Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene illustrates the power of ambiguity in scientific discourse. The rhetorical and epistemic resources that ambiguity provide are most apparent at the level of metaphor but are also central to the exigency for Dawkins’s argument and to the narrative form that the argument takes. Using ratios derived from Burke’s dramatistic pentad, I analyze how ambiguous language helped Dawkins to link different theoretical conceptions of the gene and consequently posit connections between genes and organisms that had not yet been empirically established. I thus demonstrate at a conceptual and textual level how ambiguity contributes to the construction of novel scientific arguments. For Dawkins, ambiguity provided a discursive space in which he could speculate on connections and developments for which he did not yet have evidence, data, or terminology. Despite his insistence that his use of figurative motive language was simply a ‘‘convenient shorthand’’ for more technical language, The Selfish Gene demonstrates the powerful epistemological and rhetorical role that ambiguous metaphors play in biological discourse.

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so pervasive in Hamilton’s representation of genetic evolution and what epistemological consequences result from this rhetorical choice. Specifically, the metaphorical language of motive allows Hamilton to represent genes ambiguously and simultaneously as both the agents of evolutionary action and as the agency or mechanism by which organism agents act. The textual ambiguity generated by the agent-agency metaphors both reflects and constructs a conceptual ambiguity in the way evolutionary processes are theorized. Analysis of Hamilton’s rhetoric thus suggests the productive function of ambiguous metaphors in highly technical scientific texts.

Interdisciplinary research is often described as the recasting of disciplinary boundaries, suggesting that interdisciplinary writing might require a “boundary rhetoric”—one that negotiates the borders between the various disciplinary rhetorics involved. An example of such a boundary rhetoric can be found in the work of S. E. Jelliffe, a prominent physician-writer who proposed an innovative and controversial theory of psychosomatic medicine that offers to unite neurology and Freudian psychoanalysis. Jelliffe's work—in both its successes and failures—suggests some of the textual and conventional ways in which a boundary rhetoric can operate. At its most successful, Jelliffe's boundary rhetoric blurs the generic conventions and expectations of his constituent fields and “translates” the values and principles of one discipline into the language and discourse forms of the other. Given the increasing interdisciplinary character of much modern scholarship, Jelliffe's case is important in helping to illuminate potential problems and possibilities inherent in boundary rhetorics.

J. B. S. Haldane, in attempting to show connections between Marxist political theory and Darwinian evolutionary theory, blurs the generic characteristics of political and scientific discourse. Read from the perspective of Bakhtin, this blurring of genres is also a blurring of ideologies. Haldane's essays thus contribute to our understanding of the cultural dimensions of scientific activities and accordingly help re‐define concepts of genre in scientific writing.

This article discusses the work of two American ecologists of the first half of the twentieth century, F. E. Clements and H. A. Gleason, who differed in terms of their understanding of community succession—that is, how ecological communities change over time. Clements's and Gleason's debate about the nature of ecological communities demonstrates, first, that in considering questions of succession, ecologists are constructing and testing plausible narratives. Second, it suggests that the structures of scientific narratives resemble structures of other cultural narratives in depending, at least to some extent, on cultural assumptions and values. The presence of these competing stories about ecological data thus calls attention to the importance of narrative as an interpretive and rhetorical strategy in scientific discourse.

This article discusses two sets of neurological case histories, A. R. Luria's The Man with a Shattered World and Oliver Sack's Awakenings, and argues that these histories display two paradigmatic explanations for the mind/brain relation, and that the movement from one paradigm to another also necessitates a movement to different forms of discourse. One explanation comes from the physical sciences and results in logical, quantitative exposition. The other originates in the human sciences and results in narrative. Luria and Sacks wrote these case histories in an explicit attempt to bridge—in understanding and in discourse—this paradigmatic gap; in the process, they redefined what it means to be a neuropsychiatrist. Case histories allow the writer to combine the empirical analysis characteristic of neurological discourse with the individual detail characteristic of psychological narrative.

Two parallels between scientific and literary discourse are the aesthetic appeal they both make and their shared use of metaphor. Essays by Stephen Jay Gould on the science of form demonstrate these parallels. In one, Gould acts as a reader of scientific discourse, in the other as a writer. In both essays, Gould demonstrates the imaginative qualities science and literature share.

Although science and scientific communication have traditionally been considered objective and non-rhetorical, current thinking suggests that science is, to some degree, dependent on perception and belief, and that scientific communication reflects the values of its author. Sociobiology, a subset of evolutionary theory, considers the degree to which animal behavior is genetically determined. The question of the applicability of sociobiology to human behavior was brought to public attention by E. O. Wilson in Sociobiology [1], initiating a prolonged argument between Wilson and other scientists. This series of exchanges demonstrates a good deal of subjectivity on the part of the writers, and provides one example of a scientific debate that relies on traditional rhetorical techniques of persuasion.