Closing the Gap
Closing the Gap
Three Rhetorical Perspectives on Science
This chapter explores three “rhetorics of science” that attempted to ”bridge Kuhn’s Gap” with analysis of persuasion and to accommodate the logical and social-institutional perspectives. These accounts of science include Marcello Pera’s abstract normative dialectics, Lawrence Prelli’s communitarian rhetoric, and Bruno Latour’s antinormative rhetoric of science. The chapter emphasizes that conceptions of cogency are rejected in terms of the intrinsic or process-independent merits of arguments in all of these models. It further emphasizes that Latour’s Machiavellian model gives natural phenomena a constitutive role in persuasive argumentation and at the same time addresses the broader social process of science as it occurs in a context populated by a range of social actors, groups, and institutions.
Keywords: rhetorics of science, Kuhn’s Gap, Marcello Pera, abstract normative dialectics, Lawrence Prelli, communitarian rhetoric, Bruno Latour, antinormative rhetoric
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
