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Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication

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Abstract

Public policy decisions often require rhetorically-engaged citizens to have some understanding of the science and technology involved. On many current issues (GMO crops, vaccinations, climate change) sectors of the public hold views differing from those of most scientists, and they often do not support proposals based on the scientists’ views. The overall cultural authority of science has also been challenged in the last decade by several negative trends in the sciences themselves, including widely-reported cases of fraud and failures in replication. With the support of professional science organizations, science communication specialists have stepped in aggressively to address science’s communication problems scientifically. This paper will examine the assumptions behind their advice on scientific information, their recommended strategies of framing, narration, and projecting trustworthiness, and their characterizations of audiences and the nature of science itself. From the perspective of rhetorical argumentation, the science communication literature does not promote addressing audiences as citizens capable of rational argumentation. But the science of science communication is likely to remain the dominant approach to public science with the professional science community.

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Notes

  1. Any overall decline in the prestige of science, at least in the US, has been rebutted by the Pew Research Council, another source of survey-derived assessments, which claims that public perceptions of sciencehave not declined since the 1970s. They report that in 2018 44% of U.S. adults surveyed expressed a “great deal of confidence” in scientists, though percentages varied in relation to specific issues (Funk and Kennedy 2019).

  2. https://www.nsf.gov/events/event_summ.jsp?cntn_id=117845.

  3. Leshner’s list is longer and somewhat different from that offered in this chapter. He names on a PowerPoint slide, “Incidents of scientific misconduct, human subjects concerns, animal welfare issues, conflict of interest problems, publishing by press release, hyperbolic and exaggerated claims, appearing to suppress dissenting views, mistakes in scientific papers, failures to replicate.”.

  4. Van Noorden lists falsification, self-plagiarism, plagiarism, honest error and irreproducible results as the reasons for retraction. Moylan and Kowalczuk include among reasons compromised peer review, data falsification, image duplication, plagiarism, and a co-author unaware of a publication.

  5. 5 May 2017, 17 May 2017, 21 August 2017. See also The Week, 18 April 2016; Aeon, November 7, 2017. For summaries of the “science is broken” theme see Hilgard and Jamieson (2017), and National Science Foundation (2018), “Threats to Science’s Reputation,” 46.

  6. https://www.nsf.gov/events/event_summ.jsp?cntn_id=124056&org=OISE&preview=false.

  7. https://www.aaas.org/programs/communicating-science.

  8. https://www.aaas.org/page/center-public-engagement-science-and-technology/2019-annual-meeting-communicating-science-seminar.

  9. https://www.compassscicomm.org/compass-scicomm-dc.

  10. Cacciatore, Scheufele and Iyengar’s article is a perfect example of a definitional dissociation argument as described in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric. The authors start with a confused concept, frame, and dissociate it into two variants under conveniently alliterative labels (emphasis and equivalence), subsequently evaluating one of the pair more positively than the other. Once the pair are in place, they are further separated in a series of antitheses. On this difference see Druckman and Lupia (2017, p. 3).

  11. For an analysis of Carbon Capture and Storage campaigns in terms of “information frames” interacting with other frames see Whitmarsh et al. (2019).

  12. In one of the articles, Downs defines narrative as a narrator’s voice setting up a conflict followed by action over time to a resolution (2014, p. 13627) while in another Dahlstrom defines narrative as a structure of cause and effect relationships between events over time that impact particular characters, and he stresses narrative as the antithesis of “logical-scientific communication” (2014, p. 13614). Each article cites a different meta-analytical study showing inconsistent results from narratives (Downs, 13628; Dahlstrom, p. 13615).

  13. https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/sydney-ideas/2018/is-storytelling-bad-for-science.html.

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  1. Department of English, University of Maryland, 2119 Tawes Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Jeanne Fahnestock

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Fahnestock, J. Rhetorical Citizenship and the Science of Science Communication. Argumentation 34, 371–387 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-019-09499-7

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