This brief article examines the scholarship of propaedeutics, which is involved when teasing meaning from cutting-edge scientific and technological fields that are often in flux. Because these fields are plagued with uncertainty, mired in shifting jargon, highly controversial, and often politicized, the scholar who studies these areas must build texts in order to approach the claims and counterclaims made by proponents and opponents and offer rhetorical critical insight. The term fringe science is used to describe three sub-fields that have been the subject of work by the author and his team. Nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and geo-engineering are three highly interdisciplinary technological fields that offer many opportunities for rhetoricians of science and technology as well as pose risks. To critique them demands a basic understanding of what they are and what they purport to be.

The discoveries of science and technology are accelerating. The choice of how to regulate and react to scientific and technological innovations relies heavily on the notion of risk. The emergence nature contemporary science and technology (i.e., complex systems that are not reducible to the simple physical and chemical processes from which they arose) confounds risk studies Indeed, whether to embark on a particular path of scientific inquiry or proceed with a technological development depends on the ability to calculate the amount of risk associated with the endeavor. We are, however, ill-equipped to resolve the demands of risk analysis with certainty.