This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The current definition of post-truth creates an adversarial relationship with rhetorical theory, relying on a positivist stance toward epistemology. Additionally, the most public-facing scholarship concerning post-truth tends to view knowledge in rather concrete ways, failing to account for the nuance of differing types of knowledge and rhetorical situations. As a result, most of the pragmatic approaches to dealing with disingenuous post-truth rhetorical tactics are predicated on positivism (e.g., fact-checking) and post-truth gets either downplayed or only treated theoretically in rhetorical scholarship. This article redefines post-truth in a manner more amendable to rhetorical theory and presents a heuristic predicated on stasis theory as a method for evaluating the epistemic certainty of rhetorical claims. The heuristic is then used to analyze an exchange from an episode of the podcast Armchair Expert to demonstrate how rhetorical discourse can become unproductive and adversarial when interlocutors claim an inappropriate amount of epistemic certainty, in particular by treating value-based claims as facts. Discussions of the post-truth dilemma need to extend beyond the confines of the current definition to include all discursive practices that ascribe the wrong amount of epistemic certainty to particular claims, not just practices that challenge established knowledge and facts.

This article uses the example of nootropics—a flexible term that capitalizes on the flexibility of the brain—as a category to describe how seemingly oppositional tropes, or turns, can occupy the same rhetorical topos, or space, and produce distinct ethos, political identity, and commitment within that space. It considers two dialectical, gendered tropes in nootropic discourse. The tropes are a falsely binary and highly problematic set of subjectivities, a Gothic masculine and an ostensible Gothic feminine. These two tropes exemplify how rhetorics of wellness produce identities whose turnings towards a politics does not map cleanly onto electoral politics or even identity politics in the US and Canada.

For most of the past two centuries, the scientific study of fungi was little more than a small, inconspicuous subfield of plant biology. Today, that is rapidly changing, as mycologists and their objects of study (fungi) are increasingly attracting young scientists and occupying the public sphere in both medicinal and environmental contexts. At the root of mycology’s popular ascendance is Paul Stamets, a self-trained mycologist, author, entrepreneur, and frequent public spokesperson. This essay offers a rhetorical analysis of Stamets’s most influential public appearance—a 2008 TED talk entitled “6 ways mushrooms can save the world”. In particular, I draw on theoretical frameworks in rhetoric and studies of expertise and experience (SEE) to explain how an amateur scientist holding no credentials beyond a bachelor's degree developed an authoritative voice as a thought leader in his field.

In this paper, we explore the gendered aspects of scientific controversy in the digital age. This project makes use of Leah Ceccarelli’s seminal work on manufactured scientific controversy by considering its implications for the discourse on GMOs and food additives published on digital food and lifestyle blogs. We perform a discourse analysis of several blogs to look at the ways that gendered online discourse and performance influences modern anti-science rhetoric, particularly that which emanates from the sphere colloquially known as crunchy living. We look at the ways the intimate and personal feminine style of digital platforms offer experiential knowledge as a substitute for science. In the current political climate of alternative facts and fake news, this study leads to broader implications about the impact of gendered discourse on the assessment of credibility in online sources.

Rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM) have provided critical understanding of how argument and argument norms within a field shape what we mean by “data.” Work has also examined how questions that shape data collection are asked, how data is interpreted, and even how data is shared. Understood as a form of argument, data reveals important insights into rhetorical situations, the motives of rhetorical actors, and the broader appeals that shape everything from the kinds of technologies built, to their inclusion in our daily lives, to the infrastructures of cities, the medical practices and policies concerning public health, etc. Big data merits continued attention from RSTM scholars as our understanding of its pervasive use and its ethos grows, but its arguments remain elusive (Salvo, 2012). To unpack the elusivity of big data, we explore one particularly illustrative case of big data and political, democratic influence: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. To understand the case, we turn to social studies of data to explore the range of ethical issues raised by big data, and to examine the rhetorical strategies that entail big data.

This essay uses rhetorical analysis to defend the population geneticist Richard Lewontin from accusations made by E. O. Wilson and others that his Marxist social philosophy distorts his empirical science. I suggest that Lewontin’s appeal to his own authority as an experimental evolutionary biologist supports his claim that racism has no biological justification and that it is his opponents whose assumptions about society distort their scientific arguments.

In this paper I analyze strategies policy scientists use to bolster their ethos with American policymakers and the public in the International Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers (SPM), from their Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007. Specifically, I treat the visualizations of computer climate models included in the SPM as technologies that the IPCC authors used to re-integrate their paradoxical ethos: commissioned to give policy guidance on the basis of their scientific reputation, these authors nevertheless field ethical attacks if their guidance runs counter to prevailing political winds. The visualizations perform continuity between the authors' traditional scientific ethos and their policy ethos. They also shift the locus of persuasion in the SPM from ethical questions to appeals to values and logic (e.g. the results of the climate models).