Search Results

This chapter turns to Seneca's study of hail and snow in what survives of Book 4b. Seneca reviews various theories of hail: in analysing each of those theories, this chapter explores the different modes of scientific argumentation that Seneca deploys to explain the ‘true’ nature of the given phenomenon. Perhaps more important than the plausibility of any given argument here is his testing of the nature of argument itself, as if Seneca here engages in a stocktaking exercise by which the rhetoric of argument is put under the microscope. After this testing exercise, by which Seneca burnishes his own credentials as a careful, highly self-critical researcher, this chapter argues that, late in the book, he offers a model demonstration of the rhetoric of argument in exemplary, persuasive action.

The introduction to the Politics of Pain traces the recent history of simultaneous efforts in pain science as well as rhetoric of science and science and technology studies to develop new integrated non-dualist approaches to inquiry and practice. Specifically, this section introduces readers to the calls for a biopsychosocial approach to pain medicine and a nonmodern or new materialist approach to rhetoric of science and science and technology studies. In so doing, the introduction argues that the time is right for renewed inquiry into pain from a hybrid rhetorical-ontological perspective. Such an approach offers great potential for reciprocal engagement between the differing areas’ overlapping calls for new foundations for inquiry and practice.

This chapter explores three “rhetorics of science” that attempted to ”bridge Kuhn’s Gap” with analysis of persuasion and to accommodate the logical and social-institutional perspectives. These accounts of science include Marcello Pera’s abstract normative dialectics, Lawrence Prelli’s communitarian rhetoric, and Bruno Latour’s antinormative rhetoric of science. The chapter emphasizes that conceptions of cogency are rejected in terms of the intrinsic or process-independent merits of arguments in all of these models. It further emphasizes that Latour’s Machiavellian model gives natural phenomena a constitutive role in persuasive argumentation and at the same time addresses the broader social process of science as it occurs in a context populated by a range of social actors, groups, and institutions.

This chapter focuses on scientific method as the key rhetorical topos, or topic, within evidence-based medicine that furnishes lines of argument that researchers adopt to align complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with scientific boundaries. At the core of debates about CAM is an epistemological debate about how research on CAM ought to be conducted, interpreted, and incorporated into practice because biomedicine’s “gold standard” methodology, the randomized controlled trial (RCT), does not easily accommodate interventions such as acupuncture. The chapter examines how CAM practices fit awkwardly within the RCT format and, turning to studies of experimental articles in rhetoric of science, rhetoric of medicine, and genre theory, investigates how the experimental genre is mobilized in the specific case of biomedical CAM research. It then isolates the concept of efficacy—whether or not a health intervention “works”—as a central organizing principle of biomedical research on CAM. The chapter shows that efficacy can be invoked strategically to draw epistemic and professional boundaries. As this chapter argues, the problem of method in biomedical CAM research is largely a problem of persuasion: the ways that researchers design their studies and report their findings determine which health interventions belong in biomedicine and which do not.

The conclusion to The Politics of Pain closes with a reflection on the many overlaps among new materialist, nonmodern, and biopsycosocial approaches to rhetorical studies, science and technology studies, and pain medicine. In so doing, the conclusion argues for an end to the cycle of hypercorrections as disciplines oscillate from realist modernist positions to anti-realest postmodern theories. Additionally, the conclusion revisits the different modes of calibration, authorizing resources, and discursive instantiations explored in the book. This calibration suite is presented as a useful resource for future inquiry. And, finally, the conclusion closes with suggestions for future horizons of inquiry within a fully rhetorical-ontological idiom.

This chapter analyzes the content and strategy of Darwin’s 1842 book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. It was not the grand synthetic geological treatise he had originally envisioned writing, but it contained an elegant theory of reef formation supported by analysis of the structure and possible origin of every documented coral reef in the world. The first four chapters were ostensibly descriptive, but Darwin classified reefs into types that corresponded to developmental stages characterizing his theory, which emerged in chapter 5. The book concluded with extended discussion of the global distribution of different types of reefs, as illustrated and systematized on a fold-out thematic map (the only one of its sort Darwin ever published). Published reviews of the book emphasized (whether favorably or not) the ambitious scope of Darwin’s generalizing about reefs; he responded to some criticisms by heavily revising the chapter on coral reefs in a second (1845) edition of his Journal of Researches. Years hence he offered inconsistent and sometimes contradictory recollections about what he had accomplished with the book, reminding critics of his caution but privately reveling in the accuracy of his speculations when supporting evidence emerged from work by J.B. Jukes and J.D. Dana.