Introduction: Rhetoricians on the Rhetoric of Science

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Readers of this journal need no reminder that the rhetoric of scientific writing has become an important research site in the sociology of science, largely motivated by constructivist, strong program, and ethnomethodological concerns. Although the use of the term rhetoric relies on a residual communal memory of an ancient branch of knowledge, in the sociological literature, rhetoric as a term and as an analytic method has been treated as a late-twentieth-century invention, conceptually born of French theorists and methodologically realized by British sociologists. But other welldeveloped bodies of rhetorical knowledge are alive in the academy and have developed both theory and analytical methods of use to sociologists interested in the rhetoric of science. Rhetoric as a discipline had its origins in the political and juridical activity of Athens; the sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and others considered how one ought to talk and present one's case in public and in what linguistic manner one could or ought to enquire after knowledge. The consideration of the most effective means of persuasion was taken up by the Romans, and then by medieval churchmen, Renaissance courtiers, and eighteenthcentury reformers. Sir Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Joseph Priestley, Adam Smith, and Alexander Bain are among those who wrote influential works on rhetoric in the early modem period; each of these considered both persuasion and the relationship between language and knowledge. As the social circumstances and social projects of the rhetoricians changed, so did the theory and practical guidelines. Together the historically deep literature of rhetoric provides many insights into the use of language and offers many analytical concepts to help expose how individual speeches and texts work. Useful introductions, surveys, and bibliographies of the history of rhetoric are James J. Murphy, A Synoptic History of Classical Rhetoric (1983), and Winifred B. Horner, nhe Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (1983). Currently rhetorical knowledge is located within three separate departments in the modern American academy: philosophy, speech, and English

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