Rhetoric in the Human Sciences: (Inquiries in Social Construction Series)

About the Book

Scholars of every sort inevitably make stylistic choices, name and frame issues, appeal to communal values, adapt arguments to ends, audiences and circumstances. Yet the myth persists that `good′ scholarship consists of hard fact and cold logic, devoid of all rhetoric; that the assent given to scholarly claims is somehow independent of the language used to communicate and defend them.

Rhetoric in the Human Sciences demonstrates that the rhetorical dimensions of scholarly discourse can no longer be ignored. The authors illustrate the usefulness of rhetorical theory, bringing its tools and perspectives to bear on such diverse subjects as language acquisition, television viewing, ethnographic writing, psychotherapy, jurisprudence and structuralist poetics. In so doing, they open up wider questions about the role of rhetoric in the making of a discipline, about rhetoric′s functions within the various disciplines, and about the potential of rhetorical theory as a unifying force across the human sciences. They show how an investigation of rhetoric can be used not just deconstructively as a way of undermining objectivist pretensions, but also reconstructively as the study of appropriate forms of persuasive language and argument in our postmodern age.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - Herbert W Simons PART ONE: THE ROLE OF RHETORIC IN THE MAKING OF A SCIENCE The Reality of Construction - John Durham Peters and Eric W Rothenbuhler The Deliberative Character of Strategic Scientific Debates - Jeanine Czubaroff The Rhetorical Construction of Scientific Ethos - Lawrence J Prelli Buridan′s Ass - Vito Signorile The Statistical Rhetoric of Science and the Problem of Equiprobability The Rhetorical Invention of Scientific Invention - Alan G Gross The Emergence and Transformation of a Social Norm PART TWO: DISCIPLINARY RHETORICS IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES Distinguishing the Rhetorical from the Real - Herbert W Simons The Case of Psychotherapeutic Placebos Ethnography as Sermonic - W Barnett Pearce and Victoria Chen The Rhetorics of Clifford Geertz and James Clifford Beyond the Rhetoric of Antitheory - Steve Fuller Towards a Revisionist Interpretation of Critical Legal Studies Limits of Consumption - Jenny L Nelson An Ironic Revision of Televisual Experience The Value of Theory in the Academic Market Place - Linda Brodkey The Reception of Structuralist Poetics The Meta-Communicative Role of Epigraphs in Scientific Text Construction - Tamar Katriel and Robert E Sanders PART THREE: PROBLEMATICS OF RHETORICAL ANALYSIS Objectivity, Disagreement and the Rhetoric of Inquiry - William M Keith and Richard A Cherwitz The Rhetoric of Inquiry and the Professional Scholar - Robert Hariman

Review :
`The revival of the ancient study of rhetoric is proving to be one of the most surprising and interesting intellectual trends today. Herbert Simons has provided a valuable service in gathering together a challenging set of papers, which take another step towards the rehabilitation of the old rhetorical tradition in the context of the modern human sciences′ - Michael Billig, Loughborough University

`this is one of the titles in a series intended to explore a `new consciousness′ about `cultural critique and renewal′. The series editors herald these titles as a cross-disciplinary and cross-national dialogue with the potential to bring about `a major shift in the western intellectual tradition′. Many of the essays in this book

embrace that ambition and ought to be read with that aspiration in mind. Nevertheless, it is sufficient to read them at a more modest level as a sample of the consequences of the rhetorical turn within various disciplines... there can be no question but that this volume succeeds admirably in fulfilling its objectives′ - Philosophy and Rhetoric