Abstract
The essay focuses on controversies where the debated issues are complex, the exchange involves several participants, and extends over long periods. Examples include the Methodenstreit, the Hering-Helmholtz controversy (Turner 1994) or the debates over Newton’s or Darwin’s views. In these cases controversies lasted for several generations, and polarisation is a recurring trait of the exchanges. The reconstructions and evaluations of the partly (but not only) polemical exchanges also exhibit heterogeneity and polarisation. Although I pick an early example of the Newtonian controversies, Darwin’s argument in The Origin of Species can also be variously reconstructed (Morrison 2000: 192–196). When scientific controversies that involve complex utterances (i.e. not single claims) are investigated, a specific problem arises, as in these situations the protagonist presenting a bundle of claims to a non-unified audience cannot fully control meaning-attribution of his utterances, and, given what we know about individual cognition, the more heterogeneous audience he succeeds in persuading, the less clear the meaning becomes. While the acceptance of a position increases potential for action, the growth in consent comes together with a fuzzy content. To problematise the role of polarisation, the significance of this description with respect to knowledge-production is investigated from both an individual and a social epistemological standpoint to answer the question: How is rhetoric epistemic in cases when at least two views on a given issue are seen as persuasively supported by communities? If engaging in a controversy is a means-to-an-end activity aimed at persuasion, directed at achieving attitude-change in recipients, how does the argumentative goal of an individual translate to epistémé in extended scientific controversies?
The work was supperted by the “Integrative Argumentation Studies” OTKA K 109456 grant. The author thanks István Danka for his comments and criticism of the manuscript.
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Notes
- 1.
In Solomon’s framework of the cognitive division of labour if there are some empirical decision vectors for some view, it is rational to maintain it (Solomon 2001). This and other frameworks stress the benefit side of controversies, but little the cost side: how much effort is used to defend a difference of opinion that is exaggerated, thus the distortion of position is unaccounted for.
- 2.
Most notably Robert L. Scott claimed that rhetoric is epistemic (Scott 1967), but after several rounds of debate it is hard to say what this exactly means (Harpine 2004), and it is even less clear how to proceed if granted that rhetoric is epistemic, as the claim was never meaningfully substantiated.
- 3.
As Kauffeld recently noted: “…rhetoricians ought to dedicate clearer, more explicit attention to the normative dimensions of persuasive argumentation than has traditionally typified their studies.” (Kauffeld 2002: 115).
- 4.
Around 1985 Latour still agreed with the proposal in the Postscript to the second edition of Laboratory Life (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 280) that there be “a ten-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of science” with the promise “that if anything remains to be explained at the end of this period, we too will turn to the mind!” In a less frequently quoted passage, the proposal continues: “If our French epistemologist colleagues are sufficiently confident in the paramount importance of cognitive phenomena for understanding science, they will accept the challenge.” The kind of cognitive explanations being rejected are those to be found in the works of Gaston Bachelard or in more general appeals to a scientific mentalité.
- 5.
“Since, for the Fathers, according to their three acts of faith, (I) A and B address nature directly, (2) there are means for revealing its order, and (3) the use of such means is regulated by universal rules, they had an easy way (easy to define, if not always easy to apply) of settling this controversy. A wins a victory over B = A proves T or falsifies T. In this context, “victory” is a metaphoric concept. … For us, the Sons, the situation is different. As our loss of faith has induced us to maintain that there is neither a nature “out there’,“ speaking for itself nor neutral means or universal rules for discovering its structure, we have no other means of settling the controversy between A and B than the resources offered by the ongoing discussion between them. Our way, then, is like this: A wins a victory over B = A refutes B’ s arguments. Here “victory” is literal-it is a victory. It refers to the fact that A engages in a real discussion, a real exchange of arguments and counterarguments.” (Pera 2000: 52).
- 6.
In Aristotle’s Rhetoric the enthymeme is an argument in a rhetorical speech - does not have formal qualities, like the scientific demonstration of the dialectical syllogism.Rhetorical proof is reasonable proof. (Bons 2002).
- 7.
- 8.
Just as sentence-variations changed the readings of Newton’s first letter, a similar sentence variation caused quite a stir in the reception of his major work, as some printed version contained and extra tanquam in a sentence on God (Koyre and Cohen 1961).
- 9.
Turnbull 1959: 83.
- 10.
Oldenburg also deleted the following passage from a later letter (21 September 1672): “To comply wth your intimation … I drew up a series of such Expts on designe to reduce ye Theory of colours to Propositions & prove each Proposition from one or more of those Expts by the assistance of common notions set down in the form of Definitions & Axioms in imitation of the Method by wch Mathematitians are wont to prove their doctrines” (Turnbull 1959: 237).
- 11.
Here I assume some form of minimal theory of framing, as is developed in (Wohlrapp 2014).
- 12.
As opposed to diachronic ‘styles of thinking’, an historical approach connected to the eary Kuhn’s work on paradigm-shifts, my interest is in the synchronic, coexisting ‘styles of thinking’ that results from, to use the late Kuhn’s phrase, the ‘speciation’ of lexicons. Foucault also first focused on the diachronic shifts in epistemé, and later allowed for the coexistence of these.
- 13.
For the Duhemian indetermination-underdetermination distinction, see (Darling 2002, 522): “there are some cases in which indetermination is never completely overcome in practice and, … Duhem argues that the physicist always works with a mathematics of the approximate, in which the theoretical consequence of an approximately true proposition must be approximately exact (and the range of these two approximations must be delimited) in order to be useful.”
- 14.
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Zemplén, G.A. (2016). Polarisation in Extended Scientific Controversies: Towards an Epistemic Account of Disunity. In: Scarafile, G., Gruenpeter Gold, L. (eds) Paradoxes of Conflicts. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41978-7_5
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