Promoting the Discipline: Rhetorical Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Condit, Prelli, and Depew and Lyne offer useful taxonomies of scholarship in the rhetoric of science, technology and medicine (RSTM), and once again provoke questions about the distinctiveness of a rhetorical approach. Rhetorical studies examine the choices rhetors make at all levels of invention (e.g., lines of argument, arrangement, terminology, visuals). But rhetoricians have not been clear in defining the distinctive contribution of their approach, and scholars in related fields do not routinely access or acknowledge rhetorical studies. There are also impediments to framing rhetorical studies for scientists and practitioners: the term rhetoric still has negative connotations in science publications, and rhetorical concepts like cooperation and reputation are addressed by other fields, creating a competing discourse. Nevertheless, RSTM will expand, and new directions for scholarship include visual rhetoric and the new persuasive practices brought about by online publication

Genres in Scientific and Technical Rhetoric

The idea of genre marks large-scale repeated patterns in human symbolic production and interaction, patterns that are taken to be meaningful. Genre thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. This report on a discussion of scientific and technical genres at the 2012 Vicentennial meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) briefly considers the differences and difficulties with different ways of defining genres and their relevance to science and technology, explorations of the ways genres change or evolve, and pedagogical applications of genre analysis in scientific and technical discourse

Figures of Argument

In the mid-nineteenth century, scientists in fields as different as chemistry and botany, August Kekule and Gregor Mendel, argued for insights that depended critically on antithetical expressions and reasoning. One hundred years earlier, Lavoisier, in his one foray into geology, used the same constitutive argumentative and verbal devices to organize his observations and claims, just as Newton, Harvey, Gilbert and Kepler had done in the centuries before him. The heuristic and persuasive use in natural philosophy of an argument form like the antithesis has particular roots in the combined grammatical, rhetorical and dialectical training established during the humanist educational reforms inaugurated in the sixteenth century. The rhetorically-inflected dialectical treatises of Rudolph Agricola, Philip Melancthon and their many imitators, textbooks for the leading figures in early modern natural philosophy, reinforced the role of stylistic patterns in argument invention originally established in classical rhetoric. Thus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, style and argument, now usually dissociated in our teaching and even in the custody of different disciplines, reinforced each other productively. While the entire array of figures of speech available in early modern manuals includes devices which inscribe all the rhetorical appeals, the set of devices derived from parallel phrasing illustrates how certain figures of speech can express lines of reasoning iconically. The continued use of these ‘figures of argument’ invites a general as well as an historical explanation based on the potential persuasiveness of pattern completion in language processing

Discovering Argumentative Patterns in Energy Polylogues: A Macroscope for Argument Mining

A macroscope is proposed and tested here for the discovery of the unique argumentative footprint that characterizes how a collective (e.g., group, online community) manages differences and pursues disagreement through argument in a polylogue. The macroscope addresses broader analytic problems posed by various conceptualizations of large-scale argument, such as fields, spheres, communities, and institutions. The design incorporates a two-tier methodology for detecting argument patterns of the arguments performed in arguing by an interactive collective that produces views, or topographies, of the ways that issues are generated in the making and defending of standpoints. The design premises for the macroscope build on insights about argument patterns from pragma-dialectical theory by incorporating research and theory on disagreement management and the Argumentum Model of Topics. The design reconceptualizes prototypical and stereotypical argument patterns for characterizing large-scale argumentation. A prototype of the macroscope is tested on data drawn from six threads about oil-drilling and fracking from the subreddit Changemyview. The implementation suggests the efficacy of the macroscope’s design and potential for identifying what communities make controversial and how the disagreement space in a polylogue is managed through stereotypical argument patterns in terms of claims/premises, inferential relations, and presentational devices

Figures of Argument (OSSA 2005 Keynote Address)

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, scientists such as Kekule, Mendel, Lavoisier and Harvey argued for insights that depended critically on antithetical expressions and reasoning. The heuristic and persuasive use of devices like the antithesis has roots in the in combined grammatical, rhetorical and dialectical training established during the early modern educational reforms of the humanists. While the entire array of figures includes devices which inscribe all the rhetorical appeals, the set of devices derived from parallel phrasing illustrates how certain figures of speech express lines of reasoning iconically. But the continued use of such devices invites a general rationale for their persuasiveness based on the importance of pattern completion in language processing