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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.

Three case studies explore the limits of the rhetorical analysis of science. The first is a case in which scientific facts and theories eventually reach a stage where they are beyond argument and, as a consequence, beyond rhetorical analysis. The second is a case where a work is scientific, that is, moving toward facts and theories beyond argument and is, at the same time, an example of deliberative rhetoric whose claims, of course, can never be beyond argument. The third is a case in which, although the science in question is now beyond argument, its policy implications remain, and will continue to remain, well within the realm of rhetorical analysis.

In questioning the millennium, Stephen Jay Gould tells the story of an autistic child, a mentally challenged young man who nevertheless can tell in a flash the day you were born given the date you were born. Gould studies his subject until he understands the way this feat is accomplished. He realizes that every 28 years there is a consistent unit—28 extra days over the standard 52 weeks plus seven days for leap years, the equivalent of five weeks. His subject . . . had added up extra days laboriously until he came to 28 years—the first span that always adds exactly the same total number of extra days, with the sum of extra days exactly divisible by seven. Every 28 years includes 35 extra days, and 35 extra days makes five weeks. You see, he had given me the right answer to my question—but I had not understood him at first. I had asked: “Is there anything special about the number 28 when you figure out the day of the week for dates in different years?” and he had answered: “Yes . . . five weeks.” May we all make such excellent use of our special skills, whatever and however limited they may be, as we pursue the most noble of all our mental activities in trying to make sense of this wonderful world, and the small part we must play in the history of life. Actually, I didn’t quote his beautiful answer fully. He said to me: “Yes, Daddy, five weeks.” His name is Jesse. He is my firstborn son, and I am very proud of him. . . . This anecdote exemplifies Stephen Jay Gould’s passionate interest in science; equally, it testifies to his dispassionate pursuit of the science that interests him, a probing skepticism that with patient effort yields the correct answer. For Gould the scientist it is of no interest that his experimental subject is his son.

In 2008 a rap video by Kate McAlpine went viral (nearly eight million views at present). Not your typical rap video, it takes place in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider and on the grounds 100 feet above. During the performance, the computer-generated voice of Stephen Hawking chimes in as part of a periodic call and response. Throughout, the lyrics are replete with technical terms like “protons,” “lead ions,” “antimatter,” “black holes,” “dark matter,” “Higgs boson,” “Standard Model,” “graviton,” “top quark,” and acronyms like “ALICE,” “ATLAS,” and “CMS.” Here is the central refrain: . . . The LHC accelerates the protons and the lead And the things that it discovers will rock you in the head. The Higgs boson, that’s the one that everybody talks about And it’s the one sure thing that this machine will sort out. . . . McAlpine’s was a prophesy that proved right on target. In 2016, François Englert and Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics for a conjecture they had made over a half century earlier, a mathematically driven leap of faith that became a scientific fact when the Higgs boson was detected—a hitherto mysterious but absolutely central member of the particle zoo. It was a discovery that confirmed the otherwise highly confirmed Standard Model, the explanatory centerpiece of the quantum world. At five billion dollars, the detector of the Higgs, the Large Hadron Collider, is the most expensive scientific apparatus ever built. It is a Mount Everest of machines, the apotheosis of the technological sublime. This form of sublimity is near the center of Lisa Randall’s professional life, the only means by which her deepest conjectures about the universe can be demonstrated. Hers is a flight into the scientific stratosphere tethered to events that she hopes will be observed by two incarnations of the technological sublime: the Large Hadron Collider or the GAIA satellite. When the UK funding for the Large Hadron Collider was still in question, Science Minister William Waldegrave challenged British physicists, telling them “that if anyone could explain what all the fuss was about, in plain English, on one sheet of paper, then he would reward that person with a bottle of vintage champagne.”

“This View of Life,” Stephen Jay Gould’s long-running essay series, forms a massive refutation of any charge that in popularized science truth and entertainment are incompatible. These essays invariably “follow two unbreakable rules,” Gould writes: “I never lie and I strive mightily not to bore you.” In the prologue to the collection Bully for Brontosaurus, Gould is more explicit concerning his first rule: “No compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in English).” Concerning the second rule, Gould is silent: he practices but does not reflect on his ability to shock us, to imitate in prose the last line of Muir’s “The Animals.” On the surface, a statement of biblical fact, its position at the poem’s end belies its factual status. We experience instead the shock of our existential state, burdened by history, by memory, by the apprehension of death. Muir has sprung a surprise, giv-ing us an experience Longinus long ago described, the literary sublime. By literary means as well, in his essays on science and its history, Gould can spring analogous surprises. In Gould, however, the literary sublime is always in the service of its scientific counterpart. I single out a group among his three hundred essays, each of which is so structured that we vicariously experience the process of discovery. Their twists and turns seem at first to lead nowhere; no picture emerges until, suddenly, one does, a surprise that evokes the experience of the scientific sublime. A very young Adam Smith—an Adam Smith well before The Wealth of Nations—tells us how us how surprise opens a path to this sublime: “When one accustomed object appears after another, which it does not usually follow, it first excites, by its unexpectedness, the sentiment properly called surprise, and afterwards, by the singularity of the succession, or order of its appearance, the sentiment properly called wonder.”

The sublime evokes our awe, our terror, and our wonder. Applied first in ancient Greece to the heights of literary expression, in the 18th-century the sublime was extended to nature and to the sciences, enterprises that viewed the natural world as a manifestation of God's goodness, power, and wisdom. In The Scientific Sublime, Alan Gross reveals the modern-day sublime in popular science. He shows how the great popular scientists of our time--Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson--evoke the sublime in response to fundamental questions: How did the universe begin? How did life? How did language? These authors maintain a tradition initiated by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith, towering 18th-century figures who adapted the literary sublime first to nature, then to science--though with one crucial difference: religion has been replaced wholly by science. In a final chapter, Gross explores science's attack on religion, an assault that attempts to sweep permanently under the rug two questions science cannot answer: What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of the good life?

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.”

Rachel Carson has become Saint Rachel, canonized time and again by the environmental movement. May 27, 2007, marked the 100th anniversary of her birth. In that year, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, Massachusetts, hosted a major Rachel Carson centennial exhibition. The show was a partnership project of the museum and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and it featured artifacts, writings, photographs, and artwork from Carson’s life and career. In 2012, the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring was commemorated by a Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens event and exhibit. From September 7 through October 23, the exhibit presented artwork, photos, and interpretive panels in the visitor center. Canonization, and the posthumous fame it bestows, comes at a price: the disappearance of the Rachel Carson whose work was driven by two forces. The first was the love of nature. A perceptive review of The Sea Around Us compares Carson with great science writers who share with her a love of nature: . . . It is not an accident of history that Gilbert White and Charles Darwin described flora and fauna with genius, nor that the great mariners and voyagers in distant lands can re-create their experiences as part of our own. They wrote as they saw and their honest, questing eye, their care for detail is raised to the power of art by a deep-felt love of nature, and respect for all things that live and move and have their being. . . . The second force was the love of a woman, Dorothy Freeman, a person who in Carson’s view made her later life endurable and her later work possible: . . . All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and the depth of understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort, recognizing the heartache, the great weariness of mind and body, the occasional black despair it may involve—someone who cherishes me and what I am trying to create, as well. . . .

In the last two hundred years, physics, biology, and linguistics have markedly increased our understanding of three mysteries that continue to pique human curiosity: How did the universe begin? What is the origin of life? What accounts for language, a capacity we share with no other creature? For helping us answer these questions, we have to thank linguists like Steven Pinker, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, and theoretical physicists like Steven Weinberg. They each have a gift for translating important technical arguments in their respective disciplines into the ordinary English we all can understand. Accompanying this extraordinary achievement in popularization, however, there is an odd fellow traveler, a campaign against religion, against God, a concerted attack extraordinary in its persistence and its vehemence. In this final chapter, I would like to investigate the extent, source, and nature of this attack, this insistence on the part of so many scientists that they are not agnostics, properly skeptical of God’s existence, but atheists, firm believers in his nonexistence, that science, not God, is the only wellspring of the sublime. It is the firmness of their belief that is in question. When Wolfgang Pauli purportedly said of another scientist’s work that “it is not right; it is not even wrong,” he meant that this work violated the boundaries of the discipline Pauli so successfully inhabited, that the offending scientist was deluded when he thought he was doing physics. Of course, such professional judgments are far from perfect. Two eminent English mathematicians had already dismissed the work of Ramanujan when G. H. Hardy, having received it unsolicited in the morning mail, judged its author as on a par with Euler or Gauss. Still, this reversal of fortune is the exception, not the rule. When, however, even world-renowned scientists cross the border into a neighboring discipline in the humanities, say theology or biblical study, the exception is the rule: they dismiss what they do not trouble to understand.

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.

Sitting in the same rain forest where Darwin penned these words more than a century earlier, E. O. Wilson shares the identical “cathedral feeling,” the identical sense of the biological sublime evoked by the diversity of the biosphere: “Hold[ing] still for long intervals to study a few centimeters of tree trunk or ground, [and] finding some new organism at each shift in focus.” It is a feeling for his fellow creatures exhibited in every aspect of E. O. Wilson’s life: his efforts to understand ant society, his discovery of sociobiology as means of understanding all societies, and, finally, his efforts to preserve the diversity of the biosphere in which all societies must find their place. For Wilson, environmental ethics flows naturally from the cathedral feeling he shares with Darwin, their sense of the biological sublime. It is 1969 and there is a knock on Wilson’s office door. It signals the arrival a talented German entomologist, Bert Hölldobler, invited to Harvard for an extended stay. The two hit it off almost immediately; eventually, Hölldobler returns to Harvard as a full professor. While his command of English improves, his German accent never entirely disappears, an accent, Wilson feels, that lends weight to his lectures: his is the authentic voice of German science. Friends and collaborators, the two produce a stream of science that culminates in the publication of The Ants. The award of the Pulitzer for this book is Wilson’s opportunity simultaneously to signal and make light of his achievements. The book “weighed 7.5 pounds, fulfilling my criterion of a magnum opus—a book when dropped from a three-story building is big enough to kill a man.” The award is also an opportunity to express his gratitude to the institution that continued to nurture his talent. At the monthly college meeting, he recalls, “I stood and basked in the applause of the Harvard faculty. Bless my soul, the Harvard faculty. Where could I go from here but down.” By this time, however, his co-author has left Harvard. The daily drudgery of turning out grant proposals has taken its toll.

Charles Dodgson warned a child correspondent of the dangers of living in the looking-glass world of mathematicians like himself, the high price of consistently believing “six impossible things before breakfast”: . . . Don’t be in such a hurry to believe next time—I’ll tell you why—If you set to work to believe everything you will tire out the muscles of the mind, and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able to believe the simplest true things. Only last week a friend of mine set to work to believe Jack-the-giant-killer. He managed to do it, but he was so exhausted by it that when I told him it was raining (which was true) he couldn’t believe it, but rushed out into the street without his umbrella, the consequence of which was his hair got seriously damp, and one curl didn’t recover its right shape for nearly two days. . . . In all his books, Brian Greene is our tour guide on a journey into his particular looking-glass world—string theory, an exercise in the speculative sublime, a sublime only for aficionados, certainly not for you and me. Here is the abstract of an article cited a respectable 201 times: . . . We show that a string-inspired Planck scale modification of general relativity can have observable cosmological effects. Specifically, we present a complete analysis of the inflationary perturbation spectrum produced by a phenomenological Lagrangian that has a standard form on large scales but incorporates a string-inspired short distance cutoff, and find a deviation from the standard result. We use the de Sitter calculation as the basis of a qualitative analysis of other inflationary backgrounds, arguing that in these cases the cutoff could have a more pronounced effect, changing the shape of the spectrum. Moreover, the computational approach developed here can be used to provide unambiguous calculations of the perturbation spectrum in other heuristic models that modify trans-Planckian physics and thereby determine their impact on the inflationary perturbation spectrum. Finally, we argue that this model may provide an exception to constraints, recently proposed by Tanaka and Starobinsky, on the ability of Planck-scale physics to modify the cosmological spectrum. . . .

Already famous at 40, Josef Haydn was searching for new means of expression. The result was his six Opus 20 string quartets, a dazzling set whose new directions put their stamp on every composer who has since attempted the form. For those accustomed to previous quartets, including Haydn’s own, every minor turn was a major surprise, each new direction conveying a sense of the composer’s joy as he reveled in his mastery of his medium. At 40, already a well-respected cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steven Pinker came suddenly to the world’s attention with his first book of popular science, the bestselling Language Instinct, an embodiment of the linguistic sublime. Emboldened by instant fame, he followed this achievement by following Francis Bacon, making all knowledge his province, telling us how the mind works, why it isn’t a blank slate, and why violence has declined. Not many professors are interviewed by Stephen Colbert; not many can be described as a brilliant lecturer who looks like a rock star: “His curly shoulder-length mane and Cuban heels give him the air of a prog rocker on his third comeback tour. He has a superbly defined jaw, glittering blue eyes and a kilowatt smile which he beams at his class as he switches on the microphone.” Not many professors find themselves on a poster that updates Raphael’s famous painting The School of Athens, a gathering of ancient worthies. Figure 10.1 is a depiction easily identified by the caricature’s flowing locks. Raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Montreal, Pinker first distinguished himself as the graduate student of the prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Kosslyn, who said of him: “He was officially my student, but almost from the start we were colleagues.” After studying with Kosslyn, Pinker went on to carve out a successful academic career as an experimental psychologist, first at MIT, then at Harvard, specializing in language acquisition in children. But he was not satisfied as a mere academic star, much sought-after, much honored, destined to shine brightly but not to dazzle.

The Internet presents an opportunity for the sciences and humanities to transform the generation, communication, and evaluation of new knowledge. Indeed, the elite scientific journals are already reinventing the traditional research article via the Internet. Its methods are being communicated by a combination of video demon­stration and verbal description, its gist, not only by verbal, but by visual abstracts, video abstracts, summaries for the general reader, and podcasts. Its contents take advantage of the computer screen; its results are communicated by multicomponent computer-generated images in color, videos of events in the laboratory or simulations of the natural world, graphs that automatically turn into tables and vice versa, maps displayed so that the viewer can zoom in and out, and 3D interactive images. Links are sending readers to a wealth of supplementary material: data, images, related readings. Community response to articles is being captured in new ways. Innovative processes for the evaluation of proposed new knowledge, before and after publica­tion, are being developed and adopted. Upon publication and even before, articles and the data in them are becoming part of virtual archives that give new meaning to “body of knowledge.” See Video 7.1 [ ]. Researchers are inviting commentary from the professional community as their data are generated; they are posting data and images online that others are free to use—with appropriate attribution, of course. Enthusiastic amateurs or the simply curious in large numbers are once again able to actively participate in scientific research projects. For the humanities, the Internet is no less promising. Film scholars are inter­posing film clips in their critique of classic films. Historians are including videos of historical events or computerized recreations, as well as reproductions of key documents of historical interest such as court testimony and reproductions of handwritten letters. Art and architectural historians are displaying interactive 3D reconstructions of sculptures and buildings and historical sites.

Just how much confidence should we place in published research findings, even if peer reviewed? What should we ignore, reject, modify, incorporate, pursue? To answer these questions, the sciences and the humanities must be continually in the business of keeping the record of knowledge straight at the edge, an enterprise the Internet can fruitfully enhance. Accordingly, this chapter looks at some Internet-based possibilities concerning this postpublication process: watch­dog blogs in the sciences, blogs and discussion forums in the sciences and humanities, and book and article reviews in the humanities. For these activities, as for peer review, Habermas’s ideal speech situation provides a useful theoretical framework. The goal is the same: the achievement of rational consensus concerning the originality, significance, argumentative competence, and clarity of expression of the work in question. After reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—after the sweeping “Prologue,” the dramatic “Pardoner’s Tale,” the raucous “Miller’s Tale,” the sermon that is the “Parson’s Tale”—readers come upon what may well be the world’s first “Retraction Notice”: . . . Now I pray to all who hear or read this little treatise, that if there is anything in it that they like, they thank our Lord Jesus Christ for it, from whom proceeds all wisdom and goodness. And if there is anything that displeases them, I pray also that they attribute it to inadvertence rather than intent. I would have done better if I could. For the Bible says, “All that is written is written to support the teaching our faith” and that is what I wish to do. Therefore I beseech you meekly, for the mercy of God, that you pray for me that Christ have mercy on me and forgive my sins, especially my translations and works of worldly vanity, which I revoke in my retractions. . . . In acknowledging error, some editors of science journals lack the poet’s candor. One minced no words, responding to a request from the editors of the blog “Retraction Watch”—Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky—for reasons that a paper was retracted with the following terse comment: “It’s none of your damn business.”

Do the changes in the scientific article incident on Internet publication constitute a revolution in representation and communication? John Stewart MacKenzie Owen insists that they do not. In The Scientific Article in the Age of Digitization, he argues that contrary to claims about the impact of digitization on scientific communication, “the journal article as a communicative form for reporting on research and disseminating scientific knowledge does not seem to have been transformed by … [the Internet]: it remains a digital copy of the printed form.” Owen views the current situation as preserving and extending “existing functions and values rather than as an innovation that radically transforms a communicative practice that has evolved over the centuries.” The conclusion Owen draws cannot be faulted. We do not doubt that the articles and journals in his sample are, on average, to quote Stevan Harnad, “mere clones of paper journals, ghosts in another medium.” We do, however, question Owen’s sample of online scientific journals. While he includes such journals as the Brazilian Electronic Journal of Economics, Internet Journal of Chemistry, and Journal of Cotton Science (all three now defunct), he excludes the most highly cited scientific journals producing printed and electronic issues, like Nature, Physical Review, Journal of the American Chemical Society, or such highly successful open-access journals as those of the Public Library of Science. It is the latter set that contains the journals we need to scrutinize if we are to discover what innovations, if any, have surfaced and are likely to be widely adopted in the future. These journals have the robust readership, the prestige, the financial resources, and the technical capacity necessary to introduce web-based innovations on a large scale. It is in these that the Internet revolution is now most visible. Still, among all scientific journals today, whether print or electronic, there remains a conservative core at this revolution’s center, a still point in the turning world of knowledge generation and communication.

The Internet Revolution in the Sciences and Humanities takes a new look at C.P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures, a distinction that provides the driving force for a book that contends that the Internet revolution has sown the seeds for transformative changes in both the sciences and the humanities. It is because of this common situation that the humanities can learn from the sciences, as well as the sciences from the humanities, in matters central to both: generating, evaluating, and communicating knowledge on the Internet. In a succession of chapters, the authors deal with the state of the art in web-based journal articles and books, web sites, peer review, and post-publication review. In the final chapter, they address the obstacles the academy and scientific organizations face in taking full advantage of the Internet: outmoded tenure and promotion procedures, the cost of open access, and restrictive patent and copyright law. They also argue that overcoming these obstacles does not require revolutionary institutional change. In their view, change must be incremental, making use of the powers and prerogatives scientific and academic organizations already have.

Has there been in the 21st-century humanities an Internet transformation similar to that in the sciences? A comparison of online elite journals suggests that the Internet transformation in the humanities is noticeably less far along. This generalization applies to the 10 elite humanities journals identified by Eugene Garfield: Language (journal of the Linguistic Society of America), Journal of Philosophy, American Antiquity, PMLA (journal of the Modern Language Association), Linguistic Inquiry, Past & Present, Philosophical Review, American Historical Review, Economic History Review, and Journal of Economic History. Even a journal called Music, Sound, and the Moving Image has no music, sound, or moving images. This state of affairs also applies to online journals. Within the past decade, the Open Humanities Press established 17 open-access journals in “response to the crisis in scholarly publishing in the humanities”; tellingly, of these 17, the articles in all but one are in the form of PDF or HTML files with straight text and, typically, few if any links or images. An exception is Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, which “brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technolo­gists to propose a rethinking of the dynamic relation of form to content in academic research.” There is an obvious explanation for this state of digital affairs: the differences between the two cultures. The typical humanities essay is primarily a verbal document composed by a single author, written in a more personal style than that of the scientific article. Typically, it is designed around an argument or narrative that does not easily lend itself to nonsequential reading. One cannot imagine essays by scholars as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, or Martha Nussbaum benefitting in any substantive way from the affordances of the web, aside from easier access to a global readership. In many cases, a simple web-based reproduction of the print version suffices. Still, the elite humanities journals are not entirely free of Internet innovation.

In a 1959 lecture delivered at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow famously argues that Western intellectual life is divided into two polar-opposite cultures—the sciences and the arts. In his view, most scientists are ignorant of the arts, “with the exception, an important exception, of music,” and as a whole non-scientist intellectuals—a group we will be calling “humanists”—have no conception of the “scientific edifice of the physical world … the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.” Moreover, Snow asserts that, besides this mutual ignorance, both sides underestimate, and even sometimes denigrate, the value of the other. He makes a telling point about the missed opportunities for intellectual advance entailed by the lack of lively commerce between the two groups: . . . There seems then to be no place where the cultures meet. I am not going to waste time saying that this is a pity. It is much worse than that. Soon I shall come to some practical consequences. But at the heart of thought and creation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies, so far as that goes—ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those in the two cultures can’t talk to each other. . . . Nowhere does Snow mention that, despite many cultural differences, the sciences and the humanities do have three central tasks in common: They generate knowledge, they communicate it, and they evaluate its quality. The thesis of our book is that, in both camps, the Internet has transformed and is still transforming these tasks in important and even similar ways. Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, all based on differences between the two cultures, on their very different sets of social habits and attitudes, in the sciences the Internet revolution appears to be further along than in the humanities.

In the midst of the controversy over the Nemesis affair—over whether a hidden star was the cause of periodic extinctions on Earth—David Raup and Jack Sepkoski were faced with a dilemma peer review had deliberately created: . . . The Tremaine analysis was technically hearsay, because it did not exist in the conventional sense of a scientific publication. To be sure, he sent us a copy of the manuscript shortly before submitting it for publication in a special volume based on the Tucson meeting. We were working on a response but could not say anything substantive about it publically, for fear of having our own paper on the subject disqualified by prior publication in the press. Besides, we had nothing to rebut until Tremaine’s paper was reviewed, revised, and finally published. . . . Precisely: Only peer review followed by publication gave them something to rebut. A survivor after a half-century of criticism concerning its efficacy, peer review remains the best guarantee that published manuscripts and funded grant proposals conform closely to community standards. Moreover, in both the sciences and the humanities, the review criteria are the same: originality, significance to the discipline, argumenta­tive competence, and clarity of expression. When we examine the ways the Internet is transforming peer review, we will see that the transparency and interactivity of the new medium make possible sounder judgments according to these criteria. Interactivity gives practitioners a firmer sense of the disciplinary-specific meanings of the standards on which their judgments are based; transparency broadcasts this firmer sense to the discipline as a whole. Under any form of peer review, knowledge is what it has always been, an agonistic system in flux, the site of a constant struggle for survival in the realm of ideas. But it is a system that cannot function properly unless each component—each bundle of claims, evidence, and argument—exhibits provisional stability. To confer this stability is the task of peer review.

Cara A. Finnegan, EditorJeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 464 pp. $99.00 (cloth), $39.95 (paper). Twelve years have pa...

How is it possible groups of ordinary people-groups as small as clubs and as large as nations-make sure that their governance is the product of a collective will that is anchored in the lifeworld, the world of our everyday experience enacted against a background of tacit knowledge, knowledge we assume rather than examine? That is Habermas's abiding concern. This presupposes the prior question: How is that collective will itself to be formed? An heir of the Enlightenment, Habermas answers the second question by insisting that collective will be the product of rational debate in which the only force is the force of the better argument. In "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," he defends his early work in all its essentials: In spite of the objections raised, I continue to stay with the intention that guided the study as a whole. The mass democracies constituted as social-welfare states, as far as their normative self-interpretation is concerned, can claim to continue the principles of the liberal constitutional state only as long as they seriously try to live up to the mandate of a public sphere that fulfills political functions. (Habermas, 1992a, p. 441) Its continuing relevance to Habermas and to us makes it imperative that the public sphere be properly construed as centered on rational debate, and that its history emphasize its unfortunate turn away from rational debate toward impression management and violence, a trend that undermines the democratically constituted state. This imperative is especially important since some rhetorical critics, having been coopted by a trend they should deplore, have championed a public sphere in which rationality is sidelined in favor of alien components that undermine its force. Other critics have failed in a different way. Because they do not see that historical changes in the nature of the public sphere have made rational debate on significant public issues difficult or impossible, they mistake the effect of these changes for their cause. Cara Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang (2004) undermine communicative rationality by incorporating visual representations into Habermas's public sphere. They can only do so by ignoring the distinction between aesthetic experience, whose truth values are merely analogous to those linked to validity claims, and discourse about art, whose truth values directly imply validity claims. It is only the latter that occur under the aegis of communicative rationality, whether in expert cultures or in the lifeworld (Habermas, 1984, p. 237-38). This confusion between "truth" and truth results in the erection of a spurious category, "aesthetic rationality" (Finnegan & Kang, 2004, p. 387-388), a phrase Habermas never uses, despite the quotation marks placed around it. Finnegan and Kang's (2004) is a confusion compounded by their conflation of the fine arts with "images and vision ... in the public sphere" (p. 379). From his later writings we can infer only that Habermas endorses the potential of the fine arts as contributors to the general health and strength of the lifeworld: Insofar as we experience their "truths" in that world, they contribute to its solidarity and in so doing, contribute indirectly to the health and strength of the public sphere. There is no sense in which aesthetic experience is or can be incorporated directly into the public sphere, whose nature must be discursive. While Finnegan and Kang illegitimately extend the scope of the public sphere, DeLuca and Peeples (2002) turn that sphere inside out. In effect, they do not supplement the public sphere so much as undermine it. Their claim is that an understanding of the effects of the new media--television and the internet--signals "the emergence of new forms of participatory democracy," of which the violent demonstrations are an example (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, p. 127). They praise this violence because it garnered media attention and fault Habermas's public sphere because it eschews violence: Violence is "a type of 'communication' a priori ruled out" (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, p. …

ArgumentA growing cross-disciplinary literature has acknowledged the importance of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of scientific texts. I contend that the proper understanding of these texts must flow from a hermeneutic model that takes verbal-visual interaction seriously, one that is firmly grounded in cognitive constraints and affordances. The model I propose has two modules, one for perception, derived from Gestalt psychology, the other for cognition, derived from Peirce's semiotics. I apply this model to an important but largely neglected text in the history of nineteenth-century science, Charles Lyell'sThe Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, and to two accounts by well-respected historians of science, both of the same key discovery in quantum physics. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the advisability of incorporating the exegetical practices my model entails into the everyday practices of historians of science.

This article proposes a taxonomy of scientific titles: those staking claims; those setting problems; and those conveying themes. A close analysis of the deep structure of these titles suggests that their goal is the maximization of information content within a short compass, a compression that permits their easy retrieval in computerized searches. Placing these titles into the context provided by Gross, Harmon, and Reidy's Communicating Science suggests further that titles evolved to this point by adapting to changes in systems of information retrieval.

Because visuals play a significant communicative role in the majority of texts in the sciences, a theory of the role of verbal-visual interaction in the creation and communication of meaning would seem a useful addition to the exegetical armamentarium. This paper offers such a theory, Dual Coding Theory (DCT), borrowed from cognitive psychology but adapted to exegesis. An analysis of Lavoisier's final geological memoir, an analysis grounded in this theory, is designed to illustrate DCT's utility. In my conclusion, I take note of the fact that in a wide variety of contemporary media meaning is also largely the product of verbal-visual interaction.

An examination of a random sample of four medical journals— The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine—reveals that one-fifth of the space of articles in medical science is devoted to an average of three tables and three flow charts, graphs, or photographs. Given these figures, the absence of discussion of visuals in the literature on medical communication may seem puzzling. But the puzzle is easily solved: our basic education gives us a coherent vocabulary for talking about prose, but no coherent vocabulary for talking about tables and visuals. Once we have this vocabulary in hand, we make another step in the direction of an explanation of the nature of communication in the medical sciences. We may note that understanding the meaning of a medical article is not just a consequence of understanding its texts; it is a consequence of understanding all its meaningful components working together—verbal, tabular, visual.