The Scientific Community as Audience: Toward a Rhetorical Analysis of Science.

Abstract

It is time that students of rhetoric bend their skills to an analysis of scientific discourse and the creation of scientific knowledge. In the light of recent historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to the production of scientific knowledge, and even in some essays directed to rhetoricians, one (at least a sociologist such as I) can find solid reasons for extending rhetorical analysis and criticism to the process of knowledge production in science. After years of dalliance with the reconstructions of a variety of positivisms, hints ofthe social and historical are appearing in analyses of scientific practice. Of course, the whole tradition of the sociology of science assumes a communitarian practice as the context for the production of scientific knowledge.' Yet of more direct pertinence here is the growing importance of the work of Thomas Kuhn.^ the debate between Kuhn and the critical rationalists.' and the undervalued work of Michael Polanyi and John Ziman,' which points to the centrality of in understanding the creation of scientific knowledge. Ironically, the latter days of positivism's struggle to eradicate metaphysics and establish an objective standard of truth once and for all led // perilously close to using a notion of community as a criterion. The commitment of that tradition to the practice of natural science as a measure of success and the logical failure of successive reformulations of its criterion of meaning have led to a collapse into what looks suspiciously like a consensual theory of truth. In both Feigl' and Nagel's^ formulation of testability as a criterion of meaningfulness, it is a collective agreement of scientists which establishes that a statement is testable or has been tested satisfactorily. From a rhetorical point of view one might handle such a communitarian notion of science by the substitution of a conception of

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