SITUATED

Accomodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts

What happens to scientific information in the course of its adaption to various noninitiated audiences?

The study of the accommodation of science from expert to lay audiences is a relatively untouched subject.

Aristotle’s tripartite division of kinds of oratory provides a continually useful system for classifying discourse.

-Forensic Oratory: the oratory of the law courts where litigants argue over the nature and cause of past events.
-Deliberative Oratory: has its place in legislative assemblies convened to debate the best possible course of action.
-Epideictic Oratory: a current here and now judgement over whether something deserves praise or blame.

A case can be made for classifying original scientific reports as forensic discourse.
(Much of the relevance of scientific articles is extratextual, not spelled out in the discourse but supplied by context, by the assumed inferences the intended audience will make.)

Accommodations of scientific reports, on the other hand, are not primarily forensic. With a significant change in rhetorical situation comes a change in genre, and instead of siply reporting facts for a different audience, scientific accommodations are overwhelmingly epideictic: their main purpose is to celebrate rather than validate.

-A deontological argument: attempts to praise or excoriate something by attaching it to a category that has a recognized value for an audience.
-A teleological argument: something has value because it leads to further benefits.

Changes in information: Under the pressure of this genre shift from the forensic to the epideictic, it is not surprising that something happens to the formation from one kind of discourse to another.

Aristotle pointed out the perennial epideictic appeal that “a thing is greater when it is harder or rarer than other things”.

Science accommodations show another interesting tendency to replace the signs or data of an original research report with the effects or results, once again increasing the significance and certainty of their subject matter.
=> Accommodation will leap to results, whereas the original authors stay on the safe side of the chasm.

=> Consequences of misunderstanding.

Latour and Woolgar’s taxonomy attempts to be very sensitive to minute changes in the certainty of claims, and the changes demonstrated in the paired examples quoted above could be described as changes in statement types according to Latour and Woolgar’s scale.

Stasis theory defines and orders the kinds of questions that can be at issue in a criminal case.
People inevitably have to be convinced that a situation exists before they ask what caused it or move on to decisions about whether the situation is good or bad and what should be done about it and by whom.

=> The movement of a scientific observation through the stases, its “rethorical life”, is an inevitable consequence of changing the audience for a piece of information and thus the purpose of relating it and thus the genre of the discourse that conveys it.

Even if the scientific report where translated from insiders’ to outsider’s language with the minimum amount of distortion and no attempt to provide an epideictic exigence for the report, the public as readers would move the information themselves into the higher stases and ask, ‘Why is this happening? Is this good news or bad news? What should we do about it?”.

Conclusions:

The way information changes as a function of rhetorical situation certainly deserves scholarly scrutiny beyond this preliminary study, for at issue is the machinery and quality of social decision making in an expert-dominated age.  Similar subject matter being communicated to dissimilar audiences.

Another area the writing/rhetorical instructor should investigate is the use of scientific and technical information by political factions and lobbying groups.

Yet the above study of science reporting that condenses as it speaks to a different audience suggests that even abstracts and summaries may distort an original in critical ways.

Pedagogical implications: Writing components cannot replace a full rhetorically based writing course for two reasons: one, they do not give students practice in addressing significantly different audiences and thus practicing the language skills that audience adjustment demands; second, they do not teach the public dimensions and responsibilities of specialist knowledge.

There is no “body of knowledge” without bodies of knowers and these are multiple.

Posted by kris_r on February 1st, 2006 in: Rhetorics.