ABOUT THIS BOOK

This volume marks a unique collaboration by internationally distinguished scholars in the history, rhetoric, philosophy, and sociology of science. Converging on the central issues of rhetoric of science, the essays focus on figures such as Galileo, Harvey, Darwin, von Neumann; and on issues such as the debate over cold fusion or the continental drift controversy. Their vitality attests to the burgeoning interest in the rhetoric of science.

REVIEWS

“Roget's has no good synonyms for ‘weak,’ and there is nothing ‘feeble’ or ‘insubstantial’ about rhetoric's role in ‘Pittsburgh minimalism.’ With [this] publication, a theoretical battle line has formed at the center of the rhetoric of science. Even the champions of the sub specie rhetoricae view will find much to admire in these essays, even as they realize that the ball is definitely in their court.”
--Quarterly Journal of Speech

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction

1. Science and the Many Faces of Rhetoric - Stephen Toulmin

2. Rhetoric and Rationality in Williams Harvey's De Motu Cordis - Gerald J. Massey

3. The Cognitive Functions of Scientific Rhetoric - Philip Kitcher

Comment - Merrilee H. Salmon

4. How to Tell the Dancer from the Dance: Limits and Proportions in Argument About the Nature of Science - J.E. McGuire and Trevor Meliz

5. The Strong Program in the Rhetoric of Science - Steve Fuller

6. Producing Sunspots on an Iron Pan: Galileo's Scientific Discourse - R. Feldhay

Comment: A New Way of Seeing Galileo's Sunspots (and New Ways to Talk Too) - Peter Machamer

7. Rhetoric and the Cold Fusion Controversy: From the Chemists' Woodstock on the Physicists' Altamont - Trevor J. Pinch

Comment - H. Krips

8. American Intransigence: The Rejection of Continental Drift in the Great Debates of the 1920s - Robert P. Newman

9. Topics, Tropes, and Tradition: Darwin's Reinvention and Subversion of the Argument to Design - John Augus Campbell

Comment: Darwin's Recapitulation - James G. Lennox

10. Rhetoric in the Context of Scientific Rationality - John Lyne

Comments: Metaphors, Rhetoric, and Science - Michael Bradie

11. Rhetoric, Ideology, and Desire in von Neumann's Grundlagen - H. Krips

12. Eddington and the Idiom of Modernism - Gillian Beer

Comment: Standing on the Threshold - Trevor Melia

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