Abstract

Rhetorical scholars have become increasingly interested in the persuasive tactics and strategies that arise out of the communication that occurs in the course of doing science. Philosophically, two primary ways of approaching this intrinsic rhetoric of science, and the practice of science itself, have emerged. One is to look at the Community and practice of science as relatively stable, a progressive vision of scientists gradually making discoveries and weeding out error, passing along their knowledge and techniques to students. But a second approach, made popular by Thomas Kuhn and his followers, holds that periods of stability are temporary and fragile and the history of science is less like steady progress than like a series of revolutions (twists and turns), where old facts, and the theories that permit them, are simply replaced by new ones, and students are trained to ignore the old structures or consider them 'wrong'.