There’s No Such Thing as a Scientific Controversy

ABSTRACT

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.

KEYWORDS:

• Research methods
• rhetoric of science
• rhetoric of technology
• social theory
• textual analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As our corpus selection indicates, we only investigated how rhetoricians of science have used the term “scientific controversy” in published work. We did not investigate how philosophers, scientists, journalists, or policymakers habitually use the term. Our claims and conclusions should be read accordingly.

2. It is also worth noting that given the inductive and empirical nature of praxiography, our analysis includes issues identified as “scientific controversies,” even where those identifications seriously strain many presumptive definitions of the term. Debates concerning marriage equality laws or proposed locations for nuclear waste disposal are primary examples here.

3. In a conservative estimate, Google Scholar reports that “The Third Wave of Science Studies” has been cited by 1,500 other scholarly articles since its publication. Some of these citations, of course, come with critiques. Among others, Sheila Jasanoff (2003) questions Collins and Evans’ (2002) boundaries between “internal” and “external” publics. In reality, she argues, publics frequently set the very research agendas that foment technical controversies. Her critique re-articulates a “second-wave” model of controversy – one that refuses to grant technical communities special status in knowledge making and, in its strongest forms, accuses them of confederating with corporate interests. (Jasanoff, 2003).

4. Before this problematic is read as a sideways critique of (Ceccarelli, 2011), it bears noting that a major and clearly stated aim of her essay was to help scientists and their rhetorical allies combat demarcation rhetorics they believed to be damaging to democratic deliberation over science policy. Her uses of the terms scientific and manufactured must be interpreted in light of those explicit aims. Not all authors have been as reflexive about their ontological stagings.

5. Whig history is a historiographic term referring to problematic histories that present the current state of affairs as though it were correct or a natural and inevitable result of events leading to the present time. See Butterfield (1965).

6. Dissoi logoi are opposing claims or viewpoints. They are at the core of Protagorean sophistic rhetorics, which were designed to maintain community via perpetual, unresolved dialogue. See Cassin (2014) or Mendelson (2002) for more detail.

7. Collins and Evans’ (2002) “third wave of science studies,” and Latour’s (2004) move toward post-critique inquiry are central here.

Additional information

Funding

A student research assistant for this project was funded by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Support for Undergraduate Research Fellows program.

Notes on contributors

S. Scott Graham

S. Scott Graham is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the developer and curator of conflictmetrics.com, a biomedical research funding visualization initiative. He researches how experts and public stakeholders communicate about risk and uncertainty as part of science-policy decision making.

Lynda Walsh

Lynda Walsh is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She studies the rhetoric of science—particularly the public reception of visual arguments and of the ethos or public role of the scientist. Her most recent book, edited with Casey Boyle, explores topology as a spatial method for inventing new ways to deliberate over issues of science and technology (Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Her monograph Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (Oxford, 2013) traces a dominant strand in the ethos of late-modern science advisers back to its historical roots in religious rhetoric.