The Rhetoric of Science, and: Persuading Science: The Art of Scientific Rhetoric

“If there are no universal and precise methodological rules, how do scientists, during a theory-change, come to convince or convert their community to a new theory or way of seeing the world?” “We take rhetoric as the art of persuasive argumentation; we thus aim at debating its role, nature, limits as well as efficacy” (Pera and Shea, pp. 99, 173). With this question and proposition, selected historians and philosophers of science were invited to an international conference in Naples on science and rhetoric. Even as these scholars were presenting their papers in June 1990, Alan Gross’s book was being printed. These two volumes, one the result of a gathering of minds, the other the result of one person’s efforts over a period of time, can serve to signal the arrival of rhetorical studies of science as a distinct intellectual program, and together they provide an introduction to the issues, methods, and insights that rhetoric offers to the more general critical examination of science.

The two volumes are similar, not only in their basic agendas, but also in several other revealing ways. Both are essentially collections of essays—separate studies, separately conceived—rather than extended or integrated arguments. Both feature a few central figures in the history of science, who are now seen as definitively revolutionary: Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. Both make Aristotle the central figure in their theory of rhetoric: in Pera and Shea, Aristotle has more index citations than anyone else, and the editors see the work in the volume as a “return to Aristotle” (p. x); Gross calls Aristotle’s Rhetoric his “master theoretical text” (p. 3) but acknowledges that Aristotelian rhetoric can use some updating (p. 18). These similarities are perhaps a bit surprising from a disciplinary perspective. Alan Gross, a professor of English, has been studying and writing about scientific rhetoric for some ten years—while all the contributors to the other volume are historians and philosophers of science, most of whom have come only recently to an interest in rhetoric and at least one of whom (Richard S. Westfall) confesses himself an amateur: “I have never formally studied the discipline of rhetoric... when I speak of ‘rhetoric’ I employ a wholly intuitive, common sense understanding of the word” (p. 107).

Pera and Shea’s collection of ten previously unpublished essays is divided into two equal sections, the first group making the general case about the relevance of rhetoric to science and the second group providing more detailed study of specific cases, with a heavy emphasis on the seventeenth century. As a whole, the collection demonstrates the great advantage that historians can bring to the study of scientific rhetoric—that is, their rich and detailed knowledge of specific figures, texts, events, and their relationships. The essays in the first section, although they claim nothing that will be new to rhetoricians, may have an interesting persuasiveness for those who are not familiar with rhetorical approaches to science: they serve as unsolicited testimonials. Readers with some background in rhetoric will find the second group of essays by far the more informative and illuminating: Richard S. Westfall describes the differences between the audiences that Galileo and Newton addressed, suggesting that Galileo had to create an audience, which then existed for Newton; Shea shows that Descartes, who forswore rhetoric, cannot be understood without the aid of rhetoric; Peter Machamer characterizes seventeenth-century scientific rhetoric as person-centered, or perspectival, a quality that Newton’s achievements ended; Maurizio Mamiani shows that Newton used similar strategies in his attempts to create certainty in the Opticks, the Principia, and his interpretation of the Apocalypse; and Gerald Holton demonstrates that two papers in twentieth-century physics (by Bohr and Einstein) can be understood as dramas or conversations among several actors: the scientist playing out his...