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Rhetoric of Science in Canada I La rhetorique de la science au Canada

2000; Canadian Philosophy of Education Society; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.31468/cjsdwr.443

2563-7320

Randy Allen Harris, Zélie Guével, Isabelle Clerc,

Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

This heading might be better amended to "We couldn't find very much (despite assiduous searching);' because we suspect that in scattered Communication, English, French, History, Philosophy, and Sociology departments, and elsewhere, research is going on that fits this general category of scholarship.Given the direction of science studies over the last decade and a bit (of which, more anon), it is difficult to believe that Canadian scholars have remained insensible to the pull of rhetorical approaches.And, in fact, rumours surface occasionally of work on the antivivisectionist literature of Victorian England here, the role of analogy in scientific argumentation there.But whatever work there is in Canada has certainly not coalesced into anything like a movement, as it has in the U.S. especially, 1 -and, eliminating speculation and rumour, there isn't very much.Canadians were, however, in on the ground floor.One of the earliest arguments that rhetoric might have something meaningful to say about science came from Michael Overington -then and now a professor of sociology at St. Mary's, in Halifax, N.S.That paper -"The Scientific Community as Audience" ( 1977a) -quickly became one of the citation classics of the field, and Overington has published a few other germane pieces (1977b, 1991).But, as he tells the story in the brief note we