Alan G. Gross

The roles of rhetoric in the public understanding of science

In the public understanding of science, rhetoric has two distinct roles: it is both a theory capable of analysing public understanding and an activity capable of creating it. In its analytical role, rhetoric reveals two dominant models of public understanding: the deficit model and the contextual model. In the deficit model, rhetoric acts in the minor role of creating public understanding by accommodating the facts and methods of science to public needs and limitations. In the contextual model, rhetoric and rhetorical analysis play major roles. Rhetorical analysis provides an independent source of evidence to secure social scientific claims; in addition, it supplies the grounds for a rhetoric of reconstruction, one that reconstitutes the fact and facts of science in the public interest.

On the shoulders of giants: Seventeenth‐century optics as an argument field

In the seventeenth century, Descartes founded, and Newton revolutionized, modern optics. This story, often told by historians and philosophers of science, can be profitably reconceived in terms of rhetoric. Conceived this way, analyzed this way, the history of optics becomes a‐succession of argument fields, scientific works are disclosed as sets of persuasive structures, and scientific revolutions are revealed as rhetorically constituted: successful efforts to persuade us that the present is seriously discontinuous with the past.

Presence as Argument in the Public Sphere

Abstract Chaim Perelmans concept of presence is extended and enriched by applying it to a historical museum exhibit that commemorated a watershed of Austrian history, the Anschluss of 1938. To understand the argumentative effect of presence in this exhibit, new rhetorical categories are deployed: foreground and background, space, and time. These are managed in the interest of an ideological position: to free the Austrian conscience and consciousness from the burden of memory created by the disproportionate participation of Austrians in the Holocaust. Finally, a basic problem with presence is addressed: its apparent incompatibility with any form of rational argumentation.

A theory of the rhetorical audience: Reflections on Chaim Perelman

Perelman has a complete and coherent theory of a rhetorical audience as a concept constructed by the speaker. This audience is of two kinds, universal and particular. Universal audiences consist of all rational beings; persuasive discourse addressed to these thematizes facts and truths. Particular audiences consist of one segment or another of humanity: Americans, Republicans, Elks, Medicare recipients; discourse addressed to them thematizes values. Discourse inpublic arenas is rarely addressed simply to particular audiences or to a universal audience; it rarely has its goal either adherence to facts and truths or adherence to values. Usually, public address represents a mixture of goals, and therefore of rhetorical audiences. Finally, the concept of audience with which speakers start differs from the concept with which speakers end the discourse. By means of the discourse, step by step, speakers bring their rhetorical audience to the desired adherence; at the same time, they hope that their discourse bri...

Toward a Theory of Verbal–Visual Interaction: The Example of Lavoisier

Because visuals play a significant communicative role in the majority of texts in the sciences, a theory of the role of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of meaning would seem a useful addition to the exegetical armamentarium. This paper offers such a theory, Dual Coding Theory (DCT), borrowed from cognitive psychology but adapted to exegesis. An analysis of Lavoisiers final geological memoir, an analysis grounded in this theory, is designed to illustrate DCTs utility. In my conclusion, I take note of the fact that in a wide variety of contemporary media meaning is also largely the product of verbal-visual interaction.

Hedging, Stance and Voice in Medical Research Articles

As a scientist employed by an industry, you would have a vested interest in the sale of its products. You might hope that consumers would benefit, but profit would be uppermost on your mind. If you were a researcher at a medical center, you might hope to profit from what you discovered: to take out a patent on a medical device or a mutant bacterium. Nevertheless, you would need to impress on your fellow researchers that uppermost on your mind was not profit, but the advance of knowledge. To communicate this mandatory attitude toward your work — this stance — your prose would adopt a characteristic voice, a particular pattern of syntactic and lexical semantic choices. For example, Everett et al. (2010) present positive findings for rosuvastatin, a drug designed to lower cholesterol but tested to prevent stroke in their JUPITER trial. These authors’ claims, however, are mitigated by a serious limitation — a meta-analysis showed that their findings in favor of rosuvastatin for stroke prevention did not differ significantly from the use of other statins. Given these results, these authors exhibit the tentativeness of their findings while maintaining face with statements such as (1): (1) Given the net benefit of statin therapy observed in our updated meta-analysis, it is possible that any apparent differences between JUPITER and each of the prior trials may simply reflect the play of chance.

The Structure of PowerPoint Presentations: The Art of Grasping Things Whole

We examine PowerPoint from the point of view of Jean-luc Doumonts design guidelines: those for individual slides and those for whole presentations. By analyzing two presentations on the same topic, designed for two very different audiences, we show that it follows from these guidelines that in all cases, full comprehension requires clearly articulated overall organization that integrates the verbal and the visual into a single message. This means that the crucial unit of analysis is not the individual slide, but the extent to which the individual slide is integrated into the presentation as a whole. The principle by which this integration is achieved changes as the audience does: general audience presentations are best organized by means of narrative, while professional audience presentations are best organized by means of argument. In all cases, audience adaptation is the master variable, determining what counts as the optimal integration of the verbal and the visual into a single message.

The Challenger Disaster And The Revival Of Rhetoric In Organizational Life

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.

Public debates as failed social dramas: the recombinant DNA controversy.

This essay exemplifies the usefulness of Victor Turners concept of social drama in an analysis of the public debate over recombinant DNA research. The analysis encourages a consideration of the various debates about science and technology as possible reenactments of ideological conflict, reenactments which, to societys detriment, continually fail of satisfactory resolution.

Analogy and intersubjectivity: Political oratory, scholarly argument and scientific reports

The different ways in which analogy is used in political oratory, scholarly argument and scientific reports reflects distinctions in the kinds of intersubjective agreement sought and achieved by these three forms of discourse. Each form has a character and a “truth “ of its own. Nevertheless these “truths” are not all of equal status; they exist in a hierarchy of reliability, a hierarchy in which scientific truth is uppermost.