid philosophical debates about science and to get on with case studies, it
would seem that the basic ingredients for a "conservative" research program in RS
are now in place. I call such a program conservative because it not only conforms
to the pieties of the "humanist paradigm" that dominates rhetorical studies but also
defers negotiating the anxieties (identified earlier) occluded by those pieties.
The humanist paradigm is based on a reading of classical texts, especially those
of Aristotle and Cicero, and its governing feature is the positioning of the rhetor as
the generating center of discourse and its "constitutive" power. The rhetor is seen
(ideally) as the conscious and deliberating agent who "chooses" and in choosing
discloses the capacity for "prudence" and who "invents" discourse that displays an
ingenium and who all along observes the norms of timeliness (kairos), appropriateness
(to prepon), and decorum that testify to a mastery of sensus communis. Within such a
paradigm, while one does recognize the situational constraints, including the specific-
ity of the audience addressed, they are, in the last instance, so many items in the
rhetor's design. The agency of rhetoric is always reducible to the conscious and
strategic thinking of the rhetor. The dialectic between text and context, a topic of
considerable interest today, is already prefigured in the rhetor's desires and designs.
Such is the model of intentional persuasion, still dominant but under trial.
It is rather ironic that the unfeasibility of this research ideology is attested by
the work of Campbell, Gross, and Prelli because each of them in different ways
struggles to respond positively to Bokeno's recommendations; and, as I shall show,
their success as critics appears to be inversely related to their actual adherence to
those recommendations.
If anyone exemplifies the case studies approach in RS, it is surely Campbell.
Campbell has been working on and around the same text—Darwin's The Origin of
the Species—for nearly twenty-five years. His essays on The Origin provide a rare
opportunity to study the shifts and turns in critical practice in relation to a relatively
stable object. While Campbell has generally refrained from theorizing about the
presuppositions of RS, both Gross and Prelli operate out of a clearly delineated
theoretical and methodological framework in their recently published book-length
studies. Each book contains a general statement that establishes a link between
rhetoric and science and a series of case studies that explore that linkage. In my
judgment, the case studies by Campbell, Gross, and Prelli, though fascinating on their own,
neither endorse a revival of the classical model, nor authorize deglobalization, nor make a case
(even a practical case) for conceptual precision. On the contrary, they put into question the
humanist ideology that gives rise to such recommendations that are largely divorced from the
actual practice of criticism. My reading of case studies by Campbell, Gross, and Prelli
and the tensions I detect between the case studies and the theoretical formulations
that underwrite them are quite different from the way the authors themselves see
their work. I read the case studies, especially those of Campbell and Gross, against
the avowed interpretive strategies of the authors.
In the pages to follow, I will examine several of Campbell's essays to show how
he appears to have exhausted the possibilities of an agent-centered model of "inten-
tional persuasion" and is now moving towards a discourse-centered model of "inter-
textuality." And yet Campbell refuses to let go of an image of Darwin as the rhetorical
superstar who is always in command of the situation. In my reading of Gross' work
I will try to show how his proposed approach—an updated neo-Aristotelianism—has
little bearing on what he does as a practical critic. Gross succeeds as a critic largely
by ignoring the approach he recommends. Prelli is a hard case because he does
precisely what he says he is going to do and does it with a remarkable thoroughness.
Prelli fashions a method of "topical invention" for analyzing scientific discourse and
applies it to a series of case studies in a manner that admirably fulfills every one of
Bokeno's recommendations—conceptual precision, deglobalization, and the revival
of classical model. But Prelli's critical exegesis, forced to conform to a preconceived
method, gets caught in a relentless taxonomic redescription that yields results that
are mechanical and unexciting.
Campbell and the Model of Intentional Persuasion

John Angus Campbell is preeminently a critic (Campbell 1970, 1974a, 19874b,
1975, 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c). Unlike Gross and Prelli, he is not
given to theorizing a particular version of RS. Having completed his dissertation in
the late 1960s under the supervision of that nemesis of neo-Aristotelianism, Edwin
Black, Campbell keeps a suitable distance from that discredited method for discerning
effects of ephemeral texts. At the same time, Campbell's early work is free of that
desperate search for an alternative critical framework characteristic of the 70s.
Campbell anchors himself securely in a critical object—Darwin's Origin—and begins
to study its constitutive emergence and intervention in a specific historical/cultural/
textual milieu. At one level, Campbell's approach is similar to that of intellectual
history as he carefully traces the interaction of ideas and the influence of prior texts
on later texts. Campbell's affinity with intellectual history is most evident in the
attentiveness with which he examines how ideas and texts are mediated by the cultural
grammar into which they are injected. What distinguishes Campbell's approach from
a typical exercise in intellectual history is his consistent use of rhetoric as the interpre-
tive instrument.
Two features of Campbell's critical practice stand out. First, Campbell's analysis
is relatively free of rhetorical terminology. Except in his most recent essays published
in 1989 and 1990, Campbell rarely uses it. This does not mean one would not find
references to the ubiquitous three modes of proof. Rather, while discussing Darwin's
textual self-fashioning or his positioning of audience or his preferred modes of
practical reasoning (as in the famous breeder analogy), Campbell generally avoids
invoking technical terms to mark the articulation of proofs. Second, Campbell's
analysis is unequivocally committed to an agent-centered model of intentional per-

suasion. The discursive objects (practices and texts) that Campbell elects to analyze
are invariably read from Darwin's point of view. These two features appear to be
related. In Campbell's recent essays, as the grip of the agent-centered model begins
to loosen and the focus shifts towards the intertextual dynamics, technical vocabulary
becomes increasingly prominent.
Campbell's earlier reticence to use rhetorical terminology is not atypical. Since
the collapse of neo-Aristotelianism, rhetorical critics have deployed technical terms
rather gingerly. Only recently it has become fashionable to linguistically thematize
discourse processes, such as the fielding of arguments (inventio), narrative strategies
(dispositio), and figuration (elocutio) in writing criticism and this fashion coincides
with a renewed interest in textual criticism. But even textual critics who favor using
rhetorical terminology tend to disavow its technical status. There is an ambivalence,
a reluctance to endow rhetorical terminology with distinctive interpretive resources

unavailable in ordinary language. (A tenacious refusal to go beyond the "show and
tell" approach that relies on the common intuitions about what Burke calls the
"psychology of form.") A rhetorical term is treated as if it were an abbreviation for
discourse processes that can be described, albeit inefficiently, in everyday language.
Thus, the interpretive power of rhetorical terminology, if it has any, is constantly
eroded by presenting it exclusively in descriptive terms. Deprived of an interpretive
function, rhetorical terminology tends towards a taxonomic pole, and becomes a
translation machine.
Even though Campbell seldom uses rhetorical terminology, his essays on Darwin
are unmistakably rhetorical. The indelible mark that makes Campbell's reading
rhetorical is his absolute and sustained commitment to an agent-centered model of
intentional persuasion. Here, once again, I believe Campbell's critical practice is not
atypical. Campbell's work shows (perhaps, on account of the relative stability of his
object of study) more dramatically than any other critic's work that within the
humanist paradigm rhetorical practice is in the last instance reducible to contents
of rhetor's consciousness. One can do away with the entire rhetorical lexicon and still
write criticism that bears a rhetorical signature so long as one reads a given discourse
practice (or text) as a manifestation of the rhetor's strategic consciousness. It mar-
ginalizes structures that govern human agency: language, unconscious, and capital.
Campbell's work illustrates how influential and seductive this model is and how
it holds the critical imagination captive. Campbell, indisputably one of the best critics
in the field, invariably reads the text as a manifestation of the author's conscious
design. In his recent essays, as he begins to map the evolution of Darwin's evolutionary
insight and its rhetorical transformations, Campbell is led to explore the intertextual
dynamics out of which the Origin emerged; and, here Campbell notices how textual
unconscious and practical rationality merge in a manner that defies authorial design
and yet he refuses to yield the image of Darwin as the master rhetorician who
unfailingly imposed his discursive will.
In Campbell's frame, Darwin stands over the Origin like a colossus. An account
of the extraordinary circumstances under which the Origin was composed is merely
a prelude to the great rhetorical saga. As Campbell tells it: "In the June of 1858
Darwin was in the second year of writing Natural Selection, a book on transmutation
he had been planning since 1837. On the sixth of that month Darwin was startled
to receive from the young naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace the sketch of a theory
virtually identical to his own. In the wake of the Wallace letter, Darwin put aside
his mammoth text, then two-thirds complete, and in nine months produced the work
on which his fame rests" (1987:70). Thus, Darwin's Origin was composed under
duress "at a time and in a form not of his choosing" (1989:217).
Not only was the Origin composed under duress, it was fated to appear before
an audience schooled in scientific and religious opinions inhospitable to the theory
it promulgated. Aside from its revolutionary scientific import, Darwin's theory was
culturally subversive. It called for a fundamental shift in the way the Victorian
England viewed the relationship between man, nature, and God. And yet within a
decade Darwin had prevailed (1986:351). Campbell sets himself the task, in essay
after essay, to given an account of the astonishing rapidity with which evolutionism
became scientifically accepted and culturally assimilated.
Campbell immediately discards one possible explanation; viz., that Darwin's
theory prevailed because it was demonstrably true and its evidential base was unas-
sailable. On the contrary, says Campbell, Darwin, who called The Origin "one long
argument," was acutely conscious of" gaps in his evidence and sought to neutralize
those gaps by practical reasoning that was closer to rhetoric than logic. "The Origin
relies upon analogy in particular and imagery in general to develop an argument
whose conclusions are not certain but, at best, probable" (1975:376-377). Aside from
the use of analogy and imagery, Campbell discusses in some detail other textual
features (always read as Darwin's conscious strategies) of the Origin that mitigate or
deflect the problem of evidential weakness. In this context, Campbell discusses how
Darwin constructs his authority to draw inferences from not altogether conclusive
data and how he navigates the readers through evidential streams as fellow inves-
tigators by shifting of pronouns from "I" to "We."
Campbell's preferred explanation focuses on Darwin's rhetorical labors, both
textual and extra-textual, that facilitated the rapid acceptance of evolutionism both
by the scientific community and the educated public. Campbell portrays Darwin as
engaged in three different types of rhetorical activities and roles. First, Campbell
examines Darwin's textual performance in the Origin in terms of how he negotiated,
subverted, and triumphed over the cultural grammar of his time. Second, Campbell
portrays Darwin as a man perfectly capable of living with a certain discrepancy
between his private beliefs and his public statements. Third, Campbell describes the
campaign of activities Darwin mounted before and after the publication of the Origi"
to manage the reception and interpretation of his theory. Campbell's analysis > -
Darwin's rhetorical activities under each of these three categories is perceptive,
detailed, and forcefully argued. It is also a model of "historical-critical" method that
survived both the collapse of neo-Aristotelianism and the pluralist hiatus that followed
(Gaonkar, 1990). What is central to this method, as exemplified in Campbell's Darwin
essays, is the reading strategy that connects certain textual features to its context of
constraints and resources through the agency of the author/speaker. Campbell's
work shows both the strength and limits of this model of intentional mediation
between text and context.
On Campbell's account, the cultural grammar into which the Origin was interjected
consisted of a complex interplay between science and religion. "To understand,"
writes Campbell, "the means by which Darwin's victory was won we must examine
Darwin's rhetorical inheritance, that tangled legacy of incompatible assumptions—of
scientific assumptions based partially on religion and of religious assumptions
bolstered partially by science . . . " (1970:2-3). Further, according to Campbell: "The
superordinate scientific field in Darwin's time, embodying the stereotypic and general
paradigm of scientific rationality per se, was 'natural theology,' and its rules were
contained in what was called 'Baconian science.' Specific fields had their own rules,
but they participated in the larger enterprise of'natural theology' and in the general
grammar of Baconian science, which related fields to one another and science to
the higher order of truths of natural theology" (1986:52). Campbell's interpretive
strategy is to connect these elements of cultural grammar to certain features of the
text by ascribing to Darwin a distinct type of agency: conscious, strategic, and inten-
tional. "My specific thesis," Campbell writes, "is that the key to Darwin's success—His
truly extraordinary feat of making the core of his revolution so widely and rapidly
intelligible, despite a variety of popular and technical disputes—was his skill in
exploiting the Baconian categories to show the intelligibility of a worldview everyone

thought the rules of the cultural grammar had excluded" (1986:352). In defending
this thesis, Campbell repeatedly identifies and analyzes four textual features.
First, Darwin's flyleaf contained citations from two (and sometimes three) prom-
inent works in the tradition of English natural theology. According to Campbell,
Darwin deliberately chose these citations to encourage the readers to view his theory
as compatible with the conventional religious view of nature as a product of divine
design.
Second, Darwin's account of natural selection as analogous to the domestic
breeder and the personification of nature it entailed was a conscious rhetorical
choice. "To a public," writes Campbell, "steeped in a theological tradition which
taught men to view the adaptations of the natural world as the artifact of a conscious
designer, Darwin presented natural selection under the metaphor of a conscious,
choice making intelligence" (1970: 13). To make his theory "socially intelligible"
Darwin was prepared to resort to those discursive conventions his audience under-
stood, even if that meant putting his key insight in a form that was (from today's
perspective) "scientifically unclear and even wildly inaccurate" (1975:381).
Third, Campbell dwells on the remarkable similarity between the linguistic prac-
tices of Darwin and William Paley, the epitome of natural theology. For instance,
Paley's description of the human windpipe and the gullet (while arguing that so
complex an organism could not have been created by blind chance but only by divine
contrivance) is stylistically similar to Darwin's description of the "beautiful co-adap-
tations . . . in the woodpecker and the mistletoe" characteristic of "every part of the
organic world" (1970:8-9). Campbell discusses at length how Darwin sought to in-
scribe the conventional terms of natural theology like "contrivance" with new evolutio-
nary meanings by what Kenneth Burke calls "casuistic stretching," the process of
"introduc(ing) new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to old principles"
(1986:361). In short, Darwin uses the language of natural theology to undermine it.
Fourth, the opening paragraph of the Origin gives an account of how Darwin
after years of careful observation and accumulation of facts came to formulate his
theory. The paragraph depicts Darwin as a passive observer not given to theoretical
speculation who is "struck" by "certain facts" and who follows those facts to gradually
arrive at his evolutionary insight. It is as if Darwin was following step by step the
inductive procedure laid out by the Baconian science. According to Campbell: "Vir-
tually every statement in this paragraph is socially correct and technically false"
(1986:361). On the basis of evidence culled out of Darwin's letters and notebooks,
Campbell has little difficulty showing that Darwin was theoretically inclined and "he
delighted in far-ranging speculations and saw himself as creating ideas..." (1987:73,
originally in Gruber, 1974). In a 1857 letter to Wallace, Darwin says: "I am a firm
believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation"
(1986:359). Campbell's explains the discrepancy between Darwin's private and public
statements as follows: "The discrepancy, I believe, is explained by the view that
Darwin was using a methodological convention important to his colleagues, though
irrelevant to his science, to give a traditional warrant to a controversial thesis and
hence make it persuasive" (1987:74-75). Campbell goes on to give an explicitly
intentional description: "(T)he testimony of Darwin's notebooks argues strongly that
Darwin thought long and hard, not only about nature, but about persuasion, and
that he went to great lengths. . . . The fact is, however, that frontal assault was not
Darwin's style, and thus a certain disingenuousness was necessary for Darwin to be
persuasive" (1987:75-76). Noting Darwin's natural tendency to exuberantly speculate
and theorize, Campbell says, "one is little short of awed by the massive restraint and
carefully premeditated adaptation of his public a r g u m e n t . . . " (1987:77).
Another striking instance of discrepancy pertains to Darwin's promotion of the
American botanist Asa Gray's pamphlet, "Natural Selection not inconsistent with
Natural Theology." In a letter of 1860, Darwin clearly rejects Gray's argument.

However, as Campbell notes: "Darwin's inability to accept the truth of Gray's argu-
ment did not prevent him from recognizing its usefulness. It was Darwin who pur-
chased Gray's untitled articles from The Atlantic Monthly, it was on Darwin's initiative
that Gray's articles came to be printed in pamphlet form, and it was Darwin who
suggested the theme for their title, paid for their printings, and had them distributed
free of charge to various scientific and religious leaders whom he felt might favorably
incline towards his views" (1975:384).15
The strategic deployment of Gray pamphlet is but one instance of Darwin's public
relations campaign on behalf of his theory. In an essay on what he calls Darwin's
"Third Party" strategy, Campbell sets out to disabuse the traditional "view of Darwin
as a rhetorical indigent, dependent on the charity of the persuasively gifted," such
as T.H. Huxley to conduct the public defense of his theory" (1989:55). Campbell
gives a vivid account of how Darwin, both before and after the publication of the
Origin, deployed his friends and colleagues—Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Lyell,
Asa Gray, and T. H. Huxley, ("Darwin's bulldog"), W. F. Bates, Fritz Muller, G. J.
Romanes, Thomas Davidson and John Scott—literally as "advance men" to manage
the reception and interpretation of his book. For instance, Campbell describes in
detail Darwin's near "obsession" to secure Lyell's public endorsement for his theory
and when at last he did secure that endorsement, how "slyly" Darwin misread/mis-
represented that endorsement to his own advantage.
In discussing Darwin's rhetorical activities, especially his textual performance in
mastering the prevailing cultural grammar, Campbell repeatedly pays tribute to
Darwin's "singular ability" to "synthesize" and to "subvert" the situational resources
and constraints. These tributes are an integral part of Campbell's explanation: the
rapid acceptance of evolutionary ideas was made possible by the agency of Darwin's
rhetoric. The language of explanation is unabashedly intentional. Specific textual
features, key phrases like "the struggle for existence" are shown to be results of
Darwin's strategic and intentional choice (1987:81). If rhetoric is an art of the "say-
able," then Campbell's Darwin was "a past master at saying the socially correct thing"
(86:360). There are moments when Campbell strays from a strictly intentional read-
ing (as when he is discussing the similarity between the linguistic practices of Paley
and Darwin) but they are rare. And sometimes when he is confronted with textual
data (i.e. the word "struck" and its variants occur 65 times in the first edition of the
Origin) that cannot be easily assimilated to a conscious design, Campbell speaks of
a buried intention: "While the frequency with which an author uses a term may be
beneath the threshold of his or her consciousness, its repetition provides an indication
of an author's underlying intention . . . " (1986, 361). On the whole, Campbell's
analysis assumes that Darwin knew exactly what he was doing and that his textual
practices were intentional and premeditated. The intentionalist reading is further
accentuated by the agonistic vocabulary used to characterize Darwin's achievement:
"battle," "win," "triumph," "herculean," etc. By reading the rhetoricity of the Origin
almost exclusively in terms of Darwin's conscious and strategic design, Campbell
foregrounds a "functionalist" view of rhetoric. His early essays illustrate in a paradig-
matic fashion Bryant's (1953) definition of rhetoric as a practical art of "adjusting
ideas to people and people to ideas."
The question is not whether Campbell, while examining the textual performance
in the Origin, is justified in ascribing agency to Darwin, but rather how should one
characterize that agency. Is it necessary, as Campbell does, to persistently position
Darwin as a conscious and deliberating agent to make sense of the performative
dialectic between the Origin and its alleged context? Does an attempt to read the
Origin under a strictly intentional description flatten out its textuality and defer
consideration of the intertextual matrix out of which it emerged? I will address these
questions not by an independent reading of the Origin, but rather by examining a
shift in Campbell's reading practices in two recent essays (1990a and 1990c).
The shift is evident on three counts: First, there is a general weakening of the
intentional model of persuasion. Instead of reading the Origin as an organic and
self-standing strategic performance, Campbell begins to read it "intertextually," es-
pecially in relation to Darwin's "transmutation notebooks." Second, while mapping
the textual movements Campbell repeatedly invokes a rhetorical lexicon. Third,
Campbell increasingly refers to rhetoric as "constitutive" rather than as "functional."
According to Campbell, the general idea of evolution—the present world of
plants and animals are the modified descendants of earlier plants and animals—was
not something original to Darwin. His own grandfather Erasmus was one among
the six earlier thinkers who had propounded different versions of evolutionary
theory. What made Darwin's version distinctive was his explanation of the mechan-
ism which drives evolution, namely, natural selection (1990a:209).16 According to
Campbell: "The basic insight that gave Darwin the core of what became the theory
of natural selection first occurred to him in late October 1838, a little over two years
after he had returned from his celebrated round-the-world voyage on the HMS
Beagle (from 1831 to 1836) . . ." (1990c:3). In the fourth chapter of the Origin, the
chapter Darwin once called "the keystone of my arch," he spelled out the concept
he had been working on for 20 years in a language that continues to puzzle the
modern reader.
In the two essays, Campbell meticulously tracks across those twenty years (and
more) the complicated itinerary of Darwin's insight and its rhetorical transformations.
Among other things, Campbell describes how that insight was articulated in relation
to the available biogeological data, some of which Darwin himself had collected
during the Beagle voyage. Campbell shows how Darwin read and misread the data
as his insight evolved. Further, Campbell describes how that insight was articulated
in a series of "preselectionist" and "early selectionist" theories Darwin entertained
and discarded before he finally settled on the version in the fourth chapter. Here
Campbell's narrative attempts to show how the "path" (or the "way") to the final
version led through a series of contradictory empirical findings, speculative theories,
and textual encounters and how Darwin's conceptual itinerary was always already inscribed
by rhetorical habits and considerations. While the earlier formulations were either con-
ceptually flawed or contradicted by the available data or rhetorically implausible,
only in the final version was Darwin able to find "the semantic space midway between
mechanism and miracle" that would ideally balance the competing claims of concep-
tual innovation and social intelligibility. Campbell's narrative takes the reader through
a dense intertextual space that traverses not only Darwin's evolutionary works before
the Origin but also his encounter with key texts of other thinkers, especially Lyell's
Principles of Geology.
There is a palpable difference between these two essays and Campbell's earlier
work and the difference pertains to the "difficulty" of reading. In the earlier essays,
the dialectic between text and context gets neatly mediated through the Darwin's
intentional design. However complex the cultural grammar into which the Origin
was interjected, so long as Darwin is positioned as the conscious and deliberating
seat of discourse Campbell's reading remains clear and crisp. But in the recent essays
Darwin is positioned differently. He is portrayed as someone struggling to articulate
a theory whose conceptual structure contradicted his own scientific beliefs and rhetor-
ical intuitions. This alters the equation between Darwin, Campbell and the reader.
When Darwin struggles Campbell struggles, and so does the reader. With Darwin
struggling, Campbell is no longer content to read in terms of a conscious design the
interplay of practical reasoning and figuration in the Origin and how that interplay
prefigures the cultural grammar of its time. At last, the Origin emerges from the
shadow of Darwin's colossal presence and is seen to have a life and logic of its own
that lures the reader into an intertextual space of notebooks, letters, and abandoned
works. It is precisely at this point one finds Campbell increasingly drawing on the
rhetorical lexicon—stasis, hypotyposis, anaphora, personification, presence, double
hierarchy, parallel case, etc.—to map the vagaries of the text. Such an intertextual
reading, the details of which defy paraphrase or quick illustration, is a messy affair
compared to an intentionalist reading.
Campbell tries to tidy up his reading by occasionally going back to the inten-
tionalist model. At various points, Darwin is portrayed as thinking hard about the
problem of persuasion and tributes are paid to his rhetorical genius. These sanitizing
moves tend to functionally split the insight from its articulation (or the context of
discovery from the context of justification) even though Campbell no longer enter-
tains such a distinction. For he writes: "We must be careful, however, not to press
too far the distinction between the form of Darwin's language and the substance of
his thought. The inventional dimension of Darwin's thought goes much deeper than
Darwin's conscious use of misleading diction. As we examine the genesis and early
development of Darwin's ideas, we find form and content, what Darwin wanted to
say, the social and linguistic resources available to him for saying it, and the audience
he wished to say it to are constitutive of his logic" (1990c: 15). As Campbell begins
to read Darwin's language and rhetoric as "constitutive" rather than as "strategic"
two interpretations of the Origin—intentional and intertextual—continue to vie for
allegiance. Campbell prefers to view the two interpretations as complementary: "Dar-
win's logic, starting with his reading of Lyell on the Beagle and continuing through
the Origin, was always situated in the midst of a living, ongoing, practical task, and
this made it at once inadvertent and intentional, opportunistic yet rational. Darwin's
reason was inadvertent—or dialectically ironic—in that both before and after the
conversion to evolution, and before and after his coining of "natural selection," he
frequendy thought he was proving one thing when his arguments ended by convinc-
ing him of something else. Darwin's logic was intentional, in that from the first, and
continuously throughout the various stages of his career, he was ambitious for scien-
tific success and readily seized every opportunity that the voyage, the heuristic re-
sources of Lyell, and the turns of his own thought and experience opened to better
make sense of nature" (1990c:22). But Campbell's readers may not abide by his
preference. As for me, after reading Campbell's recent essays, the balance has irret-
rievably shifted in favor of an intertextual reading. It is difficult imagine how an
intentionalist reading could do justice to the Origin as a text.
Gross and the Neo-Aristotelian RS

Unlike Campbell's exclusive devotion to Darwin, Gross' rhetorical readings in
science cover a wide range. His book—The Rhetoric of Science (1990)—contains a
collection of case studies, most of them previously published. The introductory essay
attempts to place the case studies within a general framework Gross identifies as an
updated neo-Aristotelian approach. Gross' neo-Aristotelianism is different from its
previous incarnation in "public address" studies in two ways. First, Gross is committed
to globalizing rhetoric. He wants to "entertain a possibility Aristotle could never
countenance: the possibility that claims of science are solely the products of persua-
sion" (3). Lest he be judged brash, Gross emphasizes the provisional character of
his analytic strategy: "Whether, after rhetorical analysis is completed, there will be
left in scientific texts any constraint not result of prior persuasion, any "natural"
constraints, remains for the moment an open question" (3). In the meantime, Gross
wants to proceed with rhetorical analysis "unabated." While Gross transgresses the
Aristotelian boundaries that confine rhetoric to the public sphere (and to the man-
ufacture of politico-juridical discourse), he insists on taking Aristotle's Rhetoric as his
master text. He accomplishes this maneuver by decontextualizing Aristotle's defi-
nition of rhetoric as the art of finding "in each case the existing means of persuasion."
For Gross, this definition which he regards as essentially sophistic in spirit authorizes
a global view of rhetoric. Further, Gross believes that once science is shown to be
susceptible to rhetorical analysis the Aristotelian limits will simply wither away.
Second, Gross is committed to "starring the text." Most of his case studies take
as their primary object of analysis discrete scientific texts such as Rheticus' Narratio
Prima, Darwin's Red Notebook, Newton's Opticks, Watson and Crick's The Double Helix
etc. Even when Gross is negotiating larger themes—analogy in science, taxonomic,
language, style in biological prose, the arrangement of scientific paper, peer review
process etc.—it is textual materials that invariably command his attention. For in-
stance, in analyzing "Style in Biological Prose," analysis centers on micro-features of
the texts, minutely examing what would seem to be the mundane mechanics of the
editorial process. By privileging the text, Gross significantly departs from the histori-
cist orientation of earlier neo-Aristotelianism that sought to dissolve the text within
its context of constraints and resources.
For Gross, RS takes "as its field of analysis the claims to knowledge that science
makes" (3). Gross establishes the general link between rhetoric and science by specify-
ing scientific knowledge as follows: "Scientific knowledge consists of the current

answers to three questions, answers that are the product of professional conversation:
What range of brute facts is worth investigating? How is this range to be investigated?
What do the results of these investigations mean? Whatever they are, the "brute
facts" themselves mean nothing; only statements have meaning, and of the truth of
statements we must be persuaded. These processes, by which problems are chosen
and results interpreted, are essentially rhetorical: only through persuasion are impor-
tance and meaning established" (4). With this general rationale for RS, Gross turns
to the practical task of applying a neo-Aristotelian rhetoric to scientific texts. The
key interpretive move involves a substituting "invention" for "discovery": "To dis-
cover is to find out what is already there. But discovery is not a description of what
scientists do. . . . Discovery is an honorific, not a descriptive term; it is used in a
manner at odds with the history of science—a history for most part, of mistaken
theories—and at odds with its current practice, a record, by and large, of error and
misdirection. The term invention on the other hand, captures the historically contin-
gent and radically uncertain character of all scientific claims, even the most successful.
If scientific theories are discoveries, their unfailing obsolescence is difficult to explain;
if these theories are rhetorical inventions, no explanation of their radical vulnerability
is necessary" (7). This substitutive move presupposes a broadly constructivist view
of scientific knowledge and representation. It also indicates Gross' theoretical affinity
with SSK and SSK-like approaches. However, Gross does not specify how the con-
structivist thesis links up with (or updates) neo-Aristotelian critical approach he
recommends.17 What follows is a general account of how rhetorical categories—stasis,
logos, ethos, pathos, arrangement, style—are applicable to scientific discourse and when
applied yield valuable insights. In the introductory essay, Gross gives a series of
short examples. For instance, he explains the difference between Aristotle's and
Newton's view of motion in terms of different staseis that motivated their inquiries.
In another illustration, Newton is shown to deploy the same common topics in his
Opticks that one finds in everyday discourse. As for ethos and pathos, Gross describes
how "all scientific papers . . . are embedded in a network of authority relationships"
and how "the disciplined exclusion of emotional appeal from scientific prose is itself
a rhetorical trope" (13-15). Further, Gross questions the view that in scientific reason-
ing "metaphor and analogy have only a heuristic function, that they wither to insig-
nificance as theories progress" by recalling the centrality of the "breeder analogy"
in Darwin's Origin.
But what do these examples signify? While Gross has little difficulty showing
that one could profitably apply rhetorical categories in analyzing scientific discourse,
one is left with a nagging suspicion that those categories are so capacious that it
would be impossible not to find them in any discourse that is "situated," and "addres-
sed." A rhetorical reading merits attention only insofar as it proffers a distinct and
"contestable" (if not "falsifiable) reading of a given scientific text.
This is precisely what Gross attempts to do in his extended case studies. Take
for instance, his essay on "Copernicus and Revolutionary Model Building." The
essay centers on a reading of Rheticus' Narratio Prima (1540), the first work on
Copernicanism, published three years before Copernicus' own De Revolutionibus. On
Gross' account, Narratio Prima revolves around a specific exigence: How to account
for one's allegiance to the Copernican system when it was less than compelling by its
own avowed standards of argument and evidence? "Until Brahe, Kepler, and Newton,
the heliocentric view fell short of its own highest goal: "to explain completely," as
Copernicus says in the Commentariolus, "the structure and motions of the Universe"
(105). According to Gross, in the intervening years the allegiance to Copernican
system was not, as Feyerabend suggests, a matter of "blind faith" sustained "fry
irrational means such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to
prejudices of all kinds" (97). Nor does Gross accept Bernard Cohen's view that
Copernicus' masterpiece "had no fundamental impact on astronomy until 1609,"

and the idea that its publication (1543) immediately revolutionized astronomy is no
more than "a fanciful invention of eighteenth-century historians of astronomy"
(107). While Gross concedes that the Copernican system was not immediately ac-
cepted, he finds Koestler's characterization of De Revolutionibus as "the book nobody
read" untenable. According to Gross: "This scarcely seems fair to a work that Rheticus
devoured, Brahe knew well, Kepler studied assiduously, and Maestlin annotated
over a period of fifty years. These men formed a network of influence. Maestlin
was Kepler's teacher, and Brahe his mentor. . . . To trace this network of influence
is to chronicle a progress that takes us from the birth of modern heliocentricity to
the threshold of its first significant intellectual flowering: Kepler's three laws of
planetary motion" (107-8). If Gross' reading simply identified this line of textual
influence hitherto overlooked by students of the Copernican revolution, it would be
an impressive contribution to historical understanding. But Gross makes no such
claim. On the contrary, he draws on the previous historical scholarship of Moesgaard
and Westman to identify that network of texts. What is distinctive about Gross'
reading is his characterization of that network as consisting of a rhetorical chain of
"rational conversions," of which Narratio Prima is the opening move.
Gross begins by noting that Narratio Prima is structured like a story and thus
diverges from a typical Renaissance astronomical treatise composed in an Euclidean
form. On Gross' account, Narratio Prima contains both a scientific case as well as a
rhetorical case for heliocentricity. The scientific case is rather straightforward. It
portrays the methods and arguments of Copernicanism as essentially conforming
to the prevailing conventions of astronomy that privileged a Euclidean form of reason-
ing, observational accuracy, and a general conformity with Aristotelian physics. How-
ever, the scientific case was incomplete by standards enunciated by Copernicus him-
self. To compensate for that gap, Rheticus places the scientific argument within a
rhetorical form. Gross' basic insight is that Narratio Prima enacts a drama of rational
conversion: It portrays Copernicus as a "great traditional astronomer, steeped in
Ptolemy," whose zeal for the accuracy of observations was second to none, who while
"walking in the footsteps of Ptolemy," was nevertheless driven reluctantly "in obedi-
ence to command given by the observations" to question geocentricity. Further, he
is portrayed as one who is neither rash nor smitten by "a lust for novelty" and fame:
"Even after he himself was entirely convinced of heliocentricity, we learn, Copernicus
was reluctant to publish his results lest others be upset. Only the repeated urging of
the Bishop of Kulm that there was no place for secrecy in science finally persuaded
the great astronomer to publish" his views (103). For Gross, this is a consummate
drama of rational conversion. Copernicanism may not have been a gapless system
but the process by which Copernicus, pursuing truth in a manner Aristotle would
have approved, arrives at heliocentricity appears to be rhetorically gapless. As Gross
perceptively notes, Narratio Prima enacts a double conversion: "In recounting Coper-
nicus' conversion to heliocentricism, Rheticus is also recounting his own" (103). Gross
finds traces of a similar drama in the works of Maestlin and Kepler and goes on to
argue that Rheticus provided the later Copernicans with a model of rational conver-
sion that bridged the gap between reason and will (109).
What is striking about Gross' engaging reading of Narratio Prima is that it is
devoid of rhetorical categories, Aristotelian or otherwise. Reading pivots on the idea
of "rational conversion." There is but a single reference to a technical formulation—
"argument field"—and it alludes to Stephen Toulmin's work on non-formal reason-
ing (Toulmin, 1958). Since many of Gross' other case studies are also free of rhetorical
terminology, one is left with same question that surfaced after an initial reading of
Campbell: what makes these case studies instances of rhetorical analysis?
In Gross' case, it is difficult to tease out the lineaments of a rhetorical signature
for two reasons: First, Gross is eclectic in the choice of his case studies. There is no
stable object (as in Campbell) against which his critical practice can be examined to
elicit a common strategy. Second, Gross is relatively promiscuous in drawing interpre-
tive constructs from various sources—speech act theory, Habermas' "ideal speech
situation," Victor Turner on "social drama," Propp on narrative, etc. Each case study
draws on a different set of conceptual material and Gross makes no attempt to
incorporate that material within the neo-Aristotelian approach he recommends. It
would not be an exaggeration to say that not even a single essay in Gross' book can be
regarded as a critical illustration of neo-Aristotelian approach. Gross' neo-Aris-
totelianism is a phantom; it does not exist. And his critical practice is unhampered
by its absence.
If neo-Aristotelianism gives no clue as to what makes Gross' readings unmistakably
rhetorical, one has to consider other possibilities. In my judgment, the rhetoricity
of Gross' readings is rooted in two basic strategies. First, on the negative plane Gross
tries to show how in a given case the textual representation of a scientific knowledge
claim derives its authority neither from an unassailable empirical base nor from a
gapless inferential sequence. Second, on a positive plane Gross tries to show how,
in fact, a given text constructs (or fails to construct) its authority to enunciate scientific
knowledge claims. This is precisely Gross' reading strategy in relation to Narratio
Prima. One can detect a similar strategy operating, though less explicitly, in several
other case studies. Since we cannot examine each case study individually, I will make
some general observations about Gross' critical practice.
First, Gross' case studies show that there is considerable variation as to how
different scientific texts, from Newton's Opticks to Watson and Crick's The Double
Helix, construct their authority. While unpacking that authority in its various textual
forms and disguises, Gross eclectically draws interpretive constructs from a variety
of sources. What is common to Gross' case studies is his constructivist stance (that
signals his affinity with SSK) rather than application of a specific interpretive lan-
guage such as neo-Aristotelianism. Second, Gross' readings gain in complexity and
credibility whenever he focuses primarily on unpacking the textual representation
of scientific knowledge claims. Inversely, the readings tend to be "thin" whenever
the rhetoricity of a scientific knowledge claim is made to rest on the latter's deficiency
in terms of logical form or empirical validation. Third, if there is weakness to Gross's
essays it is not because he does not use the rhetorical vocabulary, but because he does
not adequately "star" the text. For instance, in the "Copernicus" essay Gross does not
follow-up his careful reading of Narratio Prima with an equally attentive reading of
how rational conversion was replayed in the later texts in the rhetorical chain.
Prelli and the Model of Topical Invention

In his book—A Rhetoric of Science (1989)—Lawrence J. Prelli proposes to apply
the classical method of "topical invention" to the study of scientific discourse. Prelli's
book has two relatively symmetrical parts. In the first part, Prelli presents a general
theory of rhetoric and a specific method for analyzing discourse; and in the second
part, he applies that theory and that method to scientific discourse.
In the first part, drawing on concepts and insights from both classical and con-
temporary rhetorical theory, Prelli characterizes rhetoric in five distinct ways: rhetoric
is the suasory use of symbols (Burke); rhetoric is situated discourse (Bitzer); rhetoric
is addressed discourse (Burke); rhetoric is reasonable discourse (Perelman, Wallace,
Fisher, etc.); and, rhetoric is invented discourse (Aristotle and Cicero) (Bitzer, 1968;
Burke, 1969; Fisher, 1978; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969; Wallace, 1963).
For Prelli, these five characterizations are interrelated in a harmonious fashion.
However, I shall argue that this is not the case.
The first Burkean characterization of rhetoric as "the suasory use of symbols"
furnishes the global framework within which the remaining four characterizations
are given specific articulation. The three middle characterizations of rhetoric as

"situated," "addressed," and "reasonable" are unproblematic insofar as they represent
the taken-for-granted background assumptions in contemporary rhetorical studies.
Prelli, quite rightly, does not discuss them in detail because his views here are in
consonance with dominant disciplinary practices as he reiterates the agent-centered
intentional model. Moreover, the middle three characterizations have a distinctly
Aristotelian flavor of "rhetoric restrained."
Prelli devotes most of the first part of his book (three out of four chapters) to
elaborating the fifth and the final characterization of rhetoric as "invented discourse."
For Prelli, rhetoric is a practical art of the "sayable." It provides a heuristic for
constructing persuasive discourse: what one can say about x (with x generally con-
ceived as field-variant) in a given "situation" that would be regarded as "reasonable"
by the audience "addressed." To articulate such a heuristic, Prelli draws on the work
of classical rhetoricians, especially Aristotle and Cicero. Prelli devotes most of the
second part of the book, as in the first, to showing how scientific discourse may be
best understood as "invented discourse." Once again, he devotes three chapters—one
each to ends, issues (stasis), and lines of arguments (topoi)—to explain how the three
steps of topical invention are applicable to scientific discourse. In each chapter, that
claim to applicability is illustrated by a series of case studies on subjects as diverse
as gravity waves, parapsychology, teaching apes to talk, and the memory transfer in
planarian worms, the last being the most detailed. Finally, in Chapter 10, Prelli
deploys the method of topical invention in its entirety for analyzing two extended
case studies—the struggle over the scientific status of "creationism" and the an-
nouncement of the "double helix" (a double-helical structure for DNA) by Watson
and Crick in their historic Nature article.
In Prelli's version, the topical method is made up of three sequentially related
components: ends, issues, and arguments. In the production of discourse, first, one
identifies "appropriate rhetorical purposes"; second, one applies "a doctrine of stasis
to discover the legitimate points of dispute relevant to the rhetorical purposes"; and
third, one applies "a topical method of" generating arguments appropriate for resol-
ving the disputes discovered by the application of stasis" (Peters, 1992, p. 58).
Prelli's exposition of the method in the second part of the book turns into an
endlessly complex affair as he offers a threefold characterization of rhetorical ends,
a four-by-four5to« schema for analyzing issues, and a list of 22 possible and recurrent
lines of arguments (topoi). The stasis theory is pivotal as it provides the coordinating
structure for specifying ends, identifying issues, and generating arguments. Accord-
ing to Prelli, there are four general kinds of "stoppage"—evidential, interpretive, evalua-
tive, and methodological—found in scientific discourse. He calls them superior stases,
that is, "arguable points concerning the four grand functions of doing science: ad-
ducing evidence, interpreting constructs and information, evaluating the scientific
significance of matters discussed, and applying scientific methods" (146). Even when
the scientists agree on the relevant superior stases in a given case, the questions arise
"about how the problem should be formulated or about which specific issue needs
to be resolved to solve the problem" (147). These are questions about "the availability,
the meanings, and the usefulness of evidence, constructs, judgments, and proce-
dures" (146). These questions admit only a limited set of responses that are mediated
by what Prelli calls subordinate stases: conjectural, definitional, qualitative, and translative.
Thus, having set up a sixteen-fold stasis matrix for framing issues, Prelli proceeds
to identify twenty-two topoi for generating arguments that can engage the points of
disagreements in a manner acceptable to scientific communities. According to Prelli,
these topoi, subsumed under four functional groups—problem-solution, exemplary,
evaluative, and the topoi of scientific ethos—are characteristic of all scientific discourse
irrespective of specialty: "they are structures of acceptable reasoning used over and
over in scientific discussions. . . . These themes constitute a stable, ever-present
collection of discussable options that are, as it were, culturally "authorized" by all

scientific communities. Knowing what these options are is helpful to any scientist
deciding what to say and how to say it to his or her colleagues" (216).
While this intricate analytic machinery might seem baffling to a neophyte, its
governing assumptions are easy to identify: All rhetorical discourse aims to "per-
suade"; to persuade successfully one must have ends that are deemed "reasonable"
by the "situated audience" addressed; what qualifies as reasonable is what coheres
with the relevant "conventional norms" embraced by an such audience. Once the
rhetor's "ends" are coordinated with the "field-variant norms" of the audience, it
becomes possible to figure out what is "sayable." The stasis-based method of topical
invention, by further coordinating the issues with possible lines of arguments, pro-
vides a heuristic for figuring the "sayable."
Let me begin by enumerating the comparative merits of Prelli's project. First,
Prelli is conceptually precise as he carefully specifies what he means by rhetorical
analysis. Further, he has articulated a system of topical invention which is specifically
tailored for scientific discourse. Second, his case studies are carefully researched and
documented. Third, Prelli's three middle characterizations of rhetoric both contain
and expand the communitarian and the epistemological strategies discussed earlier.
While rhetoric as "addressed" and "situated" gives a more precise reading of the
communitarian strategy, rhetoric as "reasonable" gives a more concrete reading of
the epistemological strategy. Moreover, Prelli rearticulates the two strategies in a
distinctly rhetorical vocabulary and grounds them in the rhetorical tradition. These
are some of the basic strengths of Prelli's approach.
Now to the difficulties. I will begin with an immanent critique; that is, I will
evaluate Prelli's method in terms of his own claims and expectations as to what it
does and can do. According to Prelli, the topical method enables one to do three
things: to describe the dynamics of scientific discourse in a systematic and intelligible
fashion; to evaluate the efficacy and appropriateness of a given discourse choice by
the scientist; and to instruct scientists to communicate productively, especially when
they are embroiled in controversies, by exposing them to the practical logic of the
topical system.
It is clear that the discourse of science is amenable to topical analysis. In his
major case studies, Prelli shows how it is possible to redescribe the dynamics of a
scientific text in terms of a topical system. Take for instance, Prelli's reading of James
V. McConnelPs 1966 paper—"The Biochemistry of Memory"—a key text in the
planarian memory transfer controversy.18 Prelli's "stasis analysis" of this 12-page
paper is quite straightforward. He dissects McConnell's arguments, step by step, in
terms of how he identifies and addresses (or fails to identify and address) the central
points of dispute. The sixteen-fold stasis machinery is put to work in excruciating
detail. Prelli quotes extended passages from the paper (almost a third of it verbatim!)
and comments on them in the "show and tell" fashion. Here the question is no longer
whether a scientific paper such as McConnell's can be redescribed in the language

of stasis analysis, but whether it is useful to do so. To answer this question, one must
attend to two features of Prelli's reading: abstract generality (i.e., thinness) and
systematicity. Earlier, I argued that rhetoric as a language of criticism is so thin that
its applicability to any discourse is virtually guaranteed in advance. The same is true
of stasis analysis. Further, in Prelli's case, the "thinness" of the interpretive vocabulary
also gives the impression of circularity to the extent one finds his reading simply
translates a scientific paper from one idiom to another. This sort of circularity would
be tolerable if the translation brought to light hitherto occluded features of the text.
But Prelli's translations tend to be highly abstract and arcane without enhancing the
explanatory power. To take a typical example, after analyzing a long passage of
McConnell's prose, Prelli writes: "McConnell was claiming that some skeptics rejected
his data because they were too biased theoretically to accept his assessments of what
the data meant. In the language of stasis analysis, McConnell was asserting that it
was not logical to take conjectural stands against the reliability of evidence because
one does not accept definitional efforts to assess evidential meaning" (165). A trans-
lation of this sort is unlikely to convince an attentive reader of its usefulness.
While evaluating McConnell's response to his critics, Prelli introduces the notion
of "stasis management." It refers to the ways in which the rhetor identifies, frames,
sequences and addresses the interconnected points of dispute that block agreement.
It also refers to the ways in which the rhetor might avoid, marginalize, and if possible,
reconfigure certain disputed points that are deemed unfavorable given the situational
exigencies. All such discursive manuevers, Prelli believes, can be mapped with the
aid of his sixteen-fold stasis grid. After a careful descriptive mapping of McConnell's
argumentative moves, Prelli identifies the key points of "blockage" (mostly pertaining
to the superior stasis of evidence in its definitional and conjectural aspects) McConnell
could not address to the satisfaction of his critics and explains why that was so. To
a degree, Prelli also speculates on what McConnell might have done to be more
effective and concludes his analysis by specifying what the disputants need to do to
resolve their differences. On the whole, McConnell gets high marks for his stasis
management. While Prelli's evaluative comments are eminently sane and quite in-
sightful, one suspects that Prelli could have generated that commentary without
deploying the elaborate machinery of stasis analysis. To be sure, Prelli believes that
the stasis theory—both as a conceptual system and as a technical vocabulary—is the
generative center of his readings and insights. Yet one finds Prelli continuously
translating back and forth between a free critical reading using ordinary language
and a stasis analysis. One cannot easily determine which of the two parallel readings
is generative of the other, or at least, which one exceeds the other in explanatory
force.
What is more, the veneer of stasis vocabulary conceals the ideological presuppos-
itions of Prelli's critical practice. More than anything else, Prelli is interested in the
pragmatics of scientific communication. For him, the stasis analysis is valuable only
insofar as its aids the scientists (and their critics) to clear up "stoppages" and "bloc-
kages" that impede communication. What Prelli aspires to do is to inject a stasis-driven
"topical consciousness" into the discursive self-understanding of science. He believes
that a familiarity with the method of topical invention would greatly facilitate scientific
communication and thereby contribute to the advancement of learning. In fact,
Prelli accounts for McConnell's success as partly due to his instinctive grasp of the
topical method. Prelli also believes that had McConnell and his critics known the
topical method they would have been more successful in negotiating their differences.
The basic assumption here is that the scientist (as any other human being) is capable
of discursive "self-monitoring" and that capacity when exercised under the guidance
of topical method can facilitate communication. This is very much an Enlightenment
notion: Not only is "self-monitoring" regarded as a virtue, but also as consequential
in facilitating mutual understanding. This ideology of communication is blind to

what Habermas would call the "systemic distortions" of institutionalized forms of
social practice such as "science." Although Prelli constantly refers to "situations,"
"audiences," and "conventions" as constraining the discursive activity of the scientist,
those references do not bring into focus the sheer materiality of science as an institu-
tional practice. It is precisely when one begins to pay attention those institutional
aspects (made familiar by the SSK research tradition), that one grows skeptical about
Prelli's view of the scientists as self-monitoring rational actors who seek to advance
knowledge through mutual understanding. Even if one were to concede a la Rorty
that modern science as a "discursive community" is conducive to garnering a high
degree of self-reflexivity and mutual understanding, it remains to be shown how a
tuition in the topical method would significantly strengthen that communal disposi-
tion (Rorty, 1987).
Now I want to shift my critique to another level and examine three more general
features of Prelli's work: the promiscuous use of the term "rhetoric," the attempt to
ground the possibility of rhetoric in a certain version of "symbolic" anthropology
and an "overreading" of Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. These
three features are most explicit in the pivotal sixth chapter where Prelli attempts
forge a systematic conceptual link between rhetoric and science (but cf. Chapter 2).
While these features are found in a somewhat amplified form in Prelli's work, they
are characteristic of RS as a whole.
Prelli, who gives such a systematic method for analyzing scientific discourse, is
also one of the most promiscuous users of the word "rhetoric." Not content to give
a topical analysis in a vocabulary that is already dense, Prelli saturates his reading
with the word "rhetoric" and its two variants "rhetorical" and "rhetor."They seem
almost talismanic; it is as if Prelli wishes make his analysis rhetorical simply by
repeating those words again and again. The most obvious case is when he refers to
the scientist sometimes simply as the scientist, sometimes as the rhetor and some-
times as the scientific rhetor. There is no discernible logic as to why he uses one
characterization rather than another. In one sentence he will identify an agent, say
McConnell, as the "scientist" and in the very next sentence he will refer to him as
the "scientific rhetor." In fact, one could delete these three words more than 80
percent of the time without doing violence to Prelli's meaning. Here is an example
of Prelli's practice: "(T)he reasonableness of a rhetor's rhetoric about science can be
diminished or enhanced through attacks or encomiums concerning a rhetor's 'scien-
tific' qualities of thought or conduct" (142-3). In a sentence of this sort, the specificity
of rhetoric is so attenuated that it becomes no more than a pleonastic qualifier.
This pleonastic usage is linked to Prelli's attempt to ground rhetoric in Burke's
theory of symbolic action. "Following Burke," writes Prelli, "I take rhetoric to be the
suasory use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperative acts and attitudes
in symbolizing beings" (13-14). Prelli goes on to rehearse the now familiar thesis as
to how, for the animal symbolicus, "reality is nothing other than that which is mediated
through . . . symbol systems," how it "cannot think without symbols," and how "it
names its experience, and through this symbolic act it creates, to a great extent, what
it takes to be its world" and so on (15). The stage is thus set for the globalization of
rhetoric as "symbolic inducement": "Rhetorical acts present allegations about what
is; they symbolically advance contentions about how we should name, pattern, or
define experiences and thereby make those experiences meaningful" (14). A rough
equivalence between rhetoric, language, thought, and reality emerges, and at that
point rhetoric loses its specificity. Prelli, again following Burke, attempts to recuperate
a modicum of specificity by linking rhetoric with the concept of selection (its agent-
centered variant, choice)—but to no avail. Observe how Prelli connects rhetoric with
the ubiquitous human practice of selecting: "Rhetoric explains the selective functions
involved when we make, apply, judge symbols. A symbolic actor can only exercise
his or her capacity by selecting symbols through which to mediate experience and
render it meaningful. Furthermore, selection is necessarily persuasive in its conse-
quences. In choosing one term over others, one directs attention toward particular
meanings and relationships and excludes or minimizes those supplied by other terms.
. . . Seldom if ever is there only one way to "see" a phenomenon. . . . All users of
language are preachers insofar as their choices of words bring into view values,
meanings, and purposes they desire. By not choosing other verbal options, they
exclude alternative values, meanings, purposes" (16). Here the problem is the same
that one finds in Weimer. Symbol using, symbol selecting, and rhetoric are analytically
inseparable. If choosing among symbols is always rhetorical and if we are always
choosing among symbols, rhetoric is unavoidable, but alas, also unspecifiable.19
There are two sides to Prelli's project: On the one hand, he has fashioned a very
specific "topical method" that draws its inspiration from Cicero. Whatever my reser-
vations about its practical usefulness in resolving scientific controversies, it can be

deployed with considerable precision and systematicity in a descriptive analysis of
scientific discourse. It is still possible for Prelli to refine (by simplifying) his method
and selectively apply it to discursive formations that are responsive to such a method.
On the other hand, Prelli's attempts to theoretically ground the RS project in Burke's
philosophical anthropology leads to a globalization of rhetoric. While this move
brings "science" within the range of rhetoric, it also deprives rhetoric of any specific-
ity. This has an adverse effect on the method of topical invention which was not
meant to sustain the mission of a globalized rhetoric. Thus, Prelli's first and fifth
characterizations of rhetoric do not harmonize. Burke and Cicero do not make good
bedfellows, at least not in the folds of Prelli's treatise.
Finally, I turn to Prelli's reading of Kuhn's Structure. It occupies a central place
in Prelli's attempt to conceptually link rhetoric and science. Prelli begins by assuming
that Kuhn's account of "science" is relatively accurate, and then, tries to show how
that account is "implicitly" rhetorical. (But see Fuller, 1992, for the claim that Kuhn
is a "positivist by other means.") This particular move is quite common among the
proponents of RS. What is distinctive about Prelli's re-reading of The Structure is his
elaborate and slow-moving translation of Kuhn's text into the language of rhetoric.
Unlike Overington and Weimer, Prelli does not magically derive the possibility of
RS from a certain description of science. Nor does he simply cite, as so many prop-
onents of RS are content to do, the famous passages in which Kuhn stresses the
importance of "persuasion" and compares paradigm shifts in science to religious
conversions. Instead, Prelli unpacks Structure, step by step, as if he were probing
into the "rhetorical unconscious" of the text. But the yield is not startling. Prelli
simply translates Kuhn's key concept of "paradigm" as "selective symbolic orienta-
tion." Thus, Kuhn turns out have a view of scientific discourse that could be construed
as a form of "symbolic inducement," although his view of persuasion, Prelli declares,
is "conceptually underdeveloped" (87). Prelli's rereading of Kuhn is instructive, and
characteristic of RS as a whole. It shows that Kuhn's work is implicitly giving a
rhetorical account of science, but, alas, does not go far enough, and so a bona fide
rhetorician must come in to do his/her appointed duty.
CONCLUSION
Why is Prelli so laboriously trying to redescribe and extend Kuhn's insights into
the language of rhetoric? This question alerts one to two distinctive and problematic
features of the so-called rhetorical turn in contemporary thought: the distinction
between "explicit" and "implicit" rhetorical analysis, and the phenomenon of co-ar-
ticulation, where rhetoric cannot be articulated without a correlative concept, in this
case science.
Explicit/Implicit Rhetorical Analysis

Explicit analysis is the one in which the analyst consciously employs rhetoric as
an interpretive metadiscourse; this is what the proponents of RS themselves do.
Implicit analysis occurs when the analyst neither understands nor describes what
she is doing as a form of rhetorical analysis, but it would be recognized as such by
someone familiar with rhetoric. An analysis of a given scientific practice/discourse
may be viewed as implicitly rhetorical, if that analysis marks certain features—ar-
gumentation, figurative language, generic constraints, modes of constructing author-
ity, and addressivity—and if the force and intelligibility of that analysis is firmly
rooted in reading and foregrounding those markings. The difficulty with the idea
of implicit analysis is that the perpetrators don't realize (or acknowledge) that what
they are doing is rhetoric. They need someone else, usually a proponent of RS, to
redescribe what they are doing as rhetoric. The power of anointing certain analyses
as "implicitly rhetorical" through vigorous rereading rests exclusively with the prop-
onents of RS, a power of dubious value given the status asymmetry between the two
groups.20
The proponents of RS, whenever they canonize a text as "implicitly rhetorical,"
as they have done insistently with Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, claim
that they are drawing out rhetorical implications that never get adequately thematized
in the text itself. The occlusion of rhetoric in the text is partly explained as an effect
of the author's lack of familiarity with the rhetorical tradition and vocabulary.
Further, it is implied that an understanding of rhetoric would have contributed
significantly to the economy and effectiveness of the text in carrying out its mission.
But it is not uncommon to find those who are celebrated as masters of "implicit
rhetorical analysis" react indifferently, if not with hostility, to such interpretations
of their work. To best of my knowledge, none of those masters (and the list is
formidable: Kuhn, Feyerabend, Gadamer, Habermas; Toulmin is the possible excep-
tion) so far has either conceded that what they have been doing all along is a form
of rhetorical reading, or gone on to incorporate rhetorical vocabulary in their sub-
sequent work. Nevertheless, the proponents of RS continue to find more and more
evidence of implicit rhetorical analysis. To a certain extent, the site for discovering
examples of implicit rhetorical analysis has shifted from HPS to SSK. Instead of
Kuhn and Feyerabend, these days Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour, and Steve Woolgar
are treated as doing implicit rhetorical analysis.
The persistent tracking of "implicit rhetoric" is understandable at one level. It
is a way of making conceptual alliances, a perfectly natural thing for a latecomer to
do. Moreover, it enriches the conceptual resources of RS. But it has also another
serious consequence which is not sufficiently recognized. In short, the dialectic be-
tween implicit and explicit rhetoric makes the very idea of rhetoric undecidable.
One can always redescribe any text, both in terms of what it says and what it does,
in terms of its unconscious deployment of rhetorical categories. Thus, it turns out
that Kuhn's book is not, in itself, an exemplary instance of implicit rhetorical analysis
but its alleged rhetorical complicity is an effect of someone else's reading. Any critical text
can be shown to possess a level of reflexivity that makes it rhetorical. The lesson is
invariably that there is no exit from rhetoric.
Co-articulation
The phenomenon of "co-articulation" refers to the fact that one rarely speaks
of rhetoric in isolation, but always in relation to something: a person, practice, event,
text, or formation. The most common linguistic form of co-articulation is "the rhetoric
of X," as in the case of RS. In the last two decades instances of co-articulations in
this form have been multiplying at a dizzying rate. Here is a selected list drawn from
a restricted field of titles and sub-titles of scholarly books, book chapters and journal
articles arranged in the alphabetic order: assent, antitheory, doubtful authority,

economics, ethnographic holism, history, human sciences, image, inquiry, interpre-
tation, irony, motives, modernism, mourning, passivity, pedagogy, philosophy, rev-
olution, secularism, social history, social sciences, temporality, textuality and so on.
A traditionalist reacts to such a proliferation of "the rhetoric of X" with predictable
horror and laments how rhetoric is being trivialized. But there is something disin-
genuous about this lamentation. A traditionalist, when it is convenient, is as liable
to use "the rhetoric of X" as promiscuously as any brazen postmodernist. At issue
here is what class of items may be reasonably substituted for X. As a rule, a
traditionalist (relying on the authority of Aristotle) expresses reservations about
substituting "natural" as opposed to "cultural" entities. And even among cultural
entities, a traditionalist is likely grow progressively skeptical as a substituted item
becomes further and further removed from some palpable link to human agency
or from a readable discursive mediation.

Thus, the ideologically motivated, normative lamentations of traditionalists al-
together miss a serious issue. They remain entangled in the age-old divide between
nature and culture. Rhetoric is more or less irrelevant in discourse on nature, even
if nature turns out to be scripted like a book, and thus the traditionalists find the
very idea of RS implausible. (At least when it comes to talking about the constitution
of scientific knowledge itself.) This is mostly an a priori assumption based on the
authority of Aristotle and what they take to be the dictates of common sense.
What the traditionalists fail to notice (being preoccupied with the paradigmatic
pole of substitutability rather than with the syntagmatic pole of contiguity) is that
the proliferating co-articulations simultaneously create the effect of both globalization
(everywhere) and situatedness (here and now). Whether one arrives at the idea that
rhetoric is everywhere inductively (based on the ubiquitous presence of the term)
or deductively (as a derivation from a philosophical anthropology), makes little
difference. The sheer usage and repetition emanating out of a hermeneutic stance
is what creates the effect of globalization. Moreover, globalization severely undermines
rhetoric's self-representation as a situated practical art. This dialectic between globalization
and situatedness has been perceptively marked out by one politically attuned ob-
server, Bruce Robbins (1990): "There is already something paradoxical about taking
rhetoric, defined by its local, conjunctural situatedness, and thus universalizing to
cover 'everything.' But more innocuous expressions of the form 'the rhetoric of %'
also produce a multitude of indirect effects, options, agendas, principles, and values
whose diversity is deviously or sophistically camouflaged by the all-embracing label
'rhetoric' It is this deviousness in the ways 'rhetoric' is currently functioning in our
discourse, a deviousness which informs but also restricts various politicizing projects
of interdisciplinarity, that I call 'the rhetoric of rhetoric.'"
Before we can decide whether the all-embracing label "rhetoric" camouflages
the "diversity" of entities in which it is presumably embedded, we have to figure out
just what is going on. These co-articulations create the illusion of unidirectionality:
rhetoric as an apparatus operating on or embedded in something, but always the
same regardless of the embedding entity. This is one sense of the promiscuous, both
universal and empty, and is what the traditionalist objects to. The other way of
reading its promiscuous ubiquity is as what Althusser calls "overdetermination." It
bears so much interpretive or strategic weight that it is literally flattened in its
appearance. It is a dead metaphor, Derrida's "white mythology." Only a disciplined
reading and probing can unpack the layers and layers of sedimented semantic struc-
ture, a venture whose value becomes more dubious as the sediments accumulate.
Placebo
Let me see if I can clarify the situation by using an analogy of ancient lineage.
Since the time of Gorgias rhetoric has been compared to a psychoactive drug. In
the contemporary usage, it is not clear whether rhetoric is actually a drug, some sort
of a (in current pharmacological jargon) "delivery system" for a drug, or a substitute

for a drug. As a delivery system, rhetoric has at least two distinct forms: a nondescript
mixer (such as water) that dilutes the potency of an alcoholic beverage, or a sweetener
(such as sugar syrup) which camouflages the bitterness of a medicine. The difference
is critical. In the case of a mixer no one confuses relative tastes of whisky or gin,
even though both are mixed with water. Rhetoric in this sense is an ubiquitous but
dull accompaniment, not something worth studying. At least one can learn fairly
quickly the right proportion of water/rhetoric to mix. But in the case of the sweetener,
there is room for ethical mischief and ideological distortion, since the underlying
flavors are obscured. But the third alternative is the most critical. When there is no
drug, no substance, rhetoric itself functions as a drug. More precisely, rhetoric becomes
a placebo in the absence of a drug. Rhetoric, seemingly the supplement, becomes
substantial.
What is centrally at stake in the RS literature (and perhaps in rhetorical criticism

in general, mutatis mutandis) is this: In the construction of scientific knowledge/prac-
tice/culture, does rhetoric ever function as the placebo? That is, does it ever threaten
to become part of the substance of science? No one doubts that rhetoric functions
as the mixer, sometimes as the sweetener, but can one argue that science is a simulac-
rum (in Baudrillard's sense), a rhetorical construction without reference? Without
some mediating reality, reference becomes a sort of placebo, a fiction created by
rhetoric. There are thus different forms in which rhetoric's supplementarity func-
tions: mixer (pedagogy), sweetener (critique), placebo (theory: power/persuasion or
tropology). The question is not really whether rhetoric is one or the other, but how
it functions in interpretive discourse.
Postscript
One might read this essay either as an interrogation of some of the governing
assumptions of contemporary rhetorical studies as exemplified in the "rhetoric of
science," or as an interpretive survey of that subfield. Those who elect to read the
essay as a survey should note two key omissions. First, I have not examined the work
of Charles Bazerman who, working out the disciplinary matrix of English Composi-
tion, has extensively examined the "writtenness" of scientific knowledge. Second, I
have not examined the growing body of case studies in RS. Among the case studies,
particularly notable is the collaborative work of Henry Howe (a biologist) and John
Lyne (a rhetorician) on the rhetoric of sociobiology.
NOTES
1
The core of this paper was initially written for a seminar on "The Rhetoric of Science: New directions
for the Nineties" organized by Alan Gross and John Lyne at the 1991 SCA Annual Convention. I am
indebted to Gross and Bill Keith (a participant in that seminar) for encouraging me to expand the paper,
innocent as they were of what "amplification" means to me, and to Keith Erickson, for devoting an issue
of SCJ to it. My debt to Bill Keith for arranging and editing this special issue around my essay is massive.
He has been a model editor: patient, encouraging, and always available to discuss substantive issues. I
am grateful to Campbell, Fuller, Gross, Leff and Prelli for taking time to read different and fragmented
versions of the paper while preparing their responses. In writing this paper I have had numerous
productive discussions with three of my colleagues—Daniel O'Keefe, Andrew Pickering, and Joseph
Wenzel. I am particularly indebted to O'Keefe for his help in "normalizing" my alien English. Finally,
this paper is offered as a token of affection to Trevor Melia—teacher, colleague and friend—who has
been promoting the idea of rhetoric of science for more than two decades at the University of Pittsburgh.
2
Literary critic Steven Mailloux (1989) has catchy phrase for this reading practice—"rhetorical her-
meneutics." But, alas, in our postmodern times a clever turn of phrase invariably turns into a method.
Unlike Nietzsche, we won't let aphoristic wisdom run its course.
3
For a "constitutive" as opposed to a "functionalist" reading of Aristotle, see Beiner (1983).
4
Until very recently the orator perfectus tradition has been virtually ignored. But recendy, a number
of scholars have turned their critical attention to that cluster of themes and concepts — eloquence,
prudence, decorum, sensus communis, ingenium, dicta acuta and dicta arguta, the ideal orator, to prepon,
kairos,judgment, etc.—that constitutes the vita activa tradition. For a representative text, see Mooney (1985).
5
See Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) and Burke (1950/1969). While Burke's own acknowledged
debt to Aristotle is well known, there is littlejustification to view Burke's rhetoric as basically Aristotelian.
6
Wichelns (1925). We must distinguish between the two components of the Aristotelian legacy: a view
of rhetoric as a practical/productive activity and containing rhetoric within the public sphere. The signifi-
cance of the former can be understood only by an understanding of Aristotle's elaborate classification
of arts and sciences. However, it is clear that the Aristotelian vocabulary in Rhetoric is that of a practical
productive art. As for the latter component, by locating rhetoric in the realm of the contingent and the
probable Aristotle did not strictly contain it within the public sphere. But in the course of his own practical
theorizing, Aristotle drew his material almost exclusively from that sphere. This choice was further
solidified by Cicero's decision to confine rhetoric to question dealing with hypothesis rather than thesis.
Thus, restraining and containing rhetoric within a certain sphere is a fundamentally practical decision,
but that practical decision has had theoretical effects in generating a certain kind of vocabulary.
7
At one point Marie Hochmuth Nichols (1963) asks: "What are historians doing that may well be
supplemented by the work of rhetoricians?"
8
I am not suggesting that the current critical vocabulary is drawn exclusively from classical rhetoric.
There have been some significant conceptual innovations and additions: Bitzer's "exigency," Black's
"second persona," McGee's "ideograph," Leffs "time and timing," Perelman's "presence" and Burke's
battery of terms headed by "identification." These are basically interpretive concepts that coexist uneasily
with the background "productionist" vocabulary of Aristotle.
9
I am not suggesting that our current critical vocabulary produces interpretations of texts and practices
which are not open to contestation/falsification. Frequently, what appears to be contestable about an
allegedly rhetorical reading of a text is not the reading istself, but what the critic takes to be its effects:
claims about the "context," the author's "design," the ideological "content," etc. Questions as to how a
rhetorical reading produces its interpretive effects are generally elided.
10
Under such conditions, the "immediacy" of rhetoric is not phenomenologically given. For an opposite
reading, see: McGee (1982) and Maurice Natanson (1965).
11
When a group of speech communication scholars audaciously proposed that "all knowledge is rhetor-
ical," Farrell shot back with his own codicil: "All knowledge is rhetorical in direct proportion to how
trivial is one's initial conception of rhetoric." See Farrell (1990, p. 82).
12
One can find useful "literature reviews" in each of the two recent Ph. D. dissertations completed at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Taylor (1990), and Peters (1992).
13
Thus, RS minimally aspires to redescribe science as a form of rhetoric. While not claiming that
science is "mere rhetoric," RS insists on exploding the positivist myth that science is entirely free of
rhetoric. In a more positive vein, RS seek to show how rhetoric is an integral part of scientific practice.
14
However, Weimer distances himself from the Popperian view that after equating explanation with
argumentation goes on to equate both of them with deduction (as a syntactic system). The Popperians,
Weimer argues, while recognizing the pragmatic character of scientific explanation refuse to abandon
the logical form.
15
According to Campbell (1987:71): The general readers of the Origin (who were advised to consult
the pamphlet beginning with the 4th edition) had no way of knowing that Darwin himself did not believe
in Gray's arguments until 1867 when he publicly rejected in his Variation in Plants and Animals Under
Domestication. No mention of this refutation was made in the two subsequent editions of The Origin in
1869 and 1872.
16
T h e core of Darwin's theory of natural selection is stated in formal language by Stephen Jay Gould
(1977) as follows: "1. Organisms vary, and these variations are inherited (at least in part) by their offspring.
2. Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. 3. On the average, offspring that vary
most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variation
will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection (p. 11)." (Cited by Campbell, 1990C: 4).
Note Campbell's remarks about the difference between the formal language of Gould as opposed to
Darwin's original ordinary language formulation.
17
Therefore, it is not necessary here to examine and critique Gross' constructivism in evaluating his
critical performance. For detailed discussion on this topic, see Gross' exchange with McGuire and Melia:
McGuire and Melia (1989), Gross' reply in Gross (1991) and their rejoinder in McGuire and Melia (1991).
18
McConneIl claimed that memory is a chemical phenomena that can be physically transmitted. To
prove that hypothesis, McConnell and his colleagues conducted a series of controversial experiments on
cannibalistic planarian worms. In one rather gruesome experiment, they classically conditioned a group
of planarians to contract in the presence of light by administering electric shocks. Then, as McConnelFs
describes it in his 1966 paper: "(We) cut them in half, and fed them to hungry cannibals. We also chopped
up untrained planarians and fed them to another group of cannibals. Then a day or so later, all of the
cannibals were trained. We found that the cannibals that had eaten the trained worms were, from the
first trials, significandy more responsive to the conditioned stimulus (light) than were the cannibals that
had eaten control animals." For McConnell, this meant that memory of the performance task had been
transmitted physically from the trained planarians to the untrained ones through cannibalization. These
experimental results were questioned and fiercely attacked by fellow researchers. McConnell (1966)
answers his critics.
19
Prelli also attempts to delimit the concept of rhetoric by linking it with another Burkean concept—sym-
bolic "orientation." But here again, the linkage fails make rhetoric any more specifiable.
20
The relation between these two groups is itself an endlessly fascinating topic. The explicit rhetorician
of science usually belong to the low status disciplines (speech communication and composition) while the
implicit rhetoricians belong to the high status disciplines (history, philosophy, and sociology). Thus far
the referencing has been exclusively one-sided. Even here the marginality of rhetoric is made manifest
institutionally.

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This article was downloaded by: [Central Michigan University]

On: 05 November 2014, At: 05:35

Southern Communication Journal

The idea of rhetoric in the rhetoric of

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10417949309372909

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR is Assistant Professor of Speech Com-

A striking but insufficiently examined feature of the current revival of interest

progressively reduced in scope from an idealized medium of "general culture" to a

The Cultural Identity of Rhetoric:

is evident in our critical practices.

The Interpretive Turn and Rhetorical Criticism:

theoretical perspectives and critical procedures employed on an ad hoc basis could

mains unanswered as to whether this vocabulary of performance can be adequately

The Politics of Repression and Recognition:

unity. This perfectly plausible explanation is tacitly acknowledged in the institutional

My own response to and readings of promiscuous uses and invocations of rhetoric

to a social science" as from biology to sociobiology, or from a "harder" science to a

the internal constraints and dynamics of a specific scientific community. That is to

Two Types of Studies

ured by any contemporary standard of scholarship, is formidable. This positioning

this: scientific knowledge production is a communitarian audience-bound activity,

Thus, having arrived at the conclusion that "theoretical explanation is . . . intrin-

must not be based upon traditional logic. To understand science as an ongoing

intuitions of science" as an antidote to Hume's skepticism; Popper's "falsificationism"

Campbell and the Model of Intentional Persuasion

analysis is unequivocally committed to an agent-centered model of intentional per-

a reluctance to endow rhetorical terminology with distinctive interpretive resources

exploiting the Baconian categories to show the intelligibility of a worldview everyone

Natural Theology." In a letter of 1860, Darwin clearly rejects Gray's argument.

Gross and the Neo-Aristotelian RS

ing scientific knowledge as follows: "Scientific knowledge consists of the current

Copernicus' masterpiece "had no fundamental impact on astronomy until 1609,"

Prelli and the Model of Topical Invention

are given specific articulation. The three middle characterizations of rhetoric as

collection of discussable options that are, as it were, culturally "authorized" by all

whether a scientific paper such as McConnell's can be redescribed in the language

in facilitating mutual understanding. This ideology of communication is blind to

vations about its practical usefulness in resolving scientific controversies, it can be

Explicit/Implicit Rhetorical Analysis

articles arranged in the alphabetic order: assent, antitheory, doubtful authority,

or from a readable discursive mediation.

of a (in current pharmacological jargon) "delivery system" for a drug, or a substitute

What is centrally at stake in the RS literature (and perhaps in rhetorical criticism

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