In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 Introduction T he publication of The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in 1994 ignited a firestorm of controversy and, as one might expect, generated a tidal wave of reviews. Essentially, the book’s authors, after extensive study of decades worth of IQ data, concluded that intelligence is determined more by heredity than by environment; by extension, the authors then suggested that Americans of African descent were genetically less intelligent than Americans of European or Asian descent. The response to Herrnstein and Murray’s work was immediate and heated.1 Dismayed by what many perceived of as the latest instantiation of eugenics, not to mention a poorly executed study, a number of reviewers, especially those with science or social science backgrounds, castigated the work. For example, economists Goldberger and Manski maintain that Herrnstein and Murray, in Part 1 of their book, “offer only scattered anecdotes, hypothetical vignettes, and selective citations” (774), and the reviewers then conclude that “The Bell Curve is driven by advocacy for [Herrnstein and Murray’s] vision, not by serious empirical analysis” (775). Kamin, a psychologist, utterly dismisses Herrnstein and Murray, saying “The book has nothing to do with science ” (99). Finally, sociologist Patterson takes no prisoners: “The authors develop their argument in a scattershot way in which all positions and available data are indiscriminately thrown at the reader, including positions that flatly contradict their own” (191). Many reviewers with roots in the humanities critiqued The Bell Curve as well. However, a certain tentativeness pervaded a disturbing number of these critiques (Gould, “Curveball” 15). For example, in The New Republic , which devoted an entire issue to the Bell Curve controversy, senior editor Mickey Kaus equivocates, saying, “As a lay reader of The Bell Curve, I’m unable to judge fairly.” Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic’s literary editor, vacillates: “Murray . . . is hiding the hardness of his politics behind the hardness of his science. And his science, for all I know, is soft. . . . Or so I imagine. I am not a scientist. I know nothing about psychometrics.”  Introduction Finally, New York Times reviewer Peter Passell hedges: “But this reviewer is not a biologist, and will leave the argument to experts” (all quoted in Gould, “Curveball” 15). What is going on here? Why were reviewers—especially those who write for publications as influential as the New York Times or the New Republic—walking on eggshells when it came to critiquing The Bell Curve? Why drastically weaken critiques that were almost invariably right on target? One answer to these important questions is that many of the reviewers who wrote critiques of the book don’t know how to approach scientific discourse. The bewildering terminology, the hopelessly complex and mind-numbing statistics, the seemingly authoritarian, objective, and neutral tone—the whole package is just simply too overwhelming for many nonscientists. As noted Harvard paleontologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his take on the controversy: “The Bell Curve is even more disingenuous in its argument than in its obfuscation about race. The book is a rhetorical masterpiece of scientism, and it benefits from the particular kind of fear that numbers impose on nonprofessional commentators. It runs to eight hundred and forty-five pages, including more than a hundred pages of appendixes filled with figures. So the text looks complicated, and reviewers shy away with a knee-jerk claim that, while they suspect fallacies of argument, they really cannot judge” (“Curveball” 15). Indeed. Surely the unwillingness or inability of these reviewers—and all those who consider themselves rhetoricians2 —to critique scientific discourse consistently and reliably hinders the ability of the vast majority of our population who do not have an academic or professional background in science to participate actively in our science- and technology-dependent democracy. Scientific rhetoric is among the most powerful of discourses. It is the way the world is represented (as Hess states in the epigraph above). Like any other powerful cultural institution, science must be watched carefully—and checked when necessary—in an effort to prevent abuses. As Rorty points out, “Much of the rhetoric of contemporary intellectual life takes for granted that the goal of scientific inquiry into man is to understand ‘underlying structures,’ or ‘culturally invariant factors,’ or ‘biologically determined patterns’” (22, emphasis added). Shouldn’t a postmodern rhetoric and composition call this goal and many other assumptions about science into question? Among the many responsibilities of rhetoric and composition should be a constant dedication to keep a close eye...

Share