Science: An Epitome of Democratic Politics

European Journal of English Studies, 2013

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In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the Case Studies and Issues and Methods volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.

Poroi, 2022

In this review essay, we look back at the evolution of the rhetoric of science by reviewing the Case Studies and Issues and Methods volumes edited by Randy Harris. We conclude by reflecting on the past, present, and future of the discipline.

IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2008

POROI 10 (2): Article 8, 2014

When Alan Gross published The Rhetoric of Science in 1990, he helped initiate a productive controversy concerning the place of rhetoric in science studies while arguing for the continued importance of the classical rhetorical tradition. However, in his 2006 revision, Starring the Text, Gross significantly draws back the classical emphasis while making more central the place of the American analytic philosophical tradition stemming from the foundational logical writings of W.V.O Quine. This essay interrogates this shift in Gross’s writings in order to find the working definition of rhetoric that threads throughout his work. This definition, I argue, turns out to be grounded more in Quine’s holistic theory of epistemology than in any sophistical or even Aristotelian conception of language as a vehicle for advocating judgment in times of deliberation and crisis. I argue that a return to the classical emphasis on situated practice can enrich the study of the rhetoric of science and build on the significant accomplishments of Gross’s work.

Essays in Philosophy, 2013

Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 2000

Welcome to the special issue on rhetoric of science in Canada, an issue that almost constitutes the field. This introduction, therefore, is brief. Beyond "there isn't very much;' it says two things about rhetoric of science in Canada: (1) there should be more; and (2) here are some examples we hope will form an important nexus for redressing (1). There isn't very much This heading might be better amended to "We couldn't find very much (despite assiduous searching);' because we suspect that in scattered Communication, English, French, History, Philosophy, and Sociology departments, and elsewhere, research is going on that fits this general category of scholarship. Given the direction of science studies over the last decade and a bit (of which, more anon), it is difficult to believe that Canadian scholars have remained insensible to the pull of rhetorical approaches. And, in fact, rumours surface occasionally of work on the antivivisectionist literature of Victorian England here, the role of analogy in scientific argumentation there. But whatever work there is in Canada has certainly not coalesced into anything like a movement, as it has in the U.S. especially, 1-and, eliminating speculation and rumour, there isn't very much. Canadians were, however, in on the ground floor. One of the earliest arguments that rhetoric might have something meaningful to say about science came from Michael Overington-then and now a professor of sociology at St. Mary's, in Halifax, N.S. That paper-"The Scientific Community as Audience" (1977a)-quickly became one of the citation classics of the field, and Overington has published a few other germane pieces (1977b, 1991). But, as he tells the story in the brief note we

Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective , 2021

Randy Allen Harris’s Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science successfully captures the interdisciplinary, innovative, and occasionally polemical aspects of an emerging field. Harris’s two-volume collection consists of thirty-five individual essays that span nearly seventy years. Each volume is organized by one of two superordinate themes, Case Studies (2018) and Issues and Methods (2020). Together, these volumes serve as an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the conversations, disputes, and queries of rhetoricians who dared to expand rhetoric’s purview into scientific domains, a shift that was not welcomed by all.

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

To what extent is the normative commitment of STS to the democratization of science a product of the democratic contexts where it is most often produced? STS scholars have historically offered a powerful critical lens through which to understand the social construction of science, and seminal contributions in this area have outlined ways in which citizens have improved both the conduct of science and its outcomes. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains that most STS scholarship has eschewed study of more problematic cases of public engagement of science in rich, supposedly mature Western democracies, as well as examination of science-making in poorer, sometimes non-democratic contexts. How might research on problematic cases and dissimilar political contexts traditionally neglected by STS scholars push the field forward in new ways? This paper responds to themes that came out of papers from two Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Panels on Science and Technology Studies in an Er...

My intention is not to get into specific, detailed historical observation about the ways that led the term 'democracy' to take on its current meaning, in science as much as in politics, but rather to establish a comparison between the models that political science proposes and interprets as important for the existence of democracy and those that science illustrates as indicators of scientific knowledge constructed in a democratic form. The debate about the contemporary meaning of democracy has generated an extraordinary diversification of models of democracy: from technocratic conceptions of government to conceptions of social life that include widespread political participation. And it is exactly for this reason that the assumption of a specific point of view on the question we are dealing with inevitably brings with it the choice of a model suitable to describe democratic form as a form of politics without further explanation, that is, as a political system with which science measures itself as a cultural category. In this sense, we can consider the passage from the concept of democracy to that of politics and generally of science to be a peaceful one, since politics has been appointed with that set of behaviours and democratic practices (including science) that political culture demands for the social benefit. This demand can be met only on condition that structural obstacles are removed and new cultural and epistemological mediators are introduced.