Notes
notes Chapter 1 1. By naïve realism, I mean a commonsense view that the ultimate or essential constituents of the world can be explicated and that language provides direct access to that reality. for rhetorical examinations of philosophical realism, see Schiappa (1993, pp. 409– 412) and Gross (1990, pp. 193–207). 2.Beck’s book Risk Society:Towards a New Modernity describes the shift over the last 50 years from a modern society concerned with the production and distribution of wealth to a risk society with a reflexive and systematic concern for managing the risks produced by modern life.Beck argues that modern,industrial society undergoes a“reflexive modernization”that results in the disruption of the logic of wealth distribution because it is forced to compete with the logic of risk distribution. for him, science plays two roles in the risk society: first, science is the simultaneous cause and solution of various risks (e.g.,nuclear accidents like Chernobyl result from deploying knowledge of physics, while those same studies contribute to attempts at controlling and remediating the results of those accidents),and second,the authority of science becomes diffused throughout society, becoming available to a greater number of people and interest groups. It is the qualities of contemporary science described by Beck,especially the latter quality,that I draw upon in characterizing debates about stem cell research and the scientistic idiom. 3.By emphasizing that the“primary”framing is religion versus science,I foreground the public attitudes represented in surveys like those from 2007 and 2009 showing that one-third of Americans believe that human beings have not evolved and a majority believe that a divine power was involved in humanity’s creation (Keeter, Smith, & Masci, 2007; Pew Research Center, 2009). I am not making claims here about the conceptual underpinnings of intelligent design (ID),which has tried to shape religious beliefs about creationism into a scientific theory.The rhetorical contours of ID have been studied elsewhere (Campbell & Meyer, 2003). 4.While many discussions of science’s ideologies use the term “scientism,” Weaver’s discussion of scientific ideologies uses the term “scientistic” (Weaver, 1970). 5. All scientific discourse analyzed within this book was identified using a snowball method. I began with scientific review articles on stem cell research.Articles mentioned in the first layer—in more than one scientific review article—became part of the 156 / notes to Pages 17–21 “second layer,” and articles mentioned in two or more of the research articles became the “third layer” of the sample.This method found a core of 50 review and research articles that scientists cited presenting work at the nexus of the debate about embryonic and adult stem cells. Congressional testimony was accessed using LEXIS-nEXIS Congressional, using an advanced search of all hearings with the term “stem cell” appearing anywhere in the hearing.When PDf documents of hearings are available, page numbers for pertinent quotations are provided. Journalistic discourse came from two sources. first, thevanderbilt Television news Archive was used to identify 103 television news stories that addressed stem cell research. The sample from 1998 to 2002 included material from ABC, CBS, Cnn, and nBC, while the sample from 2004 onward also included foX news. Second, the newspaper articles examined came from a two-tiered sample.A two-tiered sample was used in order to gather discourse from the most prominent newspaper sources inAmerica as well as to gather a breadth of the discourse used across the United States.The first tier consists of high-impact papers, specifically The NewYorkTimes and USAToday. They represent the most prominent U.S. newspaper and the most popular U.S. newspaper.The second tier consists of low-impact papers, consisting of newspapers from various cities throughout the United States.Both samples were collected through LEXIS-nEXIS news search,and each tier consists of 100 news articles in order to maintain a manageable amount of discourse to be studied. Key terms were identified by using a basic text search, and a term was identified as key to the definition of stem cell if it appeared in four or more sources in a given body of discourse (i.e., if a term was found four times in scientific discourse, it was identified as part of the scientific definition; if a term was found four times in Congressional discourse ,it was identified as part of the political definition,etc.).Descriptive statistics were developed for each body of discourse, and rhetorical methods of analysis were used to identify...
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