Volume 14, Issue 1 of POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention makes available three articles on topics of rhetoric.

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.

We argue that the rhetoric of science occupies an important niche in contemporary science studies. Although we are pluralistic about how different rhetoricians of science can and do conduct their inquiries, we assert that their disciplinarily distinctive approach is to treat argumentation as a constituent of context. From this perspective, we observe various interacting forms of rationality at work in the controversies that constitute science in society. We argue that modes of discovery and modes of proof are mutually engaged in the process of rhetorical invention. We identify a variety of topics or commonplaces that show invention as we conceive it at work. We take a pro-science attitude toward the role of science in finding the truth and in sustaining democratic institutions.

The essay argues that Edmund Burke's differences from Adam Smith on government-sponsored assistance for the unemployed is rooted in their differences about the nature of government, not in their economic theories. Burke, unlike Smith, cannot free himself from the violent display of power on which he thinks political legitimacy rests. In this way, his work testifies to the insights of Michel Foucault. Smith has a different, more bourgeois ideal and a higher estimate of the "bourgeois virtues" of the common person.