Rhetoric of Science in Canada I La rhetorique de la science au Canada

This heading might be better amended to "We couldn't find very much (despite assiduous searching);' because we suspect that in scattered Communication, English, French, History, Philosophy, and Sociology departments, and elsewhere, research is going on that fits this general category of scholarship. Given the direction of science studies over the last decade and a bit (of which, more anon), it is difficult to believe that Canadian scholars have remained insensible to the pull of rhetorical approaches. And, in fact, rumours surface occasionally of work on the antivivisectionist literature of Victorian England here, the role of analogy in scientific argumentation there. But whatever work there is in Canada has certainly not coalesced into anything like a movement, as it has in the U.S. especially, 1 and, eliminating speculation and rumour, there isn't very much. Canadians were, however, in on the ground floor. One of the earliest arguments that rhetoric might have something meaningful to say about science came from Michael Overington then and now a professor of sociology at St. Mary's, in Halifax, N.S. That paper "The Scientific Community as Audience" ( 1977a) -quickly became one of the citation classics of the field, and Overington has published a few other germane pieces (1977b, 1991). But, as he tells the story in the brief note we

Introduction include in this issue, he saw that research primarily as a necessary move to clear a space for him to get on with the type of sociology that mattered to him, not as a dominant theme in his scholarship. He quickly moved on.
There are other points of participatory Canadian contact with rhetoric of science, as well, some significant. We have published two important books in the field,a collection of Landmark Essays ) and a major historical monograph, Larry's Stewart's ( 1992) Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain. We offer graduate courses on rhetoric of science, at UBC and the University of Waterloo, both of them initiated by Judy Segal, an essay from whom we are pleased to include in this issue. We have had addresses by major rhetoricians of science -Alan Gross (1993) to the Canadian Society for the History of Rhetoric, and Carolyn Miller and Thomas Huckin to CATTW. Established Canadian scholars who work in the field are well distributed geographically across Canada: Judy Segal in BC; Larry Stewart in Saskatchewan; Randy Harris and Cathy Schryer in Waterloo, and Michael Jordan at Queen's, in Ontario; and Carol Corbin, at the University College of Cape Breton. In Quebec, professional writing programs in French that foster this interest have recently been implemented at Universite de Sherbrooke and Universite Laval (Quebec City). Celine Beaudet and Isabelle Clerc have developed a keen interest in rhetoric of science, as have Sarah Cummins, Ginette Demers (and her team) and Zelie Guevel, in relation to translation and specialized languages. And, most promisingly, younger scholars are showing an interest in the field -notably Anna Cooper, who is developing a thesis on genetic counselling at UBC, Lorelei Lingaard, whose recent dissertation for Simon Fraser was on the discourse practices of medical students, and Joyce Parsons, Frances Ranger, and Christine Trott, all graduates of Waterloo who have work gracing this issue of Technostyle.
But that, to the best of our knowledge, is pretty much it: a one-paragraph survey covers it, amounting to maybe a dozen publications in all (see the References below).

There should be
There should be considerably more Canadian work in this area, because scientific discourse "is quite likely the most triumphant, the most imitated, the most universal form of human discourse ever developed" (Montgomery,p. 2). And, more intriguingly from a rhetorical perspective, it is also a discourse which has characterized itself from the beginning as immune to rhetoric, if not the very cure for it, -indeed, from before the beginning. Science grew out of philosophy, which has almost always had either a sneer or, at best, a patronizing rub on the head for rhetoric. (Plato epitomizes both attitudes. First, he mockingly compares rhetoric to cosmetics in the Gorgias, Technostyle vol. 16, n° 1 Hiver 2000 something which gives the illusion of wholesomeness, but cannot provide the genuine bloom of health. Then, in the later Phaedrus, he allows rhetoric to be in thrall to dialectic, an unfortunately necessary sop philosophers may require for the instruction of the degenerate remainder of mankind). When the Christian virtuosi of Enlightenment distilled natural philosophy into modern science (Shapin, 1994), the disdain, if anything, increased. "Who can behold, without indignation;' asked Thomas Sprat, the Royal Society's first house dog "how many Mists and Uncertainties, these specious Tropes and Figures have brought on our knowledge?" (Sprat,p. 5). Other terriers of the period borrowed Plato's cosmetology image, cudgeling rhetoric for despoiling "the face of truth by daubing it over with the paint of Language" (Childrey, quoted in Shapiro,p. 239). 2 The refrain is a familiar one, down to today: science has no truck with rhetoric. In an American Scientist review of Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, for instance, Michael May wrote the book off as "not an exercise in science but an escape into rhetoric!' But, of course, rhetoric is: (a) functional, (b) directed, (c) belief-inducing, and ( d) action-inciting discourse; scientific discourse is ( e) all of the above. Rhetoric of science is inevitable.
Increasingly over the last two decades, this inevitability has become virtually commonplace; the translation we include of Latour and Fabbri's (1981) "La rhetorique de la science" makes a strong case for a rhetorical dimension of scientific discourse, but for many science scholars, it is a case that no longer needs to be made. Rhetoric of Introduction infused by the sensibilities of the rhetoric-as-epistemic movement and neo-sophism (see the introduction in  for a sketch of these developments). But -as the two review articles in this issue outline, one by James Allard, of recent anthologies, one by Lynette Hunter, of recent monographs -it has grown beyond those roots to develop its own distinctive themes, problematics, and even its own anxieties.
In Canada, as Judy Segal briefly argues in her essay in this issue, we have a peculiar cast to our rhetorical scholarship, which she sees as somewhat more socially situated and genre-based (in Carolyn Miller's sense of genre). It may be that we also have a distinct cast to our science, one that is likewise somewhat more socially sensitive, and certainly much less tied to military funding, than the science of our American cousins. These observations suggest that a home-grown rhetoric of science -of the sort Segal exemplifies on one coast, and Corbin ( 1998a, l 998b) on the other, Parsons in the middle -might well be in the making. As Segal also notes, however, it is still too early for any but the most preliminary remarks about a specifically Canadian rhetoric of science. But there is unquestionably room for a much stronger Canadian presence in rhetoric of science, irrespective of its cast(s). We have the two requisite ingredients in spades. We have lots of interesting science; one of Jeanne Fahnestock's best papers, for instance, drew heavily on Canadian archeologists; Halloran and Miller both examine the prefigurative DNA research of Oswald Avery in important papers (1984 and 1994 respectively); and we have a score of Nobel laureates (including Alexander Fleming, the subject of one of this issue's articles, and John Polanyi, one of the most responsible and astute voices in science). Nor do we have a shortage of good rhetoriciansthe constituents of CATTW and the CSSHR alone confirm that.

Some examples
The idea we had for this issue was two-fold: to plumb instances of rhetoric in Canadian science; and to see what specifically Canadian characteristics rhetorical analysis of scientific discourse has in Canada. We were fortunate enough to find both in the submissions, and both are well-represented in the papers we accepted and now await your interest.
Included in this issue are a note, a translation, a reprint, and six original papers. The note is a significant contextualizing statement by Overington, one of the pioneers, albeit a somewhat reluctant pioneer, which outlines some of the issues that came to a head in his "Scientific audience as community''. The translation is of an early work by a major articulator of the rhetorical turn, Bruno Latour, in collaboration with Paolo Fabbri, -which is also the article we reprint, since the original is no longer easy to obtain. In some ways it is a model for rhetoric of science -focusing as it does on a close reading of a scientific text. Rhetoric has always been, in the phrasing Technostyle vol. 16, 11° I Hiver 2000 of Michael Halloran (1984, 70) "a strongly empirical field of study in that it places great emphasis on the particular case" In other ways, Latour and Fabbri's paper is more of a useful resource for rhetoricians of science; the actual rhetorical quotient (in the North American neo-Aristotelian sense of rhetoric) is minimal. But, in both cases, the (superb) translation, by Sarah Cummins, is welcome and overdue. Moreover, the very fact of its translation points to an important contribution Canadians can make to the rhetorical turn. There is much continental French work that would repay translation -by Francoise Bastide and Pierre Bourdieu, for two -and Canadians are recognized leaders in translation and translation theory.
But it is the specific analyses, we feel, that are the most important contributions of this issue. Joyce Parson's analysis of The Canadian Strategy on HIV/AIDS is in the area of public science policy, akin to the sort of work Craig Waddell (1990), and Killingworth and Steffens, initiated in the late eighties. Such work is almost alwaysas is Parson's -doubly rhetorical. It is rhetorical in the academic sense of the critical tools it deploys, and it is rhetorical in the traditional sense of advocating a position with respect to a policy. In particular, she argues the deep text of The Canadian Strategy fosters a separation of HIV I AIDS patients -an alienation, even -that subverts all the surface platitudes of responsibility to the ill, and Parsons argues the breach must be healed.
Frances Ranger also finds subversion in the discourse she investigates -the argumentation around J. Philippe Rushton's notorious race science, both Rushton's argumentation and his opponents' -but it is a wholesome subversion largely invisible to the arguers. Rush ton's insistent claim is that he simply reports objective facts. His opponents counter that he is selective and manipulative with his data, making him anything but objective. But Ranger notes that the idea of race and the ideal of objectivity are fundamentally incompatible, that both sides are effectively making a category mistake; in particular, that the bulk of Rush ton's opponents are ceding the ground of the debate to him, making it "about objectivity:' No-one, not even Rushton, whose work would seem to depend on it, has offered a robust definition of race, but ceding this ground allows the debate to assume there is such a definition, that there are, objectively, distinct human races. Since, however, objectivity is predicated on the erasure of values, and since race is as value-laden a concept as there is, Ranger sees no possibility of a robustly objective definition, which should vitiate the entire debate.
Christine Trott's article is more conventional as an essay in rhetoric of science, in the tradition of Halloran's ( 1984) "Birth of Molecular Biology" and Gross's (1988) "Shoulders of Giants;' essays which examine the discourse of pivotal moments in scientific history -in her case, the discovery of insulin. The familiar story is of the lone scientist, Frederick Ban ting, and his trusty companion, Charles Best, struggling Introduction against the odds to extract a life-saving potion from dog pancreases. And there is much to recommend that story, but only as a partial account. The fuller picture is, in one ofTrott's subheads, a narrative of collaboration and compromise. It is not Best's name beside Banting's on the Nobel prize. It is lab director J.J.R. Macleod's name. In Trott's analysis, this is for good, mostly rhetorical, reasons. Judy Segal's paper reports on her rhetorical presence in a collaborative research project on end-of-life decisions at a psychiatric hospital. The essay is largely descriptive, but in an evocative way that reveals the potential importance of rhetoricians in such roles -as facilitators alive to issues of authority and terministic screens and the potency of language. She provides something of a blueprint for rhetorical involvement in multidisciplinary research teams focusing on science, especially on the human dimensions of science.
Celine Beaudet looks into the highly charged Sokal affair, which made even bigger headlines in Parisian circles than in North America. To remind: In 1996, New York physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately absurd paper in Social Text, parodying American social science authors who delight in quoting French philosophers and intellectuals. Social Text's editors and readers were blind to the parody, and the real heat arose after Sokal published a subsequent article, in Lingua Franca, revealing the hoax. Debates quickly arose, in Lingua Franca, in Le Monde, in Liberation, in La Recherche, in Physics Today and Physics World, and in academic conferences, and postmodern hallways, and scientific coffee klatches everywhere. 5 Several books appeared, including a book by the same Sokal and Bricmont (another physicist) stating their views on social scientists' writings, and three others by French scholars from the humanities -Jeanneret, Richelle and Jurdant -in reprisal and response. Beaudet's analysis of these books reveals misunderstandings and strong disagreements about science and scientific discourse. It also indicates the difficulties of popularizing scientific research, of applying an interdisciplinary approach and of connecting reality to language.
From a totally different perspective, Ginette Demers, applying a normative scientific writing model aimed at attaining objectivity and clarity of expression, and using a statistical approach, shows the evolution over more than a century of two French-Canadian scientific journals and how they have developed the canonical model over this period of time.

Enjoy!
We are proud to bring you this collection, both as scholarly entertainment, and as significant scholarly moves in the growth of Canadian rhetoric of science.

Notes
Aside from the growth of journal publications -including special issues of Rhetorica (Leff and Campbell, 1989), Argumentation (Prelli, 1994), Southern journal of Speech Communication (Keith, 1994), and Teclmical communicati<m quarterly (Gross, 1994)-conference papers and sessions, there is now a society, the American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (see <http://www.hu.mtu.edu/aarst/>), with its own subconference within the annual National Communication Association congress.