The Public Address and the Rhetoric of Science: Henry Rowland, Epideictic Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American Science

Abstract

The public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.

2. ²For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman’s The Languages of Edison’s Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy’s Communicating Science, and James Wynn’s Evolution by the Numbers.

3. ³For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli’s On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon’s Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree’s Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gabriel Cutrufello

Gabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at [email protected].