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Chapter Two. The Frontier Metaphor in Public Speeches by American Scientists
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53 chapter two The Frontier Metaphor in Public Speeches by American Scientists x A t the beginning of the twentieth century in America, when the western frontier had disappeared because the citizenry had sufficiently spread out to fill the empty places on the nation’s maps, Americans came to believe that it was a pioneering spirit that most distinguished their national character. As the preceding chapter documented , the “frontier of science” was introduced by Frederick Jackson Turner and others as a promising new metaphor to meet the American citizen’s need for an unlimited space in which to employ that characteristic spirit. As this chapter demonstrates, at the beginning of the twenty-first century American scientists continue to be presented in the public imaginary as pioneers and explorers who preserve the American way by venturing into challenging new territory to open it for profitable development. Today, appeals for government funding of basic scientific 54 Chapter Two research are still grounded on the assumption that technological applications will inevitably follow the discoveries of scientists engaged in pioneering basic research, just as the discoveries of risk-takers traversing the geographic frontier resulted in resource flow out of the new territories. An attitude of individualism and a disposition that delights in competitive struggle for personal, corporate, and national advantage continue to flourish as entailments of this frontier metaphor in American public address about science. In our contemporary postcolonial era, the forces of globalization recommend a different idealized image of science, one that promotes cooperation across borders by men and women working together to resolve the dilemmas facing all of humanity. But even as the modern problems of worldwide epidemics and global climate change call for international knowledge communities to work together, the frontier of science metaphor persists in attaching the imperialist motives of an earlier era to American science. Influenced by a familiar terministic screen, contemporary American scientists characterize themselves in a way that promotes science but also insensibly restricts the possibilities for reshaping the future of science in America. In this chapter I examine a corpus of recent public speeches by scientists, each of which utilizes the frontier of science metaphor as a central organizing theme in making arguments for increased funding and support of scientific research and education.1 Speech texts were chosen as the object for analysis because they allow us to see how scientists present their profession to others when putting their best foot forward in arguments to recruit acolytes and financial backing. Speech texts also were chosen because they are such understudied artifacts in the rhetoric of science. Although rhetoric as a field of study was first developed in ancient times to investigate the persuasive design of public speeches, the more recently developed subfield of “rhetoric of science” has rarely taken the public speech texts of scientists as objects for analysis.2 As I indicated in the introduction, the more typical discursive artifacts selected for scrutiny by rhetoricians of science are scientific monographs or journal articles and their transformation through popularization or public controversy.3 These more typical choices of objects for study are appropriate when the purpose of the rhetorician of science is to better understand the specialized discourse of scientific communities or the transformations of that discourse by journalistic science writers. But the purpose of this study is different. This chapter calls [3.133.147.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 19:42 GMT) The Metaphor in Public Speeches 55 attention to speech texts by scientists who are directly addressing public audiences about the value of science, and the purpose of studying these texts is to better understand how scientists are conceptualizing and characterizing their profession. Rhetorical criticism of these speeches tells us a great deal about how the frontier of science metaphor shapes the character of scientific research in America. The assumptions about science that accompany the frontier metaphor in these speeches are that scientists are heroic risk-takers, that basic scientific exploration deserves to be funded over applied research, and that scientists are engaged in a competitive race to claim new territory for profitable development. Each of these is a theme introduced in the previous chapter, a part of the performative tradition of the frontier of science metaphor that is preserved and extended in the contemporary public address of American scientists. The Frontier of Science as a Heroic and Exciting Space In 1992, Nobel prize–winning physicist Leon Lederman used the frontier metaphor extensively in his presidential lecture for the American Association for the...