The Conduit Between Lifeworld and System: Habermas and the Rhetoric of Public Scientific Controversies

Abstract

The vibrancy and health of political culture in democratic societies increasingly depends on the publicity and resolution of public scientific controversies. However, creating a framework for analysis that avoids reductive categorization remains a difficult task. This essay proposes a Habermasian framework of analysis for public scientific controversies and draws out its rhetorical implications. We argue that the roots of public scientific controversies are found in moments of urgency that call forth contested scientific theories into the public realm. These controversies embed epistemological disputes over knowledge-claims within pragmatic contexts, thus forcing interested parties to achieve some level of intersubjective consensus on the legitimacy of broad-based policies that fuse politics, ethics, and science. These controversies thus provide the situational grounds that make possible, if not always actual, the interaction among citizens, scientists, and legislators through rhetorical forums that feature the discursive interplay among epistemological concerns, aesthetic experience, moral valuation, and practical judgment.

Notes

¹These definitions are distinct from Brante's distinction between a “scientific” controversy, which involves the status of knowledge claims, and “science-based” controversies, which involve practical policies in which scientific facts or theory are at stake. This is because the root of Brante's distinction is between theory and practice, which we believe to be a false distinction. The difference between a specialized scientific disagreement and a publicized scientific dispute is not between theory and practice but between audiences and interests. A specialized scientific disagreement may actually have significant practical impact, but insofar as the public is not involved, it retains its “technical” character; and a publicized scientific dispute may both be theoretically rich and have great practical relevance, but the context in which it is communicated and understood is largely one of entertainment, not one of policy or urgency.

²In a separate essay, Lyne and Howe further clarify how publicized scientific disputes often come about, noting the distinction between the “inter-disciplinary frame,” in which the “expert appears before an audience of peers with the persona of a credible contributor to an existing research program” and the “extra-disciplinary frame,” in which the expert speaks outside a specific discipline to largely public audiences that he or she wishes to educate or persuade (“The Rhetoric” 136, 139–140). Similarly, Leah Ceccarelli explores the rhetorical nuances of technical scientific disagreements and publicized scientific disputes in her Shaping Science with Rhetoric. We only wish to emphasize that a different interpretive framework is required to analyze public scientific controversies to complement these perspectives.

³Our use of the term “propaganda” follows the definition by Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell as “the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (7). The important difference from rhetoric is that propaganda cannot exist as a single message developed in response to a particular contingency; its parts are always components of a systematic campaign organized by some institutionalized group for the purposes of advancing its own self-interest.

⁴Reichenback (1938) originally intended the distinction to explain the difference between the psychological and subjective process of invention that occurs in the individual scientist and the social and argumentative techniques used to verify claims within a scientific community. Habermas takes this epistemological distinction and pragmatically applies it to the political realm of legal policy.

⁵Although Habermas does not directly define “sensual-aesthetic,” his contextual use of this term seems to refer to a type of experience that primarily comes to us through the senses and strikes us immediately (and largely unreflectively) as beautiful or ugly, pleasurable or painful, helpful or obstructive. Notably, Kenneth Burke actually pairs these terms together (albeit in something of an offhand manner) in his effort to define dramatism. He writes: “The dramatistic route to knowledge is thus: (a) one acts; (b) in acting, one encounters the resistance to one's purpose; (c) one learns by suffering the punishment dealt by such resistances. There is a sheerly sensory (“aesthetic”) route to knowledge, as when one happens to touch something that is hot, and one ‘instinctively’ withdraws the hand” (Human 375).

⁶Deetz defines systematically distorted communication as “an ongoing process within particular systems as they strategically (although latently) work to reproduce, rather than produce, themselves. It is shown in systems that respond to themselves and are unable to form a relation to the outside on the outside's own terms; they respond to shadows of themselves cast on the events around them. In this form they translate all back to their own conceptual relations, thus precluding alternative discourses or conflicts with contrary institutional interpretive schemes” (Democracy 187). One way to interpret this phenomenon is by saying that the imperatives of systemic “transmission” disrupt and disable the “ritualistic” forms of communication that maintain social ties and generate common interests and values.

⁷Celeste Condit has also commented on the tension between the backroom and the public voice, noting equally the influence of the backroom and the power of the public voice. She writes that although “the public voice is probably best located today by reading newspapers and magazines and watching television news and documentaries,” this “does not mean that public policy is always and only responsive to this voice. Much legislation is indeed gerrymandered in smoke-filled rooms. However, legislation cannot be gerrymandered in such a fashion in direct opposition to a strong public voice, at least not for an extended period” (259).

⁸The dramatic form of public scientific controversies that emerges from our reading of Habermas roughly parallels the stages of scientific controversy outlined by Alan Gross. Drawing from the work of Victor Turner, Gross explores how science functions in public controversies that are “social dramas” that involve “real-life sequences of events that share a common underlying dramatic structure” (Starring, 153). In the first act, the Breach, agents bring an “underlying social conflict vividly to public attention” (153). In the second act, Crisis, the conflict organizes publics into conflicting or antagonistic parties. And in the third act, Redressive Action, society “adjudicates rival claims in such arenas of redress as legislatures, regulative bodies, and judiciaries” (153). Furthermore, scientific controversies demand that resolution not merely be an “intellectual” affair of expert consensus, but must be “resolved by experimentation or controlled observation” held in the public eye and made publicly accountable (“Scientific,” 46). The point is that a public scientific controversy is not an affair of fractured consensus about an abstract intellectual matter that is publicized over the mass media; it is a temporal legal drama in which citizens and publics dramatize common problems in order to redress them in parliamentary bodies where collective judgments must be made on the basis of common understanding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathan Crick

Nathan Crick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, 136 Coates Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA.

Joseph Gabriel

Joseph Gabriel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences at Florida State University, 1115 West Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4300, USA.