Towards a new rhetoric of scientific discourse : reading Stephen Jay Gould

The character of modern scientific discourse is the legacy of a disciplinary and philosophical tradition in science of equating its discourse with the natural world that it describes. Science claims the availability of an egoless transparent discourse in which authorial presence virtually is effaced, leaving visible only the empirical world to which it refers. The practical effect of the success of this position, both in science and culture, is that science has become privileged as a special source of objectivity and infallibility.

Science's privileged status establishes two difficulties for both science and culture. First, it invites scientific error as a result of scientists' remaining unaware of the impact of their values and disciplinary commitments on their practice of science. Second, it invites cultural misappropriation of and mismanagement of the technological products of science as a result of culture's reliance on science's apparent infallibility and objectivity.

Recently, Stephen Jay Gould has challenged the foundations of scientific discourse by arguing that its claims to objectivity and infallibility are inaccurate and misleading. Gould's own rhetoric of science is a self-conscious rhetoric that both reveals and critiques its own self-interest. His position has provoked a defense of scientific discourse among its practitioners that demonstrates not only that Gould's position is valid, but that his new rhetoric provides a viable alternative for redefining the relationship between science and culture.