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SCIENTIFIC WRITING AND THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM

BY
Robert Charles Goldbort

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1989

ABSTRACT
SCIENTIFIC WRITING AND THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM

BY
Robert Charles Goldbort

The study of scientific writing--its rhetorical
evolution and special rhetorical features--emerged as a
scholarly concern during the 19305. Two major views are
evident with regard to the precise origin of the ”plain
style“ in scientific discourse. The camp represented by
the ideas of Morris W. Croll and George Williamson holds
that the plain style of the modern scientists is rooted in
the Classical plain style of antiquity, i.e., that of
Tacitus and Seneca. Alternatively, R. P. Jones, Robert
Adolph, Richard Halloran, and Merrill Whitburn have argued
that the scientific plain style originated as a new
prosaic standard developed by Royal Society of London
founders in the seventeenth century. In the first
chapter, I support the second of these camps and argue for
an intellectual connection between the rhetorical theory
of Peter Ramus, Francis Bacon, and the plain style
strictures adopted by the Royal Society, as articulated by
its first historian Thomas Sprat.

In Chapter Two, I argue that the view of scientific

writing as "plain" is too limited and misleading; although
referentially such writing is indeed largely concerned
with material reality--or 'thing-ness”--it is also true

that rhetorically it is not concerned solely with

 

technical exposition, but contains argumentative elements
as well, whether the audience is specialized or popular.
Moreover, in recent years some scientists have produced
literary works, especially fiction, in which expository,
suasive, and speculative elements are combined. The final
chapter focusses on scientific writing as a pedagogical
area. I suggest that the study of the rhetoric of science
must be a fundamental dimension of the liberal arts

curriculum, serving as an integrating tool with respect to

 

the now fragmented nature of undergraduate education.

Here I broaden the definition of scientific writing
further to include writing about science by those outside
the scientific community, essentially arguing that
scientific rhetoric is not the exclusive property of
scientist-writers. I show how thematic reading/writing
units--with a substantial component of scientific fiction
by literary artists--can be used to bring together the
language and rhetoric of both scientists and humanists to
bear on such central modern issues as the place of science

in society and the definition of science itself.

Copyright by
ROBERT CHARLES GOLDBORT

1989

To my parents, Jaime and Victoria,

who first taught me the value of
schooling; to my wife Joanne, without
whom I could not have come this far;
and to our children, Raechel, Jonathan,
Julia, and Sarah. With love.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my Doctoral
Committee for keeping me afloat in the barely-charted
waters of scientific rhetoric: Professor Stephen N.
Tchudi, my dissertation director, who from the start
believed in my personal search to bridge "Snovian"
cultures, and gently pushed me forward; Professor Jay B.
Ludwig, who helped me through rhetorical theory and
history, including the work of Peter Ramus; and Professor
Marilyn J. Wilson, on whose general encouragement I could
always depend. I also want to express my gratitude to the
late Professor R. Glenn Wright, for guiding my reading and

writing in Literature and Science.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 0 C C O O O C O O O O O O O O O O O O O 1
I. THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC WRITING . . . . . 16

II. THE RHETORICAL RANGE AND DIVERSITY OF
SCIENTISTS AS WRITERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

III. THE PEDAGOGY OF SCIENTIFIC WRITING . . . . . 128
CONCLUSION O O O O O O O O O O O I O O O O O O O O O 167

BIBLIOGRAPHY O O O O O O O O O C I O O O O C O O O O 175

iv

INTRODUCTION

The issue of the relations between literary art and
experimental science was brought into prominence in this
century by C. P. Snow's metaphor of ”the two cultures,”
which at once captured the distinctive character of our

present-day Weltanschauung and added to the modern lexicon

 

a simple phrase with which to hold up to closer
examination the centuries-old problem of clashing
intellectual traditions. Literature and science, in
Snow's view, are opposite but essential to one another,
their historical separation having seriously limited the
creativity and growth of both intellectual traditions
Importantly, the scientist-novelist cast the problem in
educational terms:
Curiosity about the natural world, the use of
symbolic systems of thought, are two of the most
precious and most specifically human of all human
qualities. The traditional methods of mental
development left them to be starved. So, in
reverse, does scientific education starve our
verbal faculties--the language of symbols is

given splendid play, the language of words is

2

not. On both sides we underestimate the spread

of a human being's gifts.1
The ultimate significance of Snow, one might reply to his
severest critic F. R. Leavis, lies in his having sparked a
deeper, more sustained dialectic in education,
particularly within the college curriculum, regarding the
relationship of the humanities and the sciences in
education and in our lives.2

Snow brought to the fore questions of definition,

answers to which remain elusive, incomplete, and still in
the making. Do poetry and science represent diametrically
opposed qualities of the human spirit? Are they different
aspects of a single creative process the manifestations of
which coexist in a vital tension? Or, is it more accurate
to hold that the poetic and the scientific ”are

fundamentally distinct yet partake of each other in a

 

1 Snow (1964), 62-63. The core argument of Snow's
1959 Rede Lecture on "The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution” first appeared as "The Two Cultures,” Egg
Statesman, October 6, 1956. Successfully or not, ”Snow
offers himself as a unique living bridge between the two
cultures” (Davis, 1964, 4).

2 The savage personal attack on Snow by F. R. Leavis
(1962) should be remembered only as a failure of nerve on
Leavis' part to engage in a more searching and honest (if
not more conclusive) kind of dialogue. Two examples that
come to mind here are the dinner conversation enacted by
Jacob Bronowski (1965) in "The Abacus and the Rose,” the
three participants being a molecular biologist, a
professor of English, and a government education official;
and Edwin Schlossberg's (1973) imaginary discussion with
Albert Einstein and Samuel Beckett.

3
manner that implies interdependence . . . a relationship
of complementarity rather than of coexistence or
conflict"? (Hoare 54, emphasis original). In the sphere
of education, such philosophic questions are bound up
inextricably with pedagogical theory and practice. The
individual and collective response to them by educators is
a major shaping force of what is taught, how it is taught,

and, ultimately, of the critical lens carried by students

 

into corporate boardrooms, government offices, voting
booths, courtrooms, laboratories, the arts, and generally
incorporated into their public and private lives.
Educational institutions can and must exercise strong
leadership in healing the cultural schism between the arts
and sciences. Perhaps it is stating the obvious to say
that our schools and colleges, far from being simply a
mirror of the culture we live in, are powerful agents of
change within that culture. The process of education
should lead to the attainment of more than employment or a
set of technical skills. The economic and practical
urgencies of life notwithstanding, the liberal
undergraduate curriculum should draw the learner toward
higher levels personal maturation and growth, perceptibly
altering his picture of reality toward a greater
comprehensiveness; it should engender a multi-dimensional
critical perspective which, in cyclical fashion, becomes

instrumental to further learning and growth. The struggle

4
in our century to arrive at a new, post-modern conception
of reality, one which explains more truthfully the
relationship between two of its great intellectual
traditions, places considerable pressure on education to
contribute its share in this growth process. By a “post-
modern" view of reality I mean a view which is synthetic
(perhaps in the Hegelian sense), a sense of reality whose
character is neither strictly scientific nor humanistic in
spirit, but, in containing elements of each, permits a
more holistic outlook.

During the past 50 years, considerable commentary and
scholarship has appeared on the relationship between the
arts and sciences.3 One philosophical orientation which I
believe holds considerable potential for elucidating the
relationship between art and science is the principle of
"complementarity,” a helpful explication of which is given
by Norman Rabkin (1967, 19-26). Rabkin traces the origin
of the idea to such physicists as Niels Bohr and J. Robert

Oppenheimer.4 In a lecture at the International Physical

 

3 Examples relevant to English studies range from I.
A. Richards' (1925, 1970) distinctions between the
scientific and non—scientific uses of language and
Marjorie Hope Nicolson's (1956) literature and science
”influence” studies to G. S. Rousseau's (1978) historical-
critical overview of the field of Literature and Science
and the critical essays by Patricia Bizzel (1979) and
Robert Connors (1983) on scientism in English studies.

4 Rabkin attempts to show how a number of
Shakespeare's plays-~including Hamlet, Troilus and
Cressida, and King Lear--'are built on visions of
complementarity” (27).

5
Congress in 1927, Bohr introduced and described the
concept of complementarity in atomic theory as "a new mode

of description designated as complementary in the sense

 

that any given application of classical concepts precludes
the simultaneous use of other classical concepts which in
a different connection are equally necessary for the
elucidation of the phenomena." In other words, while
scientists cannot limit their view of reality by the
results of particular experiments they have chosen to
perform out of a myriad experimental options, the
inferences they do make--while only partially reflecting a
more complicated reality--must perforce be expressed in
simple, logical, and coherent terms. The chief example to
which Rabkin constantly returns deals with the nature of
light. The fact that the latter may be seen in one
experiment as wavelike and in another as corpuscular does
not mean that one or the other view is the more truthful
one; our understanding of the physical nature of light is
dependent on the complementarity of these two views, since
one makes sense in the analysis of certain phenomena and
the other "works" in explaining other phenomena. Rabkin
points out certain analogies to problems in other areas
observed by Oppenheimer:

Indeed, an understanding of the complementary

nature of conscious life and its physical

interpretation appears to me a lasting element in

6

human understanding and a proper formulation of
the historic views called psycho-physical
parallelism. For within conscious life, and in
its relations with the description of the
physical world, there are again many examples.
There is the relation between the cognitive and
the affective sides of our lives, between
knowledge or analysis and emotion or feeling.
There is the relation between the aesthetic and
the heroic, between feeling and that precursor
and definer of action, the ethical commitment;
there is the classical relation between the
analysis of one's self, the determination of
one's motives and purposes, and that freedom of
choice, that freedom of decision and action,
which are complementary to it.5

A key question here with respect to English education, in

the context of the relations between Snow's two cultures,

 

5 A recent argument for the complementarity of
intellectual traditions--surprisingly, in the relationship
between religion and science--is offered by the
theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John
Polkinghorne (1986). “Reality," writes Polkinghorne,

is a multi-layered unity. I can perceive another
person as an aggregation of atoms, an open
biochemical system in interaction with the
environment, a specimen of homo sapiens, an
object of beauty, someone whose needs deserve my
respect and compassion, a brother for whom Christ
died. All are true and all mysteriously coinhere
in one person. To deny one of these levels is to
diminish both that person and myself; to do less
than justice to the richness of reality. (97)

 

7
is this: How does the notion of complementarity apply to
the area of composition studies, and particularly to the
teaching of scientific writing in the liberal arts
curriculum?

The view that literary art and experimental science

are complementary rather than conflicting human activities

 

permits a recognition of several meeting points between
English studies and science which, beside comprising an
exciting domain of scholarship, are of immediate and vital
concern in the classroom. One of these meeting points, a
discussion of which is undertaken in Chapter One, has to
to with the historical development of the ”plainness”
ethic with respect to prose style--now coming to be known
as "the plain English movement."6 It seems clear that a
major shaping force of English prose style since the
seventeenth century has been the linguistic strictures
promulgated by the Royal Society of London, as announced
by the Society's first historian, Thomas Sprat, in 1667.
Thus, it is certainly important for English educators to

understand how it is that the experimentalists came to

 

5 The recent history of this movement in government
and business is treated in different ways by Halloran and
Whitburn (1982) and-Janice C. Redish (1985). My own
treatment of the subject will consider the possible
seventeenth-century scientific basis of the plain language
ethic, and agrees with Halloran and Whitburn's historical
view. Redish does not address the question of the
historical origin of stylistic plainness, except to point
out that the current movement in government and business
dates to the 19703.

8
feel the way they did about the function and style of
discourse, and, beyond Sprat, how the scientific view of
discourse affects current attitudes toward language and
writing. Interestingly, too--and ironically--while the
community of scientific scholars collectively disallows
rhetoric, science itself cannot function without some sort
of rhetorical organization, i.e., a way of using language
which permits scientists to accomplish their specific
"routine" and broader, long-term ends. By manipulating
language, scientists attempt to construct as precisely and

convincingly as possible a representation of the world as

 

they see it; in effect, such representations are
imaginative rhetorical constructions. The link to
complementarity here is evident: Science simply cannot
operate without language. More, as Jacob Bronowski (1978)
asserts, science is a language; he puts forth the view
that the method of science, the objectification
of entities, abstract concepts, or artificial
concepts like atoms, is in fact a direct
continuation of the human process of language,
and that it is right to think of science as being
simply a highly formalized language (49).
According to Bronowski's ”constructivist“ view of how
scientists use language,
we make, we construct, the laws of nature as we

see them. We cut up the environment into things;

9
we make groups of things, concepts, classes, and
then reconstitute them in different forms of
sentences. And the whole of our imaginative
process is carried on in this way; that is, our
capacity to do this in the brain is built on the
fact that we are able to remember in symbolic
terms; we are able to attach symbols to our
memory and project them forward as foresight, and
in this way we are able to manipulate by
imagination the environment as it might be. And
language is simply a way of doing that which is
communicable, but inside our heads we are using
this sort of language all the time in order, to
put it briefly, to imagine. And imagination is
essentially a constructivist activity. (1978,
50-51)
While Bronowski's notion of science as a highly formalized
language--one which is shaped by its own rhetorical
purposes and constraints--may seem sensible to literary
scholars, his contention (and my own) that the "plain"
language of science was invented by the Royal Society has

been for many years a subject of debate.7

 

7 The view that the modern plain style originated
with the Royal society is supported by such scholars as
Richard Foster Jones, Robert Adolph, and S. Michael
Halloran, but has been rejected by Morris W. Croll and
George Williamson, who attempted to make a case for the
primary influence of the Anti-Ciceronians of antiquity,
especially Seneca and Tacitus.

10
Following my treatment in Chapter One of "The

Evolution of Scientific Writing,” in Chapter Two I examine
and demonstrate ”The Rhetorical Range and Diversity of the
Scientist as Writer.“ The central point made here is that
scientific writing, far from being isolated from the
rhetorical-humanistic tradition, actually is quite
immersed in it. This is true even of the more technical
aspects of scientific writing. "One of the common
misconceptions about language,” writes W. Ross Winterowd
(1968),

is that the mathematical ‘language' of science is

not loaded--that it is purely objective and that

it carries no emotional overtones. The

intimidated college freshman looking at a page in

the text for his required course in math would

certainly not agree that the precise language of

mathematics is ‘unloaded', and that the simple

equation E = MC2 is not perhaps one of the most

portentous utterences of our era (1).
Winterowd notes that general semanticists have pointed out
that there is nothing wrong with the fact that there
exists differences in meaning in our various uses of the
same word; thus, "any suggestion that we try to use

language neutrally is futile” (2), and not even

ll
necessarily desirable.8 Still another connection of
technical scientific writing to the rhetorical tradition
is P. B. Medawar's (1967) assertion that at the heart of
the scientific process is the telling of stories, for
a scientist, so far from being a man who never
knowingly departs from the truth, is always

telling stories in a sense not so very far

 

removed from that of the nursery euphemism--
stories which might be about real life but which
have to be tested very scrupulously to find out
if indeed they are so. (127, emphasis original)
Beyond the area of technical communication,
scientists have engaged (especially since the nineteenth
century) in other forms of writing, most notably in the
popularization of their work and discoveries.9 Recent
examples are the writings of Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay
Gould, Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan, and the late Loren
Eiseley. Beside the growing importance of popular writing
in the scientific life, scientists have also written
fiction and poetry, though this is a relatively recent
development. Salient examples are the novels of Isaac

Asimov, Michael Crichton, and Gregory Benford, and the

 

3 For a provocative refutation of the notion that
technical writing is inherently more objective than other
kinds of writing, see David N. Dobrin (1985).

9 See for instance Julian M. Drachman's (1930)
historical discussion of scientific popularization.

12

poetry of astrophysicist Alan Lightman and Czech
immunologist Miroslav Holub. This range and diversity of
writing by scientists (not to mention such important forms
as letters, autobiography, and government policy
contributions), shows both the continuity of scientific
communication with our long rhetorical tradition--
including the complementarity of objectivism and
subjectivism in the language-—and the inseparabality of
the scientific life and manners from human values.

Following my treatment in the first two chapters of
the evolution and rhetorical richness of scientific
writing, in the third chapter--on ”The Pedagogy of
Scientific Writing"--I turn to the practical concerns of
the classroom. Chapter Three addresses the uses of
scientific writing in a liberal arts curriculum; first, to
demonstrate the fact that science, no less than any other
intellectual tradition, cannot operate independently of
language. One important question here, for instance, is
the stylistic one: Can the importance of clarity and
"readability" (Hirsch, 1977) and the uses of 'opaqueness"
(Lanham, 1974) somehow be reconciled and recognized as
each making their unique contribution in all kinds of

writing, including scientific prose?lo Another concern is

 

10 See for instance Merrill D. Whitburn et a1.
(1978), who report on their classroom experiences with
encouraging the use by technical writing students of
certain rhetorical devices--with the aim being not only to
enhance clarity, but to nourish as well the personal and

13

the pedagogical uses of scientific writing as a literary
thgmg, rather than as only a prose style. Here I will
argue that the scientific fiction and non-fiction written
by both scientists and humanists can be used to draw
students into the great ongoing dialectic in western
culture between literary art and experimental science.
This argument is accompanied by specific illustrations
with respect to reading/writing strategies.11 A central
part of my aim in the third chapter--as well as of the
dissertation as a whole—-is to show how reading and
writing about the relationship between art and science
students can be used to engage students in forming their
own conception of the unique role and intellectual limits
of the two views of reality as well as of their vital
dependence on one another in the search for a holistic
view of reality.

The importance of the notion of complementarity as a
guiding principle for the undergraduate liberal curriculum

is suggested by A. N. Whitehead's observation of the utter

 

aesthetic dimensions of writing.

.11 That scientific writing can be taught in a
humanistic context is evident in the examples of classroom
practice found, for instance, in Teaching Scientific
Writing (1978), edited by Stephen N. Judy (Tchudi) for Th3
English Journal. One of the instructors, E. Fred
Carlisle, shows for instance that the assumptions we make
about the relationship between language and science have
certain implications for our teaching practices--
especially with regard to the relations between writer and
subject, writer and audience, and the writer's value-
laden attitudes and his intentions.

 

 

 

14
fragmentation of the college learning experience. In his

Aims of Education, Whitehead writes that there are

 

three main roads along which we can proceed with
good hope of advancing towards the best balance
of intellect and character: these are the way of
literary culture, the way of scientific culture,
the way of technical culture. No one of these
methods can be exclusively followed without grave
loss of intellectual activity and character. But
a mere mechanical mixture of the three curricula
will produce bad results in the shape of scraps
of information never interconnected or utilized.
(84-85)

Whitehead's argument holds important implications
for English as a liberal art, as a subject which offers
special opportunities for personal growth through the
appropriate structuring of language experiences; more
specifically, reading and writing activities can be
structured to encourage students to develop for themselves
a synthetic, post—modern picture of reality. By “post-
modern” I refer to the nascent recognition of the limits
of science by a culture whose credo since the seventeenth

century has been plus ultra, always more beyond. As

 

Kenneth A. Bruffee (1984) points out, the pressure is not
only on humanists to comprehend the scientific point of

view, but also, reciprocally, on scientists to understand

15
what humanism is all about. In a deeply troubled world
which is trying desperately to pull itself together, the
study of scientific writing-~in its historical,
linguistic, and rhetorical contexts—~can help us begin to
repair the ideological wreckage of several centuries of
feuding intellectual traditions. ”The clashing point of
two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures--of two
galaxies, so far as that goes--ought to produce creative
chances," wrote Snow (1964, 16). Since modern science,
like literary art, is rooted in language and the western
rhetorical tradition, what better place in the liberal
arts curriculum to study and foster their natural co-

operation than the English classroom?12

 

12 Important here is the concept of ”organic
English,'defined by Stephen N. Judy (Tchudi) in his T23
ABCs of Literacy (1980) as ”a language-based curriculum
that takes as its overriding goal providing each student
with as many diverse, growth-producing experiences with
language as possible" (178). See also the treatments by
Judy and Judy (1981) and Tchudi (1986) of writing as a
liberal art.

15

CHAPTER I

THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC WRITING

The study of modern scientific writing--its
emergence, development, and rhetorical aspects--is a
recently established academic specialization, in the
making roughly for 20 years.13 Scholarship and pedagogy
in the area have developed through the collective (and
sometimes collaborative) efforts of educators in a number
of academic "home" departments, including the sciences,
history, philosophy, psychology, communication,
journalism, speech, and English. In English departments
scientific writing is closely linked with, and owes a
great intellectual debt to, the field of "Literature and
Science.” Research and criticism in literary-scientific
relations came of age at mid-century, with a rapidly
growing body of scholarship and strong representation

within the Modern Language Association. By 1951, Marjorie

Nicolson could say that ”We had sown the wind, and are

 

13 Although scholarly attention to the uses of
language by scientists can be found much earlier, such as
I. A. Richards' discussion of “The Two Uses of Language"
(Chapter 34) in his Principles of Literary Criticism
(1925), Leonard Bloomfield's Linggistic Aspects of Science
(1939), and Theodore H. Savory's The Language of Science
(1953).

16

17
reaping the whirlwind.“14 The founding of the Literature
and Science field is probably one of at least two major
forces (the other being the technologization of our
culture) giving impetus to scholarly activity in the area
of scientific writing, and to the rapid and widespread
development since the 19605 of college courses and
programs in science communication and scientific

writing.15

 

14 In her remarks on the field in The Seventeenth
Centur (1951, 1-9) and in the Preface to Science and
Imagination (1956), Nicolson cites as being among the
field's earliest influential works Carson Duncan's N31
Science and English Literature (1913), I. A. Richards'
Science and Poetry (1926, 1935), Arthur 0. Lovejoy's Th3
Great Chain of Being (1935), and the essays on prose style
by Morris W. Croll and Richard Foster Jones. During the
19405, the M.L.A.'s Literature and Science group amassed
1,300 titles of books and articles published since 1930 on
literary-scientific relations. Other important
bibliographies on the relations between literature and
science are those by Fred Dudley (1968) and the annual
listings in the journal CLIO. Professor Nicolson herself
was not only instrumental in forming the M.L.A. group, but
trained dozens of scholars in the field over a fifty-year
period and ”was the first scholar to make the field
respectable . . . a valid field for research, publication,
and professional advancement" (Rousseau, 1978, 586).

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 See Lawrence P. Verbit's Diregtory of Science
Communication Courses, Programs, and Faculty (1983).
In the introduction of both this second edition and its
1978 predecessor (edited by Verbit, Sharon Friedman, and
Rae Goodell), the editors make distinctions between
“science communication" (writing for general audiences)
and "technical communication" (writing for specialized
audiences). "Scientific writing" is identified with
technical communication. Yet, the examples of pedagogical
approaches in the The English Journal issue I cited
earlier (note 11) demonstrate that teaching scientific
writing involves much more than teaching laboratory note-
taking and technical report writing. My own use of the
term scientific writing, as I explain in the second and

 

 

 

18

Teaching and research in scientific writing, within
and without departments of English, coheres around a
number of central questions which relate in important ways
to the subject of this chapter, such as: What is
scientific writing? (To which the writing instructor will
quickly add, What is gggg scientific writing?) How does
it differ from other kinds of writing? What are its
historical origins? What is its place, respectively, in
our culture, in the western rhetorical tradition, in the
college curriculum? Such questions do not lend themselves
to easy or unequivocal answers: yet, they do identify the
field's chief preoccupations, and as such have a definite
relation to the present discussion of the evolution of
scientific writing.

In attempting to make sense of the origin and
development of scientific writing, the question of
definition is crucial. What is it, precisely, that we are
examining the evolution of? What does the term
"scientific writing” mean? One can choose, for instance,
to restrict the definition scientific writing to mean
journal report-- i.e., to technical scientific exposition
in “plain” prose. (Here, as will be seen, one encounters
the ongoing argument regarding the relative influence of

"Attic“ prose or Scripture or London's Royal Society on

 

third chapters, is far more inclusive than that of Verbit
et a1.'s definition.

19
the rise of the plain prose ethic.) A definition of
scientific writing that is limited to technical
exposition, however, fails to recognize the even broader
extent to which science and rhetoric have been
historically associated. In the first place, it is clear
scientists write more than exposition in relation to their
work--argument and narrative have their important place,
too, even in technical writing. Second, scientists do a
modest amount of "lgg-tech" writing, including popular
exposition, issue-oriented works on science and human
values, autobiography, and even fiction and poetry with
scientific themes. Third, a good deal of writing about
science (from popularization to fiction) is the work of

non-scientists. Fourth, beside evolving as an ostensibly

 

identifiable and powerful prose form, and as writing with
a broad rhetorical range produced by scientists and non-
scientists alike, scientific writing has evolved, as I
indicated earlier, into a academic field of study; as
such, it has also evolved into its own niche in the
liberal arts curriculum. Scientific writing must be
defined, then, without excluding any of these various
senses of the term, for each of them is real; each of
these senses forms an integral part of the story of the
historical development of scientific writing. (The
present chapter addresses only the first of these four

aspects; the other three are taken up in in the following

20
two chapters.)

I begin, then, with a consideration of the evolution
of scientific writing as a style of prose. The essays on
this subject by Morris Croll and R. F. Jones in the 19205
and 19305 served to raise, if not solve, two major issues.
The first issue has to do with the precise origin of the
scientific style of prose: Is it rooted in the Anti-
Ciceronian prose of antiquity, exemplified by Tacitus or
Seneca? Or is scientific prose a different and new kind
of "plain style,” born with the modern scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century and, even more
specifically, with the fellowship of the Royal Society of
London? The second issue, mentioned earlier, is closely
tied to the first: Given the assumption that the plain
style has become a major prose model in the modern era,
the question presents itself: Whigh plain style?
Seneca's? That of religious discourse? The Royal
Society's? My intent, I would like to note at the outset,
is not to make a special case for a particular
phylogenetic influence in the rhetorical development of
scientific or ”plain” discourse, but rather to underscore
the point that, despite the historical rejection of
rhetoric by the new scientists, scientific prose has
evolved within the western rhetorical tradition.

The scientific prose style was officially born in the

third quarter of the seventeenth century, with the

21
agreement among the fellowship of the newly-chartered
Royal Society of London to abide by certain strictures in
their "manner of discourse." In the now familiar words of
Thomas Sprat, the Society firmly resolved
to reject all the amplifications, digressions,
and swellings of style: to return back to the
primitive purity, and shortness, when men
deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal
number of YE£9§° They have exacted from all
their members, a close, naked, natural way of
speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a
native easiness: bringing all things as near the
Mathematical plainness, as they can: and
preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen,
and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.
(History, 113, emphasis original)16
The key question which arises here is: Was the Royal
Society's "plainness" ethic with regard to prose style
something unprecedented, a totally new linguistic attitude
and practice, or did it have historical roots and
continuity with a rhetorical plain style tradition which

is not apparent from Sprat's attack on what he and his

 

16 Robert Adolph (1968, 114-115) points out that the
statutes on style discussed by Sprat referred to written
discourse as well as spoken, and to non-scientific learned
discourse as well. That Sprat's pronouncements on these
matters do not represent merely his own views (or those of
John Wilkins, for instance) has been shown by Margery
Purver (1967, 9-19) in her study of the Royal Society.

22
fellow experimentalists saw as a vicious excess of speech?
For R. F. Jones, the plain style promulgated by the
Royal Society in the 16605 was indeed a new rhetorical
development--the genesis of both a modern scientific mode
of discourse and of the prose model for the modern
scientific age, right up to its continuing unfolding in
our own day. Scientific discourse arose, in Jones' view,
from the great distrust of language itself fostered by the
experimental scientists. It was a radical change in
attitude toward language and its functions which lay at
the heart of the new philosophers' perception of plainness
in written and oral discourse.17 In his essay ”Science
and Language in England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century"
(1932), Jones writes that the stance of the new scientists
was that the truth of ideas regarding nature was
dependent upon accuracy of language, and that the
advancement of science must necessarily wait upon
the introduction of greater precision and clarity
into the use of words. This linguistic
reformation was to be achieved by a constant
narrowing of terms through strict definition, and

by the employment of words that would be exactly

 

17 And, though Sprat and the Royal Society spoke
mainly about learned discourse in all the disciplines, the
rather explicit implication in Sprat's History is that it
would certainly be patriotic to adopt this style of
discourse in our everyday lives--i.e., to make it a norm
in society at large.

23

equivalent, not to hazy conceptions bred

in the minds of men by the loose usage of the

past, but to the objective truths of nature.

They were seeking an objective rather than

subjective, materialistic rather than

psychological basis for language. (150)18
This new attitude toward language should be no surprise,
Jones pointed out, in light of the great advancement of
mathematics in the seventeenth century, particularly with
respect to refinements in the use of mathematical
symbols.19 Linguistically, what the scientists found most
uncomfortable to live with was that, in the established
rhetorical tradition, a word could have multiple meanings
or the same meaning as other words. "The desire to make

the word match the thing,” argued Jones, "to be in a

 

13 All page references for Jones are to the volume
of essays published in his honor, The Seventeenth Century
(1951).

 

19 Both the modern conception of truth and the new
stylistic ideal were in the making decades before the
birth of the Royal Society, in the clear, concise, and
pointed expository prose with which Rene Descartes, one of
the Society's eventual and most distinguished members, set
forth his discovery of a new method of reasoning in his
1637 Discourse on the Method of rightly conducting the
Reason and seeking Truth in the Sciences. The cornerstone
of the Cartesian system of thought having been provided by
modern mathematics, it is this science which Descartes
uses in his three appendices to the Method (the Geometr ,
the Meteorics, and the Dioptrics) to illustrate his new
method of objective and logical thinking. As I discuss
later, Bacon and Ramus (unlikely bedfellows as they are)
were even earler, founding influences on the development
of the new plainness ethic.

 

 

 

 

24
strict sense a description of a thing or action, explains
their exaggerated antipathy to metaphors and figures of
speech" (Ibid. 155).
In an earlier essay, "Science and English Prose
Style in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century"
(1930), Jones held
that the attacks on the old, as well as the
formulation of the new, style find consistent
expression in those associated with the new
science, that the first organized scientific body
in England, the Royal Society, definitely adopted
a linguistic platform which exerted a powerful
influence on the style of its members even in
writings other than scientific, and that the
foremost exponents of the new style were members
of this society and in most cases deeply
interested in science. (76)
As salient champions of the emergent attitude toward
language and style, Jones cited such figures as John
Wilkins, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Thomas Sprat, and
John Locke. Wilkins (a mathematician) was among the first
of the founding members of the Royal Society to promote
the new ethic of stylistic plainness, and, from the
standpoint of the history of ideas, he will probably be
remembered most for his attempt to establish a universal

scientific language based on mathematically precise

25
symbols. Wilkins' earliest effort to promote a plain

style of discourse was in his Ecclesiastes, or, A

 

Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching As it fals

 

under the Rules of Art (1646), where he declared in the

 

spirit of the new philosophy that the "phrase“ in
preaching ”must be plain and naturall, not being darkned
with the affectation of Schollasticall harshnesse, or
Rhetoricall flourishes." In his 1668 Essay Towards a Real

Character and a Philosophical Language, a work Sponsored

 

by the Royal Society, Wilkins tried to establish a
language for all learned discourse that was free from
ambiguity, a language that would permit description of
things and expression of thoughts with the accuracy and
clarity demanded by the new science.20

The creation of a universal language had been
attempted earlier by other members of the Royal Society,
as Jones notes. Wilkins, Robert Boyle, William Petty, and
the mathematicians Seth Ward and John Wallis assisted
Dalgarno in producing such a language in Delgarno‘s 1661

Ars Signorum, the aim of which, according to Dalgarno, was

 

 

20 On Wilkins' Real Character, and on other members
of the Royal Society--including Robert Boyle, Joseph
Glanville, and John Locke--who were especially influential
in the shaping of modern prose, see Wilbur Howell (1971),
448-502. With respect to the question of rhetorical
origin of the plainness ethic, Howell comments: "A
passion for the revival of a merely Senecan plainness in
style would scarcely seem able to account for the depth
and scope of Wilkins' passion for a new scientific medium
of communication“ (464).

 

26

”to remedy the difficulties and absurdities which all
languages are clogged with . . . by cutting off all
redundancy, rectifying all anomaly, taking away all
ambiguity and aequivocation."21 Wilkins carried this idea
further by attempting, Jones writes, “to classify
everything in the universe, and then by a combination of
straight lines, curves, hooks, loops, and dots, to devise
for each thing a symbol which would denote its genus and
species" (155).22

The most detailed example offered by Jones of the
influence of the new stylistic ideal on non-scientific
writings is the series of increasingly plain-styled
editions of Joseph Glanville‘s Vanity of Dggmatizing
between 1661 and 1676. Jones compares a number of
passages from its first and third editions to demonstrate
Glanville's process of "reducing exotic and unusual words,
or ‘hard words', to more natural terms, as well as a
constant striving for a simpler, more direct expression”
(96). Some of the shorter examples of revision in

Glanville's Vanity of Dogmatizing cited by Jones are:

 

21 Quoted by Jones, "Science and Language in England
of the Mid-Seventeenth Century,“ in The Seventeeth

Century, op. cit., 154.

22 While Wilkins was an early influence on establishing
the new stylistic orientation, in the first half-century of
the Royal Society's existence the most important influence
(according to Jones) in the development of the new style was
John Locke, who expressed his preference for the plain style
in Chapter x of Book III--titled “Of the Abuse of Words'--of
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

27
‘Which is to us utter occult, and without the ken
of our Intellects' becomes ‘to which we are
altogether stranger'; ‘those abstrusities, that
lie more deep, and are of a more mysterious
alloy' = ‘the Difficulties that lie more deep';
‘those principiate foundations of knowledge' =
‘the Instruments of knowledge'; ‘Plato credits
this position with his suffrage; affirming' =
‘Plato affirms'; ‘is a difficulty which
confidence may triumph over sooner, the conquer'
= ‘is hardly to be conceived'; ‘is but as the
Birth of the labouring Mountains, Wind, and
Emptiness' = ‘stands yet unresolved';
‘preponderate much greater magnitudes' =
‘outweigh much heavier bodies'. (96)
Jones asserts that Glanville's revisions do not signify a
change in ideas, "but an alteration in treatment and
expression only“: e.g., the "Brownesque inversions” are
smoothed out, exclamatory sentences and rhetorical
questions give way to direct assertions, sentence length
is decreased, unusual Latinisms and exotic words are
replaced by more current words, emotional expressions are
tempered, and figurative language and poetic imagery are
removed. The comparison of the two versions of
Glanville's Vanity of Dogmatizing shows, in Jones' view,

"not only a change in style but also a vivid picture of

28
the spirit of one age yielding to another” (97).23
Morris W. Croll and, years later, George Williamson

maintained, in opposition to Jones' thesis, that the
seventeenth century plain style was neither a particularly
new nor a particularly scientific writing style. Croll
and Williamson saw modern scientific prose as a modified
form, a phylogenetic offshoot, of the classical plain
style of antiquity, a style exemplified by the writings of
Seneca and Tacitus and their modern disciples, Lipsius and
Montaigne. In a 1931 review of Jones' above-quoted essay,
Croll countered that Jones simplified the more complex
rhetorical history involved: ”The scientific cult of
unrhetorical speech from 1650 onward," insisted Croll,

was a second, later stage in the history of the

same naturalistic tendency that shows itself in

the Anti-Ciceronian victory at the end of the

preceding century. It did not create a new, a

rival style to the Anti-Ciceronian; it only

introduced certain changes within the cadres of

that style. It was an attempt, a successful

attempt, to take the heat and fever out of the

imaginative naturalism of Montaigne, Bacon, and

Browne, to prune their conceits and metaphors, to

 

23 Jones' other main example, which he discusses in
less depth than Glanville, is the stylistic change in
Abraham Cowley's writing between his A Vision Concerning
Oliver Cromwell (1661) and “The Gardefi‘ (1666).

 

 

29
restrain the wild motions of their eloquence.
But it did not change the form and structure of
the prose of its time. (Fish, 1971, 91, emphasis
original)24

In The Senecan Amble (1951), Williamson supports Croll's

 

view of the rhetorical history, and lumps together Sprat's
History and Wilkins' Essay, published a year apart, as
works holding to the same stylistic doctrine, a doctrine

which "ultimately returns to Ecclesiastes, where it is

 

associated with Seneca, not science" (295). It is this
Senecan style, persisting from the Anti-Ciceronian
movement of antiquity, rather than some new prose style
spawned by the modern scientific revolution, which for
Croll and Williamson has been the primary shaping force of
modern prose.

This difficult question of the precise rhetorical
origin of scientific prose remains largely unsettled. For
both camps, Bacon's discourse style and stylistic
philosophy figure centrally in their respective
explanations for the modern reform in prose style, which
achieved full strength by the third quarter of the
seventeenth century. Both sides agree that Bacon did give

shape to the stylistic platform of the Royal Society, but

 

24 Fish's collection contains two of the Croll essays
which argue for the Senecan influence: "Attic Prose:
Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon" (1923) and "The Baroque Style
in Prose" (1929).

30

the question lingers as to whether he did so as a Senecan
or as a visionary and rhetorically gifted promulgator of a
truly novel and modern stylistic ideal, of a ngy plainness
ethic for the scientific age.25 While Croll, R.S. Crane
(Fish, 92-93), and Williamson view Bacon as a Senecan,
Jones and a number of others see him and the Royal Society
as the creators of a new, distinctly "scientific" plain
prose style, a style grounded not on theoretical
conceptions and disputations of pre-Conceived ideas, but
on the independent existence of material reality.
Jones' contention that scientific prose constituted a new
measure of stylistic plainness is supported by Robert
Adolph in his The Rise of Modern Prose Style (1968). For
Adolph, scientific writing emerged, like the Royal Society
itself, with new Baconian spirit of utilitarianism in the
seventeenth century--a spirit which viewed 'thing-ness” in
a light different from that of the Senecans. “Unlike all
the theoreticians of the classical plain style,“ writes
Adolph,

Bacon means by ‘things' objective physical

reality and its causes, existing before and after

the writer's perception of them and independent

of him. The Baconian writer, like his ideal

 

25 The studies by Brian Vickers (1968) and James
Stephens (1975) are helpful in understanding the
surprising differences between the plain style of the new
scientists and Bacon's own prose style.

31
researcher, submits his mind to these things,
rather than constructing a mental edifice of his
own according to some ideal pattern or looking
within himself to relate the physical world to
his own private concerns. But in the classical
plain style ‘things' are intellectual and
subjective, not physical and objective. In

Croll's words [Sty1e, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, 95],

 

the Egg are ‘the candor of the soul . . . the
secret experiences of arduous and solitary minds
. . . exploring unfamiliar truth by the unaided
exercise of its [the soul's] own faculties'.
Baconian theory, with its emphasis on the
passivity of the faculties, and its distrust of
their unguided exercise, is in effect a denial of
the classical plain style, as well as Christian
mimesis. (168, emphasis original)
However, whether one labels Bacon, in his push for
plainness, as a Senecan or Aristotelian, as belonging to
the Anti-Ciceronians of his time, or as a Utilitarianist,
still does not provide a satisfactory answer to the
question of the precise origin of scientific prose and its
characterization as a "new” style of discourse. It seems
likely that several rhetorical movements or traditions,
preceding and contemporaneous with Bacon, all contributed

to the making and the taking hold of the scientific plain

32
style, whether the latter is viewed as a modified
classical plain style or as a truly new plain style.26
Furthermore, it is noteworthy that beside the

classical plain style, there is the tradition of the

 

25 In his 1930 essay ”Science and English Prose Style
in the Third Quarter of the Seventeenth Century," R. F.
Jones distinguished between the stylistic platform of the
Baconians and the Anti-Ciceronians by pointing out that
the desire to discover knowledge which would more
fully satisfy the demand for reality was
responsible for both revolutions, but the
stylistic movements that accompanied them pursued
different and divergent courses. The Anti-
Ciceronian style found its theories in Aristotle
and its models in such Latin writers as Lucan,
Juvenal, Persius, Tacitus, Pliny, and especially
Seneca; science renounced Aristotle and all his
works, and sought for no models in the ancients.
Instead of a conscious literary style, such as
the other movement was developing, the new
philosophy found in the very nature of its
material a manner of expression characterized by
the lack of literagy qualities. CThe former
style, which was far from denying itself the
assistance of rhetoric, made use of aphorism,
antithesis, paradox, and especially metaphors;
the latter, which eschewed all rhetorical
flourishes, laid not the slightest claim to these
qualities, and against metaphors . . . carried on
a constant and uncompromising warfare. Again,
neologizing was a distinct characteristic of the
Anti-Ciceronians, and freakish Latinisms and
strange words were admitted into their works: the
scientist, on the other hand, abhorred all such
importations, preferring ‘the language of
Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants' to the
'hard' words of scholars. (The Seventeenth
Century 104-105, emphasis added)
With respect to ”neologizing", it is ironic that, while
the new scientists strove for greater simplicity, clarity,
and precision in their language, the host of new
scientific terms (such as in medical biology) which
appeared from the seventeenth century onward had the
effect of rendering scientific language a closed system to
those outside the sciences (see Savory, 1967, 47-64, on
"The Growth of the Language of Science").

33
Scriptural plain style, which had become established among
Puritan preachers by Bacon's time.27 Though it is
difficult to determine the influence of this religious
plain style on the discourse style favored by the
experimentalists, the same rhetorical revolution that
affected the preaching style of the Puritans may also have
had a strong facilitative effect on the adoption by Bacon
and his disciples of the scientific plain style. The
revolution to which I refer is English Ramism, the appeal
of which was considerable from the fourth quarter of the
sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century.
More specifically, I mean the logician Peter Ramus'
success in promulgating, throughout the English
educational system, the view that the art of rhetoric
should be concerned only with the third and fifth parts of
traditional rhetoric, style and delivery (invention and
arrangement belonging under logic). Ramist rhetoric, as
George Kennedy (1980) notes, “is a powerful force
throughout the seventeenth century in France, England, and
Puritan America“ (212). To suggest that Ramistic doctrine
influenced the Baconians' rhetorical philosophy (or at
least that Bacon's rhetorical theory is in certain

respects consistent with Ramus's), may seem surprising in

 

27 See Perry Miller (1939, 331-361). Also, Janel M.
Mueller (1984, 111-112 and 177-180) notes the Lollard
tradition with respect to Scriptural plain style, dating
back to the fourteenth century in England.

34
light of the well-known fact that Bacon was critical of
Ramus's method.28 However, in his study of Ramus' 1577

Dialectique in contrast to Bacon's Novum organum (1619)

 

 

and De augmentis (1623), Craig Walton (1971) argues that

 

“two chief elements of Bacon's mature writings were chief
elements in Ramus' work, and that they were developed in
ways remarkably close to those of Ramus" (290-291).29 If
the early evolution of scientific prose style is to be
adequately understood, it will be worth exploring here a
possible Ramus-Bacon connection in the area, not of
logical method, but of rhetorical theory, involving
specificially Ramus' reduction of rhetoric essentially to
style.

The possibility of a Ramist facilitative role in the

 

28 Kennedy (1980, 216) points out that there are two
references to Ramus in Bacon's Advancement of Learning
(1605), one of which is by name and complimentary
(2.17.12), while the other characterizes Ramus's
discussion of method "weakly inquired” (2.17.1).

 

29 The two Ramist elements incorporated into Bacon's
method on which Walton elaborates are, first, “the
definition of and distinction between ‘invention' and
‘judgment',' and, second, 'a shift of emphasis from formal
causes as static definitions of substances and properties
to articulation of operative principles as interdependent
variables in explanation" (291). For a similar connection
between Ramus and one of the founding members of the Royal
Society, John Wilkins, see Howell (1971, 454-455), who
points out that that Wilkins could have learned of Ramism
from William Perkins' 1592 Prophetica, one of the
treatises recommended by Wilkins as a supplement to his
theory of preaching. According Howell (1956, 206) the
first translation of the Prophetica from Latin into
English is Thomas Tuke's 1606 The Arte of Prophecying, or,
A Treatise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and
methode of Preaching.

 

 

 

 

 

35
origin of a modern plain style, one which I now raise,
does not appear to have been considered by Croll or
Williamson, both of whom stressed the Anti-Ciceronian
influence; nor is Ramus mentioned by Jones or Adolph in
their studies of the genesis of a scientific discourse
model. Given the strong appeal of Ramism in England by
time of the Baconian instauration, the unexplored possible
relationship between Ramist rhetoric, which emerged in the
15405, and the scientific plainness ethic evident in

Bacon's 1605 Advancement, seems to represent a gap in the

 

study of the intellectual currents bearing on the
emergence of a scientific style of prose. Arguments have
been advanced for the special influence on the evolution
of a scientific prose style of Anti-Ciceronianism, or of
the empiricist outlook, or of the plain Puritans, or of
utilitarianism. I believe other scholars have missed
possibility of Ramus-Bacon connection. Specifically, I
will argue that Ramus' reduction in the scope of classical
rhetoric to the devices of style facilitated Bacon's
usurpation and reconstruction of rhetoric for scientific
purposes, and the replacement during the seventeenth
century of the Ciceronian stylistic ideal by the stylistic
program of the new scientists.

The controversial French educator and logician Pierre
de la Ramee (1515-1572), popularly known as Peter (or

Petrus) Ramus, ”has continued to interest scholars

36
throughout the centuries,” as Peter Sharratt (1987) notes,
”especially scholars of rhetoric and logic, and all those
concerned with humanism, and with the history of ideas,
and, since Ramus attempted to re-organize the encyclopedia
of all the arts, with the theory and practice of
education” (7).30 Ramus's interests, as both an educator
and scholar were wide-ranging, including grammar,
rhetoric, logic, geometry, algebra, arithmetic, mechanics,
optics, physics, ethics and religion, ”all linked together
by his obsession with education” (Sharratt 34). Despite
the financial hardship of his early years, he persisted at
Paris and in 1536 earned a Master of Arts, following his
defense of the thesis that ”Whatever is to be found in
Aristotle is false" (Duhamel, 1949, 163). Although his
radical doctrine was not so much an attack on Aristotle
himself than on his medieval disciples, his reform
efforts--directed widely throughout the liberal arts
field--resulted in a new program for teaching the trivium,
and his treatment of rhetoric, as written out by his close

associate Audomarus Talaeus (or Talon), enjoyed a strong

 

3° Beside Sharratt's bibliographic essay, especially
helpful background sources in my discussion of Ramus and
his influence have been Duhamel (1949), Howell (1956, 146-
281); Nelson (1947); Ong (1958, 1971), and Tuve (1947,
331-353 and 384-388). Other important sources,
particularly with respect to Ramus and Bacon, are cited in
the following pages.

37
following in England.31
For the present context, the important aspect of
Ramus's reform of the logic, rhetoric, and grammar taught
in his time is that, motivated by what he saw as a
theoretical redundancy and indecisiveness in these
fundamental liberal arts, he ordained that instruction in
invention and arrangement be assigned to logic only, and
that the study of rhetoric be limited to style and
delivery; grammar was to be concerned with etymology and
syntax. This new system, in Ramus's view, allowed logic
and rhetoric to work together like the head and heart in
the expression of our thought, and corresponded to the
two universal and general gifts given to man by
nature, reason and speech. The first is the
concern of dialectic, the latter of grammar and
rhetoric. Dialectic seeks to establish the all-
round strength of the human reason in the
discovering and disposing of matter. Grammar
seeks the purity of speech in the words and
syntax to speak or write well. Rhetoric
demonstrates how to ornament an oration with

tropes and figures and the dignity of proper

 

31 Evidence of the popularity and persistence of
Ramus's rhetoric in England between the 15705 and the
early eighteenth century can be found in Howell, 1956,

38

delivery.32
It is in this ordained theoretical split between logic and
rhetoric, with no overlap in their respective aim and
scope, that the Ramist system departs most significantly
from the classical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero.
Ramus would not grant the possibility that the four great
Classical procedures for producing a communication could
constitute one process in dialectic and another in
rhetoric, settling for him the confusion between rhetoric
and logic--a confusion which he attributed to Aristotle
and which he felt was magnified by Cicero and
Quintilian.33 Before turning to the matter of Ramus's

influence in England and, specifically, on the Baconians,

 

32 Translated by Duhamel (1949, 163) from Ramus's
Rhetoricae distinctiones inguintilianum (1559).

 

33 Howell (1956) points out that it is in the French
version of Ramus's 1543 Dialecticae Libri Duo that he
states most firmly the essential point in his reform of
scholastic logic and traditional rhetoric. In the
Dialectique (1555), Howell writes, Ramus indicates ”his
b€lief in one system of logic for both science and
opinion, and in one theory of invention and arrangement
for both logician and rhetorician, whereas the
scholastics, following Aristotle and Cicero, preferred two
systems of logic, one for science and the other for
opinion, and two systems of invention and disposition, one
in the field of scientific and the other in the field of
popular discourse” (155). A delineation of the
historical, logical, practica1,and natural factors which
led Ramus to make what he did of the arts of logic and
rhetoric can be found in in both Howell (1956) and Duhamel
(1949). In the division between logic and rhetoric which
he adopted, Ramus was a disciple of Rudolph Agricola--
whose most influential work (written in the 14705 or
14805) was De Inventione Dialectica--and of Agricola's own
disgiple, Johannes Sturm, whose lectures he attended at
Par 5.

 

 

39

I note again that the limitation of rhetoric to style and

delivery (the latter largely ignored by later Ramists) was

formally established by Ramus's friend and collaborator in

educational reform, Talaeus, whose intention in his 1544

Institutiones Oratoriae (known also as Rhetorica) was to

 

 

do for rhetoric was Ramus had done a year earlier for

logic:

Peter Ramus cleaned up the theory of invention,
arrangement, and memory, and returned these
subjects to logic, where they properly belong.
Then, assisted indeed by his lectures and
opinions, I recalled rhetoric to style and
delivery (since these are the only parts proper
to it); and I explained it by genus and species,
(which method was previously allowed to me); and
I illustrated it with examples drawn both from
oratory and poetry. Thus these present precepts
are almost wholly in words drawn from those
authors; but as this first and rude outline has
unfolded, the precepts have been tested by the
judgment of both of us, and disposed in order,

and ornamented and treated by kind.34

The spread of Ramism in England, as a number of

authors have shown, was rapid, wide-ranging, and by no

 

34 Translated by Howell (1956, 148-149) from
Talaeus's 1544 preface to the Rhetorica.

 

40
means a frivolously regarded phenomenon, affecting various
aspects of English cultural and intellectual affairs,
including the mechanical arts, historiography,
jurisprudence, political science, and religion (the
Puritans embraced Ramus's reform efforts). In the
universities, interest probably began with Gabriel
Harvey's 1575 and 1576 lectures (partly published in 1577

as the Rhetor and the Ciceronianus) on Ramist rhetoric at

 

Cambridge, which were guided by the chief purpose of
instituting the Ramist re-distribution of the five great
arts of Ciceronian rhetoric, making numerous references to
Agricola, Sturm, Ramus, Talaeus, and Foclin (author of a

1555 French translation of Talaeus's 1544 Rhetorica).

 

Other English editions, translations, and interpretations

of Ramist rhetorics include Dudley Fenner's The Artes of

 

Logike and Rethorike (1584),35 Abraham Fraunce's Arcadian

 

Rhetorike (1588), John Barton's The Art of Rhetorick

 

 

Concisely and Compleatly Handled (1634), Alexander

 

 

35 This anonymously published work consists of a
translation of the main heads of Ramus's 1556 Dialecticae
Libri Duo (the briefest Latin expression of his logic) and
the first English translation of the main heads of
Talaeus's 1544 Rhetorica. As Ong (1949-1953) has shown,
Fenner's 1584 Rethorike was one of three anonymous units
of a 1651 work titled A Compehdium of the Art of ngick
and Rhgtorick_in the English Tongue, the other two units
EEIng Robert Fage‘s translation of Ramus's Dialecticae
Libri Duo and Thomas Hobbes' English abstract of
Aristotle's Rhetoric. Remarkably, according to Father Ong,
the Rethorike of Fenner appeared in 1681 as an anonymous
Artgf Rhetorick appended to Hobbes' condensed version of
the Rhetoric cfiAristotle, and until 1951 was accepted as
part of Hobbes' canon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

41
Richardson's notes on "Talaeus his Rhetorick" in his

Logicians School-Master (1657), and John Newton's Ah

 

Introduction to the Art of Rhetorick (1671). The

 

popularity of Ramist rhetoric is also evident from its
widespread incorporation in texts for schoolchildren, the
most famous example (and one of the leading textbooks of
the seventeenth century) of which is Charles Butler's

Latin version of Talaeus, Rhetoricae Libri Duo (1598);

 

Butler inspired such treatments of Ramist rhetoric for

schoolchildren as William Dugard's Rhetorices Elementa

 

(1648; fifth ed. by 1657), presenting Talaeus's rhetoric
in the form of a catechism, Charles Hoole's A New

Discovery of the old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660), and

 

the 1671 Rhetorick of John Newton mentioned above. Even

 

into the early eighteenth century, interest in Ramist
rhetoric is evident in such publications as a ninth

edition of John Smith's 1657 The Mysterie of Rhetorique

 

Unvail'd in 1706 and an abridgement of the latter by one
”J. H., Teacher of Geography" in 1739. What I have wished
to show thus far in my discussion of Ramist rhetoric is
that for well over a century (between Gabriel Harvey's
lectures on Ramism at Oxford and John Newton's catechism
of Talaeus for schoolchildren) the view was popular in
English schooling that the art of rhetoric consisted
essentially of a consideration of the third part of

Ciceronian rhetoric--of the tropes and figures that

42

”adorn” the £331 substance of discourse, which is
generated and ordered using the principles of logic.36

What does all this have to do, then, with the
evolution of scientific prose (and, indeed, of a
scientific rhetoric)? Short of providing conclusive and
irrefutable evidence of a Ramist influence on the new
scientists' style of prose and view of rhetoric, the
difficult question of influence can be approached by
underscoring certain aspects of Ramist rhetoric which (as
I hope to illustrate momentarily) are reflected in the
function given to rhetoric, and the attitude adopted
toward language and communication, by the New
Philosophers. First, I call attention to the fact that,
unlike the earlier "stylistic rhetoric" tradition which

had only emphasized style,37 Ramist rhetoric made style

 

 

35 ”In the period between 1600 and 1621," according
to Howell (1956), "the English Ramists had almost no
rivals among their own countrymen in the the dissemination
of rhetorical ideas . . ." (364).

37 Examples of early stylistic rhetorics include the
anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (the oldest extant Latin
treatment 5? rhetoric and prose style), Cicero's Orator
and De Oratore, Quintilian's Institutio Ogatoria, the
Venerable Bede's Liber de Schematibus et Tropis (the first
stylistic rhetoric written in England, circa 701). In his
treatment of “The Rhetoric of Style," Howell (1956, 116-
137) identifies these works as part of ”a recognizable and
distinctive pattern of traditional rhetorical theory in
England . . . openly committed to the doctrine of style as
the most important aspect of training in communication,”
though also "openly mindful that invention, arrangement,
memory, and delivery, or combinations of two or more of
them, conceived in sum as Cicero had anciently dictated,
were also legitimate parts of the full rhetorical
discipline" (116). Howell's treatment of stylistic

 

 

 

 

43
the yhglg of rhetoric (delivery was essentially
forgotten), thus degrading the art itself. As Norman E.
Nelson (1947) notes, "anyone who has respect for the art
of oratory as the all-important instrument of free and
democratic institutions
cannot help but hold Ramus in part responsible
for separating logic from rhetoric in such a way
that the inventional or logical part of oratory,
which was to Aristotle the whole of the art, was
removed, leaving rhetoric nothing but stylistic.
Anyone who has read the pitifully dull manuals of
schemes and tropes which constitute most of the
so-called rhetorics of the Renaissance must be
saddened to see how a great art of civilization
has fallen till it deserves Socrates' insulting
comparison to the ‘knack' of cookery. (17)
Significantly, despite the fact that interest in Ramus's
educational and rhetorical doctrine dropped off markedly
in England by the last quarter of the seventeenth century,
the practical interchangeability of the words ”rhetoric“
and “style" had by this time become a culturally-
entrenched perception (one that has persisted to the

present). The scenario I picture here is one in which

 

rhetoric ends with Henry Peacham's 1577 The Garden of
Eloquence, "the last English treatise on the tropes and
figures to appear in print before 1584, when the earliest
English version of Ramistic rhetoric was published" (137)
--i.e., Fenner's translation of Talaeus.

 

44
this general perception of rhetoric as style only (a
degenerated and weakened rhetoric), coupled with the new
attack against a Ciceronian superfluity of discourse,
immensely facilitated the Baconians' rejection--indeed,
their utter denia1--of traditional rhetoric. The modern
scientists (Bacon among them in his thinking and spirit if
not in actual practice) attempted to overpower, and to do
away with, even the little that had been left to classical
rhetoric by Ramus, style itself, and in the process to
substitute a new scientific rhetoric. The details and
consequences of this proposed scenario can be appreciated

more fully with a closer look at Bacon's Advancement.

 

It will be useful to begin with W. S. Howell's (1956)

perspective on the crucial role played by the Advancement

 

in the development of a new rhetoric:
This remarkable work, which influenced English
learning of the seventeenth century as did no
other contemporary work, contained some ideas on
rhetoric which were in opposition not only to
Ramistic theory but also to the traditional
rhetoric of the early Renaissance. This
opposition grew as the seventeenth century
advanced. The Royal Society, which carried out
scientific investigations in the manner proposed
by Bacon, and which was to some extent the finest

result of Bacon's pioneering thought, had finally

45

to develop a system of communication suited to

the transfer of information from one scientist to

another, and from scientist to public, and the

rhetorical theory which underlies that system is

a step towards the creation of a new rhetoric.

(9, emphasis added)
Emphasized here are the few, but important, words with
which the present discussion of Ramism, style, and modern
science does not wholly agree. Actually, Howell himself
says something significantly different from this, and in
my own view more accurate, when later in the same work he
characterizes Bacon as a figure who ”stands as a composite
of scholasticism, of Ramism, and of something that looks
to the future" (375, emphasis added). Such differing and.
in a sense contradictory views seem to reflect an
incomplete state of understanding regarding the question
of the precise historical relationship--on such levels as
ideology, rhetoric, and practicality--and in such spheres
as education and science--between Ramus and Bacon.
Moreover, studies dealing with the Bacon-Ramus connection
focus mainly on differences in their systems of logic and
method, on their respective dialectics, with essentially
no consideration given to the possible connections in the

context of rhetorical history.

 

Lisa Jardine (1974), for instance, is representative

of the currently popular view regarding the existence of

46
any connection between the dialectics of Bacon and Ramus
when she writes that
as far as Ramism is concerned, whilst clearly
aware of Ramist controversy (he alludes to it as
having moved a ‘controversy in our time' [111,
403], and criticizes some specifically Ramist
texts), Bacon's only direct borrowing appears to
be his use of the word ‘axiom' atypically as
Ramus uses it, for any proposition used as a
premise for argument" (8).
While Bacon generally did not find Ramism very palatable,
this is not necessarily so with regard to Ramist rhetoric.
In his reform of rhetoric, Ramus seems to have set out, in
the same stock-taking spirit as Bacon, to deliberately
change the stylistic orientation of learned and/or popular
discourse. The Bacon-Ramus rhetorical connection, if in
fact it is real, involves the crossing of intellectual
paths at the right time and place to potentiate an already
growing reaction to orthodoxy and tradition. I hope to be
able to show in my brief consideration of Bacon's

Advancement that Bacon appears not to have been wholly

 

anti-Ramist, as seems widely held, and that Bacon's

conception of rhetoric is actually Ramistic in outlook.
As aleady mentioned, for Bacon, and certainly later

in the century for Sprat and the Fellowship of the Royal

Society, traditional rhetoric came to mean a waste and an

47
abuse of language, both because of what they perceived as
an excessive verbiage in the expression of thought--i.e.,
a emphasis on ZEEQE for their own sake--and a lack of
sound matter about which to communicate.38 Thus, in Book

II of the Advancement Bacon reproves those who, in the

 

Renaissance tradition of stylistic rhetoric, pursue to

excess a Ciceronian charm and copiousness in their

discourse, leading them to
hunt more after words than matter: and more after
the choiceness of the phrase, and clean
composition of the sentence, and the sweet
falling of the clauses, and the varying and
illustration of their works with tropes and
figures, than after the weight of matter, worth
of subject, soundness of argument, life of
invention, or depth of judgment. (119)39

This view of rhetoric, or essentially of what was left to

rhetoric by Ramus, is the driving force behind Bacon's own

 

38 While here we are dealing with the lOO-year period
encompassing both English Ramism and the Baconian
instauration--roughly 1575 to 1675--it should be noted
that Bacon's re-definition of traditional rhetoric, Ramist
elements included, only grows in importance over the
centuries, both for modern science and in the eyes of
western culture generally, with the great influence of the
ideas of such figures as Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and
John Locke, as well as with the great accomplishments of
modern science itself.

39 Page references are to the edition of the
Advancement by Spedding, Ellis, and Heath (1864-1874).

 

48

attempt to reform rhetoric.40 In the second book of his
treatise (260-300), Bacon re-distributes the major parts
of Ciceronian rhetoric and uses them in a wider context
than any single discipline, while limiting the term
rhetoric itself to a rationally-ruled utilitarian
function. This limited function of rhetoric is assigned
to his modified concept of the Ciceronian art of delivery
as "the expressing or transferring of our knowledge to
others" (282), to which Bacon also refers as Elocution
(the traditional term for style) and Tradition.41

Bacon's treatment of Tradition is partitioned into
its Organ, its Method, and its Illustration--functions
which are carried out, respectively, under Grammar, Logic,
and Rhetoric. When he comes to his consideration of
Illustration, the specific role of which is to make

knowledge clear to its intended audience,42 Bacon first

 

40 Especially helpful here are the studies by Charles
Whitney (1986), James Stephens (1975), and Karl R. Wallace
(1943).

41 "The Intellectual Arts are four in number," Bacon
declares, "divided according to the ends whereunto they
are referred: for man's labour is to invent that which is
sought or propounded; or to 'ud e that which is invented;
or to deliver over that which is retained. So the arts
must be four; Art of Inquiry or Invention: Art of
Examination or Judgment; Art of Custody or Memory; and Art
of Elocution or Tradition" (260-261, emphasis original).

 

 

42 It is Howell's view that Bacon's ”chief
contribution to modern rhetoric consists in his theory of
tradition, and in his emphasis upon rhetoric as the
supreme illustrator of knowledge for any audience, learned
or popular" (375, emphasis added).

49
acknowledges and praises the Rhetorics of Aristotle and
Cicero. "Notwithstanding," he then writes, ”to stir the
earth a little about the roots of this science, as we have
done of the rest:
The duty and office of Rhetoric is to apply

Reason to Imagination43 for the better moving of

 

the will. (297, emphasis original)
Karl R. Wallace (1961, 115) has suggested that the core of
Bacon's entire rhetorical theory may be encompassed by the
just-quoted sentence paired with the following one from
Bacon's 1623 De Augmentis:
Rhetoric is subservient to the imagination, as
Logic is to the understanding; and the duty and
office of rhetoric, if it be deeply look into, is
no other than to apply and recommend the dicates
of reason to imagination, in order to excite the
appetite and the will. (ngkg, IV, 455)
Essentially, in Bacon's scheme of the intellectual arts,
rhetoric assumes a subservient, diplomatic role in
enabling the forging of a stable alliance between Reason
and Imagination, thereby preventing the latter from

associating itself too closely with the passions and

 

43 The editors' own footnote here reads: ”Rhetoric
being to the Imagination what Logic is to the the
Understanding."

50
causing the will to act irrationally (Howell 371-372).44
It is here, finally, that we encounter the Ramist

association with Bacon's rhetoric. "By viewing the
imagination and reason as definitely distinct faculties,"
notes Edward P. J. Corbett (1971) in his condensed survey
of rhetoric,

Bacon lays the groundwork for the great amount of

subsequent discussion about the separate

provinces and the separate cultivation of these

faculties; and of course he is thereby fostering

the Ramistic dichotomy between logic and

rhetoric. (613, emphasis added)
It is this Ramist separation of logic and rhetoric which
left to rhetoric and imagination a relatively minor place
in learning and discourse--while of course considerably
elevating logic--that explains not only the new place and
scope in learning allowed by Bacon to rhetoric, but
Bacon's views on discourse spylg as well. Bacon actually
adopts and preserves Ramus's view of rhetoric as being
essentially the handmaiden of logic, a view which forms
the basis for his advocating that style was to be at the
service of ESE rather than ygppg.

Here we encounter again the new passion for--and, in

 

44 By "excite the appetite and will” (my emphasis)
Bacon seems to mean not excitation in an emotional sense,
but rather intellectually, "appetite“ referring to
curiosity.

 

 

51
due time, Epiph in--"thing-ness" and practicality which,
as Adolph (1968) argues, arose with the period's
utilitarian spirit. It should be noted here that the
modern spirit of utilitarianism holds an important place
in the educational ideology of both Ramus and Bacon.
Bacon's sense of practicality and utility is clear not

only in his Advancement, but also in his unfinished

 

utopian tale The New Atlantis (published almost 20 years

 

after the Advancement), with its detailed picture of the

 

scientific activities of Salomon's House, the end of which
is the useful application in society of the results of
scientific experimentation. Ramus's utilitarian spirit,
on the other hand, manifests itself differently. For
instance, one of the guiding principles of the French
educator's reform of the liberal arts involved his
adherence to a naturalistic practicability which insisted
that every art should imitate nature. As Duhamel (1949)
has noted, a substantial part of the rhetorical and
logical examples used by Ramus ”are taken from ‘nature',
from the orators and poets, instead of being manufactured
to illustrate theoretical principles" (168). For Ramus,
quoting from Vergil or Cicero gave to his logic and
rhetoric a certain objectifiable thing-ness, analogous in
texture and feeling to the importance for the new
scientists of physical nature. Anthony Grafton and Lisa

Jardine (1986) express the broader, more fundamental sense

52
in which Ramus's ideas for educational reform are
associated with utility (a sense different from Bacon's
materialistic one) when they write that it was
natural for Ramus to make his practical
interventions into contemporary intellectual
debate in the form of a revised programme of
education--one centered on grammar and dialectic
(probabilistic argument), and aimed at
proficiency in that range of arts skills which
will make the product of his school an able and
active member of contemporary society. The ‘new
philosophy' of the school of Agricola and Erasmus
makes utility its main criterion for success:
utility being taken to mean, productive of the
kind of competence which will make an individual
a responsible, moral and active member of the
civic community. (163, emphasis original)
These examples of Ramus's concern with usefulness and
practicality seems to be precisely the context in which R.
Hooykaas stated that ”. . . with Ramus we see the
transition from the ‘literary empiricism' . . . of the

humanists to the ‘scientific empiricism' of Bacon.“45

 

45 Quoted by James J. Murphy (1977) in his review of
Ramus's 1549 Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum
(Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian). Ong (1971)
has pointed out that the Ramist passion for logical
analysis of utterances, including those of the poets, had
the consequence of fixing attention on the written word
rather than the spoken word, which fixation ”makes human

 

53

Ultimately, then, the limitation of rhetoric to style
by Ramus had the effect, first, of isolating--and thereby
of drawing more negative attention to--not only style
itself, but to the Ciceronian manner of discourse which
was becoming offensive in a utilitarian age; and,
consequently, of facilitating Bacon's own usurpation and
transformation of rhetoric which, at least on the surface,
allowed precious little room for eloquence. Ramus gave
Bacon impetus and justification for promulgating a style
ruled by the dictates of logical reasoning (though Bacon
and his disciples would not have consciously referred to
the new scientific manner of discourse as a "style”). In
any event, the great exemplars of logical reasoning over
the past three centuries came to also represent, not by
accident, the new models of prosaic plainness: such works

as Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method, Isaac Newton's

 

Principia, John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, and

 

 

 

expression less a conveyance of a truth or of wisdom and
more of an object upon which one performs an operation.
Ramist analysis strengthens the tendency to regard the
word as a thing" (162, emphasis added). Also, that
Ramus's application of the concept of utility differed
from Bacon's ought not blind us to Ramus's apparent
captivation by the era's scientific spirit, in the form of
his rather serious, if only modestly successful,
involvement with modern mathematics; see for instance John
F. Daly's (1973) discussion of Ramus's Arithmeticae Libri
Egg and Scholarum Mathematicarum Libri Unus et Triginta,
both published in 1569. Duhamel (1949) points out, too,
that Ramus's interests were not limited to the ”exoteric'
arts (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic), and that of the
"esoteric" or 'acromatic” arts (mathematics, physics, and
metaphysics) he favored mathematics, although he did write
a Scholarum Physicarum and a Scholarum metaphysicarum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

54

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.46 In the end, the

 

connection proposed here between Ramus and Bacon is an
ideological one, as historical pieces to the puzzle of the
evolution of a scientific prose style. When Ramus
weakened the intellectual power of classical rhetoric by
limiting its scope to stylistic ornamentation,

Bacon's attempt to ”stir the earth a little about the
roots" of classical rhetoric was made that much easier by
his only having to center his critique chiefly on

stylistic philosophy and practice.47 Essentially what

 

45 These works are "plain” in the sense that they
rely on illuminating their subject matter by the
principles of logical (inductive and deductive) reasoning
as applied strictly to natural phenomena, with a
rhetorical style that is straightforward. However, as
will become apparent in the following chapter, the works
of such writers, and of scientific writing more generally,
turn out upon closer scrutiny pgp to be so thoroughly
plain, and, on the contrary, actually to depend in
important ways on metaphorical expression, among other
rhetorical devices.

47 As to the question of any direct influence of
Ramus on Bacon, Craig Walton (1971) notes that while he
has found no evidence that Bacon actually read Ramus's
original works,

not all of Ramus' thought was lost to the
Ramists, who in turn greatly shaped the schools
in Bacon's lifetime. There is circumstantial
evidence that Bacon grew up in an atmosphere of
Ramist interpretation and critique, and that
Ramus' stipulative definition of "invention” as
first-order discovery, a usage counter to its
usage in the history of rhetoric, was understood
and employed artfully in England, e.g., by
Milton. (294)
According to Howell (1956), by the 15805 Scholastic logic
in England was replaced by Ramism, the latter dominating
the British grammar schools over Bacon's lifetime and
throughout the seventeenth century.

55
Bacon sought for science, and later Sprat and Wilkins
sought for the English tongue generally, was a style of
discourse that was to be appreciated not for its beauty of
expression, for the words themselves, but for its
effectiveness in conveying natural facts in the
straightforward, unadorned, concise, carefully measured
wording required to convey those facts. Rationality, not
stylistic virtuosity, was to be the hallmark of modern
discourse. From the seventeenth century onward, the
Ciceronian style isolated by Ramus was to be engaged in a
perpetual Battle of the Styles (to paraphrase Swift) with
the new plain style of the Baconians.

However, the crucial point for our purposes regarding
the attempts by both Ramus and Bacon to subvert by
reformulation the rhetorical tradition is that it is clear
that the activity and language of science gig evolve in a
rhetorical context, though the scientific community has
not consciously conceptualized its discourse as such; and,
moreover, that scientific prose, beyond its technical
aspects associated with experimentation or theory, indeed
does have a style--one suited to its own needs. (The
second chapter discusses at greater length the rhetorical
context of the scientist as writer and illustrates the
range of rhetorical artistry exhibited in scientific
writing.) Bacon's re-structuring of the intellectual arts

did not diminish the importance of rhetoric in modern

56
scientific learning. On the contrary, as Charles Whitney
(1986) shows, in reducing the scope of rhetoric to the
"illustration of tradition,‘I Bacon actually ”imported the
traditional rhetorical principles into the more central
intellectual arts" (66). The result is the substitution
for the traditional art of a concept of “scientific
eloquence," a
special Baconian non-eloquent eloquence [which]
aims most of all to preserve Cicero's link
between thought and expression, word and thing.
. . . For Bacon it is no longer poetry and
oratory but the reporting of scientific truth
that retains a privileged link to the processes
of discovery and observation. (Ibid. 67)
R. S. Crane (1967), like Whitney, notes the importance of
rhetoric in Bacon's reformed scheme of the sciences,
giving specific examples of how that Bacon adapted
traditional rhetoric to the needs of the experimentalists.
Crane writes that Bacon constantly
draws upon the analogy of the humanistic
discipline of rhetoric to indicate the subject
matter and function of various particular
sciences. The parts of what he calls rational
philosophy are themselves the traditional parts
of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, memory,

elocution) . . . the new method of scientific

57
discovery by which he sets such store is in its
essential features (for example in its use of
general commonplaces of sameness, difference,
degree, etc., to organize and interpret instances
of heat) an adaptation to the investigation of ‘
things of the old rhetorical technique of topical
invention, which . . . was recommended by
Quintilian, Vives, and Elyot. (64-65)48
Clearly, then, scientific prose evolved in a rhetorical
context, regardless of whether or not recognition and
acceptance are accorded to that context. The role of the
rhetorical arts in scientific learning and discourse turns
out to be, unsurprisingly, no less vital than its role in
any other realm of human thought and activity. Both the
humanistic and the scientific realms of inquiry depend,
after all, upon language; what is ”true” in each, the
making of knowledge in each, takes on meaning in language-
-visua1, oral, and (the present concern) written.

As to the more specific question of the degree of
scientific influence on the modern era's stylistic
orientation (and view of the function of style in
discourse), this is an important issue associated with the
evolution of scientific writing which, like the question

of the origin of scientific prose, remains unsettled. By

 

48 See also Wiley (1971), whose extreme argument
reduces Bacon's science to rhetoric.

58
some accounts of intellectual history, the discourse style
of the traditional-humanistic culture has faced a losing
battle with the style embraced by the new scientists. In
this view, scientific prose stands as the stylistic model

of the modern age. For instance, in his History of Modern

 

Culture (1930, 1934) Preserved Smith claims that the new
science is one of the two major shaping influences on
modern language and literature (the other being
democracy), and that by the eighteenth century there is
ample evidence of the effect on prose style of its
infection (note Smith's illness metaphor) by the “virus of
science":
Prose became less majestic, less artfully
involved, less emotional and ornate, but more
lucid, easier to read, and better fitted for
exposition and narrative. The pampered metaphors
and far-fetched vocabulary of Sir Thomas Brown
were pruned to the simple directness of Swift;
the majestic thunder of Milton's periods was
reduced to the ordered perspicuity of Dryden's
sentences; the rugged and brutal power of Hobbes
was subdued to the smooth evenness of Locke; the
demonic outpourings of Cromwell were refined to

the polished glitter of Bolingbroke's verbiage.49

 

49 See Smith's (1934) discussion, "The Modern Prose
Style" (Chapter IX), 273-320.

59

In The Seventeenth Century Background (1934), a study of

 

the influence of the seventeenth century scientific
revolution on religion and poetry, Basil Willey makes the
same point when he remarks, on the Royal Society's
resolution (in Sprat's words) ”to separate the knowledge‘
of Nature from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of
Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables," that
No clearer proclamation could be desired of the
victory of the new world-picture, the fact-world,
over the older worlds of traditional feeling.
(213)
Willey cites especially the influence exerted on the
literature and prose style of succceeding times of a
Cartesian attitude toward language. Rene Descartes'
"insistence upon sound and clear Reason, and clear and
distinct ideas, and, in general, the mathematical lucidity
of his spirit and writings, find their counterpart in the
general set of that time towards prose and good sense, and
in the reaction against the metaphysical tradition in
poetry” (89). In his 1932 essay ”Science and Language in
England of the Mid-Seventeenth Century” (143-160) Jones
argues that it is finally from the seventeenth-century
experimentalists' regard of language with suspicion and
distrust that our modern stylistic litany has issued:
There should be little figurative language,

especially metaphors, which falsely describe

60
actions and things. There should be no verbal
superfluity, but rather an economy of words
sufficient to match exactly the phenomenon.
Words should be the plainest possible, with
intelligible, clear, and unequivocal meanings,
preferably common words which are closer to
material realities. There should be no emphasis
upon or interest in the mode of expression for
its own sake. Rhetorical ornaments and sheer
delight in language represent a pernicious
misplacing of emphasis, and in the end destroy
the solid and fruitful elements in knowledge.
(157)

A number of other writers over the past 50 years,
beside R. F. Jones and Robert Adolph, have expressed their
belief in the major influence of a scientific
utilitarianism in the shaping of modern prose, including
S. Michael Halloran, Merrill D. Whitburn, and Richard A.
Lanham.50 The work of Halloran and Whitburn on prose
style addresses the latest development in the evolution of

a scientific style of discourse, a development going.

 

50 See for instance Lanham's (1974) discussion of
"poetic prose," where he writes that

No fundamental difference separates fictional
from nonfictional prose, just as none divides
prose and poetry. Any attitude, or combination
of attitudes, may inform either pair, although
perhaps the scientific attitude most often
informs nonfictional prose. (96, emphasis added)

61
beyond the taking root of a strong faith in its proposed
standard of "correctness" to its widespread

institutionalization. The authors illustrate this

 

development in business, industry, and government:
Former President Carter's executive order 12044
mandated that regulations be ‘as simple and clear
as possible', and the Office of Management and
Budget is currently striving to carry out his
order by promoting plain English in federal
agencies. HR 6410, a bill that calls for
sweeping revision of the writing done by both the
federal government and organizations dealing with
the federal government, was recently signed into
law. Laws calling for the use of plain language
are on the books or under consideration in fully
half the states. Banks are simplifying their
loan forms, insurance companies their policies,
and realtors their contracts. Industries like
IBM, Bell Laboratories, United Technologies,
Sunstrand Aviation, and General Motors are making
major commitments to promote plain language in

their publications. (1982, 58)51

 

51 The authors argue that "the growing concern for
plain and effective communication in technology, business,
and public affairs should be met by a reaffirmation of
human judgment as superior to any quantitative
methodology" (71). Such a reaffirmation would in their
view entail our adherence to Cicero's "symphonic” notion
of style rather than to some generic ”all-purpose"

62

This progressive regularization of plain English,
especially in government and private business, is noted
also by Janice C. Redish (1985) in her overview of the
development in the 19705 and progress in the 19805 of "The
Plain English Movement."52 The latter is defined by
Redish as "the effort to simplify the language in legal,
government, business, and academic documents" (125).
"Plain English," she writes,

means writing that is straightforward, that reads

as if it were spoken. It means writing that

is unadorned with archaic, multisyllabic words

and majestic turns of phrase that even educated

readers cannot understand. Plain English is

 

stylistic ideal admitting the current bias for a
depersonalized plainness. While the current plain style
movement in government and business may be a different
kind of plain style than that promulgated by the the
modern scientists, Halloran and Whitburn do point out that
researchers and communicators of our time, ”in attempting
to make style amenable to mathematical treatment, are
taking fundamental steps similar to those taken by Newton
and other scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth
century." Further, terms like ”plain language” and "plain
English, they note, "echo both the seventeenth-century
term ‘plain style' . . . and the much older notion of a
plain style found in classical rhetorical theory. We
believe that recent thinking about plain language lg
rooted in the same simplistic positivism as seventeenth-
century views on the plain style" (my emphasis).

 

 

52 Unlike Halloran and Whitburn, who identify the
plain style with the rise of modern science, Redish does
not address at all the question of intellectual origin of
the plain style. See also Jacqueline M. Dorney's ERIC/RC8
report on "The Plain English Movement” (1988), which also
focusses on plain language in government and business, but
alludes as well to the connection with technical
scientific writing.

63

clear, direct, and simple; but good plain English

has both clarity and grace (to borrow the title

of Joseph Williams' excellent new English

textbook). (125)
While the authors just quoted all recognize the intense
pressure in our society for plain discourse, they are
divided on their view of that pressure. Halloran and
Whitburn are concerned with maintaining a Ciceronian
balance in stylistic character, a balance that preserves
the human, individualistic element of discourse; Redish's
emphasis, on the other hand, is on utility, on language as
a conveyor of information.53

The evolution of a scientific prose style tells the

story of an ideological and attitudinal clash over the
proper limits (Sprat's ”right practice") in languaging
behavior. In using a phrase like "languaging behavior," I
do not mean to reduce the problem to sociobiology.
Richard Lanham risks doing this, I believe, in his
proposal of a ”post-Darwinian humanism" which relies on
putative genetic predispositions in language behavior--

along the intentional vectors of play, game, and purpose--

 

53 Parallel and closely associated with Redish's
defense of plain English, but applied in a wider context,
is the empirical calculation of such notions as "maximal
readability” (Hirsch, 1977) and “syntactic fluency“
(Mellon, 1969). There is of course a "counter-movement,“
calling for the reaffirmation of a personal style; beside
Halloran and Whitburn, one may include in this group such
writers as George Kennedy, Ken Macrorie, and Richard
Lanham.

64

which regulate a human ”biogrammar."54 Lanham subscribes
to a Wilsonian sociobiolgy that regards the use of
language (stylistic orientation included) ethologically,
as having evolved in a natural phylogenetic sense.55 Such
a perspective, he argues, should prove useful in the
forging of an urgently needed ”post-Darwinian synthesis"
which,

by giving us a new way to think about human

behavior, also gives us a new way to think about

rhetoric, about literature, and about their

relationship, as that works itself out in the

university curriculum. These three worlds--

composition, literature, and humanist curriculum

 

54 A more recent example of this attempted
biologization of rhetoric, or synthesis of rhetoric
and biology, is the discussion by Winterowd (1986, 11-24)
of a "gene-scene dialectic," which, while more thorough
and provocative in its scientific detail than Lanham's
proposed synthesis, is certainly no more conclusive,
except for his point about the obvious dependence of
language on certain neurophysiological processes.

55 On sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of
organismic (including human) behavior, see E. O. Wilson's
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and his popular
work on sociobiologic theory On Human Nature (1978).
Wilson makes many references to human language, the
evolution of which he views as adaptive in the Darwinian
sense. Sociobiologists have been severely criticized by
biologists, philosophers, and others who view them as
biological determinists (in their neglect of environmental
influences on behavior). Wilson begins his final and
controversial chapter of Sociobiology--titled “Man: From
Sociobiology to Sociology“--with the proposition that the
social sciences and the humanities (including literature)
be viewed as specialized branches of biology, as ”the
research protocols of human ethology" (547). Ethology is
the study of animal behavior in its natural habitats.

 

65

--are being revitalized by the same evolutionary

theory of behavior, and that revolution provides,

finally, the central means of relating them.

(1983, x)
My own use of the word ”evolution" in this chapter's title
differs from Lanham's use in that it does not presuppose
the influence of a deterministic ethology, and refers
instead to the historical development, in the competitive
marketplace of ideas, of our culture's attitude toward
style and the uses of language.

It is in just this context of stylistic attitude,

minus the behavioral biology framework, that Lanham views

the conflict over style in Style: An Anti-Textbook

 

(1974).56 The traditional Ciceronian tri-partite, high-

middle-low division of style is inadequate, Lanham first

asserts, because its great vagueness makes it
nearly always applicable--especially so if you
redefine it thoroughly, either morally or
affectively. You can even adapt it to the
dictates of clarity and scientific prose. The
high style becomes bad, the middle good, and the
low ‘colloquial'. . . . Because [the tripartite

division] renders comparison invidious, it

 

55 This work was published one year prior to the
appearance of Edward O. Wilson's controversial text,
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which ignited a new form
or the familiar “nature versus nurture" debate.

 

66
introduces the dispute that invidious comparison
inevitably brings. It cannot just describe, it
must evaluate. Which purposes are best? Which
subjects most serious? Who, what, most moral?
More than this, it has repeatedly proved itself'
tone-deaf. It can tell you what was said and
explain why it was said that way, but it seldom
reveals the spirit in which it was said. It
defines badly the kind of agreement struck
between writer and reader. It forces us,
finally, to take an attitude toward style,
whether the attitude be formal (diction, syntax,
density of figures), moral (as with Frye's
definition), or scientific. (46-47, emphasis
original)
What Lanham then proposes is a new, bi-partite basis for
characterizing style, one that does not carry preconceived
attitudes but aims instead to measure the psychological
variable of "stylistic self-consciousness,” asking:
To what degree does a writer acknowledge his

style as a style? To what degree are we to feel

 

the style as such? To what degree, that is, does
the style realize itself as opaque, as--the enemy
of clarity--a style to be looked at rather than
through? (47, emphases original)

In this at-through stylistic duality (or spectrum of

67

options) one will again recognize the ESE versus ygppa
quandary of the pivotal period in intellectual history
encompassing the educational reforms of Ramus and Bacon--
but in a supposedly neutral context, one which does not
fall prey to biased attitudinizing. For Lanham, the
fundamental consideration regarding style requires only a
stylistic judgement:

How should we attend to or I'take" the style?

Does it diminish into insignificance on the right

or does it move left, growing so large in our

consciousness as to become the subject? (54)

Thus, the evolution of a scientific prose style may

be viewed as a struggle for recognition and dominance of
an empiricist attitude toward style which, in Lanham's
model, draws attention to its subject--material/factual
reality--to a degree which in effect seeks to disallow
style (Ramist rhetoric) as an important element in
scientific discourse and, if the Baconian loyalists had
their way, in popular discourse generally. This aspect of
the evolution of a scientific prose style--i.e., its
competitive struggle with what might be called, for lack
of more precise language, a humanistic style--is of course
at the center of our story. It is symbolic of the deeper
problem which C. P. Snow embodied in his famous metaphor
of the two cultures. Essentially, the conflict is rooted

in differences in world-view which have have led, not to a

68
working synthesis, but instead to a struggle for
intellectual sovereignty among the competing pictures of
reality. Consequently, an artificial schism (something

like a corpus callosum) has been perpetuated in our

 

intellectual tradition, with the competing parties
emphasizing their special value practically to the point
of caricature. (Yet, paradoxically, as will be seen in
the following chapters, there has always existed between
rhetoric and the new science a vital complementarity.)

I would like to reiterate here, as a final note,
that my chief aim in this chapter has been two-fold: to
argue for a Ramus-Bacon-Royal Society connection in the
genesis and evolution of a scientific plain style, and to
suggest that the change in stylistic orientation between
Bacon's and Sprat's time has survived through the
centuries to form the basis for the current premium placed
on plain discourse, not only in the spheres of government
and business, but also in the sphere of education (i.e.,
writing instruction). It is worth noting, for instance,
that in the eighteenth century the battle with regard to
manner versus matter in discourse is reflected in the
opposing sides taken by the perspicuitists, represented by

such works as George Campbell's 1776 The Philosophy of

 

Composition and Hugh Blair's 1783 Lectures on Rhetoric and

 

 

Belles Lettres, and the elocutionists, whose

representative works include John Holmes' 1739 The Art of

 

69

Rhetoric Made Easy and John Sterling's 1788 A System of

 

 

Rhetorick in a Method Entirely New. In his discussion of

 

these two movements, Winterowd (1968) writes that Holmes,
like other elocutionists, "made a clear distinction
between logic and rhetoric, the same kind of division that
Ramus made two hundred years earlier. To the
elocutionists, manner was virtually the all" (59). For
Winterowd, the rationalistic attitude toward discourse
expressed in the writings of Blair and Campbell are the
culmination of the plainness ethic voiced by Sprat,
Wilkins, and the Royal Society in the third quarter of the
seventeeth century. "Together," continues Winterowd,
the Aristotelianism of the rationalists and the
Ciceronianism of the elocutionists constituted
the scene from which a modern rhetoric might
emerge. Longinus had provided the doctrine of
the sublime, the viaticum whereby matter and
manner could be separated. Rationalism posited
psychological theories that gave philosophical
credence of the doctrine of perspicuity and the
plain style. And the elocutionists brought a
kind of rhetoric to the masses--a kind of
rhetoric that concerned itself largely with the
‘flowers' of discourse. (74-75)
In the neoclassical age of the eighteenth century, he

suggests, are clearly defined the rhetorical problems of

70
our age, an age which still awaits the synthesis of a new
rhetoric, to be molded in part from the developing
knowledge in linguistics and psycholinguistics.

There are comforting indications that an important
change has been occurring during the past 30 years in the
meaning of the word "conflict" in reference to the
relationship between the humanistic-rhetorical and
scientific traditions. The shift in meaning is from the
customary sense of combativeness to a positive, post-
modern connotation of an ongoing dialectical exchange that

is constructive.57 In this emergent intellectual climate,

 

stylistic orientation is a matter of conscious personal
and circumstantial choice rather than a pressure to
conform to some universal ideal of plainness. The
complementarities and reciprocities of humanistic and
scientific styles, rather than their structural-

intentional differences, becomes the focus. Such a change

 

57 See Herbert Dingle (1955), who points out that the
destructive side of the friction between art and science
has been ameliorated, if not totally dissipated, by the
recognition in our century of more than one order of truth
and beauty. (Hence, one might add, I. A. Richards' later
use of the plural forms 'poetries and sciences.') This
new intellectual climate is represented by such dialogues
as those imagined by Bronowski (1965) and Schlossberg
(1973), mentioned earlier. A salient example of the new
attitude from my college experience (circa 1981) is a
Literature and Psychology course, team-taught by a
literary critic and an experimental psychologist whose
pedagogical style was to draw the class into their term-
long dialogue, aiming to weave together into a working
historical unity the scientific and literary world-
pictures.

71

means, for instance, the recognition that the style of
scientific prose is in actuality not limited to that
demanded by the repOrtage of laboratory results or by
technical theoretical discussions. Thus, today we
introduce our freshman composition and scientific writing
students to the stylistic diversity exhibited by the
popular works of scientists,58 and to the literary works
of those scientists who have allowed their science the
linguistic freedom of excursions into the world of
fiction. In the broader picture, the fiction and poetry
written by scientists forms part of the perennial thematic
presence of science in the fiction, poetry, and drama of
western culture generally,59 to which considerations, and
their illustration, I return in Chapters Two and Three.

To reiterate, then, as I proceed to a discussion of
the rhetorical range of scientific writing, there are
three dimensions of the evolution of scientific writing
which are separable for individual consideration. First--
the chief concern of this chapter--is the stylistic
dimension, with respect to which I have explored the
possibility of a Ramus-Bacon connection in the rise of a

scientific plain style; it is this modern plain style, I

 

53 See, e.g., the anthologies by Bowen and Mazzeo
(1979) and Lynch and Swanzey (1981).

59 See, e.g., Crum (1931), Nicolson (1956), Franklin
(1966), Jones (1966), Heath-Stubbs and Salman (1984),
Gordon (1985), and Digby and Brier (1985).

72
have also suggested, which is intimately associated with
the plain English movement of the past 15 years. The
second major aspect of the evolution of scientific writing
becomes evident when the definition of scientific writing
is broadened to include imaginative 1iterature--fiction,
poetry, and drama--involving science as a central concern.
These first two aspects of the evolution of scientific
writing--its development as a style and as a part of the
literary tradition--place writing associated with science

in its proper rhetorical context. The third aspect of the

 

evolution of scientific writing involves its emergence,
especially since the 19605, as a pedagogical
specialization in the college curriculum (see Verbit,
1983). This last topic is addressed in Chapter Three,
where I discuss the importance of the study of scientific
writing in relation to liberal education; that chapter
argues for the important role of English studies, whose
special focus is on language, in exploring and imparting a
clear and balanced sense of the historical struggle
between the humanistic and scientific traditions, and of
their complementary relations in the context of learning

and rhetoric.

72

CHAPTER II
THE RHETORICAL RANGE AND DIVERSITY OF SCIENTISTS

AS WRITERS

Scientists who view their writing in literary or
rhetorical terms are exceptions to the norm. In a short
essay addressing the question "What is good scientific
writing?", written for a peer audience of medical writers,
physician Charles G. Roland observes that as a consequence
of the dissociation of science from the humanities
physicians [and by implication laboratory
scientists] seem to think that scientific
writing is not a literary form; the very word
‘literary' frightens many, who believe that
science is objective while literature is
subjective. They pursue this belief to its
questionably logical conclusion by supposing that
science is gply objective, and that therefore it
must be antiliterary. (1971, 3-4, emphasis
original)

What Roland means by ”literary,“ in the context of

scientific writing, is "the ability to write clearly,

unequivocally, concisely, and pleasingly" (3). His

73

74

conception of good scientific writing boils down to the
familiar strictures of the plain style, with the notable
addition of "pleasingly." Though Roland does not explain
his use of "pleasingly" in connection with what he means
by "literary," it seems clear that by good scientific
writing he also means good scientific rhetoric. Thus,
were it not for the relative inaccessibility to him (as a
scientist) of the concept of rhetorical art, he might have
said that it is wrong as well to think of science, and of
scientific writing, as anti- or non-rhetorical.60

The belief that science and rhetoric (as a humanistic
discipline) are "opposites"--a belief indirectly
encouraged by Snow's Rede Lecture--suggests the equally
flawed view that these two intellectual arts are totally
separable and mutually exclusive ways of learning and
thinking. In a review of Dominick LaCapra's History and
Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), Steven Weiland
notes how, in drawing attention to the rhetorical nature
of historiography, LaCapra points the way toward a
parallel awakening with respect to the way science and
rhetoric are perceived to relate to one another:

It is as false, LaCapra insists, to hold

science and rhetoric to be opposites as it is to

 

50 In the broadest view of rhetoric as the writer's
manipulation of language to achieve an intended effect on
a particular audience, even the aim to ”please”
stylistically is a rhetorical strategy.

75
claim that a plain style is the only acceptable
one for truth-seeking in prose. To be scientific
and anti-rhetoric, he says, amounts to ‘a self-
denying quest for a certain rhetoric, a rhetoric
unadorned by figures, unmoved by emotion,
unclouded by images, and universalistic in its
conceptual or mathematical scope' (42). (1987,
822)
In this chapter I develop the alternative view that, far
from being isolable from rhetoric, scientific writing has
a rhetorical framework of its own, one that is contiguous
with the classical rhetorical tradition in several
fundamental ways. There are a number of studies in the
”rhetoric of science“ literature which show for instance
that, even in their technical reports, scientists engage

in argumentation (versus merely reporting), project a

 

rhetorical gthgg, and use metaphoric language. Though my
focus initially is on technical scientific writing, I
define "scientific writing“ broadly enough to include
other kinds of writing by scientists, such as science
popularization and scientific fiction, which I discuss
later in the chapter.61 Beyond the understanding that

they must "write up" their experimental findings, and

 

51 One aspect of scientific rhetoric which I do not
discuss here, but which is important to note, is the use
of persuasive strategies in public deliberation--grant
proposals, convention papers, and public debate (Wander,
1976).

76
submit them for publication in a standardized format--
i.e., introduction, methods and materials, results, and
discussion--scientists are not inclined to discuss amongst
themselves such matters as the style, personality, or the
persuasive power of their research reports. Their ‘
attitude is that the facts, accurately and fully
presented, speak for themselves. Yet, as Susanne Langer
(1957) noted, even a ”fact" is not so much Eggpg as it is
m2g3--it is "an intellectually formulated event, whether
the formulation be performed by a process of sheer vision,
verbal interpretation, or practical response” (269,
emphasis original). In the context of Langer's
definition, a fact is essentially an argument for the view
of reality constructed by the fact-maker.

In The Manufacture of Knowledge, Karin D. Knorr-

 

Cetina argues that a scientific research “report” is in
actuality a rhetorically decontextualized artifact which,
through a selection process involving ghgp is told and hp!
it is told, actually presents a "disfigured" or
"perverted" version of the full social--and rhetorical--
context of laboratory activity. What is not visible in
the written product of the research process is the web of
more subjective social interactions--the oral rhetoric--
among the group of scientists who participate in various
capacities (e.g., as advisors, technical assistants, and

principal researchers) as the experimental work moves

77
closer to its final written form. She demonstrates how,
in preparing technical reports, scientists use a number of
"rhetorical strategies for objectification," including
paragraph organization, choice of vocabulary, grammatical
structure (such as use of passive voice and regal we),
”redoubling" (offering both sides of an argument), and
avoidance of explicit value statements.

As a social-anthropological study of the connection
between what happens in the laboratory and how that
process is rhetorically re-contextualized or transformed
in its written representation, Knorr-Cetina's analysis of
a specific scientific paper (one of the few such studies
available) is remarkable for its completeness and
detail.62 The paper she dissects deals with an
alternative method for protein precipitation for use in
protein recovery, and is titled "Potato Protein
Concentrates: The Influence of Various Methods of

Recovery Upon Yield, Compositional and Functional

 

62 See Chapter 5 of her book, “The Scientist as
Literary Reasoner, Or the Transformation of Laboratory
Reason,“ 94-135. The unique aspect of her study is the
complete access she had--while the experimental work was
in progress--to both the scientists involved and the many
drafts (16 in all) which the paper she analyzes underwent
up to its publication. In her presentation, Knorr-Cetina
juxtaposes interview responses of the principal scientist
involved, a protein chemist, with the many specific
changes made in his report as its final draft emerged.

78
Characteristics."63 In comparing the original draft with
the published version of the paper, Knorr-Cetina
identifies three major strategies of modification:

deletion of particular statements, change in modality of

 

certain assertions, and reshuffling of the original

 

statements. These changes are especially evident and
important in the paper's Introduction, for, as Knorr-
Cetina shows, it is here that laboratory reasoning is re-
cast, "purged of personal interests and situational
contingencies,” by the rhetorical demands of writing for
publication; changes made in later sections of the paper
are determined in turn by the new rhetorical framework
constructed in the Introduction.64

In the case of the "Potato” paper, the published
version of its Introduction 'dissimulates the dramatic
emphasis and straightforwardness found in version 1
[through] . . . a series of modifications which run
counter to the rhetoric of the original presentation"

(102). Many specific examples are provided by Knorr-

 

53 Knorr-Cetina makes available in Appendices to her
book (154-172) the entire first draft and the final,
published version of the paper, which appeared in 1978.

54 Knorr-Cetina shares Medawar's view that scientists
are ”always telling stories,” and asserts that the
Introduction of a scientific paper 'is complete with
respect to such conventional elements of literary
structure as tension and resolution, identification of
good and bad, and organized development of action.
Susequent sections function more as appendices to this
structure than as the unfolding of a dramatic structure”
(100).

79
Cetina of deletions, changes in modality, and
rearrangements of statements to demonstrate the kind of

rhetorical transformation she postulates. Deletions of

 

statements typically are of two kinds,
either arguments which essentially reinforced a
certain point, or assertions considered ‘weak' or
‘dangerous' . . . For example, four of the
fourteen statements eliminated from the first-
version text accentuated the negative value of
the prevailing protein recovery method by
commenting on its disadvantages or the
‘advantages' of FeCl3 as a ‘major' alternative.
Another group of eliminated statements reinforced
a previous point, such as the phrase, ‘if the
remaining 70-80% could be converted into
nutrients . . .' which immediately followed the
phrase ‘According to Kramer and Krull (1977) only
20-30% of the vegetable plants are utilized
directly for human consumption . . .'. The
former statement was deleted because it was
‘obvious'. Yet the latter statement did not meet
with approval either. It was later deleted as a
‘dangerous' claim which was expected to generate
opposition and disbelief. (102)

A similar weakening or ”softening" of the dramatic

character of the Introduction is effected by the other two

80
major types of changes. The modality of certain
statements was changed ”from the necessary to the
possible" and generally from strongly to weakly made
assertions:
Instead of saying that something ‘is' the case,
we find that ‘it has been suggested as possible';
instead of ‘should', we find ‘could'.
Expressions like ‘mainly' are watered down to
‘usually' or ‘commonly', and the ‘good'
solubility of PPC becomes merely ‘enhanced'. The
scientists either hold back claims, or couch them
in terms which denote hesitation and doubt. (102)

The reshuffling of statements in the original Introduction

 

over subsequent drafts leads, in Knorr-Cetina's view, to a
loss of clarity and straightforwardness; the original
Introduction had a paragraph structure moving from the
general to specific, while in the published version of the
Introduction the paragraph organization is “nested" (i.e.,
previous topics are resumed later). Consequently,

the final Introduction proceeds by a spiral-like

hedging in on the purpose it gives to the study.

 

This hedging in is accentuated by the softened
surface of propositions produced by [modality
changes], with the result that any dramatic
climax is diffused and difficult to identify.

(102-103)

81

Caution must be exercised in generalizing from what
happens, rhetorically Speaking, in the writing up of one
particular paper to any kind of statement which is
descriptive of the scientific writing process as a whole.
What does seem generalizable from Knorr-Cetina's study is
that the writing of a scientific paper is a process that
involves, no less than in other kinds of writing, the

making of rhetorical choices--as in the deletion of value

 

judgments, the wording of assertions, or the relative
position of particular statements; in other words,
scientists as writers are also rhetors.65 In the sense
used by Halloran and Whitburn (1982), technical scientific
writing is a rhetorical orchestration shaped by specific
motives and for specific effects on the reader.

Viewing the technical writing of scientists in a

rhetorical light in no sense implies an act of deliberate

 

55 That scientists are rhetors in the act of
composing laboratory reports does not presuppose that all
scientific activity is fundamentally rhetorica1--any more
than, analogously, literary/rhetorical studies are
fundamentally scientific simply because, say, language
abilities are in part biologically-based (in the sense
that humans inherit neural language centers), or because
linguists like Noam Chomsky have developed empirical
models of language structure-function relationships, or
even because one may be able to describe objectively and
systematically, as Northrop Frye has asserted, how
literature "works." Rhetoric has its undeniable place in
science just as, reciprocally, science certainly has its
place in literature (e.g., thematically, metaphorically).
The delineation of these reciprocal relationships is a
large part of the formidable challenge of arriving at a
deeper understanding of the relative role of science and
literary creativity in human learning and maturation.

82
deception or misrepresentation by scientists in the
communication of their research.66 Herbert W. Simons
(1980) rightly criticizes the frequent appearance in the
rhetoric of science literature of the image of the
scientist as a “rhetor in disguise,"
one who falsely pretends to the status of
nonrhetor and thereby renders his rhetoric
deceptive; one, moreover, who is not above
engaging in such allegedly sophistic practices as
masking self-serving motives behind a vocabulary
of legitimizing motives or subtly promoting
partisan values in the guise of being
informative. (115)
The problem, as Simons points out, is with the words "in
disguise.” Why should scientific rhetors be any more (or
less) liable to misuse rhetorical art than any other
classification of rhetor one may choose to define?
What is revealed and objectified by detailed analyses,

like Knorr-Cetina's, of specific technical reports is a

 

55 Though it is interesting that Medawar (1982)
states that it is practically impossible to gain an
insight into how scientific methodology operates by simply
reading journal papers since they "not merely conceal but
actively misrepresent the reasoning that goes into the
work they describe” (132). On this point, he cites Karl
Popper's ”Science: Problems, Aims, Responsibilities”
(Federation Proceedings, 22: 961-972, 1963) and his own
broadcastgfIs the Scientific Paper a Fraud?“ (Listener,
September 1963). The best way to understand what
scientists do in the laboratory, Medawar suggests, is by
listening to the laboratory oracy itself (as Knorr-Cetina
has done).

 

83
way of communicating within one specialized language
community.

The observation of a characteristic manner of
handling the language by scientists, a manner grounded in
a traditional value system of its own, suggests another
aspect of the rhetorical nature of technical scientific
writing--namely, that such writing projects a distinctive

persona or ethos.67 How an ethos is projected in

 

67 Although ”persona" is a literary and "ethos" a
rhetorical term, their senses merge in that both terms
entail choices with respect to human values, both deal
with character and the motives of human conduct. See Paul
Newell Campbell (1967), who argues that scientists
construct personae which are a reflection of the
attitudes, points of view, and values of the writer. For
Campbell, the persona is more than merely a literary
product; it is a personality that is created in the act of
communication. "What is true of the actor is also true of
our language," he writes,

for on one level, our language, our discourse, is
a dramatic, a presentational form that excludes
the negative. At bottom, our discourse is always
poetic and rhetorical, always formally
expressive, attitudinal, and hortatory; i.e., we
are always symbolizing for the joy of
symbolizing, and we are always taking points of
view, and expressing attitides, never taking no-
point-of—view or expressing nonattitudes. Thus,
our discourse, scientific or otherwise, can only
display those attitudes we do, in fact,
demonstrate, for on the level on which to
discourse is to perform, to enact, we can only
enact those attitudes, beliefs, biases, opinions
that constitute the personae of such discourse.
(404)
Campbell's performative view of discourse limits the
meaning of "plainness" in scientific writing. While it
poses no difficulty to the notion of scientific writing as
a style of prose that is straightforward and simple in its
phrasing, and that draws greater attention to its subject
than to its words, it rejects the possibility that
scientists can write in a manner that totally excludes the
personal, sentient element of human communication.

84

technical scientific writing is illustrated by 8. Michael
Halloran's (1984) case study of the 1953 Nature article,
titled "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” in
which James Watson and Francis Crick proposed their famous
”double helix" genetic model. Halloran believes that,
both argumentatively and stylistically, the Watson-Crick
paper "articulates a recognizable public persona . . . a

particular image of the scientist speaking, within a

 

broader set of more vague and general norms that apply to
all scientific discourse“ (75, emphasis original).68
Argumentatively, Watson and Crick support their
proposed DNA structure in three major ways, ways which
serve not merely to present the experimental data,
Halloran claims, but to offer, alongside the proposed

genetic model, "a model of the scientist, of how he ought

 

58 Like Campbell (1975), Simons (1978) and others,
Halloran sees these rhetorical norms--which together
comprise a scientific ethos--in terms of Kuhnian
paradigms. The kinds of questions a Kuhnian rhetorician
should ask, according to Simons, includes the following:

How in particular do paradigms gain acceptance?
By what strategems and through what channels are
theoretical innovations diffused? In the absence
of fully formalized rules, what role is played by
exemplars and by enthymematic appeals? How is
the language of one paradigm translated into the
language of another? (129)
Halloran's study of the Watson-Crick paper suggests
preliminary, working answers to such questions. As to the
first of these questions, for instance, Halloran believes
that, while it is undeniably the technical particulars of
the double-helix model which have ultimately determined
its importance, the ethical-rhetorical aspect of Watson
and Crick's work, its ethos, “contributed to the speed
with which their model of DNA gained prominence as a
theory” (78).

85
to hold ideas and present them to his peers" (78). The
chief argument used by Watson and Crick--an implicit
appeal to the theoretical elegance of the base-pairing
mechanism holding the two DNA helices together--'is in
effect an enthymeme whose missing premise is a scientific
tgpgs so basic and powerful that it would be gauche in the
extreme to state it openly in a technical paper” (73).69
The second major argument offered by Watson and Crick,
relating to the observed base-pair ratios in their DNA
model, is also implicitly presented and left for the
reader to make the connection with the first (base-pairing
mechanism) argument; this constitutes for Halloran
"another enthymeme resting on the pgpgg of explanatory
power." The third and final argument--which points out
the inconsistency of their proposed structure with
available experimental data--is the only explicitly
stated argument; however, like the other two arguments, it
is carefully qualified and understated. Thus,
rhetorically, the paper's manner of argumentation
communicates, in Halloran's view, 'a sense of supreme
confidence . . . [and] the arguments in support of the

model are assumed to be so persuasive that they need no

 

59 Halloran cites H. F. Judson's observation, in
The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in
Biology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, 196-198),
that Watson's appeal to the reader's sense of theoretical
elegance is made explicit in The Doublegelix: ”a
structure this pretty just had to exist.”

 

 

 

86
bolstering or emphasis" (74).

Stylistically, Halloran notes that the salient
feature of the paper is its conscibusly contrived ”genteel
tone," especially when compared to the arrogant attitude
surrounding the discovery that is expressed in Watson's

own account in The Double Helix (1968).70 ”If we can

 

believe The Double Helix," writes Halloran, "the genteel

 

style of Watson and Crick's first published paper reflects
a rhetorical persona, perhaps fabricated with a bit of
intentional, tongue-in-cheek irony; in the flesh they were
obstreperous and irreverent" (74). Halloran notes that
the authors' self-consciously genteel style, combined with
their avoidance of the conventional passive style, invests
their prose with a highly personal tone that is unusual in
technical scientific writing, and that this personal

dimension--this individual ethos--evident in their paper

 

70 See the edition by Gunther S. Stent (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1980), which includes useful commentary and
reviews. The diction of qualification and understatement
evident in the Watson-Crick paper contrasts sharply with
Watson's own account of the discovery, Halloran points
out, which shows that he and Crick were astonished and
jubilant at the great blunder (involving elementary
chemical principles) that they found in Linus Pauling's
proposed DNA model. Examples given by Halloran of the
genteel wording used in the Watson-Crick paper are such
phrases as “We wish to so est a structure . . . ,' “in
our opinion," "we Believe,3 'it is not clear," and "appear
to be.“ Finally, for Halloran, in the famous concluding
sentence of the paper “the genteel style becomes a
transparent burlesque . . . One can almost feel the elbow
in one's ribs: ‘It has not escaped our notice', Watson
and Crick wrote, ‘that the specific pairing we have
postulated suggests a possible copying mechanism for the
genetic material'."

87
holds important implications for rhetorical studies of
scientific discourse: namely, that
except at the most general level, it may be
misleading to speak of phg rhetoric of science
. . . that other particular cases of scientific
rhetoric will exhibit their own peculiarities. A
detailed understanding of the rhetoric of science
will have to include some sense of the
permissible range of variation. To achieve this
we need a body of critical literature on
particular cases of scientific discourse. (80-

81)71

 

71 Halloran believes that what is needed is a
critical approach which Edwin Black (1980) calls emic:
"criticism that begins with the particular instance and
aims toward the development of theories comprehending more
general principles that operate across larger bodies of
discourse" (81). Halloran's suggestion that it is wrong
to speak of phg rhetoric of science is complemented by
Medawar's (1967) advise against believing in such a thing
as phg scientist:

Scientists are people of very dissimilar
temperaments doing different things in very
different ways. Among scientists are collectors,
classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are
detectives by temperament and many are explorers;
some are artists and others artisans. There are
poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and
even a few mystics. What sort of mind or
temperament can all these people be supposed to
have in common? Obligative scientists must be
very rare, and most people who are in fact
scientists could easily have been something else
instead. (1967, 132, emphasis original)
Though it is possible and useful to delineate certain aims
and values shared by scientists as a community, as Jacob
Bronowski attempted to do, scientists are still individual
human beings whose individual perculiarities find
expression, in Halloran's view, along with the technical

 

88
Halloran seems to be trying to reconcile the paradigmatic
View of scientific activity with the inviduality and
diversity of human expression. Thus, while he believes
that the Watson-Crick EEEQE has come to serve as a
paradigm for other scientists, he also recognizes (and
encourages the development of) the personal and unique
aspect of scientists as writers.

To illustrate the stylistic variation in scientific
writing--and the differences in what perceives as the old
and new paradigms--Halloran compares the Watson-Crick
paper with the earlier article by Oswald Avery et al. on
the crucial role of DNA in heredity72; as a rhetorically
sophisticated construct--i.e. as a confident, yet
deliberately understated, attention-getting introduction
to the still-to-come details of what they well knew to be
a great discovery--the 1953 paper

presumes an understanding of science as a human

community in which neither facts nor ideas speak

 

side of their scientific writing. Relevant to Black's
emic approach are the numerous case studies of the oral
rhetoric essential to laboratory research, which
supplement analyses of the written texts produced by
scientists; see for instance Greg Myers' "Writing Research
and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: A Review of
Three New Books," Collegg English, 48: 595-610, October
1986. (Knorr-Cetina's study, cited earlier, does combine
analysis of both oral and written laboratory rhetoric.)

 

 

72 Oswald T. Avery, Colin M. Macleod, and Maclyn
McCarty, "Studies on the Chemical Nature of the Substance
Inducing Transformation of Pneumococcal Types,” Journal of
Experimental Medicine, 12: 137-158, 1944.

 

 

89
for themselves, and the attention of an audience
must be courted. By contrast, Avery and his
colleagues present their work in a single
technical paper structured in a reportorial
pattern which implies that facts g9 speak for
themselves. Their strategy seems to presume that
the work of the scientist is simply to give
oneself up to the facts. Avery speaks from
within an essentially positivisitic, pre-Kuhnian
view of science, Watson and Crick from within

what Frederick Suppe [in The Structure of

 

Scientific Theories] calls a Weltanschauungen

 

 

view. They recognize that a discipline includes
tacit assumptions about what is and what is not a
legitimate question, and that in order to gain a
hearing for a new theory, one may have to suggest
what use the theory might have, what new
questions it might pose and answer, what new
lines of research it might open up. (77-78)
The contrast between the Avery et al. and Watson-Crick
papers, I would also suggest, is a consequence of the
tacit understanding and acceptance by the later authors of
the importance of rhetorical art in the shaping of
scientific discourse.
Beside engaging in rhetorical argumentation (vs.

merely reporting data) and projecting a scientific ethos

90
in their discourse, scientists as writers rely on another
aspect of rhetorical art in developing and communicating
scientific concepts: figurative language. As with the
argumentative and ethical aspects of scientific discourse,
the use by scientists of figurative language shows that ’
technical scientific communication goes beyond the
presentation of purely objective information. ”No
synthesis could ever be achieved, no models postulated, no
paradigms established," write Halloran and Bradford
(1984),
if science relied wholly upon ‘careful
observation' for its theories. Model-building
requires an inductive leap; carefully recorded
examples must be synthesized into a logical
premise, and then be further verified and
expanded by traditional scientific method. For
this, science must exploit the power of metaphor;
it must shape its expectations, choose its
experiments, and interpret its data in a realm of
thought outside the literal world. (183)
It is true that scientists traditionally have rejected the
use of figurative and metaphoric expression, as
exemplified by the vituperations of Thomas Sprat.
However, in his discussion of the attitude of contemporary
scientists toward the use of metaphor in theories, Robert

R. Hoffman (1980) makes two important points. First,

91
scientists are not in complete agreement over the place of
metaphoric expression in science. Physicist Rene Duhem
and computer scientist M. A. Arbib are examples of
critical attitudes--pointing to the ambiguity or open-
endedness of metaphors--whi1e the nineteenth century
physicists James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday
acknowledged and encouraged the use of metaphor in
science. Maxwell believed that metaphors are not only
"legitimate products of science, but capable of generating

science in turn."73

 

73 Quoted by Hoffman from Maxwell's "Address to the
mathematical and physical sections of the British
Association," British Association Report, 1870, II:
reprinted in The Scientific Papers of J. C. Maxwell, 11,
Ed. W. D. Niven (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890), 226.
Hoffman also quotes from an 1879 letter Maxwell sent to
William Thompson: "I never sailed through a plate of
meerschaum on a molecule, so that I do not know whether
the passage is like the Forth & Clyde or like the
Caledonian Canal but I should not expect to have many long
reaches, but rather plenty of locks and sluices so that it
would not be very much like a tube but more like a
cullender.” Other relevant sources cited by Hoffman
include Duhem's 1906 The Aim and Structure of Physical
Theory (Trans. P. P. Weiner, Princeton: Princeton UP,
1954) and Arbib's The Metaphorical Brain (New York:
Wiley, 1972). Duhem and Arbib argue that metaphors are
too limited and imprecise (and therefore misleading) to
use in theory-building, and are appropriate only for
pedagogical purposes. See also Turbayne (1962), who
discusses the use of metaphor by Descartes and Newton and
concludes that they were victimized by their metaphors,

victimized because they presented the facts of
one sort as if they belonged to another, but
without awareness. They were engaged in sort-
crossing. But because they did not know that
they were, they confused their own peculiar
sorting of the facts with the facts.It was as
though, having found that wolf-properties were
eminently suitable for illustrating man, they
came to believe that he was indeed a wolf. (46)

 

 

 

92

Indeed, there are a number of important examples of
the reliance on metaphor by scientists. Physicists may
see the atom as a microcosmic solar system, biochemists
use the "lock and key” analogy in referring to enzymatic
activity, and computer scientists compare the human mind.
to computer function. Halloran and Bradford explore at
some length the power in biology of the genetic ”message”
metaphor, a metaphor that in both popular and technical
discussions of DNA "can add presence and life to an idea
that is otherwise remote and lifeless. Those four [DNA]
bases somehow take on a heightened reality when seen as
letters in an alphabet used to spell out instructions to
the machinery of the cell" (184). A whole vocabulary is
created to support the metaphor. For lay audiences, and
often in the technical periodic literature, the workings
of DNA are represented by such words as coding,
transmitting, transcribing, and translating of genetic

"information."74

 

74 One of the authors' specific illustrations from
popular works is the Time-Life Science Library volume by
John Pfeiffer on The Cell [New York: Time Inc. 1964], in
which the DNA code is referred to as ”The Alphabet that
Spells Life” and compared, in the great amount of
information ("instructions“) it holds, to volumes in an
encyclopedia. Halloran and Bradford also cite the use in
technical journals (e.g., Science, Nature, and The New
England Journal of Medicine) of such words as expression,
messenger, editing, and reading. See also the essay by
Owsei Temkin on "Metaphors of Human Biology" (1949), in
which the author develops the thesis that “metaphors have
exercised considerable influence over the biologists'
thought,‘I with examples taken from the history of
medicine.

 

 

 

93
For science itself, the message metaphor is not
merely a metaphor, argue Halloran and Bradford, but a
fundamental metaphor, a metaphor to think and
work by. It has become basic to molecular
biology's way of interpreting experience--so much
so that it has set the agenda for much of the
research done in that field since Watson and
Crick's discovery of the double helix. One of
the great questions that occupied biologists
throughout the 19505 and into the sixties had to
do with what we might call the morphology of the
genetic code. The metaphorical basis of this
work is perhaps most apparent in Crick's effort
to devise what he called a ‘comma-free code', a
morphological scheme in which the boundaries
between meaningful units--‘words'--on the DNA
molecule would not have to be marked by discrete
spacing elements--‘commas'. His notion turned
out to be mistaken, but what interests us here is
his way of conceptualizing and expressing the
problem. The experience of communication
through language served as an organizing
perspective on the working of DNA. (187)
Halloran and Bradford demonstrate how metaphorical
thinking in scientific activity and technical discourse

can serve as a powerful organizing force, as a vehicle for

94
further thought and model-building.75 Moreover, according
to E. Fred Carlisle (1980), who has compared extensively
the discourses of literature and science, the function of
models in science is practically identical to the function
of literary metaphors, since "both models and metaphors
build situations or construct an equivalent world or
system that organizes a less well known, or a diverse,

amorphous, reality and makes it intelligible” (46).76

 

75 The authors cite the parallel point made by George
and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), and argue that
scientific metaphors are similarly useful in lending
coherence to experimental observation and theory
development. See also Agnes Arber's essay "Analogy in the
History of Science" (1944), in which the author points out
the historical use of analogy among scientists not only in
suggesting hypotheses, but in exposition as well. One of
Arber's examples concerns Francis Galton's symbolic
description (just prior to the rediscovery of Gregor
Mendel's work) of "particulate inheritance," in which he
uses an analogy from the construction industry. (Arber
selects a lengthy passage from Galton's 1889 Natural
Inheritance to make her point.)

 

76 In suggesting that certain kinds of scientific
models are really metaphors, Carlisle draws on such works
' as Max Black's Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1962) and Mary Hesse's “The Explanatory Function of
Metaphor,” in ngic,_Methodology, and Philosophy of
Science, Ed. Y. Bar-Hillel (Amsterdam: North-Holland,

). Hesse asserts that ”theoretical explanation in
science is a metaphoric redescription of the domain of the
explanandum." Other works cited by Carlisle which show
the importance of metaphorical expression in science
include Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977) and W. H. L.
Leatherdale's The Role of Analo , Model and Meta hor in
Science (New York: American EIsevier, I974). Though
Carlisle is interested in making a beginning toward
developing a "poetics" or rhetoric of science, one major
weakness of his study, when compared to the studies by
Knorr-Cetina (1981) and Halloran and Bradford (1984) is
the absence of specific applications to individual cases

 

 

95

In the foregoing discussion of technical scientific
writing I challenge the notion, perpetuated historically
by attitudinal biases within both the scientific and the
literary communties, that technical scientific discourse
and classical rhetoric have little, if anything, to do
with one another.77 It seems clear that science and its
technical language operate within--not a rhetorical
vacuum--but a rhetorical tradition with its own manner of
argumentation, of explaining reality, of imagining and
constructing worlds; one with its own gthgg, and its own
attitude toward language. Further, a rhetorical view of
scientific writing permits the recognition that, beyond
the sphere of the technical communication and its limited
audience, scientists as a community have developed other--
more personal and sometimes 1iterary--outlets for sharing
their knowledge, their ideas, and their world with society
at large. They have developed a broader-based rhetoric,
one that reaches out from the inner circles of the

laboratory to the widest possible audiences. Whatever the

 

of technical scientific writing. With regard to
nineteenth century science, a number of studies have been
published on the rhetorical dimension of the writings of
Charles Darwin, particularly his use of evolutionary
metaphors. (e.g., Campbell, 1970: Hyman, 1974).

77 An example of the current prevalence of this
attitude among rhetoricians is the omission in E. P. J.
Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student of
a rhetorical analysis of a scientific essay (either
technical or popular), or even of scientific fiction,
written by a laboratory scientist.

96
precise reasons may be, many scientists in this century
have been willing to engage in self-scrutiny, to lay open
their souls, to recognize that human values and moral
responsibility are an integral part of scientific
activity.78 What this means, in the context of the
subject of this chapter, is that scientists as writers are

more than technical rhetors. The rhetoric of science

 

extends into such traditional-humanistic forms as the
popular essay, fiction, and poetry.'79 Therefore, a
discussion of the rhetorical range and diversity of
scientists as writers should include attention to these
forms of scientific rhetoric. In the illustrations which
follow, my aim is to show how the less technical rhetoric

of scientists is continuous with their concerns in the

 

78 The substantial body of intimate, introspective,
and creative works by contemporary scientists has surely
been prompted in part by the the horrors of two world
wars, with all the human loss to ever more innovative
forms of psychological, chemical, and physical
annihilation that scientific advances, together with the
particular cultural mindset, have made possible: further
causes for scientists to reach the widest possible
audiences as they themselves reflect upon their work are
such spectres as a nuclear holocaust, runaway
environmental pollution, the population 'timebomb,”
genetic engineering, and the dehumanization of the
workplace (which many fear will be the legacy of the
computer and robotics revolutions) of the post-industrial
age.

79 In the third chapter, on pedagogical implications,
I consider scientific writing in its broadest context, and
discuss works about science written by non-scientists,
particularly fiction, poetry, and drama: the present
chapter focusses on scientists as writers in order to give
emphasis to the rhetorical view of their discourse.

 

97
laboratory. The examples I have selected highlight the
confluence (or simultaneous operation) of expository,
argumentatative, and speculative features of their
discourse, especially in the case of scientific fiction.
(My consideration below of the sociobiology debate also
dovetails to suggest the speculative, subjective element
of technical-scientific writing--i.e., the notion, raised
earlier, that “facts” are intellectual constructs hardly
separable from the world-view of the fact—maker.)

As discussed earlier, in technical exposition and
argumentation there is a sense of building a case from the
observed data, and the technical report itself constitutes
a "story," the likeliness of which must be judged by
fellow scientists. Popular exposition is an extension of
technical exposition, but with the greater freedom of
expression permitted by an ”off the record” context.

Thus, for instance, popular periodicals like Scientific

 

American and The Sciences do not just translate technical

 

information for the lay public, but take the opportunity
as well to "sell” science, with a Baconian faith and
enthusiasm, as a great human enterprise. In the foreword '

of entomologist Vincent Dethier's To Know a Fly (1962),

 

for instance, ethologist Niko Tinbergen praises Dethier's
warm, personal style and writes that society “should be
convinced of the need for scientists: it should be willing

and indeed eager to support them. Scientists therefore

98
should give their very best when ‘popularizing' their
work" (vi). Thus, Dethier's book is not merely about
flies; it is an also argument (by example) for the value
to society of scientific research.80

The informal context of Dethier's To Know a Fly also

 

brings out the rhetorical nature of scientific fact--fact
as 2292! in Langer's and Knorr-Cetina's senses. For, as
Dethier notes, in the end scientists present only their
own view, issuing from their personal, subjective,
dramatic involvement with what happens in the laboratory.
Dethier's view of what a fly is all about is of his own
making. Scientific exposition, with its demand for a high
degree of objectivity, is nonetheless inescapably
subjective and rhetorical. 'By the rules of the game,"

Dethier writes in his concluding chapter of To Know a Fly,

 

Science is supposed to be objective. This is, of
course, ridiculous. As long as Science is
conducted by scientists it will be subjective.
There is a basic law of physics which states

that in one way or another the observer always

affects what he observes. This effect may be

 

80 Other examples of works like Dethier's are
physicist George Gamow's 923, Two, Thrge . i . Infinit
(1947), ethologist Konrad z. Lorenz's King Solomon‘s Ring
(1952), microbiologist Paul De Kruif's The Microbe
Hunters, geneticist George Beadle's The Language of Life
(1966), biologist Lewis Thomas's The Lives of a Cell
(1974), physicist Jeremy Bernstein's Experiencing Science
(1978, and the many popular works by biochemist Isaac Asimov.

 

 

 

 

 

 

99

infinitesimally minute or beyond all hope of
measurement or it may be apparent to any dullard.
But clearly between the fly and the scientist
there is an interaction. What the scientist does
to the fly determines in part what the fly does,
and what the fly does is seen by the eyes of the
scientist and sends nerve messages along his
optic nerves to his brain and is there switched
around and juggled and changed and eventually
comes out as a thoroughly subjective observation.
So, perhaps to know the fly one must also know
the scientist. He is the second dramatis
persona, presented after the curtain falls as is
the author in all proper (and improper) plays.
(111)31

Here, the intellectual connection of scientific discourse

with the literary-rhetorical tradition is explicitly

 

31 See also in this connection Richard Schlegel's
“The Impossible Spectator in Physics,‘ in The Centennial
Review, 12, 217-231, 1975. Like Dethier, Schlegel invokes
Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as well as the
often quoted statement made by Niels Bohr (in his Atomic
Theory and_the Description of Nature, Cambridge UP, 1934,
119) that ”we are both onlookers and actors in the great
drama of existence." While Dethier's study of the biology
of the fly constitutes his extended example of this
phenomenon, Schlegel use a specific physical problem--
determining the velocity of a piece of matter that is
freely floating in empty space--to show that there is 'a
genuine ontological dependence which does indeed force the
scientist-observer in some measure to be responsible for
the particular individual micro-events that he describes“
(218).

 

 

100

acknowledged. Scientific exposition and description,
notwithstanding its concern with precise empirical
measurement, remains a rhetorical construct--the
individual and subjective interpretation of its author.

Beyond the rhetorical aspect of popular exposition,
scientists argue directly and openly in their popular
writing about the scientific and technological issues
facing our society. A source of confusion and frustration
for the lay public with respect to such argumentation is
that it is practically impossible to distinguish
established scientific fact from the author's personal
speculation--hard evidence from rhetorical suasion based

on personal values and beliefs. Is the author explaining

 

something that is empirically real, telling a 'true'
scientific story (in Medawar's sense)? Or is the author
going beyond what can be concluded from the experimental
data, speculating about its implications? A major example
of this frustrating dilemma in our time, one which I would
like to consider at some length here, is the “nature
versus nurture" debate, the academic focal point of which
(since the 19705) has been the sociobiology theory of

zoologist Edward O. Wilson.82 In order to bring out the

 

32 In once again illustrating the rhetorical nature
of scientific writing--this time in the popular context--I
select sociobiology in particular because of recent
efforts (Lanham, 1983; Winterowd, 1986) to incorporate
sociobiology theory into composition theory and teaching
(e.g., the notion that rhetorical style varies as a
function of sociogenetic vectors for play and game). Does

101
rhetorical nature of this debate, it will be necessary
first to explain, as briefly as possible, the claims of
sociobiology theory along with its detractors' counter-
arguments.

The central premise of sociobiology is that social
behavior in animals, including human beings, has a genetic
basis. By comprehending and accepting our own species'
genetic heritage, Wilson asserts, we will be empowered to
help shape human social evolution. Wilson builds his case
for sociobiology in three works written for progressively
wider audiences: The Insect Societies (1971),
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), and On Human
Nature (1978).83 In the latter volume, he aims to
persuade the public “that the time has at last arrived to
close the famous gap between the two cultures, and that
general sociobiology, which is simply the extension of
population biology and evolutionary theory to social
organization, is the appropriate instrument for the

effort“ (x). Not unlike B. F. Skinner's mechanistic

 

the application of sociobiology to composition and
rhetoric hold promise of a ”new synthesis" in English
studies? Or, is it a form of “scientism,” warranting the
same harsh attitude taken by Bizzel (1979) and Connors
(1983) toward the application of Kuhnian paradigmatic
theory and empiricist methodology to composition studies?

33 See Arthur L. Caplan's The Sociobiology Debate
(1978), an anthology of the reactions to the concluding
chapter--titled ”Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology'--of
Wilson's second and most ambitious work of the trilogy,
Sociobiology.

102
psychology, set forth for the public in his controversial

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), Wilson's plea in 92

 

Human Nature is for the acceptance of our sociogenetic

 

fate: "No species, ours included, possesses a purpose
beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history"
(2).84 Thus, specific behavioral patterns of cultural
significance--from pair-bonding and altruism to xenophobia
and aggression--are presumably programmed into the central
nervous system, causing a predisposition toward those
behaviors.85

Are we really the slaves of selfish genes? Is
biology destiny? Is the human nervous system really
genetically programmed for all social behavior? Are we,
as a species and as individuals of that species, merely
”bodies" or biological machines that evolved as a
sophisticated survival strategy for our I'selfish genes”

(Dawkins, 1976)? Wilson's detractors, among them

 

34 See also Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's (1971)
notion of a "human biogram,‘ a genetic 'wiring' for
behavior, for culture, for art, and for whatever else we
may do and learn as a species: and Richard Dawkins' (1976)
assertion that we are slaves to our genome, bodies
(without minds?) that have evolved as a sophisticated
survival strategy for our "selfish genes."

85 Rhetorical art, too, is reduced by sociobiology to
a genetotropically shaped tradition. Richard Lanham
defines rhetoric as 'a genuinely evolutionar theory of
style--in the last analysis, a theory of Behavior“
(Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, 1983, 7-8,
emphasis original). Thus, a stylistic option becomes a
biobehavioral imperative, an instinctual drive like any
other drive inherited from our ancestors.

103
biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin,
charge Wilson and the field of sociobiology with a
groundless biologization of human nature.86 They assert,
instead, the primacy of culture over genes in shaping
human social behavior. For what Gould sees as a
pernicious biological determinism, he would substitute the

notion of biological potentiality. "Why imagine that

 

specific genes for aggression, dominance, or spite have

any importance," Gould asks,
when we know that the brain's enormous
flexibility permits us to be aggressive or
peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or
generous? Violence, sexism, and general
nastiness ELE biological since they represent one
subset of a possible range of behaviors. But
peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as
biologica1--and we may see their influence
increase if we can create social structures that
permit them to flourish. Thus my criticism of
Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological
‘environmentalism': it merely pits the concept of
biological potentiality--a brain capable of the
full range of human behaviors and rigidly

predisposed toward none--against the idea of

 

35 See Gould, "The Nonscience of Human Nature," in
Ever Since Darwin (1977), 237-242.

 

104
biological determinism--specific genes for
specific behaviors. (257-258)87

In his review of Lumsden and Wilson's Genes, Mind,

 

and Culture (in which the authors offer critics of

 

sociobiology a mathematical model for the sociogenetic
"multiplier effect"), Richard C. Lewontin (1981)
essentially calls sociobiology a scientific fiction. He
points out that all the scientific rhetoric of
sociobiologists has yet to produce any evidence for a
specific gene-behavior pairing. Where are the putative
nucleotide sequences that code for aggression,
territoriality, altruism, and so forth? In the absence of
any hard evidence, Lewontin argues, biological determinism
in humans must be rejected in deference to culture as a
non-genetic (learned) shaper of human affairs. With the
development of culture (in the anthropological sense),
human behavior acquires a contingency and a
contextual sensitivity not known among fruit
flies. The social modulates and negates the
individual; the incest taboo, that favorite
example of sociobiologists, is a case in point.
Sociobiologists confuse the universality of a
social rule (incest taboo) with the occurance of

an act (incest). While incest taboos may indeed

 

37 "Biological Potentiality vs. biological
Determinism," in Ever Since Darwin (1977), 251-259.

 

105
be universal, incest as an act is really quite
common. The universality of an explicit rule

against incest is prima facie evidence against

 

there being a biological revulsion; if such a
revulsion were built into our genes, we would
need no such law. Indeed, one is hard put to
think of any significant human behavior that is a
stereotyped sequence like the courting behavior

of Drosophila. While we cannot rule out the

 

possibility of some genetically programmed

stereotyped behavior in humans, a successful case

has yet to be made. (24)
The most significant aspect, however, of Lewontin's attack
against Genes, Mind, and Culture, and against Wilson
personally, is his accusation of rhetorical
underhandedness. Lewontin offers many examples in support
of his claim that Lumsden and Wilson's book is “filled
with intricate devices, rhetorical flourishes, and
exaggerated claims, all meant to distract the eye. Only
the most conscientious reader or reviewer can get through
it without being taken in at least once.” As an example
of an intricate device, Lewontin explains in detail how
the authors "first misstate, then misrepresent, and then
misuse” Sewell Wright's adaptive surface theory with the
help of 'gussied-up' equations and ”mathematical puffery."

With respect to rhetorical flourish,

106
catchy phrases and newly coined words for old
concepts, ‘culturgen', ‘gene-culture adaptive
landscape', ‘the biogeography of the mind',
‘ethnographic curves', and ‘assimilation
functions' all have the air of something new and
exciting but lack content, precision, or novelty.
The second author is a past master of the art of
rhetorical inflation, and that would seem to be
his major contribution to the present book. (26)
Lewontin warns the reader against being taken in by
Lumsden's model-building process, which is "not motivated
either by intrinsic plausibility or by a body of fact
about genes, behavior, and culture, but, like The Mikado's
Pooh-ha, by a desire to ‘give artistic verisimilitude to
an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative"I (25).88
Not surprisingly, Wilson charges the Sociobiology
Study Group of Science for the People (whose membership
includes Lewontin and Gould) with basing their
"environmentalist" theories on their own political biases

and conception of “human nature.” The most significant

 

33 See Gould's collections of essays, Ever Since
Darwin (1977), The Panda's Thumb (1980), and Hen's Teeth
and Horse's Toes (1983), which illustrate the rhetorical
argumentation within the scientific community on several
other sociobiologic issues, such as racism in IQ
measurement. Also helpful is Arthur L. Caplan's The
Sociobiology Debate (1978). In the area of genetic—
engineering, see Lewis Thomas's argument against “Cloning
a Human Being," in The Medusa and the Snail (New York:
Viking Press, 1979).

 

 

 

 

107
and intellectually frank comment made in the crossfire of
the debaters' essays is, I believe, Gould's admission that
neither ”biological determinism" nor “biological
potentiality" has been proven to be empirically true: ”I
cannot prove my scenario," Gould writes, "any more than my
colleague can demonstrate his. But in the current context
of no evidence, thay are at least equally plausible”
(1977, 256). No scientific basis for either camp's view?
No evidence? What could remain, then, but the techniques
of classical rhetorical suasion, including the use of
ethical and emotional appeals (Aristotle's I'artificial
proofs").

The point illustrated by the popular works on
sociobiology is that experimental data, the numbers--
whether Watson and Crick's or Skinner's or Wilson's or
Gould's--may be true in themselves, physically real and
empirically verifiable, but that is not enough. It is the
intellectual lens through which the data are both
collected and judged that is the significant dimension of
scientific activity and, later, of “writing up" the
experimental story. Can the observation, for instance,
that caged male rats under stress (electric shock) exhibit
more fighting behavior than female rats under the same
conditions serve as a basis for concluding that the males
are more ”aggressive" than the females? 'While this may

be considered proof that males are naturally agressive,“

108
notes neurophysiologist Ruth Bleier (1976), I'what about
the equally ‘obvious' conclusion that females must be more
intelligent, since fighting each other is clearly an
ineffectual response to being shocked by some human
being?" (1976, 44).

Beyond the methodological problem of measuring
aggressivity by only one of its many variables is the
problem of making too much of the data. 'It has been a
small step from such research on fighting behavior,"
Bleier writes, "to the speculations and observations of a
host of ethologists, primatologists, sociologists and
assorted defenders of the status quo that patriarchy and
male domiance are inevitable, since men are more agressive
than females because of inborn hormonal differences" (49).
Bleier points out that, when attempting to use biological,
data to justify or explain sociological facts, laboratory
researchers must maintain high ethical standards in
presenting their findings--that their writings must be
completely truthful. (There is a striking parallel here
to Quintilian's requirement that a rhetor have, above all
else, good character.) Scientists must acknowledge,
writes Bleier, that

with a careful selection of experimental data,
it is possible to support any theoretical
position. The reader has no way, short of her

own literature search or research experience, to

109
know that contradictory data have been omitted
from the discussion. Similarly, it is possible
to overinterpret the significance or the
implications of data. While, specifically such
techniques serve to obscure findings that
challenge cherished beliefs, the general danger
is that our approach to real understanding is
hindered. As painful as it may sometimes seem,
we had best state the facts as they seem to be
and let the chips fall where they may. (57)89
Even if one is inclined (as I am) to agree with Bleier on
the problems of collecting and discussing data without
personal value-biases--as illustrated by sociobiology
'research--the process of communicating the facts ”as they
sggm to be" is still a personal, value-laden rhetorical
process. Complete ”objectivity" is impossible. Even
while to most readers their writings (technical or
popular) on the biology of human social behavior will seem
expository, they are actually argumentative. From the
standpoint of empirical proof, neither Gould nor Wilson

can as yet claim to know the complete “truth.” Rather,

 

89 Other scientists beside Bleier who find the
arguments for a deterministic view of human gender
differences lacking in rhetorical honesty are Gould
(”Women's Brains,” in The Panda's Thumb), Lambert (1978),
and Lowe (1978). For an interesting example in fiction of
deterministic attitudes regarding sex differences, see
Audrey C. Peterson, "Brain Fever in Nineteenth-Century
Literature: Fact and Fiction," Victorian Studies, 12:
445-464, 1976.

110
they each opt for one possible version of reality.90
Ultimately, each reader must make a personal decision as
to whose version (or, in Medawar's terms, 'story') to
believe.

From the rhetoric of laboratory reports and of their
extension, popular scientific writing, I would like to
turn finally to a third dimension of scientists' rhetoric
--"imaginative" or literary writing. The fact that a
scientist may be able and willing to write about
scientific experiences and ideas in "poetic prose" or in
verse or fiction would appear to be (if C. P. Snow is
right) contradictory. The rhetoric of literary art--its
moral imperatives, its metaphoric vision and beauty, its
stylistic and emotional freedom--is supposed to be the
polar opposite of science and its controlled, measured,
ethically and emotionally neutral discourse. Yet, in the
context of intellectual and rhetorical history, examples
can be found of quite reputable scientists who probably
would have taken Thomas Sprat's proscriptions with a grain

of salt. In his two-volume History of Modern Culture

 

(1932, 1934), Preserved Smith notes that such eminent

 

90 Kenneth Burke establishes the connection between
scientific discourse and rhetoric when he writes: "Even
if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by
its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of
reality; and to this extent it must function also as a
deflection of reality” ('Terminalistic Screens," Lan ua e
as Symbolic Action: Essays on Lifgy Literature, and
Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, 45).

 

 

 

 

lll
scientific figures as Copernicus, Galileo, and Buffon
presented their ideas with with a suasiveness highly
dependent upon literary artistry. While Copernicus could
”write as dryly and objectively as Euclid, he could also
drive home his ideas with poetical imagery worthy of an
artist," writes Smith, noting that one particular passage

in Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (Book 1, chapter X, on

 

cosmic order) has been compared with the twenty-second
canto of Dante's Paradiso. When used (in Smith's words)
for "driving home ideas"--scientific ideas included--

literary artistry becomes a rhetorical act.

 

It is necessary to ask here whether the apparent
fusion of scientific and literary rhetorics by some
scientists in earlier centuries has become, in the wake of
the modern scientific revolution, a historical curiosity,
a practice which has no place in contemporary scientific

life and manners. In his The Seventeenth Century

 

Background (1962), Basil Willey expressed his regret that

 

the modern idolatry of empiricism has become a barrier to
the educational cultivation of the ability to pass freely
from one order of "truth” to another, a barrier to
holistic knowing and self-expression. “The Cartesian
spirit,” wrote Willey,
made for the sharper separation of the spheres of
prose and poetry, and thereby hastened that

‘dissociation of sensibility' which Mr Eliot has

112
remarked as having set in after the time of the
Metaphysical poets. The cleavage then began to
appear, which has become so troublesomely
familiar to us since, between ‘values' and
‘facts'; between what you £313 as a human being
or as a poet, and what you thought as a man of
sense, judgment and enlightenment. Instead of
being able, like Donne or Browne, to think and
feel simultaneously either in verse or in prose,
you were now expected to think prosaically and to
feel poetically. Prose was for conveying what
was felt to be true, and was addressed to the
judgment: poetry was for conveying pleasure, and
was addressed to the fancy. (87-88, emphasis
original)
This is essentially the polarized intellectual climate
objectified metaphorically by C. P. Snow. Is the schism
between the ancient value-oriented tradition and modern
experimental factualism a real intellectual division, as
Snow believed, or an attitudinal and political artifact?
The late physical anthropologist Loren Eiseley asserted
the latter, arguing that true scientific understanding
(vs. merely fact-collecting) cannot be achieved without
the help of a literary sensibility. Like Jacob Bronowski
and Peter Medawar, he believed that scientific and

literary creativity have a common origin. However, while

113
Bronowski and Medawar focussed on delineating the
differences between the scientific and the artistic
conceptions of reality, Eiseley emphasized the natural co-
operation or complementarity of the two intellectual
spheres. Beyond recognizing the differences between
quantitative and qualitative understanding, he pointed out
the necessity of their operational union in the search for
"truth." In this sense, the notion of the two cultures
was for Eiseley illusory, and he insisted that meeting
points of science and art are there whether or not one
chooses to grant them explicit recognition. Because of
his belief not only in their common intellectual origin
but in their ”points of contact even in division," Eiseley
asserted that ”the ‘two cultures' are an illusion, that
they are a product of unreasoning fear, professionalism,
and misunderstanding" (275-276):

Is there something here we fear to face,
except when clothed in safely sterilized
professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in
this age of power to admit mystery and beauty
into our thoughts, or to learn where power
ceases? . . . If, after the ages of building and
destroying, if after the measuring of light-years
and the powers probed at the atom's heart, if
after the last iron is rust-eaten and the last

glass lies shattered in the streets, a man, some

114
savage, some remnant of what once we were, pauses
on his way to the tribal drinking place and feels
rising from within his soul the inexplicable mist
of terror and beauty that is evoked from old
ruins--even the ruins of the greatest city in the
world--then, I say, all will still be well with
man. (278)
The significant departure of Eiseley from the two-culture
conception held by Snow, Bronowski, and Medawar is his
insistence that the scientific and literary imaginations,
their differences notwithstanding, actually work together
in each of us and that it is time to face this reality.
Continuing with his forward-looking image of a savage
pausing at the ruins of a past civilization, Eiseley
writes:

And if that savage can pluck a stone from the
gravel because it shone like a crystal when water
rushed over it, and hold it against the sunset,
he will be as we were in the beginning, whole--as
we were when we were children, before we began to
split the knowledge from the dream. All talk of
the two cultures is an illusion: it is the pebble
which tells man's story. Upon it is written
man's two faces, the artistic and the practical.
They are expressed upon one stone over which a

hand once closed, no less firm because the mind

115
behind it was submerged in light and shadow and
deep wonder. (279)

It is difficult to tell as yet whether or not
Eiseley's position represents an emergent new attitude in
the general scientific community toward the relationship
between the rhetoric of literary art and that of
scientific inquiry.91 The use of "poetic prose” by
scientists in their writing about scientific ideas and
concepts is rare. And how many scientists would expend
the effort to capture the mystery and wonder of life as
does Eiseley in ”The Spider"?:

His science has progressed past stone,
His strange and dark geometries,
Impossible to flesh and bone,

Revive upon the passing breeze

The house the blundering foot destroys.
Indifferent to what is lost

He trusts the wind and then employs

 

91 For a helpful discussion of Eiseley's efforts to
achieve a union in his writings of the scientific and
poetic sensibilities, see Schwartz (1977). While G. S.
Rousseau (1972) is skeptical about there being--as in the
Renaissance --”men of both cultures,“ Eiseley insists that
human beings have a natural intellectual tendency to dwell
in both cultures, and that the barriers to doing so are
self-imposed and perpetuated institutionally. See also
Elizabeth Sewell's essay “Science and Literature" (1967),
in which she develops the view that in poetry there is
hope (and evidence--e.g., Walt Whitman) for the
unification of poetic and scientific sensibilities: she
does not, however, include examples of poetry by
scientists in her discussion.

116
The jeweled stability of frost.
Foundations buried underfoot
Are forfeit to the mole and worm
But spiders know it and will put
Their trust in airy dreams more firm
Than any rock and raise from dew
Frail stairs the careless wind blow through.

(The Star Thrower, 155)

 

Eiseley's insistence on bringing together the scientific
and poetic outlooks for a holistic understanding of the
natural world would probably be viewed derogatively by the
vast majority of his scientific colleagues as placing
trust, like the spider he describes, "in airy dreams."
However, whatever the long-term significance may be in the
evolution of the relations between the two rhetorical
traditions, Eiseley certainly is not alone in his writing
about science in poetic language. Other examples are the
physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, immunologist Miroslav
Holub, medicial scientists Carolin Breese Hall and Anselm
Paralatore, and astrophysicist Alan Lightman (Gordon,
1985). What these scientist-poets share and convey in
their poetry is the belief that reality cannot be fully
explored and described in empirical language alone. The
closing lines of Holub's "Evening In A Lab,“ for instance,
express the limitations of knowledge derived solely from

within the laboratory world: ”Among cells and

117
needles,/butts and dogs,/among stars,/there, where you
wake,/there, where you go to sleep,/where it never was,
never is, never mind--/search/and find." The little
poetry published by contemporary working scientists
represents a barely audible but important voice which
cries out that, as individual human beings, each of us
feels the need not only for a rationalistic explanation of
reality, but also for an ethical-aesthetic orientation
toward that perceived reality. The combination of
scientific rhetoric and literary rhetoric, these
scientist-poets seem to say, is a much more powerful
instrument for human understanding than either rhetoric
used alone.

Just as some scientists have articulated the concerns
and experience of their world in poetic prose or in verse,
a few others have turned to fiction--short stories,
novellas, and novels--as an outlet for scientific
rhetoric. It is true that science and scientists were an
important subject in fiction long before they began to
occupy the pages of the sci-fi 'pulps' in the 19308, and
have continued to be a theme in imaginative literature--

even outside the sci-fi movement itself--to the present.92

 

92 Molecular biologist John Roe O'Neill in Frank
Herbert's The White Plague (1982), for instance, is in
some ways a modern Victor Frankenstein. I prefer using
the phrase "scientific fiction" as opposed to "science
fiction” simply because the latter term, associated with
the 19205 movement, has proven difficult to define.
Frederik Pohl (1981) defines "science fiction" as the

 

118
However, what seems rather novel--more so as a rhetorical
than as a literary event--is the fact that in the past 50
years a few scientists have extended the rhetorical range
of scientific discourse by combining it with the rhetoric
of fiction, of imagined worlds peopled with imagined
scientists and laboratories and discoveries. Though C. P.
Snow's talents as both a scientist and a novelist may have
been, as Robert Gorham (1965) characterizes them,
mediocre, this should not obscure his accomplishments
intellectually and rhetorically as a living bridge between
two world-views, and as a pioneer in the present-day
scientific community (i.e., among doctorally-trained
researchers) in the writing of scientific fiction. Other
scientists after Snow (himself a physicist) who have
written scientific fiction are biochemist Isaac Asimov,
biomedical scientist Michael Crichton, experimental

psychologist B. F. Skinner, biophysicist Thomas McMahon,

 

literature of chan e, and cautions that
the word science' should not be understood too
literally in the term. . . . There are many
works, undeniably entitled to wear the label
‘science fiction', which have nothing to do with
science. Such writers as Ray Bradbury, Harlan
Ellison, J. G. Ballard, and Kurt Vonnegut are
certainly writing science fiction (though some of
them would deny it), but they are also certainly
not writing about science: for them science is
irrelevant and even technology is only a
metaphor. (6)

My point here is that the literature with which I am

presently concerned is literally concerned with science

and scientists, and with their place in human affairs, so

that I use the term "scientific fiction" to make this

distinction.

119
and physicists Russell McCormmach, Carl Sagan, David Brin,
and Gregory Benford.

The scientific fiction written by these and a few
other scientists is significant from the standpoint of
rhetorical history, for, here is the kind of discourse--
imaginary, metaphoric, emotional, personal, subjective--
that Thomas Sprat urged the scientific-minded to
repudiate. Here, in the manner and purpose of the
language used--for pleasure versus for truth-seeking--is
the supposed dividing line between the literary and
scientific traditions.93 And when scientists write about
science in the manner of the literary artist, in novels,
where is that supposedly distinct line between scientific
rhetoric and the rhetoric of fiction, or between Snow's
two cultures? This is of course exactly what Eiseley
makes the readers of his poetic prose contemplate. In the
context of fiction, David Brin (1987) notes that the
boundaries between science and science fiction sometimes
are not too clear, citing as an example the subject of
many of his own stories--exobiology or SETI (the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence). The chief point I
wish to reiterate, and to illustrate briefly here, is that
the use by scientists of the techniques of fiction in

writing about their experience and ideas extends the range

 

93 See I. A. Richards' Poetries and Sciences (1970),
where he distinguishes between poetic truth and scientific
truth in terms of emotive versus logical statements.

 

120
and power of scientific rhetoric. Scientific fiction
permits the scientist-writer to examine the personal-
ethical dimension of science, and to construct and argue
for models of scientific activity which suggest the larger
social and moral implications of what happens in the
laboratory. Such models are, in terms of both the
scientist's and the reader's personal value-system, self-
confrontational. They provoke reflection on the question,
”What do I believe?"

For instance, Snow's novel The Search could almost be

 

called a case study in scientific ethics. The young
chemistry researcher Arthur Miles is discovered by a
colleague to have made a major error in a technical report
already published; this simple technical mistake costs
Miles his induction into the Royal Society. While his was
an honest mistake, due to momentary carelessless regarding
a simple technicality, a few months later Miles catches
his close friend and colleague Sheriff in the act of
falsifying experimental results: "He had committed the
major scientific crime . . . Sheriff had given some false
facts, suppressed some true ones" (345). Miles' failure
of nerve to send his drafted letter to the journal
exposing Sheriff's dishonesty means his irrevocable break
from science: "The passion was over now.“ Beside the
rhetorical purpose of convincing the reader that there

indeed are moral values--to be adhered to religiously--

121
bound up with scientific activity, Snow's 1958 edition of

The Search had a further rhetorical aim--one connected to

 

his two-culture argument: Non-scientists could learn from
the novel something about what it is like to be a
scientist.94

In the past 30 years other scientific novels
published by scientists have offered, like Snow's 323
Search, a picture of the modus operandi of science and its
practitioners, including attention to relevant ethical,
social, philosophic, and/or historical contexts. Michael

Crichton's Terminal Man (1972) is a neuropsychiatric

 

patient who willingly submits to an experimental
biofeedback wiring protocol, only to find (with the

reader) that he is being treated more like a rat than a

 

94 In the foreword of his 1958 revision of Th3
Search, Snow raises the two-culture argument that was the
subject of his Rede Lecture a year later, including the
stereotypes held by each culture of the other: "The
scientists' stereotype of the literary culture:
defeatist, unvirile, profoundly selfish, unconcerned about
their brother men, indifferent to the social condition,
intellectually untruthful. The literary stereotype of the
scientist: brash, shallowly optimistic, indifferent to
the individual condition, lacking all sense of tragedy,
unemotional, naive, asexual” (vi). Consistent with Snow's
belief in education as the chief way to correct these
stereotypes, another rhetorical aim of his novel is, then,
the presentation of what he perceives to be an accurate
picture of scientific life, manners, and learning. It is
lamentable that Snow, having had the distinction of being
a member of both cultures, seemed to be concerned
exclusively with scientific education, and appears to
utterly neglect (except ironically by his personal
example) education in the literary arts, as if the latter
will somehow take care of itself; not to mention the
importance of exploring the complementarity of the two
cultures in the learning process.

122
human being; even when it becomes apparent to the
neurobiologists treating him that the treatment (intended
to control neurologically his aggressivity) has failed,
the scientists continue their experiment in the interest
of further data, over the objections of the female member
of the team who has fallen in love with the doomed
patient. Crichton asks his reader to ponder: Is this the
kind of medical science our society should tolerate?

Two novels by physicists which deal with the ethical
side of science and scientists in earlier epochs of
revolutionary scientific activity are Thomas McMahon's
Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry (1970), on the
Los Alamos atomic bomb project in the 19408, and Russell
McCormmach's Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
(1982), on the transition in the late nineteenth century
from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian picture of reality.
Neither of these novels brings the reader into the
laboratory scene itself, as does Snow's story, but both
deal even more intensely than Snow with the personal lives
of the scientists performing the research and show how
their lives and personal values are completely
intermeshed with their scientific work._ The personal

lives of the physicists in McMahon's Principles--as

 

recalled years later in the quiet, intimate conversation
of one of the principal researchers and his physicist son-

-are as depressing and self-destructive as the monstrosity

123
that they created in the Nevada laboratory. Asked by his
son whether the Los Alamos research changed him, the
father can only point somberly to the abhorrent
militarization of nuclear research: 'He smiled, but it
was a vacant smile. When I looked at him, he seemed to be
gazing into a desert: his own image of the emptiness of
physics as a modern thing to do. Its unconcern. Its
narrow professionalism. Its spiritual poverty“ (239-240).

In Night Thoughts, McCormmach conveys the same image of

 

physics research as McMahon's, though in a far different
time and setting--l870s Germany. In 1918, 69-year-old
retired physicist Victor Jakob reflects on his 50-year
career, focussing on such matters as objectivism versus
subjectivism in the construction of scientific truths, and
the chaotic indeterminacy and uncertainty of reality in
the age of quantum mechanics compared to that of classical
Newtonian mechanics, which seemed to him more
comprehensible and unified. Like McMahon, McCormmach uses
the techniques of fiction to explore and comment on a
historical event: the main characters involved in both
novels are not fully developed people, as in biographical
or realistic fiction, but used only as representative
figures, as a way of organizing their view of the events

that form the subject of their work.95

 

95 In the Afterword of Night Thoughts, McCormmach
writes: ”I have constructed a composite physicist from
real voices and events of the past. Jakob is invented,

124

The novels by McMahon and McCormmach are rhetorical
in that they construct a personal view of the scientific
enterprise in the context of historical change and the
associated ethical contingencies. Two examples of novels
by scientists which are outright arguments for a change in
the future course of action in the application of
scientific knowledge to societal issues are experimental

psychologist B. F. Skinner's controversial Walden Two

 

(1976) and astrophysicist Carl Sagan's Contact (1985).
Skinner's novel pictures an experimental commune which is
founded on behavioristic education: though his mechanistic
approach to learning has met fierce opposition in favor of
more humanistic educational strategies, his novel remains
as another example of a scientist using literary art to
treat (in this case, to argue for) scientific ideas. In
Contact, Sagan uses fiction to promote the search for

extraterrestrial intelligent life; in his story, contact

 

but his outlook and activities belong to many of the real
physicists who were his contemporaries. Every detail in
the invented physicist's career is based upon the careers
of real physicists, and every detail I attribute to real
physicists comes from the historical record“ (159).
McCormmach also appends a bibligraphical essay to detail
this point. To support his picture of the prevalent anti-
semitism among European scientists during this period, for
instance, he cites Leopold Infeld's discussion on the
matter in Quest: The Evolution of a Scientist (New York:
Doubleday, Doran, 1941). He also cites a host of
scientific autobiographies, biographies, histories,
technical journal articles, letters, and obituaries which
he used in constructing Jakob's life in physics, his views
on local and world affairs, and his reflections on
changing technical aspects of physics.

 

125

is actually made with an alien intelligence by an
international team of astrophysicists, only for the team
to be doubted and ridiculed by humanity since the means of
contact is almost practically impossible for anyone else
beside the participating scientists to comprehend--a
realistic scenario which is not uncommon with respect to
the process of societal acceptance of revolutionary
scientific discovery. Sagan's novel is a rhetorical
effort, similar to Skinner's, to convince his reader to
place faith in the problem-solving power of science--in
his case applied not to educational issues but to cosmic
ones.96

A final rhetorical use of fiction by scientists which
must be mentioned is the futuristic-speculative writing of
Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, and David Brin. Isaac
Asimov is without question the most prolific writer of
scientific and technological fiction within the small

group of scientists who write fiction. He has written

 

96 This great religious faith in astrophysical
science which Sagan exhibits in Contact, and toward which
he hopes to attract converts (from the ranks of the
skeptics), is also evident in his self-produced television
series Cosmos, about which Thomas M. Lessl (1985) notes:

As an attempt to portray science as a righteous
force, as a holy movement culminating in the
cosmic drama, Sagan projects a moralistic vision
of science, a theodicy vindicating the ethical
integrity of the scientific way. As such, as
communication not just about what is and is not
but also about what is good and bad, Cosmos has
its rhetorical roots in the traditions of
religious discourse as much as in the scientific.
(185)

126
many dozens of short stories and novels since the 19405 in
which he presents extrapolative scenarios of
interplanetary travel, space colonization, and biosocial
evolution, including (in his latest fiction) speculations
about computer-mind interfacing; his most ambitious and

far-reaching work is the continuing Foundation series, set

 

more than 20,000 years into the future.97 Asimov, and
more recently Sagan, have been inspirational to Brin and
Benford, whose stories are set anywhere from decades to
millions of years into the future and constitute
meditations on time, memory, and the human species' place
in the universe.98 Like Asimov, Brin and Benford
speculate extrapolatively about future technological
advances derived from basic astrophysical research
activity, particularly interplanetary travel and
habitation; and like, Snow, Skinner, Crichton, and Sagan
exhibit a unshakable faith in the problem-solving power of
scientific methodology in present and future worlds, even
while some of the problems they address may in part issue

from scientific activity itself (e.g., genetic

 

97 He began this series with The Foundation Trilogy
(l951)--Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second
Foundation--and resumed it in the early 19805 with three
more novels, containing speculations in such areas as
computers and mental telepathy.

 

 

93 Both Erin and Benford have published several
novels and numerous short stories. See for instance
Brin's recent collection of stories (all published during
the 19805) titled The River of Time (1987), and Benford's
Artifact (1985) and In the Ocean of Night (1987).

 

127
engineering, overpopulation, artificial intelligence, and
nuclear power). A great part of the rhetorical aim of
their fiction is, in fact, to propose possible solutions
to the problems which they perceive to already exist or
which they anticipate in the biosocial evolution of our
species.

A5 I hope to have shown in this chapter, to think of
scientific writing in narrowly technical terms is
erroneous, for the rhetoric of scientists extends well
beyond the standardized models of laboratory discourse.
Moreover, the popular and literary (especially fictional)
rhetoric of scientists comprise an important outlet for
their exploration of, and argumentation about, the ethical
implications of what they do professionally. Clearly, as
David Brin points out in many of the postscriptural
comments to his stories, the professional journals in
astrophysics would never consider accepting for
publication the kinds of meditations he develops in his
fiction, though they arise legitimately from research
observations. In the following chapter, I consider the
pedagogical usefulness and implications of a rhetorical
view of scientific writing in a liberal education. In
that context, I discuss scientific writing in its broadest
definition, focussing on composition pedagogy as well as
on the complementary uses in the English classroom of

scientific literature by non-scientists.

CHAPTER III

THE PEDAGOGY OF SCIENTIFIC WRITING

In the first two chapters, I sought to bring out the
rhetorical context of scientific writing, both in the way
such writing evolved and in its range of expression. I
wished to show that scientific writing developed
contiguously with, rather than in isolation from, the
rhetorical tradition: that the scientific plainness ethic

reflects an attitudinal orientation emphasizing "thing-

 

ness” over the words themselves. However, I also pointed
out that a manner of writing that is totally p1ain--i.e.,
devoid of metaphor and figurative language, completely
objective and unambiguous, and purged of emotion and the
individual writer's character, is rather mythical, even in

technical scientific writing.99

 

99 In his autobiography, microbiologist Salvador E.
Luria (1984) comments as follows on scientists'
contrasting styles:

Just as an experienced listener can tell which
[violin] virtuoso is playing, so an experienced
scientist can often tell which virtuoso is the
author of an important scientific paper.

The differences are not just in the writing, but
in the thinking and the quality of
experimentation: from the terseness of Al
Hershey's or Charles Yanofsky's work, to the
almost whimsical quality in Seymour Benzer's
research and writing and lecturing: from the

128

129
In technical scientific writing, I noted further, the
laboratory researcher has the task not only of

communicating clearly the experimental results, but of

 

convincing a specialized readership that the particular

 

interpretations set forth with respect to the collected
data are viable. Technical writers must tell believable
stories. Thus, contrary to being produced in a rhetorical
vacuum, scientific writing is shaped by rhetorical
imperatives of its own, serving the needs and purposes of
both the individual scientist-writer and the aims of
scientific activity generally. Moreover, as illustrated
by the case of the sociobiology debate, the rhetorical
aspects of scientific writing are magnified as the
audience broadens to include non-specialists and the
general public. An extension and diversification of
scientific rhetoric is evident, too, in fiction (and to
some degree, poetry and poetic prose) by scientists.

The diachronic and synchronic study of scientific
writing reveals the natural connection between scientific
and humanistic ways of knowing and their shared dependence
on language, on the rhetorical manipulation of verbal
signs and symbols. By ”rhetorical manipulation" I mean

the shaping of language to achieve a specific effect on a

 

slightly baroque manner of Sol Spiegelman to the
aggressive mode of Seymour Cohen. Each of these
leading biologists is distinct in style because
each if a unique self and projects that self into
every aspect of his work. (159-160)

130
particular audience, whether that effect be to enlighten,
to entertain, to persuade, or some combination thereof.
As Peter Dixon (1971) points out, if stress is laid on the
part of the definition of rhetoric which concerns the
speaker's or writer's impact on his audience, then
rhetoric can be stretched to include
almost the entire area of human discourse, since
most of our speech and writing (even much of our
soliloquizing) is directed to an audience,
however small). The concern of rhetoric becomes
nothing less than the whole complex business of
communication through language, the intricate
network of relationships which connects a speaker
(or writer) with those he addresses. (2)
Within this broad sense of rhetoric, scientists no less
than humanists may be viewed as rhetors. The connection
between rhetoric and scientific fiction is also evident
since, as Dixon notes, "as a literary-critical term,
rhetoric in this broader sense will cover all the
techniques by which a writer establishes rapport with his
readers, and by which he elicits and guides their
responses to his work" (3).100

In the present chapter, the point I want to make is

 

100 Here Dixon cites Wayne C. Booth's use of rhetoric
in his Preface to The Rhetoric of Fiction as 'a detailed
study of ‘the author's means ofcontrolling his readers'"
(3).

131

that an understanding of the place of scientific writing
within the rhetorical tradition will make a lasting
imprint in our culture only when attention is given to the
practical applications of that understanding in the sphere
of education. Indeed, the study of scientific writing
would be incomplete without its consideration as a
recognized area of academic study--as a classroom
activity. More specifically, I will develop and
illustrate the assertion that engaging students in reading
and writing about science creates opportunities for
raising and illuminating a series of fundamental
questions, including: What is the intellectual
relationship between scientific and humanistic modes of
learning? Do they inform one another? Notwithstanding
the presuppositions and stereotypes that abound, what
exactly is "science"? What is 'art'? How is a poem or
fictional narrative different from a scientific theory in
intent, in cognitive and affective processes, and in uses
of language which led to its creation and by which it
achieves its effect? Is a poem or novel less truthful,
less real, less "useful" than a textbook on molecular
genetics? Do imagination, human values, and "personality"
have any relevance to scientific writing?

Before proceeding, I must note here that what I mean
by "scientific writing” in this chapter is much broader

than the usual concern with technical or journal article

 

132
writing by scientists. A narrow definition of scientific
writing as technical journal writing is exemplified by
Charles Bazerman's recent study of the rhetorical nature

of such writing in his Shaping Written Knowledge: The

 

Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science
(1988). Bazerman does recognize that beside the journal
article, "many other genres of great significance have
energed in the sciences. Important stories remain to be
told about theoretical articles, reviews of literature,
speculative articles, handbooks and other reference works,
proposals, and various pedagogic genres--their separate
histories and interrelationships" (7). However, my own
concern is even broader than the body of technical
scientific writing produced by scientists. Within the
term scientific writing, I include non-technical writing
about science--works written by scientists as well as by
writers outside the scientific community: popular
scientific works and literary writings (fiction, poetry,
and drama) dealing centrally with scientific ideas,
themes, and characters.

Only when students are engaged in reading and writing
about science in this larger context of the widest
possible range and diversity of language uses will their
intellectual perspective be broadened to the point of
comprehending the interdependence of all modes of knowing

in piecing together one's personal view of reality. In

133
this challenging task, scientific and artistic domains of
thought and activity are not mutually exclusive in
intellectual and practical terms, but co-operate in ways
that elude simple explanation. Moreover, the elusiveness
of a straightforward definition of the relationship
between the two intellectual traditions or processes is in
part due to the ongoing evolution of that relationship;
the latter is, in other words, not simply an objective
"given" entity but something that we as individuals and as
a culture create.

When approached rhetorically--as a process involving
an interplay between competing views and uses of language
--scientific writing (in its broadest sense) can be used
to draw students into the center of the ongoing dialectic
between the "ancient" and "modern" world-views. Reading
and writing about science holds the potential not only of
helping students to work out for themselves the validity

of scientific-humanistic distinctions which constitute our

 

culture's "climate of opinion," but also of focussing

their attention on the possible complementarities of these

 

two intellectual traditions as they forge a comprehensive
explanation of our world, of what we as human beings are
and of what we can or should be. An understanding of
scientific writing as a range of rhetorical options--
rather than as being monolithically and technically plain

--encourages the development of a holistic outlook on

134
learning, thinking, writing, reading and their dependence
on how human beings manipulate language with different
aims and audiences in mind.101 Since, as James Britton
(1975) has emphasized, it is through the manipulation of
language that human beings are able to shape a world-
representation for themselves, it would follow that
students should experience a multiplicity of language
uses, spanning the humanistic and the scientific realms of
thought and activity.

Given its established foci on literature,
composition, and language, the field of English studies is
in a position to exercise leadership in the use of reading
and writing activities which immerse students in the kind

of dialectic I have mentioned. As a core component in the

 

101 In his delineation of the features of scientific
discourse, Kinneavy (1971, 88-89) is correct in stating
that such discourse is referential and "thing'-oriented.
However, his overall discussion is misleading in at least
two important respects. First, he states that because of
the referential character of scientific discourse, ”the
reader as a target of persuasion, emotional or otherwise,
intrudes only indirectly and implicitly." As I attempted
to show in the preceding chapter, scientists employ
various means of persuasion, even in their technical
writing. Second, Kinneavy's exclusive concern with
technical scientific discourse, and his omission of
scientists' writing for wider audiences, leads him to
assert that scientific discourse is non-literary: ”A
discourse which becomes noticeably expressive or directly
persuasive or literarily preoccupied is a discourse which
is in danger of becoming nonscientific.” While it is true
that popular (including literary) scientific writing is
not a major form of scientists' discourse, these forms are
heavily referential as well as persuasive and emotive. In
relation to Kinneavy's scheme, the referential-emotive
distinction attempted long ago by I. A. Richards (1925)
also is difficult to uphold categorically.

 

135
liberal arts curriculum, English studies can serve in part

as an important (and perhaps the only) integrative force

 

in the academic community, demonstrating in particular how
writing about science is no less rhetorical than other
kinds of writing. The English classroom can foster, more
easily and with more energy and time than the "content”
areas, the broadest possible range of reading and writing
experiences, including not only a structured sampling of
the diverse writings by scientists but also, side by side,
writings about science by humanists and imaginative
literature dealing with scientific themes and ideas.

A5 I noted in my Introduction, A. N. Whitehead

pointed out in his Aims of Education that the three chief

 

components of a liberal education--the scientific, the
practical, and the literary--must somehow be more
integrated than they are in order to achieve a true
balance of intellect and character through liberal
education. A liberal and liberating education is one that
does not distort the importance or contribution of one
area of knowledge or intellectual "culture” in relation to
the others, but nourishes instead the ability to use any
and all modes of thinking and manipulating language in the
process of educational and personal development. Again,
while such a multidisciplinary or holistic intellectual
perspective can and should be nurtured in gyggy content

area (up and down the educational system), I am arguing

136
that the English c1assroom--as the college curriculum's
enclave of literary, composition, and language study--has
a special opportunity and responsibility to do 50.102
In his discussion of "interdisciplinary English,"
James P. Beck (1980) argues that students must be taught
to make use of as many disciplines as possible, not as

"bins of fact," but as perspectives, as intellectual

 

lenses. Beck grants that there are differences and
conflicts across the disciplines, that "each lens differs
in terms of basic questions asked, basic presuppositions,
scope of subject-matter, operating methods and research,
even the use of language." (30) Nonetheless, reading and
writing activities which are integrative--i.e., structured

to emphasize the cooperation of all the lenses in fully

 

explaining reality--create opportunities for students to
develop an "explict awareness of the many paths to the
elephant of reality" (32). Interdisciplinary English is a
way to teach, too, that no one of these paths is

inherently more intellectually promising or superior to

 

102 My focus here on the pedagogical uses of
scientific writing in the colle e curriculum should not
obscure the importance of, and successful experimentation
with, the incorporation of scientific thinking and writing
in the secondary and elementary curricula. See for
instance the suggestions for the secondary school teacher
by Neil Ellman and Lynda Chittenden's work with elementary
schoolchildren in Barr et a1.'s What's Going on?:
Language/Learning Episodes in British and American
Classrooms, Grades 4-13 (1982). A more recent resource
for the secondary teacher (but also adaptable for college
teaching) is Dale Worsely and Bernadette Mayer's The Art
of Science Writing (1989).

 

 

 

 

137

the others, and that all the paths are paved with the
medium of language. There is a certain cross-disciplinary
unifying power in the notion that all areas of learning
depend on language and that, language being as imperfect
as it is, words resist being held to absolute, unequivocal
meanings, even in science. This shared linguistic
indeterminacy itself puts all the disciplines on an equal
intellectual footing.103

Before turning to a discussion of specific uses of
scientific writing and scientific literature in the
English classroom, I would like to point out certain
professional biases, tacitly held by many educators within
and without the field of English, which work against the
establishment of a place within English studies of
scientific writing and reading. A fundamental bias, one
which I have challenged in the first two chapters, is that

rhetoric and scientific discourse have little or nothing

 

103 In terms of the kind of integrative, dialectical
approach which I am proposing, there is a significant
difference between the concepts of interdisciplinary
English and writing-across-the-curriculum (e.g., Fulwiler
and Young, 1982; Fulwiler, 1984). The latter appears to
focus on improving writing skills--c1arity, readability,
and so on--relevant to a given content area.
Interdisciplinary English holds the potential, on the
other hand, for encouraging the integration and
interfacing of a spectrum of rhetorical forms, from the
informational/expository to the imaginative/literary, for
promoting the kind of holistic thinking to which Beck
refers. In this regard, then, interdisciplinary English
can both include and move beyond the concerns of cross-
curricular writing programs by engaging students in a
greater diversity of reading and writing experiences than
those limited by specific content-area preoccupations.

138
to do with one another. It is true, as James Raymond
(1982) and Robert Connors (1983) assert, that rhetoric and
science are different methodologies or systems of inquiry
developed for different purposes. Raymond notes that
while science is concerned with empirical certainty,
rhetoric
deals with questions that science methodically
excludes: questions about values, ethics,
esthetics, meaning, politics, justice, causality
involving human motives, and causality involving
an indeterminate number of variables. In short,
physics can tell us how-to build a nuclear
reactor, but it cannot tell us whether we ought
to build one, or whether, on balance, the costs
will outweigh the benefits. (781)
The crucial distinction between rhetoric and science, in
Raymond's view, is expressed in a quote from Aristotle's

Nichomachean Ethics (1.3): ”It is the mark of an educated

 

man to look for precision in each class of things just so
far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently
foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician
and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs" (782).
Connors, concerned specifically with the relationship
between composition studies and science, adds:

The push for science in our field at the present

time can lead all too easily to scientism,

139
placing methodology at the heart of rhetorical
education and tilting composition studies toward
the sort of mechanistic concerns with neutral
‘techniques' that we wish in our best moments to
transcend. As Richard Weaver constantly reminds
us, we as rhetoricians must be concerned with a
wider realm than are scientists--for scientists
are concerned only with facts and the
relationships between them, while rhetorical
concerns must include both the scientific
occurrence and the axiological ordering of these
facts. (19)
Both Raymond and Connors warn against allowing the
intrusion into English studies of pseudo-scientific
methodologies which distort the aims and purposes of a
rhetorical education.104
The view that rhetorical and scientific methodologies
differ in fundamental ways does not mean, however, that
scientific writing is a-rhetorical, i.e., that it has
nothing to do with the Classical modes of suasion and
argumentation, or with human feelings and value-judgments.
As Elizabeth Harris (1982) notes, it is this narrow view

of scientific writing as a “practical," mechanical skill

 

104 Neither author argues, however, against the
appropriate use of empirical methods--as opposed to
”imitation science”--in composition research.
(Presumably, they mean the kind of research cited, for
instance, by Stephen North, 1987, 141-196.)

140
which, has led some teachers and scholars to question the
so-called "liberal-arts approach" to technical writing, or
"any approach to research or scholarship in scientific and
technological texts which employs concepts and methods
primarily from the liberal arts: literary theory and
history, traditional and modern rhetoric, linguistics, and
the philosophy and history of science and technology"
(628). Harris points out two disturbing pedagogical
implications of this "anti-academic" perspective on
technical writing: first, that “we already know or will
casually find out everything we need to know about
technical writing in order to teach it, and second, that
“the use of language to construct whole discourses in real
situations can be taught by simple prescription and
imitation” (629). These assumptions, in Harris's view,
fail to recognize ”the complexity of the language object,
it relation to the situation in which it is constructed,
and the subjective experience of constructing it. . . .
[They suggest] insensitivity to the variables and
subtleties of all natural-language texts” (629).

Beside having to answer to biased assumptions
regarding the dividing points between the humanistic-
rhetorical tradition and scientific discourse, the liberal
arts approach to studying scientific writing meets
resistance from the I'heritage model" of English studies

(Bosmajian, 1980; LaConte, 1980). The heritage model has

141
dominated English studies since its establishment as a
discipline in the late nineteenth century, and as a
pedagogical tradition it has roots in earlier centuries
(Applebee, 1974, 10-11, 34-36). Under this model, the
chief concern of English studies is the teaching of the
great works of poetry, drama, and fiction written by the
celebrated British and American authors through the
centuries. While valuable, this model of the profession
tends unfortunately to neglect the pedagogical importance
of non-fiction (Rygiel, 1984) and contemporary literature,
although since the 19605 the teaching of the latter has
increased considerably (Donelson, 1977). In addition, the
heritage model works against the classroom uses of
science-related literature, no doubt largely because of
the historical tension between Snow's two cultures.

Yet, despite these rhetorical and literary biases
against scientific reading and writing, in recent years
scientific fiction and non-fiction have been included in
anthologies for introductory composition and for students
in the sciences.105 Two examples of such texts are Mary
Elizabeth Bowen and Joseph A. Mazzeo's Writing About
Science (1979) and Robert E. Lynch and Thomas B. Swanzey's

The Example of Science (1981). The common humanistic-

 

 

105 Teachers of English in the schools, too, have an
extensive science literature avaliable for their
classrooms: see, e.g., Judy (Tchudi), 1980: Chittenden,
1982; and Armstrong, 1982.

142

rhetorical approach of these works is evident; the authors
view science and scientific writing as a human, creative
activity stamped by the individual scientist's personality
and style. Beyond the stimulating content of their
selections, the authors aim to demonstrate the rhetorical
range and sophistication of the scientist-writers,
including the extent to which the writings are self-
referential: "By the very act of telling us about the
world, these authors say more than perhaps even they are
aware they are saying about themselves" (Bowen and Mazzeo,
xxiii).106

The humanistic-rhetorical approach to teaching
scientific writing, which is the focus of the remainder of
this chapter, contrasts sharply with another major

pedagogical approach in the field--that of prescriptivism.

 

105 There is one significant difference in the
pedagogical approach of these two texts. Bowen and Mazzeo
focus on rhetorical modes--e.g., definition, description,
classification and enumeration, comparison/contrast,
argument/persuasion, and analogy. Lynch and Swanzey, on
the other hand, in seeking to show in part ”that the
stages of the act of science are fundamentally the same as
the stages of other creative pursuits“ (x), organize the
first five of their eight chapters according to the
scientific method--'Defining the Problem," “Observing the
Evidence," “Forming the Hypothesis,” "Experimenting,” and
”Presenting the Theory." The major drawback of Lynch and
Swanzey's format is that it gives the impression that
scientific inquiry is straightforward, a notion questioned
by P. B. Medawar and others. In his Preface to The Double
Helix, for instance, James Watson notes that “science
seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner
imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and
sometimes backward) are often very human events in which
personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.”

143
Examples of texts in the prescriptive tradition--which
emphasizes the traditionally acceptable or ”correct" forms
of laboratory note-taking and technical report writing--

are Donald H. Menzel et a1.'s Writing a Technical Paper

 

(1961), Robert Barrass's Scientists Must Write (1978), and

 

Melba Jerry Murray and Hugh Hay-Roe's Engineered Writing

 

(1986).107 The differences in pedagogical philosophy and
practice between the prescriptive and humanistic-
rhetorical approaches to teaching scientific writing are
exemplified respectively by Morris Freedman's "The Seven
Sins of Technical Writing" (1958) and E. Fred Carlisle's
"Teaching Scientific Writing Humanistically: From Theory
to Action" (1978). While Freedman's approach is
characterized by advice on how to avoid certain stylistic
and grammatical ”sins,“ Carlisle focusses on the human,
value-laden, more subjective elements of language in
scientific writing, and includes a consideration of the
wide range and diversity of writing by scientists and
about science, recognizing that scientists write more than
just laboratory notes and reports.108

The point which I would like to develop and

 

107 For an example of the prescriptive approach in a
writing-across-the-curriculum text, see Maimon et al.
(1981), 257-326.

103 For other examples of the prescriptive approach
in teaching technical scientific writing, see Barloon
(1954), Zisowitz (1964), Booth (1975), and Binkley (1977).

144

illustrate, then, is that scientific reading and writing
in the English classroom can be used to engage students in
activities other than (and beyond) those intended to
develop "practical skills." Again, what I am suggesting
is a pedagogical approach which permits a consideration of
the intellectual meeting points between the humanistic and
scientific traditions. As Joan Digby and Bob Brier (1985)
note in the preface to their collection of readings in
science and literature, the world-view that we each
develop through a liberal education is the result of a
cross-fertilization of the humanistic and literary
traditions with the scientific one; thus, students should
be encouraged "to reflect on the two [traditions] together
and how the interaction of their language and ideas causes
permutations of human thought.“ The major aim of engaging
students in scientific reading and writing, therefore,
should be to bring together the diverse uses of language
by scientists and humanists (particularly literary
artists) which exhibit both the common and divergent views
of reality of their respective intellectual traditions. I
hope to demonstrate that the pedagogical approach that is
best suited for accomplishing this aim is that of thematic
reading/writing units. '

The notion of thematic units in English studies has
an extensive history. As Arthur Applebee (1974) notes,

such units became established in anthologies for secondary

145
English teaching by the 19305.109 Currently, the thematic
organization of anthologies for college English is
widespread, as illustrated by such collections as Sheena

Gillespie and Linda Stanley's Someone Like Me: Images for

 

Writing (1984), Douglas Hunt's The Dolphin Reader (1986),

 

and Mary Lou Conlin's Patterns: A Short Prose Reader

 

(1988). Themes in these works range from simple
categorizations like ”People,” "Emotions” and "Choices,”
to groupings within ”The Natural Environment," "The Man-
Made Environment," and "Animals and Man." (Several
scientists' writings are represented in these anthologies,
including Loren Eiseley, Konrad Lorenz, Richard Selzer,
and Lewis Thomas.)

The use of thematic teaching units permits a
broadening of pedgagogical concerns in English studies
beyond those of genres, periods, and particular authors
and works. The thematic approach reflects a concern with

the personal growth of the learner versus an emphasis on

 

109 By this time, thematic units centered around
important personal or social goals were often combined
with the "experience“ approach. See for instance the
final report of the NCTE-appointed Curriculum Commission,
An Experience CurEiculum in English (1935), which
recommended such ”experience strands” as ”Exploring the
Physical World," "Studying Human Nature,“ "Giving Fancy
Rein," and "Sharing Lyric Emotion" (Applebee, 119-120).
Such studies of secondary English anthologies as Arno
Jewett's 1959 English LanguaggZArts inAmerican High
Schools and James Lynch and Bertrand Evans' 1963 High
School English Textbooks show that the thematic approach
became even more firmly rooted though the 19505 and into
the 19605 (Applebee, 169-171).

 

 

 

146
specific literary works as objects worthy of study for
their own sake. In the context of the historical tension
between the two cultures, thematized reading and writing
experiences can be used to focus students' attention of
constructing their own view of the intellectual
relationships betweeen the humanities and the sciences--
particularly the fact that both modes are inquiry are
dependent on language and human values.

In the area of science writing/reading, Anne
Eisenberg (1986) suggests three kinds of thematic units
that can be used with students in engineering and
technology. Her first suggestion is a unit on "The
context of Discovery," which would have students read (and
presumably write on) accounts of moments of great
scientific discovery, such as those of Charles Darwin,
Marie Curie, Friedrich Kekule, Albert Einstein, and James
Watson. Eisenberg's also suggests units on "Science as
Debate” (treating such issues as spontaneous generation
and astro-archeology) and on the patent, which might
include such documents as those on suspenders by Mark
Twain and on dresser trunks by Lillian Russell. However,
the kinds of thematic units which I will suggest and
illustrate in greater detail in the following pages are
more in line with the earlier considerations I raised with
respect to creating chances for immersing students in

the two-culture dialectic. They would have students

147
confront their own and our culture's attitudes and biases
regarding scientific-humanistic distinctions. These
biases are at the heart of the ongoing dialectic between
competing world-views, and they are the basis upon which
delineations are drawn between ways of learning. Here the
ground is soft. Words like "rhetoric" and ”literature"
are as difficult to define as "science'I and ”experiment”
and "the scientific method.” Ultimately, defining such
terms (and others like them, such as “religion,"
”politics," and "mind") is an arbitrary, rhetorical act.
Individually, we can define them as broadly or as narrowly
as we wish. The definitions we construct for ourselves
ultimately become, to borrow the words of Mark Johnson
(1980), "metaphors we live by.”

When the definition of scientific writing is
broadened beyond a narrow association with technical
reportage of laboratory experimentation, to include
popular and imaginative writings about science by both
scientists and non-scientists (particularly literary
artists, in light of the two intellectual poles defined by
Snow), students can be given opportunities to see the

basic connections across the disciplines in the context of

 

rhetorical and linguistic choices and processes. As
examples, I will detail three reading/writing units which
would have students focus on the ethical aspects of

”revolutionary" science, on the place of ”normal" or

148
routine science in everyday human affairs, and on defining
"the scientific process” itself. I would like to
emphasize here that my illustrations of thematic units are
presented not as tested-and-proven ideas, but rather in
the spirit of William Strong's "An I-Search On
Language/Composition Research" (1986)--except that the
works on my list are those which have been helpful in my
personal attempts to make sense of the relationship in our
culture between the humanities and the sciences. Also, in
contrast to Strong's chronological groupings (from the
mid-19605 to the mid-19805), I find it more convenient to
categorize my selections on the basis of the kinds of
questions, issues, or themes that they invite the reader
to explore. However, regardless of how the works are
divided, the point I wish to make is that their collective
effect should allow the reader to take part meaningfully
in the ongoing dialectic between the humanistic and
scientific world-views, in something like Bronowski's
searching ”The Abacus and the Rose: A New Dialogue on Two
World Systems" (1965).

I begin, then, with a unit of fiction which raises
the issue of what biologist Leonard Isaacs (1986) termed
"the Frankenstein scenario'--the conducting of
revolutionary scientific research driven by an obsessive,

often self-serving personality whose priorities are

149
confused.110 Heading the works that can be included in
this group is of course Mary Shelley's classic

Frankenstein, which for Isaacs “embodies and dramatizes

 

many of the most frightening dilemmas that have resulted
from the advance of twentieth century science," especially
in the areas of nuclear physics (since Oppenheimer and Los
Alamos) and genetic engineering. The hubris of Victor
Frankenstein, who finally discovers the cause of animation
only to unleash upon humanity a ”filthy creation," is
present in other fictional scientists. The protagonists
of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter” and “The
Birthmark" are brilliant life scientists who, ironically,
lack a sense of the timeless verities of the heart and
soul. Rappaccini's actions, for instance, have wider
significance than the nineteenth century debate over the
respective virtues and drawbacks of allopathic versus
homeopathic approaches to medical treatment (Uroff, 1972);
and, far less than an attack on science itself, the tale
is a warning against the abusive excesses of unregulated
experimental science.

Likewise, the scientists in some of the stories in
the sci-fi 'pulps' of the 19205 and 19305 (Ashley, 1974,

1975) are obsessed with achieving great breakthroughs and

 

110 As a scientist, Isaacs showed a genuine concern
with the uses of fiction for immersing students in science
and society issues; see his short but useful study Darwin
to Double Helix: The Biological Theme in Science Fiction
(1977).

150
give little or no forethought to their possible darker
side when actually applied. Two good examples of this are
the physicist Avery in Charles Willard Diffin's “The Power
and the Glory” (1930)--whose creation of a mechanism that
generates great power based on ”the disintegration of the
atom” is today easily recognizable--and the biochemist
Beetle in John Taine's ”The Ultimate Catalyst" (1939), who
creates a fungus to do away with hardened criminals.
(Taine is the pen name of the CalTech mathematician Eric
Temple Bell.) There are a number of other literary works
which serve as examples of Isaacs' Frankenstein scenario,

including H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, Karel

 

Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Aldous

 

Huxley's Brave New World (worth reading with Huxley's

 

Brave New World Revisited and biologist Lewis Thomas'

 

essay "On Cloning“), George Orwell's 1984, Fred Mustard

Stewart's The Methuselah Enzyme, William Kotzwinkle's

 

Doctor Rat, Michael Crichton's Terminal Man, Robin Cook's

 

 

Coma, and Frank Herbert's The White Plague.111

 

 

111 A useful framework within which to engage
students in discussion of these novels, and of many of the
works I mention below in the other thematic units, would
be the five 'Mertonian norms" for the behavior of academic
scientists (Ziman, 1984, 81-90). These norms--dea1ing
with such concepts as the communalism of scientific
knowledge and the personal disinterestedness of the
researcher in relation to his work--essentia11y define a
scientific ethos, an ideal pattern of behavior to be
followed by all scientists. Sociologist R. K. Merton
first proposed the norms in 1942; the original papers in
which he set them forth are reprinted in his The Sociolo
of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I973).

 

151

The works in the first group deal with the
scientist's moral responsibility to society. In depicting
science at its worst, they constitute a rather cathartic
experience--a denouncement of a flawed scientific ethos,
one founded principally on self-glorification, and at the
same time a re-affirmation of positive human values. (An
analogy could be made here with Quintilian's requirement
that a rhetor be of good character above all else.) This
next group contains works which are connected thematically
by their bearing on the matter of the place in our society
of routine or "normal" science (in Thomas Kuhn's sense),
as opposed to those less common moments of scientific
activity which are marked by revolutionary breakthroughs
and their applications. The authors of these works
suggest answers, frequently controversial, to the
question: What is the place of science in everyday human
affairs?

A good initial literary spark for taking up this
question is Francis Bacon's 1624 utopian dream-vision N3!
Atlantis (profitably read with P. B. Medawar's equally
optimistic essay 'On ‘The Effecting of all Things
Possible'”). Though unfinished, the historical

significance of New Atlantis lies in its alluringly

 

detailed and prophetic sketch of Solomon's House, a great
scientific research foundation which thrived independently

of the political, economic, and religious systems of its

152
host society, and which became a reality in 1662 as The
Royal Society of London.112 Beside Bacon's tale (a
remarkable instance of the complementarity of the literary
and scientific imaginations and of two rhetorical
orientations), several other works of fiction offer their
own commentary on the place of science in society.

Charles Dickens' Hard Times and behaviorist B. F.

 

Skinner's Walden Two, for instance, express different (and

 

in some ways opposing) views of the place of science in
learning. Who can forget the "eminently practical"
Grandgrind ranting in M'Choakumchild's classroom about the
importance in life of "Facts”? Substitute "facts" for
"things” and one can almost hear in Gradgrind's preaching
the equally fervent voice of Thomas Sprat. "Now, what I
want is, Facts," exhorts Gradgrind, “Teach these boys and
girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.
Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can
only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts;

nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” sir!"

 

112 Included in Thomas Sprat's 1667 History of the
Royal Society is another work which could’be included in
this second unit of readings--Abraham Cowley's 'Ode to the
Royal Society.” Cowley's poem draws attention, for
instance, to the conflict which continues in our time
regarding the relative importance of Words and Things in
the search for “true” knowledge; speaking of Bacon, Cowley
writes:

 

From Words, which are but the Pictures of Thought,
(Though we our Thoughts from them perversely drew)
To Things, the Minds right object, he it brought,
Like foOlish Birds to painted Grapes we flew;

He sought and gather'd for our use the True . . .

153
Life was not to be lived in the manner of the fanciful
Sissy Jupe, girl number twenty, the circus-man's daughter,
but rather like her classmate, Bitzer, who could describe
and classify a horse for M'Choakumchild in concrete,
exact, and "real" terms. Check the Fancy, encourage the
Reason. Coketown itself is a cold, hard fact made up of
many smaller cold, hard facts: "Fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact,
fact everywhere in the immaterial." While Dickens' §2£§
Timgg caricatures the excesses of utilitarianism and

empiricism, Skinner's novel Walden Two is more in the vein

 

of Bacon's utopia in that it projects a vision of the
ideal method of learning, presented popularly in his

controversial Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971). Several

 

novels by scientists which explore the place of science in
society futuristically and extrapolatively have already
been mentioned in the previous chapter, including those of
Isaac Asimov, David Brin, and Gregory Benford.113

With respect to the debate concerning biological
determinism, discussed in the chapter two in the context
of the rhetoric of sociobiologists, a few examples of

novels which will provoke a lively consideration of the

 

113 A recent novel which deals with the place of
technology (applied science) in present-day American
culture, depicting a technological overkill in our daily
lives--e.g., from radio transmissions, sirens, and
microwaves to ultrasonic appliances, television
overstimulation, and industrial pollution--is Don
DeLillo's White Noise (1984).

 

 

154
topic are Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series of
”experimental" novels, such as Germinal and Nana, August

Strindberg's By the Open Sea, and Harold Frederic's The

 

Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination. Zola's

 

pervasive use of animal imagery in 5323, for instance,
suggests that the characters described are trapped in
their own biological heredity, that they are animals more
of instinct than of reason. The audience at the Theatre
des Varietes, where Nana performs, sound like twittering
sparrows; the men waiting in Nana's foyer are likened to
"bow-wows sitting round on their behinds; the lawyer Venot
eats "with a small nibling sounds suggestive of a mouse;
Countess Sabine "might have been a cat, sleeping with
claws withdrawn and paws stirred by a scarce perceptible
nervous quiver; the cheering crowds at the Grand Prix
looked "like insects swarming madly" and their cry was 'a
wild beast's cry despite the garb of civilzation.‘ Nana
herself, at the center of Zola's veritable zoo of
characters, becomes in the end ”the fly that had flown up
from the ordure of the slums, bringing with it the leaven
of social rottenness”; her capricious denigration of
Muffat and Parisian society “was an affair of unconscious

hereditary spite; it had come to her in her blood."114

 

114 In his 1880 essay "The Experimental Novel,“ Zola
envisioned a natural partnership between the laboratory
scientist and the experimental novelist, whom he defined
as ”the one who accepts proven facts, who points out in
man and in society the mechanism of the phenomena over

155
The question of biological determinism is also

treated in the plays The Hairy Ape (1921) and The Adding

 

 

Machine (1923) by Eugene O'Neill and Elmer Rice,
respectively. Both of these plays deal with the dreadful
possibility of an inescapable, evolutionary-determined
nature of one's lot in life. Rice mocks the idea of
"progress" itself: the adding machine that replaces the
main character Zero only becomes in his next life a
'super-hyper-adding machine," which will require even less
of his intellect to operate, further demeaning him as a
human being. The ”gorilla-like" Yank in O'Neill's play is
at much at the mercy of heredity as Rice's Zero. Other
plays which deal with the place of science and scientists
in society more directly are Friedrich Durrenmatt's $22

Physicists (1962), and Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of

 

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1968).115 While the plays by Rice

 

and O'Neill pose the question of the biological basis of

human behavior, the plays by Durrenmatt and Kipphardt

 

which science is mistress, and who does not interpose his
personal sentiments, except in the phenomena whose
determinism is not yet settled, and who tries to test, as
much as he can, this personal sentiment, this idea‘g
priori, by observation and experiment“ (Ellmann and

Fei e son, 1965).

115 See Daniel L. Zins' essay “Teaching English in a
Nuclear Age” (1985), which discusses both Durrenmatt's The
Physicists and Kipphardt's Oppenheimer, as well as BertEI—
Brecht' 5 play Galileo (New York: Grove Press, 1966). The
conclusion to the latter play, quoted by Zins, also
reflects the theme of the other two plays: "May you now
guard science's light/Kindle it and use it right,/Lest it
be a flame to fall/Downward to consume us all."

 

156
engage the reader in equally difficult questions about the
ethical relationships between scientific research and the
sociopolitical concerns.

Beside the themes of Frankensteinian science and the
place of science in society, a third thematic unit can be
organized around the definition of science as a mode of
inquiry and as a way of viewing reality: How is "doing
science" different from and similar to other, non-
scientific or humanistic activities? What kinds of human
values does science engender? What is the role of
creativity and imagination in scientific activity? No
small part of the tension between the humanities and the
sciences is due to the elusiveness of achieving a clear,
comprehensive, and mutual understanding of what each is--
as a process of thought and action, as a methodology for
learning, as a world-view, and as a human experience
rooted in values and language--though definitions and
differentiations have been attempted by both scientists
(Einstein, 1936; Heisenberg, 1955; Medawar, 1967;
Bronowski, 1978) and non-scientists with various
backgrounds and interests, including literary artists and
English educators (Arnold, 1889; Richards, 1925, 1926;
Huxley, 1963; Levin, 1968; Bizzell, 1979; Raymond, 1982;
Connors, 1983). Possibly indicative of a recent change in
the posture of scientists toward the humanistic-

rhetorical tradition is Bronowski's assertion in Magic,

157

Science, and Civilization that "the method of science, the

 

objectification of entities, abstract concepts, or
artificial concepts like atoms, in in fact a direct
continuation of the human process of language, and that it
is right to think of science as being simply a highly
formalized language" (49).

There are number of works of fiction and non-fiction
which provide stimulating entry points for shaping and
testing definitions of science--works which offer examples
of the scientific imagination, the value-systems of
science, and the language of scientists in its social
context. I have already mentioned in chapter two a few
novels by scientists which depict scientific problem-
solving activity or scientists grappling with important
issues of their time--e.g., Snow's The Search, Sagan's

Contact, and McCormmach's Night Thoughts. In addition,

 

there are a number of works by literary artists which can
help the reader comprehend scientific activity and the
life and manners of scientists. Examples of these are

Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (which could be read with Paul

 

De Kruif's The Microbe Hunters), Ursula K. LeGuin's The

 

Dispossessed, Irving Stone's biographical novel on Charles

 

Darwin, The Origin (which might be read with Darwin's

 

Autobiograth)p and three of John Steinbeck's works--his

 

short story ”The Snake," his novel Cannery Row, and The

Log from The Sea of Cortez, a literary account of a

158
Darwinesque collecting expedition with his close friend
Edward Ricketts, a marine biologist who is also the main
character in the other two stories. To these works might
be added Hawthorne's sketch "Earth's Holocaust," the

thematic preoccupation of which is with the distinction

between the external, material manifestation of human
values--influenced by the progress of science--and their
inner, spiritual origin.

In addition to these works of fiction there is a
substantial body of poetry by scientists and literary
artists which deals with the activity and values of
science. "Scientific poetry," or poetry which employs
scientific concepts, themes, and images, has a history
going back at least to the seventeenth century
(depending on one's definition of 'science'). There is a
mixture of purposes expressed in such poetry, ranging from
the merely descriptive to the critical and laudatory. A
few examples by literary artists since the nineteenth
century are Edgar Allen Poe's ”Sonnet--To Science,”
William Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned,” Walt Whitman's
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer,“ Robert Frost's “Why
Wait for Science,” and John Updike's "Cosmic Gall.” Poems
about science and scientific values by scientists include
James Clerk Maxwell's "Molecular Evolution,” Miroslav

Holub's "Evening in a Lab," and Eva Royston's "Working in

159
the Laboratory."116 Two contemporary examples show the
differing attitudes held toward experimental science.

In "Working in the Laboratory" (Poems of Science, 312)

 

Royston expresses the comforting routine and exactness of
laboratory work, versus the limitations of science
expressed by many of the above-cited poems:

Working in the laboratory

You're exact, if nothing else.

I like my whitecoated sterility.

I count fear in terms of adrenalin.

The rabbit's pickled fur intoxicates me.

I slice the strings of intestine. Yes, of course

I can hear the afternoon sun knocking

Against the window like a timid visitor,

When I go home, I'll whip eggs,

And read. But now my rubber hands

Dip into ethyl alcohol

Jars, like drifting embryos, demand a label.

There's so much tissue.

Of course I can look up suddenly

And smile like a child.

In the meantime, I weigh this cellular butter

 

115 Many other examples of “scientific poetry” can be
found in such collections as Ralph B. Crum's Scientific
Thought in Poetgy (1931), John Heath-Stubbs and Phillips
Salman's Poems of Science (1984), and Bonnie Bilyeu
Gordon's Songs From Unsung Worlds: Science in Poetgy
(1985).

 

 

 

 

160
Against the stone,

And like my whitecoated sterility.

By contrast, Anne 8. Perlman's ”The Specialist" (Unsung

Worlds, 168) beseeches the researcher to step outside the

abstract

directly:

confines of the laboratory to view nature more

He no longer marvels at stars.

That's what.

Under the telescope's dome,
he crouches in a

concrete basement,

his head down,

decoding the graphs

a cosmic camera

drops in his lap.

In his own regional head

(it could be a dungeon)

he parses electrical impulses,
regroups the lines

(fudging a little)

into lakes and sandstorms,
peaks and tide wracks,

his whole territory

shut against tresspassers

161

Poems about science by both scientists and poets provide
another way, in addition to fiction and drama, to explore
not only the contribution of scientific methodology and
thought to everyday human affairs but also the place of
a literary sensibility in the scientific life and
manners.117

The fiction, drama, and poetry I have mentioned can
of course be complemented by narrative accounts of
scientific activity by scientists themselves, such as
those found in autobiographies.118 I have already

mentioned Vincent Dethier's To Know a Fly, Konrad Lorenz's

 

King Solomon's Ring, and James Watson's The Double Helix.

 

 

The latter work, an account of the race to discover the
molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is
particularly revealing with respect to the social process
of scientific activity and the role of ethics in science,
and should be read with the alternative and conflicting
account by Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, and the
essay "A Sorrow and a Pity: Rosalind Franklin and Th3

Double Helix” by physicist Jeremy Bernstein. Must reading

 

 

117 Such considerations are taken up in the
introductory dialogue between Alan Lightman (an
astrophysicist) and George Starbuck (a poet) in
Gordon's Unsung Worlds (1985).

 

118 Recent autobiographies are microbiologist S. E.
Luria's A Slot Machine, A Broken Test Tube (1984), from
which I quoted earlier, chemist Primo Levi's The Periodic
Table (1984), and physicist Richard P. Feynman's ”Surely
You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (1985).

162
with all of these works is P. B. Medawar's little book

Advice to a Young Scientist, which includes a chapter on

 

sexism amd racism in science.

The three thematic units I have outlined--on the
Frankenstein scenario, science and society, and defining
science--bring together voices from the literary and

scientific communities to foster a constructive clashing

 

of two major intellectual traditions, the kind of
educational experience which, as Snow argued, is urgently
need in our highly specialized schooling, and which would
help overcome the fragmented condition of liberal
education described by Whitehead. It is difficult to say
whether there could emerge from this clashing an Hegelian
synthesis in the form of a new consciousness and rhetoric,
perhaps something neither fully scientific nor fully
humanistic but a complementary fusion which (like the two
strands making up a DNA double helix) becomes a third
force with greater potential for expression and growth
than either intellectual lens alone.119 Even if such a
synthesis or co-operative merging of the two world-
pictures were possible, how could one know for certain if
it happened? What means of assessment of changed
attitudes, new perspectives, and/or personal growth could

be used as a reliable and valid yardstick? Despite such

 

119 I am not in agreement with Rousseau (1972), who
apparently believes that the two cultures cannot co-exist
within one individual.

163
nagging questions, the potential value in the English
classroom of the thematic units I have discussed is
enormous. At the least, the sensitive reader will be
drawn into the center of the two-culture dialectic, the
lasting benefit of which is likely to be a heightened
critical attitude with regard to making judgments about
the relationship between the humanistic and the scientific
disciplines--an attitude which must begin with the premise
that neither mode of inquiry or picture of reality is
inherently superior to the other. Moreover, if the
teaching of English is largely a political act, as
suggested by some English educators (Moffett, 1981; Zins,
1985; Ohmann, 1974, 1985), thematic units provide a viable
opportunity to identify and scruinize biased or
stereotypical conceptualizations of both the humanist and
the scientist, and to nurture a peaceful cooperation
between the two cultures.

Finally, I would like to add a brief remark on
classroom writing activities associated with science.
Clearly, while the thematic units just presented will
provide structured contexts for writing assignments, a
number of other writing exercises, not necessarily linked
to science reading, can be used to encourage students to
bring together the perspectives of the two cultures and to
explore the subtle complexities of their relationship.

Students can write science dialogues (Wilkes, 1978), try

164
"webbing" (Abruscato and Hassard, 1976), or perhaps write
and produce short television ads that rely on scientific
proof of the product's value. Additional possibilities
are the writing of technical reports based on actual field
research (Lewis, 1978), science fiction, plays dealing
with science in relation to human values, and sensory
poetry.120 Lastly, even in technical report writing,
students can be encouraged to use rhetorical devices as a
way to personalize their presentation of scientific
information. In their experiments of this sort with
technical writing students, Whitburn et a1. (1978) observe
that the use of such rhetorical devices as climax,
parenthesis, polysyndeton, antithesis, and alliteration
promote such traditional ideals in technical
writing as economy and clarity. They encourage a
student to be a more aggressive writer and let
his personality through on nonspecialist
communication. They strengthen the belief that
writing is an art that can be learned and not a
talent inherent in the genes. They help with

invention, the discovery of content. They arouse

 

12° Examples of sensory poetry on scientific themes
written by high school students are given by Worsley and
Mayer (1989), 60-63. Such poetry may help students
visualize metaphorically their observations of natural
phenomena.

165
reader interest. (357)121
I reiterate the point, in closing, that the kinds of
science writing that are encouraged by the thematic units
I have set forth, and by the suggestions made in the
preceding paragraph, are clearly not founded on a "skills"
model of composition. An emphasis on the mechanistic
aspects of writing short-changes the deeper dimension of
using language which goes beyond the words themselves.
"What we are looking for in English,” David Holbrook wrote

in English for Meaning, "is not merely a technical skill

 

. . . but a particular orientation towards the world
through words, which devotes itself to the discovery of
truth and meaning of experience" (229). The English
classroom, where more attention is given than anywhere
else in the curriculum to language, is the ideal place to
create holistic learning structures, to encourage the
development of multi-disciplinary and bi-cultural (in
Snow's terms) perspectives. Reading and writing

constitute not so much a source of facts or a set of

 

121 See also Whitburn's "Personality in Scientific
and Technical Writing" (1976) and Jerome Bump's ”Metaphor,
Creativity, and Technical Writing" (1985). Bump believes
that metaphor "is one of the scientist's as well as one of
the poet's most powerful tools” and that (in agreement
with Max Black) ”metaphorical models are in fact
indispensible tools for the generation of creative
hypotheses and effective explanations in science' (447).
Therefore, he suggests, journal writing and directed
exercises are two ways to encourage students of technical
writin to engage in metaphorical thinking. (Bump does not
provide specific examples of writing assignments.)

166
skills, but deeply personal experiences through which
readers and writers build their self-concept, shape and
test their view of the world, and celebrate the
multifariousness of language, ideas, and human experience.
It is time, as Robert Shafer (1986) suggests, to implement
more widely models of English education based on the

points of agreement in the personal growth movement.

CONCLUSION

The words "scientific writing" suggest to some a mode
of using language that is diametrically opposed to the
"colors" of traditional rhetorical forms of discourse and,
indeed, that the writing of experimental scientists is not
rhetorical at all. Thomas Sprat's rejection of rhetoric
on behalf of his fellow Baconians constituted an attempt
to purge the language of the new science of the
subjective, ambiguous, and emotional qualities which
permeated the discourse of those who had hitherto measured
learned discourse by a Ciceronian eloquence--by the
skillful use of the figures of speech and thought revered
since antiquity. When Peter Ramus reduced rhetoric
essentially to considerations of style, a practice which
gained wide acceptance among seventeenth century educators
at all levels of schooling, the stage was set for a clash
between the ancient and modern uses of language. “Plain
language,” in the context of the emergent linguistic needs
and aims of modern science, meant arhetorical language.
Classical models of learned discourse did not, the new
scientists argued, focus on objective, material reality--

on things--but on words as an end in itself. Scholastic

167

168
disputation in particular represented for the new
scientists an abuse of words, since the physical world,
the Book of Nature, was not the central source of
reference.

In the first chapter, I wished to show that the
scientists' new conception of plainness, notwithstanding
its rootedness in physical nature, was shaped by
rhetorical constraints of its own. The four great arts of
traditional rhetoric-~invention, arrangement, style, and
memory-—have had no less a place in scientific activity
and writing than in humanistic modes of inquiry and
discourse. This point is developed further in chapter two
by a demonstration of the subjective, argumentative
elements present in the wide range of writing by
scientists. Whether one considers the technical
scientific article, the popular writings by scientists, or
their fiction, rhetorical argumentation--persuasive
discourse--is a fundamental dimension of the writings of
scientists. With respect to the technical and popular
writings by scientists, the sociobiology debate spurred by
the writings of E. 0. Wilson is representative of such
persuasive discourse, though any number of other examples
might be chosen which are far less visible and

dramatic.122 The argumentative nature of scientists'

 

122 See for instance the detailed case study by
Charles Bazerman (1988, 193-225) of the technical
publications of the physicist Arthur Holly Compton, in

169
writing becomes increasingly evident as the audience of
scientist-writers widens to include those readers outside
a particular community of specialists; only the language
in which the arguments are framed changes, not the
essential purpose of persuading a readershipto accept the
view being presented of the natural phenomena being
considered, whether the latter be organismic (including
human) behavior or the behavior of atomic particles
subjected to experimental manipulation.

Finally, in the third chapter, I argue that at the
broadest audience level of scientific writing, most
notably that at which it intersects with literary art, the
rhetoric of science can be seen as emanating from and
belonging to an authorial and linguistic community larger
than that of laboratory researchers. Scientific writing
ultimately becomes, then, a co-participatory process which
comprises a dialectic between the humanistic and empirical

traditions. The central point of chapter three is that

 

which Bazerman shows the rhetorical framework of Compton‘s
attempt to persuade his colleagues of the validity of what
eventually came to be known as the Compton Effect, a
phenomenon claimed to occur when electrons are scattered
by x-radiation. Bazerman writes that Compton
creates a crispness of argument not only by
detailed revisions of the representation of the
experiment and the results, but also by his
careful control of the epistemic level, authorial
voice, and authorial judgments. His persuavive
ends can only be met if he maintains the
confidence of his readership that his
representation on all levels adheres to the
current standards of scientific practice. (224)

170
scientific writing must be taught in the liberal arts
curriculum as comprising such a dialectic. The limits of
scientific knowledge and methodologies, the promise of the
scientific age, must be set in relief against cautionary

scenarios like those of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World,

 

Michael Crichton in Terminal Man, or Frank Herbert in The

 

White Plague. The cosmic, futuristic dramas imagined by

 

phsycists David Brin and Gregory Benford, as well as those
pictured by biochemist Isaac Asimov, are necessary
reminders that the same physical power that holds the
potential to propel the human species through vast
galactic expanses also could, by the exercise of opposing
ethical values, destroy entire civilizations. All of
these speculative stories, whether authored by scientists
or by literary artists, are part of the rhetoric of modern
science, no less so because (as Brin notes) they cannot
ever make their way into the technical periodicals of the
scientific community. The language of science, its
argumentative rhetoric, can be fully undertood and
appreciated only when it considered in its multifarious
forms and seen for what it is, a dialectic between the
individual rhetor's personal values and beliefs on the one
hand and, on the other, the irrepressible desire to find
order in, and thereby to control and shape, the material
world.

The past three centuries have been characterized by

171
the "modern" ideal of virtually limitless progress
engendered and sustained by the scientific revolution born
in the seventeenth century. The modern revolution in
science is, in a real sense, a rhetorical reéorientation.
As individuals of the western world who have benefitted
from the great technological advances made possible by
experimental research we have come to revere a fact-world,
in a way not too dissimilar from the way Dickens'
Gradgrind worshipped facts. The rhetoric of media
advertisements, for instance, constantly bombards its
targetted audiences with experimentally-derived facts to
back the claims made for all sorts of products. Facts are
worshipped (even if they often intimidate), as are the
scientists who generate them.

This factualistic orientation in modern culture is
evident as well in our colleges and universities, where
scientists and the scientific curriculum typically
overshadow the contributions of humanists and humanistic
studies. The voice of fact, of science and technology,
speaks louder and more convincingly than the voice of art
--and particularly, needless to say, than the voice of
literary art. It is in this very context of competing
intellectual perspectives--perspectives dependent for
their coherence upon identifiable and agreed upon (if not
explicitly stated) uses of language-~that English studies

can serve as an integrative discipline. The English

172
classroom can serve as a base for bringing under close
scrutuny the languages of both scientists and literary
artists in order to explore the ways in which both depend
upon imagination and creativity in forging, and arguing
for, particular views of reality. As Bronowski and
Medawar have repeatedly stated, both scientific hypotheses
and poems are imaginative constructs which must be re-
created and re-interpreted in the mind of their audience.
Moreover, the combined study of scientific and

literary uses of language can help students integrate what
Jonathan King (1986) calls "the three faces of thinking'--
the empirical, interpretive, and evaluative dimensions of
human endeavor. The language of empiricism, the mark of
the experimental sciences for the past three centuries,
must be accompanied by the language of contexts, King
asserts, a language which provides an interpretive
framework in which to place empirically-derived facts.
Such an interpretive framework is offered by the language
of analogies, metaphors, models, paradigms, ideologies,
stories, and myths. "Such prophets as Huxley and Orwell,"
writes King,

told us stories of what could be but should not

be, precisely in the hope that we would alter the

script. Without such stories we cannot

experiment with visions; we cannot compare them.

With no comparisons, we run great risks in our

173

collective lives, for a society with false

visions is just as dangerous as a society with no

visions. (85)
The third face of thinking, which King terms "evaluative,"
is concerned with moral development. Rationalistic,
utilitarian thinking historically has tended to exclude
completely questions about right and wrong, and has
focussed near—sightedly on a concern with merely producing
empirical knowledge. It is evaluative thinking which is
the basis upon which, for instance, Oppenheimer questioned
the wisdom of creating nuclear weaponry or, more recently,
the biologist Lewis Thomas (1979) warned against
experimentation leading the capability of cloning the
human genome. It is the same kind of thinking exemplified
by Michael Crichton in Terminal Man--a commentary on the
self-serving laboratory ethos as much as it is a research
thriller like Gregory Benford's Artifact--or by C. P.

Snow in The Search or Hawthorne in 'Rappaccini's Daughter”

 

or Kate Wilhelm in The Clewiston Test.

 

We live in a “post-modern” world (Magill, l977)--a
world which no longer measures “progress" by the lone
yardstick of scientific ratiocination and technological
advancement, particularly since the latter have also
brought a host of new problems (from environmental
pollution to the spectre of nuclear holocaust). Beyond a

concern with practical "skills” and vocation, a liberal

174
curriculum should be, first and foremost, integrative; it
should develop an understanding of the co-operative and
complementary relationship between the humanities and the
sciences.123 The study of scientific writing in the
broadest sense, from its plainness ethic to its rhetorical
extension into imaginative literature, offers a powerful

context and means for achieving this purpose.

 

123 In his 1958 address to the American Association
of University Professors--titled “Science and Humanities
in Education"--chemist Eugene Rabinowitch remarked, in
line with the climate of opinion anticipating Snow's Rede
Lecture on the two cultures, that just as humanistic study
must incorporate "the characteristics of open-mindedness
and tolerance, the principles of relativity and
complementarity, which modern science has evolved . . .
science cannot remain an activity unrelated to the
humanistic principles and values which mankind has evolved
in its history. . . . [The scientist] has to learn to
integrate science with the humanities, and not to place
the two mechanically one beside the other" (Obler and
Estrin, 1962, 170-171, my emphasis).

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