John Lyne

“Punctuated equilibria”: Rhetorical dynamics of a scientific controversy

A case study in the rhetoric of science, this essay follows the development of a controversy through a series of different audiences and interpretive frames. Originating as an attack on gradualistic assumptions in paleontology, the theory of “punctuated equilibria” was then posed as a broad challenge to evolutionary biology, prompting a range of responses within and without the scientific community. The essay highlights the problematic role of expertise as a scientific and rhetorical construction.

The rhetoric of expertise: E. O. Wilson and sociobiology

In contrast to the “structural account” of scientific expertise, which ties the experts discourse closely to disciplinary constraints, this essay develops a “rhetorical account,” showing how experts can move fluidly among disciplinary criteria and use paradigms more as strategies than constraints. Wilson, the exemplar here, projects his sociobiology into several discourse frames, each presuming a different audience, purpose, and persona for himself as expert. This shifting of frames has not only enabled Wilson to exert a great deal of influence on the social sciences and public discourse, it has also enabled him to elude disciplinary standards of evaluation.

Rhetoric and semiotic in C. S. Peirce

A philosopher and scientist of enormous scope, Charles Sanders Peirce created a semiotic framework to accommodate science, art, and practical persuasion. This essay outlines Peirces program of Speculative Rhetoric, understood as the means for “rendering signs effective,” and examines the philosophy of signification in which it is rooted.

Gene talk in sociobiology

Abstract Terminology within the biological sciences gets its import not just from semantic meaning, but also from the way it functions within the rhetorics of the various disciplinary practices. The ‘sociobiology’ of human behavior inherits three distinct rhetorics from the genetic disciplines. Sociobiologists use population genetic, biometrical genetic, and molecular genetic rhetorics, without acknowledging the conceptual and experimental constraints that are assumed by geneticists. The eclectic blending of these three rhetorics obscures important differences of context and meaning. Sociobiologists use foundational terms in genetics, such as ‘gene’, ‘fitness’, ‘evolution’, ‘heritability’, ‘trait’ and ‘polygenic inheritance’, in starkly different ways from geneticists, while basing their analysis of human behavior on the implied authority of genetics. As a free‐floating ‘gene talk’ moves across different disciplinary contexts, and before different audiences, it takes the form of an over‐simplified and mis...

Discourse, knowledge, and social process: Some changing equations

PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE. By Richard Rorty. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981; pp. 401.

Speech acts in a semiotic frame

6.95 paper. TOWARDS A TRANSFORMATION OF PHILOSOPHY. By Karl‐Otto Apel. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.

Rhetoric and everyday knowledge

30.00. CENTRAL PROBLEMS IN SOCIAL THEORY: ACTION, STRUCTURE AND CONTRADICTION IN SOCIAL ANALYSIS. By Anthony Giddens. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Social epistemology as a rhetoric of inquiry

9.95 paper.

A Dialogue on Market Innovation and Laissez Faire

The performance of speech acts requires interpretive conditions that are best conceived within a semiotic frame. Three variables within these interpretive conditions are considered: (1) the options permitted or suggested by the structure of the discourse, (2) the degree to which illocutionary force is made explicit, and (3) the definition of the situation. Each of these suggests promising lines of confluence for the speech‐acts perspective and the rhetorical tradition, both of which focus on the pragmatic uses of codes.

Not Every Two-Sidedness is a Dualism: A Response to Lessl

This essay attempts to locate within a philosophical analysis some of the conditions on which rhetoric becomes pertinent to ordinary knowledge. Taking knowledge to be justified true belief, the argument advances three kinds of audience relativity that might be a consequence of the justification condition.