The Role of Patience in Arguments About Vaccine Science

Abstract

We value dialogue deeply. In public disagreements over science, however, ideals like “parsimony” and “objectivity” can create false justification for refusing dialogue. We impatiently proclaim the “facts” of scientific consensus, treating them as nonrhetorical objects, letting the science “speak for itself.” This essay makes a case for patient discourses of science, willing to acknowledge even the concerns of “pseudoscientific” publics, like vaccine denialists. Anthimeria is discussed as a practice for patiently “playing” with the tokens of expression associated with ours and others’ epistemological commitments, in order to embrace opportunities of knowing and relational being-together through the most “becoming of terms.”

Keywords:

• Anthimeria
• Patience
• Vaccination
• Rhetoric of Science
• Ethics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank Leah Ceccarelli and Melba Vélez Ortiz, in addition to Robert Rowland and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and insightful commentary on earlier drafts of this work.

Notes

^1. The phrase, “most becoming of terms,” I borrow from Quintilian (1933) in De Institutio Oratoria: “Too much insistence cannot be laid upon the point that no one can be said to speak appropriately who has not considered not merely what it is expedient, but also what it is becoming to say. I am well aware that these two considerations generally go hand in hand. For whatever is becoming is, as a rule, useful, and there is nothing that does more to conciliate the good-will of the judge than the observance or to alienate it than the disregard of these considerations” (p. 159–11.1.8).