The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science

David R. Gruber, Lynda C. Olman, David R. Gruber, Lynda C. Olman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351207812
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science provides a state-of-the-art volume on the language of scientific processes and communications. This book offers comprehensive coverage of socio-cultural approaches to science, as well as analysing new theoretical developments and incorporating discussions about future directions within the field. Featuring original contributions from an international range of renowned scholars, as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research, this handbook:

• identifies common objects of inquiry across the areas of rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication studies, science and technology studies, and public understanding of science
• covers the four key themes of power, pedagogy, public engagement, and materiality in relation to the study of scientific language and its development
• uses qualitative and quantitative approaches to demonstrate how humanities and social science scholars can go about studying science
• details the meaning and purpose of socio-cultural approaches to science, including the impact of new media technologies
• analyses the history of the field and how it positions itself in relation to other areas of study

Ushering the study of language and science toward a more interdisciplinary, diverse, communal and ecological future, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in this area.

Part I

History and development of language and science

1

Language and science from a rhetorical perspective

Leah Ceccarelli

‘Rhetoric is the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion’.¹ That definition, set out by Aristotle in ancient Greece, is the foundation for a field of study that would become one of the seven original subjects of the liberal arts. This essay introduces a branch of that field known as the ‘rhetoric of science’. As with most introductions, it will not dwell on the flaws and limitations of its subject (though they certainly exist), but will instead focus on the subject’s accomplishments and distinctive characteristics.

It is worth noting at the outset that the word ‘observing’ in Aristotle’s definition can have two meanings: to see (I observe the sunset) or to do (I observe the law). So ‘rhetoric’ can denote the inspection of the means of persuasion or the performance of the means of persuasion. That makes rhetoric both an academic field that analyzes suasion as well as the suasion itself that is being studied. For the purposes of this essay, when I refer to rhetoric, I will most often mean the former—what is known as rhetorica docens (a pedagogically oriented research tradition undertaken by the rhetorician, or scholar of rhetoric) rather than rhetorica utens (the practice of persuasive composition undertaken by the rhetor, or communicator). A moment’s reflection, however, will reveal that the two can never be fully separated. One studies the art of rhetoric in order to improve performance of rhetoric, and one’s performance of rhetoric improves through study of the art.

Rhetoric as a field of inquiry is typically housed in the humanities, that academic domain where the design of artifacts is subjected to critical analysis and the language of texts is dissected through close reading. Rhetoricians make up a thriving intellectual community, generating scholarship mostly in North American university departments of English (where writing studies/composition is housed) and communication (where instruction in speech and debate resides), as well as in a growing number of European universities. Although rhetorical scholarship traditionally has focused on spoken or written language, a good deal of it now also looks at visual images, the built environment, and other non-verbal forms. Given the importance of science to the current era, it should come as no surprise that scholarship on the rhetoric of science (RS) exists as a vibrant sub-disciplinary focus. Insofar as scientists use language to persuade others in their expert communities about their theories, discoveries, or inventions, and insofar as arguments about science by experts and non-experts alike have an impact on decision-making in public life, the rhetoric of science is a subject of considerable value. To cultivate a sense for what RS, as an area of research, can contribute to ongoing conversations about language and science in the academy, I will begin with a profile of the typical RS scholar, focusing on the characteristic sensibilities and objects of study taken up by someone doing this kind of intellectual work.² I will then review, ever so briefly, some exemplary RS scholarship to demonstrate the value of applying concepts from the historical tradition of rhetorical inquiry to that most modern of subjects, science.

The rhetoric of science scholar

The fact that RS is an area of study in the humanities is one thing that sets its practitioners apart from the mostly social scientific researchers who share with them the broadly overlapping interdisciplinary arenas known as science studies, science and technology studies, or science, technology, and society.³ Like other scholars in the humanities, those who engage in rhetorical inquiry seek understanding and appreciation of the output of human creativity, critically analyzing texts (and other persuasive materials) and rendering judgments about their quality. But unlike most other fields in the humanities, rhetorical inquiry focuses on the situated nature of communicative artifacts rather than on their enduring qualities. So a scholar of rhetoric is likely to scrutinize a text to understand how it is designed to meet the particular exigence into which it is inserted, rather than to reveal the universal truths it might convey. Rhetoricians focus on the fact that discourse is addressed, which means that it has a particular audience, a situation into which it is inserted, and a purpose it is being used to achieve. This emphasis on function is why rhetorical inquiry, although firmly situated in the humanities, shares with the social sciences a pragmatic interest in knowing why and how things unfold as they do. It also explains the ameliorative ambition of most rhetorical scholarship. Rhetoricians study texts of and about science not just to better appreciate or more fully understand them, but to critically analyze them in the interest of improving future communication of and about science.

Casting our gaze more closely on the rhetorician of science, we find a humanities scholar with an intellectual perspective generated from the particular terms of Aristotle’s ancient definition. ‘Persuasion’ is the thematic core of that definition, accepted as the focus of analytic attention for most rhetoricians. Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke’s treatment of language as a ‘terministic screen’ conveys the belief shared by almost all scholars of rhetoric that whether we are conscious of it or not, the words we choose when we speak or write ‘necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen’ or filter on our perceptions.⁴ By turning attention to ‘the necessarily suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures’, the rhetorician of science reveals that ‘even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality’.⁵ In other words, the RS scholar assumes that the language we use, whether we are aware of it or not, always seeks to persuade others to share our perspectives, embrace our values, and support our ends.

Aristotle’s statement that rhetoric observes the ‘available means’ of persuasion ‘in any given case’ reminds us of another important consequence of the field’s location in the humanities. The presumption that human beings make choices about language, whether or not those choices are made with conscious awareness, is a starting point for rhetorical analysis. Scholars of rhetoric recognize that users of language who seek to communicate with others choose from an assortment of inventional resources, or tools of rhetoric. Scrutinizing what is said or written on a given occasion carries with it an understanding that other things could have been said or written instead. The rhetorician of science examines the possibilities taken, against the backdrop of the means of persuasion known to be available but not taken, in order to better understand how that particular attempt at persuasion was designed, and in many cases, to pass judgment on it. Theories of rhetoric help the RS scholar to identify and evaluate the means of persuasion being used in each particular case.

While the rhetorician is always alert to the influences of culture, history, material constraints, and ideology on the decisions of rhetors, the humanist presumption guiding rhetorical inquiry is that decisions have been made by rhetors, and those decisions are worthy of scrutiny. Situated as he or she is in the humanities, the RS scholar attends to the choices of people, usually as recorded in the textual traces they leave behind. The means of persuasion selected by a rhetor in a particular case are always going to differ in some way from the selections made in other cases. The factors involved in making a persuasive case vary according to the audiences addressed and the situations faced, at a minimum. Rather than generalize from the quantitative study of persuasion in controlled settings, the humanities-dwelling rhetorician of science most often undertakes a close reading of a particular case in its context to develop a rich understanding of that case, as well as to uncover the influences upon it and to trace the effects that follow it.⁶

When focused so close to the ground of a given case, the rhetorician of science is more artist than scientist, building specific awareness of a particular rather than discovering a generalizable nugget of knowledge. That said, the RS scholar does not eschew the researcher’s ultimate goal of developing theory. Theory gestates in the mind of the trained RS scholar when rhetorical concepts are adapted and applied from one case to the next. This is what Aristotle meant when he called rhetoric a ‘faculty’. The ability to observe the available means of persuasion in any given case is developed over time, by scholars who have experienced the analysis of many other similar cases and applied, adjusted, and extended their understanding of the tools of rhetoric accordingly. Reading the research output of a rhetorician of science gives one a better understanding and appreciation of a particular case, as well as a better sense for the possibilities of persuasion that are available in other similar cases that might be encountered.

In the rest of this essay, I will introduce a few of those tools of rhetoric that RS scholars have observed in specific cases where they scrutinized language of and about science. This sampling from the literature highlights some findings on metaphor and other stylistic devices, as well as on strategic appeals to character that I have found particularly useful and that I think others who attend to language and science from other disciplinary communities will find interesting as well. It is by no means meant as an exhaustive review of RS as an area of research.

Metaphor

Rhetoricians cannot claim ownership of the concepts they use when doing research. Metaphor is a case in point; literary critics, sociolinguists, and philosophers could just as legitimately declare it to be within their provenance. But each discipline ...