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Abstract
This paper explores the rhetorical basis of a major paradigm change in meteorology, from a focus on inductive observation to deductive, mathematical reasoning. Analysis of Cleveland Abbe's “The Physical Basis of Long-Range Weather Forecasts” demonstrates how in his advocacy for a new paradigm, Abbe navigates the tension between piety to tradition and dissent necessary for innovation through the rhetorical imagination of and appeal to a disciplinary telos. This strategy allows him to dismiss the traditions of meteorology while simultaneously creating common ground between a new paradigm and an audience of contemporary scientists whose traditions he rejects.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Notes
1. Laura Lee, Blame it on the Rain: How the Weather has Changed History (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 17.
2. Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Tradition and Technology in Local Newcasts: The Social Psychology of Form,” The Sociological Quarterly38 (1997): 364. See also Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologist Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991).
3. See e.g., Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1935/1984).
4. Cleveland Abbe, “The Physical Basis of Long-Range Weather Forecasts,” Monthly Weather Review 29, no. 12 (1901): 551–61.
5. Alfred Judson Henry, “Memoir of Cleveland Abbe,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 7 (1917): 62.
6. “AMS Award Descriptions,” American Meteorological Society, modified October 24, 2010, http://www.ametsoc.org/awards/descriptions/index.cfm .
7. Abbe's text thus exists in what Trevor Melia called terra incognita for rhetoric: the communicative interactions that occur within the hard sciences. Melia worried that scientists will never grant territory to rhetoric: “[…] rhetoricians, are after all wordmongers, denizens of the library, not the laboratory.” Since then, however, philosophers, sociologists, and rhetoricians have made the move from the library to the terra incognita of the laboratory and reported on the functions of rhetorical interaction within the boundaries of particular scientific disciplines: for example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's observations about argumentative modalities in Laboratory Life, Karin Knorr Cetina's accounts of metaphors in high-energy physics and molecular biology, or S. Michael Halloran's work on Watson and Crick's “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” speak to the epistemic role communication plays in the shaping of scientific fact and disciplinary identity within specific fields of science. See Trevor Melia, “And Lo the Footprint … Selected Literature in Rhetoric and Science,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 311; Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); S. Michael Halloran, “The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse,” Rhetoric Review 3 (1984): 70–83.
8. R. Allen Harris, “Assent, Dissent, and Rhetoric in Science,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 20 (1990): 13–37.
9. James Wynn, “Arithmetic of the Species: Darwin and the Role of Mathematics in His Argumentation,” Rhetorica 27 (2009): 76–97; G. Mitchell Reyes, “The Rhetoric in Mathematics: Newton, Leibnitz, the Calculus, and the Rhetorical Force of the Infinitesimal,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 163–88. Wynn points out the “general scarcity of work on the broader topic of the relationship of mathematics to rhetorical argumentation” (78). Others, like Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh who argue against the idea that mathematics represents an antithesis to rhetoric, or Alain Bernard who explores historical connections between deductive mathematics and rhetoric starting with the ancient Greeks, have made similar appeals to increased rhetorical study of not only inductive science but also deductive mathematics. See Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, “Rhetoric and Mathematics,” in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, ed. John S. Nelson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Alain Bernard, “Ancient Rhetoric and Greek Mathematics: A Response to a Modern Historiographical Dilemma,” Science in Context 16 (2003): 391–412.
10. Harris, “Assent, Dissent, and Rhetoric in Science.”
11. See e.g., Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Kenneth Zagacki and William Keith, “Rhetoric, Topoi, and Scientific Revolutions,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25 (1992): 59–77.
12. Everett Mendelsohn, “The Political Anatomy of Controversy in the Sciences,” in Scientific Controversies: Case Studies in the Resolution and Closure of Disputes in Science and Technology, ed. H. Tristram Engelhardt and Arthur L. Caplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 97.
13. Leah Ceccarelli, “Rhetorical Criticism and the Rhetoric of Science,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 395–415; Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Rhetoric With Science: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrödinger, and Wilson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; John Lyne and Henry F. Howe, “‘Puncuated Equilibria’: Rhetorical Dynamics of a Scientific Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 132–47; John Lyne and Henry F. Howe, “The Rhetoric of Expertise: E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 134–51.
14. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 62–90. See also Mendelsohn, “The Political Anatomy of Controversy.”
15. John Angus Campbell, “Scientific Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin's Origin,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 351. See also John Angus Campbell, “A Rhetorical Interpretation of History,” Rhetorica 2 (1984): 227–66.
16. Alan G. Gross, “On the Shoulders of Giants: Seventeenth-Century Optics as an Argument Field,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 9, 2, 10.
17. Burke, Permanence and Change, 71, 74, 76.
18. The vision Abbe creates of meteorology is what Burke would call a tragic one: a frame in which diarists and others who see meteorology from a primarily inductive perspective are holding back the field's natural progression, while Abbe's role is not to create and impose a new direction, but to remove barriers and thereby make room for an inevitable disciplinary evolution that connects past to future.
19. Latour, Politics of Nature.
20. Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, rev. ed. (New York: The Colonial Press, 1899), 319, 222.
21. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
22. Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 28, 31.
23. A. Elley Finch, On the Pursuit of Truth as Exemplified in the Principles of Evidence, Theological, Scientific, and Judicial (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1873), 100.
24. Norriss S. Hetherington, “Cleveland Abbe and a View of Science in mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 31. See also George H. Daniels, “The Process of Professionalization in American Science: The Emergent Period, 1820–1860,” Isis 58 (1967): 157. It was during this time that science journalism emerged as both a collaborator and captor of serious science. To some, the professionalization of science represented a problematic exigency: it restricted scientific knowledge to professionals who were trained in understanding the material and had access to the texts and meetings through which scientific knowledge was exchanged. People like Thomas Huxley and Robert Chambers knew that the promotion of new scientific knowledge was paramount to challenging established religious, political, or social orthodoxies and dogmas, and they actively popularized science by reporting on findings in outlets that were accessible to lay audiences. See Joel Schwartz, “Robert Chambers and Thomas Henry Huxley, Science Correspondents: The Popularization and Dissemination of Nineteenth Century Natural Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 32 (1999): 343–83.
25. James R. Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
26. Patricia A. Taylor, “The Organizational Formation of Atmospheric Science,” Social Science Journal 42 (2005): 640.
27. Jan Golinski, “‘Exquisite Atmography’: Theories of the World and Experiences of the Weather in a Diary of 1703,” British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 149.
28. Lisa Robertson, “The Weather: A Report on Sincerity,” Chicago Review 51/52 (2006): 32, 36.
29. Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.
30. Edmund P. Willis and William H. Hooke, “Cleveland Abbe and American Meteorology, 1871–1901,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 87 (2006): 317.
31. Edmund P. Willis and William H. Hooke, “Cleveland Abbe and American Meteorology, 1871–1901,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 87 (2006): 380.
32. Cleveland Abbe, “The Meteorological Work of the US Signal Service, 1870–1891,” Report of the International Meteorological Congress 11 (1894): 242.
33. William Jackson Humphreys, Biographical Memoir of Cleveland Abbe, 1838–1916 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1919).
34. Fleming, “Meteorology in America,” 156–57.
35. Willis and Hooke, Cleveland Abbe and American Meteorology, 322.
36. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
37. Janusz Pudykiewicz and Gilbert Brunet, “The First Hundred Years of Numerical Weather Prediction,” in Large-Scale Disasters: Prediction, Control, and Mitigation, ed. Mohamed Gad-el-Hak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 430.
38. Janusz Pudykiewicz and Gilbert Brunet, “The First Hundred Years of Numerical Weather Prediction,” in Large-Scale Disasters: Prediction, Control, and Mitigation, ed. Mohamed Gad-el-Hak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 431; see also Peter Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction: Richardson's Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
39. Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction.
40. Lynch, The Emergence of Numerical Weather Prediction. 4.
41. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
42. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
43. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
44. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 552.
45. See also Smith, Fact and Feeling.
46. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 558.
47. Abbe biographer W. J. Humphreys legitimizes the need to write a biographical memoir for Abbe by referencing his “influence on the progress of pure science” in the biography's first sentence. See Humphreys, Biographical Memoir, 469.
48. William T. Sedgwick, A Short History of Science (Stronck Press, 2007), 315.
49. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 558 (our emphasis; also see 555 for spherical harmonics).
50. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
51. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
52. Daniels, “The Process of Professionalization in American Science.”
53. Smith, Fact and Feeling.
54. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
55. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551. our emphasis.
56. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 558.
57. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 552.
58. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 553.
59. See also Fleming, Meteorology in America. Using observational data, the Smithsonian Meteorological Project from 1849 to 1874 relied on the weather diarist to provide valuable information from remote US locations. The weather diarists were hailed by the Smithsonian project director Joseph Henry for their faithful and detailed observations. The editor of the Smithsonian Report, the publication that printed much of the weather diaries, described the diarist this way: “The observers are generally persons engaged in occupations which admit to some extent of their being present as the place of observation at the required hours of the day all the year round…The classes to which the observers belong, are professors in colleges, principals or teachers of academies, farmers, physicians, members of the legal and clerical profession, and a few engaged in mechanical and mercantile pursuits” (as quoted in Fleming, 88–89). Fleming notes that the diarist was revered because “perseverance was valued more than profound thought, cooperation more than creativity” (87).
60. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
61. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
62. See e.g., pages 555–58.
63. See e.g., pages 558.
64. See e.g., pages 554.
65. See e.g., pages 551.
66. See e.g., pages 554.
67. See e.g., pages 554.
68. See e.g., pages 554. our emphasis.
69. See e.g., pages 554. our emphasis.
70. See e.g., pages 554. our emphasis.
71. See also Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Here, Latour discusses the importance of terminology, naming, and language for the discovery of germs as disease-causing agents by Louis Pasteur.
72. Hetherington, “Cleveland Abbe and a View of Science in mid-Nineteenth-Century America.”
73. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
74. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 551.
75. See e.g., Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Epochal Rhetoric in 19th-Century America: On the Discursive Instantiation of the Technical Sphere,” in Spheres of Argument: Proceedings of the Sixth NCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Bruce E. Gronbeck (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1989), 57–65.
76. Pudykiewicz and Brunet, The First Hundred Years, 430–31.
77. Pudykiewicz and Brunet, The First Hundred Years, 430–31. Willis and Hooke, Cleveland Abbe and American Meteorology.
78. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 558.
79. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 552.
80. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 560.
81. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 552.
82. Abbe, “The Physical Basis,” 558.