Sociology of Science Without the Sociology

Abstract

Whatever readers of Social Studies of Science think of Lawrence J. Prelli's attempt to bring together rhetoric and science studies, they will probably approve of his reading; the case studies on which he bases his argument are almost all by science studies researchers associated with this journal. But I think that A Rhetoric of Science is likely to offer more to rhetoric than to science studies. For the rhetoricians, it provides modern examples for some daunting lists of traditional categories of argumentative strategies. For the sociologists and historians of science, it may be interesting mainly as a perhaps uncomfortable example of how their studies can be used in another discipline. The word inventing in the subtitle is used in its technical sense, to refer to the division of Greek and Roman rhetoric called 'invention', which was concerned with the discovery of appropriate arguments for a given situation. While this field may suggest dusty historical scholarship to European academics, it is the basis of much of the research on contemporary discourse done in Speech Communications and English composition departments of the big American state universities. Recently researchers in this tradition have begun to look beyond the political and legal speeches that were their main texts to the study of academic discourse.1 Prelli's thesis is that the classical categories of stases (defining what is at issue) and topoi (commonplaces locating general lines of argument) can, with suitable modification, be used to generate scientific arguments. He rejects a model of scientific argumentation based entirely on logic, but asserts that