Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies (review)

During vespers, a few vagrants vandalized the cathedral by tainting an elegant fresco of simon-pure objectivity with the subtle stain of subjectivity. The fresco has been sullied, but the cathedral still remains. Or, the method is still rigorous, but the man isn’t. One must imagine the impishness it takes to intuit that “imagination is more important than knowledge” and to engage in endless epigrams about everything under the sun. In the age of specialization, only individuals answering to the name Hawking or distinguished Nobel Laureates who have scaled the rarefied pyramid of scientific expertise are granted the luxurious diction of eloquent generalities of a personal voice. The scientific worker usually confines herself to the self-contained logic of the laboratory and leaves aphorisms or other divertissements to les éminences grises. The calling is to lead cloistered lives of self-denial in the monastery devoted to pure science.

In recent years, science studies turned the searchlight on these vagrants (christened intuition, beauty, imagination, persuasion, society, personal ambition, the cult of personality, history, politics, and a host of other terms—usually considered nonscientific) and rediscovered their tempestuous role in the development of the sciences. The cross-pollination of philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, discourse studies, economics, and other subfields yields the umbrella term “science studies.” For the sake of simplicity, science studies can be described as the effort to analyze the subject—scientific inquiry in terms of its predicate—namely, everything else that converges in making the enterprise a success or failure. Of course, this hasty characterization does no justice to the diverse range of science studies.

Alan Gross’s Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies serves as an excellent preamble and insightful tome that provides a conceptual juxtaposition of rhetoric alongside its counterparts—philosophy, sociology, history, and kindred disciplines. The book is divided into four parts. First, Gross commences by making an eloquent rationale for the rhetorical analysis of science. Readers who are aware of his groundbreaking classic The Rhetoric of Science might observe a barely perceptible, delicate shift here. If the earlier work required that the author simultaneously lay the groundwork and offer a timely apologia for the role of rhetoric, the present work relays the arguments in a celebratory tone. Instead of reiterating the readily accepted view that science is impassable without rhetoric, Gross suggests that science is one of argumentation’s supreme achievements. In his words: “From the point of view of rhetoric, the truths of science are not beyond argument; rather, they are achievements of argument; science rests on facts and theories that have been argued into place” (43).

He supports this position by emphasizing the role of analogy in philosophical argument and scientific theorizing. Max Black and more recent philosophers of science have reaffirmed the importance of metaphors and analogies in the scientific enterprise without adequately acknowledging the source of these tropes—rhetoric. Gross makes rhetoricians proud by revealing a rhetorical dimension to one of the thorniest issues in the philosophy of science. Popper rejected Kuhn’s conception of “paradigm shifts” by comparing them with “mutually untranslatable languages.” In Gross’s words, “The translation analogy of Popper and Kuhn is as much a part of their argument as Roosevelt’s military analogy is part of his” (36).

The strength of this section is inconsequentially impacted by the author’s sortie into the philosophy of language and epistemology. Consider the following sentence: “To say that theories are undetermined by experience is merely to say science never can have enough evidence to demonstrate that a theory is true” (42). This would be true if the author inserted the modifier “completely” before the word “true.” Contingency or even the incompleteness inherent in correspondence theory (the bridge between sentences and the world) is scarcely a sound refutation of a realist epistemology, even a classical one. It simply means that we don’t have the full picture, and nothing more...