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A major contribution to rhetorical theory and an important tool of rhetorical criticism, Perelman’s distinction between particular audiences and the universal audience has been misconstrued by his critics and even by Perelman himself. Properly construed, the universal audience is focused on facts and truths and consists of all human beings in so far as they are rational; consequently, discourse addressed to it eschews proofs from character and emotion. In contrast, addresses to particular audiences focus on values; they embrace not only proofs reason, but also those from character and emotion.

Lucy Hawking has had the good fortune of being the daughter of the most famous living physicist; she has had the better fortune of having been a teenager before Stephen Hawking became famous, a time when he was known and respected only by other theoretical physicists. In this less hectic time, he was just a father, a man with a disability, to be sure, but not a disabled man, a sufferer from Lou Gehrig’s disease who defied the odds. Who could view as disabled a man who zipped through the streets of Cambridge in a Formula 1 electric wheelchair driven at reckless speeds and, on one occasion at least, almost disastrous consequences? Hawking is now, perhaps, the most famous physicist since Einstein. While his work significantly expands the territory of the scientific sublime, his life embodies that sublime. This is not the ethical sublime that Rachel Carson, the subject of the next chapter, embodies; it is not a code of conduct. Rather, it is our firm sense that we are dealing with an extraordinary human being who has overcome daunting challenges to become an impressive virtual presence, a man who, alone among contemporary scientists, is a star, nay, a superstar. Confined to a wheelchair, he towers above us, an exemplar, a demonstration of just how deep a deep-seated commitment to science can be. But is he any good at physics? Is it all hype? His heroes—Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—are models he cannot hope to emulate. Those on whom he consistently relies—Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Richard Feynman—are clearly his superiors. True, he is an elite physicist honored by his peers, but he is more a Dom than a Joe DiMaggio, excellent, though not the very best. As he says himself, “To my colleagues am just another physicist.” But his professional reputation hardly matters, because, as he asserts with characteristic good humor: . . . To the wider public I became possibly the best-known scientist in the world. This is partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius. I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses—the wheelchair gives me away. . . .

Steven Weinberg had been working for some time on the problem of the strong force that holds together the components of an atom’s nucleus. He was getting nowhere. “Suddenly,” while driving home in his red Camaro, insight arrived. He did not have the wrong answer to the problem of the strong force but the right answer to a different, equally interesting problem: …And I realized the massless particle in this theory that had given me so much trouble had nothing to do with the heavy particles that feel the strong interaction; it was the photon, the particle of which light was composed, that is responsible for electric and magnetic forces and that indeed has zero mass. I realized that what I had cooked up was an approach not just to understanding the weak interaction but to unifying the theories of the weak and electromagnetic forces into what has since come to be called the electroweak theory… “A Model of Leptons” is a paper of which he is justly proud. It has garnered 4,503 citations; a copy has been offered for sale at $950. This is the physicist at his mathematical best, a language he speaks as if it were his native tongue. Another incident confirms Weinberg’s extraordinary talent. Physicist Rich Muller has a bright idea. After several tries, however, the mathematics continues to defeat him. Despondent, he walks down the hall to an office where Steven Weinberg is chatting with Freeman Dyson. The two agree to help: …Weinberg went to the blackboard, wrote down the first equation. “And then he did some manipulations on it,” said Muller, “and stood back.” Dyson said, “I think if you make a substitution of variables now— .” Weinberg said, “Oh, yes, of course,” and wrote several more lines. “I was taking notes,” Muller said, “but I wasn’t sure what he was doing.” Weinberg paused in his writing, and Dyson said, “Now evaluate the delta function,” and Weinberg said, “Oh, okay.” Weinberg wrote down a few more lines, and Dyson said, “Good. You’ve proven it.”

In an episode of The Simpsons, “Black Eyed, Please,” Ned Flanders has a nightmare. He visits his “personal hell” where they “worship famous atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion,” a devilish figure in the process of “making Catholic-saint stew.” Irreverent enough to be attracted to the program’s irreverence, and enough of a celebrity to be asked to do the show’s voice-over, Dawkins is content to appear as a parody of himself. But his skepticism is no act. It is deep-seated, with roots in his early childhood. Concerning his 18-month-old self, Dawkins says: …At Christmas a man called Sam dressed up as Father Christmas and entertained a children’s party in Mrs. Walter’s house. He apparently fooled all the children, and finally took his departure amid much jovial waving and ho-ho-ho-ing. As soon as he left, I looked up and breezily remarked to general consternation, “Sam’s gone!”… This precocious skepticism blossoms in Dawkins’s later views, a set of convictions in which science does not so much supplement as substitute for religion: “a friend . . . persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity probably about the age of sixteen.” To Dawkins, biology is no more—and no less—than a rigorous skepticism applied to the living world. No need for Father Christmas. Without question, Dawkins’s vision of biology, a living world ruled by mathematics, is a “grand conception,” readily comparable to the origin stories of Weinberg, Greene, Randall, and Hawking, a saga of “how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.” In his work, Dawkins has employed mathematics to create, as Adam Smith said of Copernicus, “another constitution of things, more natural indeed, and such as the imagination can more easily attend to, but more new, more contrary to common opinion and expectation, than any of those appearances themselves.”

Richard Feynman was a fox, not a hedgehog: he did not know one big thing; instead, he knew many things. He was an inspired tinkerer, a Thomas Edison of theoretical science. Still, like Leo Tolstoy, he yearned to be a hedgehog. Feynman’s vision was like Tolstoy’s: “scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of the fox bitterly intent on seeing in the manner of the hedgehog.” This difference extends to method and attitude. While the great physicist Hans Bethe, Feynman’s frequent working companion at Los Alamos, proceeded deliberately in any argument between them, Feynman “was as likely to begin in the middle or at the end, and jump back and forth until he had convinced himself he was right (or wrong).” It was a contest between “the Battleship and the Mosquito Boat,” a small, lightly armed torpedo vessel. From 1948 to 1958, Feynman enjoyed triumph after triumph. To a former student, Koichi Mano, Feynman wrote: “You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods.” Working on these problems, Feynman reflects a general conviction typical of successful scientists. Another scientist says what Richard Feynman might have: “There’s nothing I’d rather do. In fact my boy says I am paid for playing. He’s right. In other words if I had an income I’d do just what I’m doing now. I’m one of the people who has found what he wanted to do. At night when you can’t sleep you think about your problems. You work on holidays and Sundays. It’s fun. Research is fun. By and large it’s a very pleasant existence.” Problems close to the gods are their gift, but the gods are capricious. This is why for many geniuses, being a genius is a career as brief as an athlete’s. For most, as for Feynman, a dreaded day arrives: the great insights stop coming. The marvelous decade having passed, Feynman tells his student Mano that he turned to “innumerable problems you would call humble.”

For over a half century, popular science books have been embraced enthusiastically by the welcoming public, from Richard Dawkins on evolution to Brian Greene on string theory. But while shelf upon shelf of books of popular science exist, only one book exists on these books, Elizabeth Leane’s Reading Popular Physics. Perhaps that’s because no other book is needed; perhaps there is no more mystery to solve, no conundrum to unravel. Take A Brief History of Time: it is selling far better than Gone with the Wind, apparently with good reason: it is a better read. A reviewer on Amazon opines: “Stephen Hawking is an established scientific genius, but this book establishes him as a brilliant writer—an extremely rare, yet valuable combination.” A blog critic pronounces his verdict: “A Brief History of Time is far more than a science book. It’s one of the renaissance books that is so seminal to the notion of who we are, and where we might be in the next 50 years, that it should be required reading for every person from high school on. If that seems like a big ask you’ve got the wrong idea about this book. It’s light and easy and fun, full of subtle humor and provocative notions.” These are views about a book chock-full of abstruse ideas strenuously avoided in their school years by all but future physicists. The universal attraction of such books is the mystery I would like to solve, the conundrum I would like to unravel. Jon Turney, a scholar of popular science and former editor of Penguin Books, questions whether such a book can be written: “At some point,” he says, “one must ask if it is possible . . . to consider the whole ensemble of books. I have my doubts. Even books on the same topic, quantum physics say, are tremendously diverse, in style, level, approach, and in which genres they draw on.” Turney is not totally despairing of success; he suggests that potential authors see popular science books as symptoms of larger forces in our culture. I intend to act on Turney’s suggestion. I acknowledge the diversity of style, level, and approach that Turney sees as an obstacle to a comprehensive account. But I attribute this diversity not to a difference in goals but to differing literary talents and to different takes on what science is and what it can accomplish. However different their skills and their subject matter, these writers are in the business of generating in their readers a sense of wonder at a nature whose workings science, and only science, can comprehend.

ArgumentHeidegger's philosophy of science is notable for the prominence it gives to visuals and visualization. This is because for Heidegger, truth – including scientific truth – is the consequence of unconcealment, the lifting of a veil. But as scientific truth is a special kind, its visualization is also special: scientific truth reveals itself to us as, in Heidegger's words, “a calculable nexus of forces.” This nexus unconceals itself largely by means of instrumentation: it is this process of revelation that turns objects into objects of science. Despite its focus on visualization, however, Heidegger's philosophy of science cannot be applied directly to scientific visuals. His categories are not designed with visual exegesis in mind. For that purpose, semiotics, the science of meaning as defined by Charles Peirce, is a necessary intermediary between the abstract and the concrete, a taxonomy of icon, index, and symbol that can be employed as a set of hermeneutic probes that permit the exploration of scientific visuals as embodiments and carriers of scientific meaning. But not their sole embodiments and carriers. In achieving scientific semiosis, the verbal and visual must combine their particular strengths. This is also in accord with a Heideggerian view: science moves methodically from the visual to the propositional, though it never leaves the visual behind.

En novembre 2000, Cherwitz et Hikins proposait une critique de l'integrite intellectuelle des principales lignes de recherches en rhetorique contemporaine, qualifiant l'attitude des chercheurs de provinciale. Les As. proposent une reponse a cette critique, insistant sur l'ambiguite des termes utilises et non expliques par Cherwitz et Hikins, et tentent de determiner si la pratique de la recherche en rhetorique se definit comme une redescription ou comme une reduction

Rejetant la these de W. Grimaldi concernant le role de l'enthymeme dans «Rhetorique» d'Aristote, l'A. reconnait la pertinence des processus inferentiels dans l'unite conceptuelle de la theorie aristotelicienne de la persuasion, fondee sur les notions de logos, pathod et ethos.

Interrogeant avec H. W. Johnstone le statut de la rhetorique chez C. Perelman, l'A. evalue la pertinence de la rhetorique comme mode de verite, a travers la question de la dissociation des concepts dans le discours public et politique.

Etude de l'union entre la pragmatique et la rhetorique rendue possible par les travaux de P. Grice dans le cadre de la philosophie du langage, en general, et dans le contexte de l'echange communicatif entre locuteur et auditeur, en particulier. Examinant la reconstruction de la rhetorique d'Aristote entreprise par C. Perelman et L. Olbrechts-Tyteca dans «The new rhetoric: a treatise on argumentation» (1969), l'A. se propose de reconstruire une rhetorique en tant que theorie cognitive fondee sur l'inference, d'une part, et de remedier a l'absence d'un traitement des preuves par emotion et des preuves par caractere en se referant aux travaux de W. Fortenbaugh, M. Nussbaum et W. Lyons, d'autre part

Explanations of the cause of the Challenger disaster by the Presidential Commission and by communication scholars are flawed. These explanations are characterized by a common tendency to emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical. Rightly construed, the Challenger disaster illustrates both the need for a revived art of rhetoric and the importance of putting in place the political and social conditions that make this art efficacious in furthering cognitive understanding and ethical conduct.

L'A. essaie d'aller au-dela du debat personnel entre Derrida et Searle et de faire avancer la theorie du langage. En effet, le debat entre les deux philosophes du langage n'est pas seulement personnel. Il fait partie de l'histoire intellectuelle de l'Occident

Reponse d'A. Gross a l'analyse critique de J. Leach de son essai sur la science du langage et le debat Derrida-Searle. L'A. apporte de nouvelles precisions sur sa conception quant a la theorie de l'acte de parole de Derrida et sa deconstruction

I define and refine Habermas’s notion of systematically distorted communication by means of focused, structured comparison among three of its instances. Next, I show that its critique is possible within the confines of his theory by recourse to a minimalist concept of rationality and a version of the truth that avoids the unwelcome metaphysical baggage of truth with a capital T. For critique to be complete, however, it must be supplemented by the full range of rhetorical proofs. Even so, there are limits to the power of critique. In the end, only social and political action can alter oppressive institutional arrangements.

In a recent paper (1989), Ian Hacking has extended his discussion of entity realism, a discussion begun six years ago in the final chapter of Representing and Intervening (1983). This extension allows us to examine for the first time the whole of one impressive attempt to rescue scientific realism from the ever more subtle skepticism of post-positivist thinking (Laudan 1984; Fine 1986). Hacking’s approach complements that of Nancy Cartwright. Like Cartwright, he implies that a full-blown realism about scientific theories and entities can survive neither the facts of history nor the arguments of opponents. Hacking is a realist only about some unobservable entities, those he thinks durable enough to survive most alterations in theory. This is the science that Kuhn said survived even paradigm change.Electrons are Hacking’s example of a real unobservable entity. Their behavior is so consistent and so well-known that they are used as tools: they are manipulated in the engineering of scientific experiments designed to extend the bounds of the known.

We owe to Bishop Sprat, the first historian of modern science, the notorious dictum that the language of science must "return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men delivered so many things in an equal number of words" (II, xx). It is this view that Swift so effectively ridicules in the third book of Gulliver's Travels. To some, nevertheless, Sprat is still the last word: the rhetoric of science cannot matter because it does not exist. According to Ruth Mitchell, "the rigidity of the order [of experimental reports] suppresses any possible distraction an artful presentation might entail. Rhetoric is not welcome here" (549). To David Dobrin, stylistic choices, such as the preference for the passive voice, do exist, but those who prefer these choices are misguided as to their purpose: "So why do people insist on the use of the convention? Perhaps because they think [mistakenly] that it makes writing efficient" ("Technical Writing" 248). The literature of composition theory contains another view, one more supportive of the rhetoric of science. This outlook suggests that the experimental report is a genre like the novel or the epic, one whose organization is as rhetorical as the arrangement of the classical oration. According to this view, style and organization in science are matters no more trivial than style and organization in Hemingway or James. To Carolyn Miller, science is a form of argument that "asks for assent." As a result, technical writing "becomes, rather than the revelation of absolute reality, a persuasive version of experience" (616). To Elizabeth Harris, "literary theory has also exposed the 'fictionalities' of ... scientific referents, the degree to which they are created by ... scientific ways of understanding the world" (634). To explore these latter possibilities is to see science from the point of view of the humanities, to apply to science the methodology of the humanities. From this vantage, science is deeply rhetorical: stylistic choices conspire in the creation of the world as meant by science; organizational choices imitate the approved means of achieving access to that world.

In the seventeenth century, Descartes founded, and Newton revolutionized, modern optics. This story, often told by historians and philosophers of science, can be profitably reconceived in terms of ...

According to Hull, all selection is "a process in which the differential extinction and proliferation of interactors cause the differential perpetuation of the replicators that produced them" (p. 134). The natural is one type of selection, the conceptual another. In conceptual selection in science, the interactors are scientists, and the replicators "the substantive content of science," whose chief vehicles are "books, journals, computers, and of course human brains" (p. 140). When interactors face their environment, there is a test of survival. As a result, some replicators survive; others do not. These differential rates of survival produce two lineages, that of replicators and that of interactors. To describe the evolution of science is to trace the genealogy of these two lineages (p. 150). In this model of evolutionary epistemology, what does testing against an environment mean? Early in his paper, Hull implies that testing in science is an exceptional procedure: "testing is reserved for those findings which threaten one's own research" (p. 131). Indeed, wholesale testing would be counterproductive: "I cannot conceive of worse advice [than checking everything]. The whole point of scientists working together is to pool conceptual resources" (p. 131). Writing in this vein, Hull refers to "the possibility of empirical testing" (p. 129; see also 154), the implication being that this possibility alone is the hallmark of the epistemological superiority of the sciences. But Hull's model seems to require that every replicator be tested against an environment. If there is no testing, there can be no differential survival: "Replicators are generated, recombined, and tested by scientists interacting with the relevant portion of the natural world," a "non-conceptual world" (p. 141). This match between concepts and the non-conceptual world is essential: "testing is essential to science"; scientists "spend an appreciable amount of time testing their views" (p. 140; p. 148). The solution to this seeming inconsistency is in part semantic. Two senses of test must be distinguished: the trial and the repetition. Science proceeds by means of empirical trials of theory; at some point, even theoretical advance must answer to empirical trial. A repetition is a trial of a trial: were the original results correct; if not, was their source error or fraud? Hull uses "test" in two senses: when he alludes to its frequency, he is referring to trials; when he alludes to its infrequency, he is referring to repetitions. But what is the environment against which replicators are tested? This question also yields to disambiguation. Crucial to each sense of test is the need to interpret. When the scientist conducts a trial, her criterion is the non-conceptual world. But she must interpret her viewings of that world; she must turn them into the candidate scientific knowledge that Hull calls information: "In their investigations, scientists learn about the structure of the empirical world. They record this knowledge in a language of some sort. This characterization of the natural regularity counts as information, but the natural regularity itself cannot without making the notion of information vacuous" (p. 142). The data of trials must be read critically; in this sense, a repetition is a reading of a reading. All testing, then, is a match between theory and the non-conceptual world; but no testing can count as science until the data are read and interpreted. This means that testing involves hermeneutic understanding.