Rhetoric Society Quarterly Sep 1996

How bad science stays that way: Brain sex, demarcation, and the status of truth in the rhetoric of science

Celeste Condit

Abstract

T here is a long-standing tension between the community and rheto ricians of with regard to the status of truth and the objectivity of knowledge. While neither the community nor the community of rhetorical scholars can be said to be monolithic in their views, the scientific view ascribes objective, permanent, and universal status to the facts produced by scientists, whereas the view supported by many rhetoricians describes facts as products of social conditions, and therefore marked by inter-subjectivity, transience, and situational delimitations. The classical account thus sees facts as discovered, whereas the sophistic rhetorical account portrays them as constructed (e.g., Fuller; Gaonkar; Gusfield; Latour; Latour and Woolgar; Lessl; Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey; Taylor, Defining Science).' As a variety of scholars have suggested, this bifurcation of views can be resolved into a unified perspective that accounts for the major arguments advanced by those supporting each of the classical orientations (Bambrough; Bernstein; Laudan, Explaining Success). It is possible, in other words, to see facts as both objective and situated-both faithful to material realities and responsive to social conditions (Howe and Lyne). From this unified perspective, scientists can make errors either because their contact with asocial material realities are flawed (e.g., cold fusion) or because there are flaws in their application of the linguistic and social codes that convey the character and meaning of the contact they have made with material realities. This essay explores the persistence of bad science of the latter sort by reporting and interpreting an interaction between scientists and a rhetorician, one that occurred when I sent a letter to the journal Science responding to a publication on brain sex research by Gur et al. (Sex Differences), which appeared in that journal. I was later interviewed by a reporter for a major newspaper with regard to my letter and the Gur research. The texts for this study therefore include the Gur research article, my letter, a reply to my letter by the authors of the Gur article, the two reviews of my letter solicited by the editor of Science, and the journalistic account of my letter and the scientists' publications. This essay interprets the response of these scientists and the integration of their work into the public sphere through theories of demarcation. It suggests that bad science, at least that which supports an ideology that is hegemonic in the social sphere,2 is maintained by a complex relationship beRSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 83 Volume 26, Number 4 Fall 1996

Journal
Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published
1996-09-01
DOI
10.1080/02773949609391080
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Topics
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Cited by in this index (9)

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