Rhetoric and the Third Culture: Scientists and Arguers and Critics

Chapter 9

Rhetoric and the Third Culture: Scientists and Arguers and CriticsA Response to Wayne Brockriede’s“Trends in the Study of Rhetoric: Towardsa Blending of Criticism and Science”

John Lyne

Two Cultures

There are several reasons that the relationship between the humanities and the social sciences may have been on the minds of Wayne Brockriede and his colleagues in 1970. The ! rst had to do with the object of inquiry for these professionals. There was a growing sense of the limitations of traditional models for the understanding of rhetoric, occasioned by the fact that most speeches were heard, often in edited form, on televi-sion, changing some of the relationships between speaker and audience, and between situation and performance. In this technological environ-ment, and in a ! eld that was widening from speech to the more global notion of communication, it was no longer clear how central the study of speeches would be to the ! eld. A second was a concern with methods of inquiry, given the expanding presence of social scienti! c approaches in the communication departments. At the time, the quantitative social sci-ences seemed destined to gobble up more and more of the terrain of the humanities. A third reason was the perceived gap between cultures of inquiry, represented by traditionalists and the empiricists in the ! eld.1

In today’s context the contrast Brockriede framed as being between traditionalists and empiricists would require some rethinking, in no small part because nonempiricists who produce scholarship in rhetorical theory and criticism now seem to be at some pains to avoid being “traditional.” Preferring to be at the cutting edge, rhetoricians have found new ways of grounding their work, and new tools have been found for the cutting. The turn toward social theory, cultural studies, and philosophy, for instance, has provided the resources and the rhetoric of “rigor” that once might have been sought in the vicinity of the empirical social sciences. A nod to the rhetorical tradition remains a familiar part of the repertoire for justi-fying one’s work, however, so the label has not lost all its relevance.2

I take as my point of departure Brockriede’s use of what I will call the two cultures trope, one that had been in circulation for a decade or

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so after C. P. Snow’s famous coinage in 1959.3 Brockriede’s use of the term, in contrast to Snow’s, was not to disparage one side or the other in the science–humanities split, but to diagnose a rift within the ! eld that he regarded as bridgeable.4 In recent decades the ! eld has created a growing number of sub! elds, specialties, and interests groups—a dizzy-ing number of them to be found in the annual program of the National Communication Association convention program. Different journals and different organizations cater to different interests and methods, eas-ing the organizational pressure to seek to reconcile or make any method accountable to any other. Yet it is still arguably the case that underlying all these surface variations one could ! nd a main ! ssure between those who accept designation as social scientists and those who do not—a re" ection of the broader ! ssure between science and the humanities.

Brockriede advocated a symbiotic relationship between the two cul-tures. For instance, he advocated using rhetorical criticism to motivate experimentation and predication. He rightly raises concerns about whether “criticism-blended-into-science” could be tested by objective measures, as well as about whether such a model could be generalized beyond the particular case. Such questions, he concludes, “invite large-scale experimental investigation,” at which point the critic presumably steps aside. The more important opening for a symbiotic relationship between the ! eld’s two cultures, perhaps, is recognized in Brockriede’s insistence that scientists are arguers.5 His respect for a received model of scienti! c process may have constrained his assumptions about the ways that scientists do in fact argue, but the simple principle that scientists argue is one that would later gain new life when a more constructivist conception of scienti! c process took hold in the ! eld. One sees in Brock-riede’s view that both critics and scientists are arguers and validators an incipient critique of the two cultures model. But a critique of that model does not necessarily inhibit the use of “two cultures” as a trope.

Scientizing Rhetoric

In the decades that followed, perhaps with a tad of defensiveness, rhe-torical critics often paid their respects to the idea of systematically build-ing toward generalizations, and although there are many who would still support this view, there has been criticism of it. In 1994, Noths-tine, Blair, and Copeland traced the development of the science–criti-cism relationship over roughly a quarter of a century, between Edwin Black’s Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (1965) and the early 1990s, and they diagnosed an unhealthy subordination to the goals of science.6 Their literature review ! nds scientism pervading this tradition, through a set of themes: “preoccupation with theory building, the cult


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of objectivity, reliance upon methods for con! rmation and falsi! cation of claims, and even the ideal of progress.”7 And they implicate some of the better known rhetorical scholars of the period. A subordination of rhetoric to science is discerned in the use of terms such as prescienti! c or preparadigmatic, and by the growing emphasis on “objectivity” as a fundamental condition for good academic practice.

Sometimes the purported collusion seems little more than a tip of the hat to the achievements of science, such as Black’s suggestion that critics might bene! t from considering the sources of science’s success. In other cases it comes from those with whom one would not necessar-ily associate the scienti! c temperament. For instance, Michael Calvin McGee is quoted as saying that whatever would achieve the status of theory must describe, explain, and predict.8 The authors assimilate this to a narrative about the move toward disciplinarity and professionaliza-tion in the ! eld. They approvingly cite James Klumpp and Thomas Hol-lihan, who align the ideal of “objectivity” found in the social scienti! c attitude with “moral noninvolvement.” “The dominant interpretation of the rhetorical critic’s purpose over the last three decades,” Klumpp and Hollihan wrote, “has formed from the relationship of critical method to social science. Indeed, the perspective of the critic as morally neutral has sprung primarily from the linkage with the objective methods promoted by American social science during that period.”9

Nothstine, Blair, and Copeland react with suspicion to Brockrie-de’s own use, in a later essay, of the term intersubjective reliability: “Although Brockriede understood reliability to rest upon the potential for argument, and not upon method,” they observe, “the desire for reli-ability nevertheless signals a will toward objectivity.”10 Moreover, in his notion of “discon! rmation” they ! nd the traces of a questionable analogy to scienti! c hypothesis testing. But analogy does not necessar-ily mean subordination. In view of then-emerging trends toward seeing a form of ethos-building in scienti! c rhetoric, it is possible to read the science-tinged rhetorical literature as a co-optation of the rhetorical style of science in order to build the credibility of critical projects—without really conceding anything of substance in the bargain. In that light the uses of quasi-scienti! c terms might be seen as little more than protective coloration, appropriate to the environment of the time. A similar point might be made about what implications one might draw from a quoted statement by Edwin Black, where he says that “there is not a single case in the literature of our ! eld in which a rhetorical theory has been aban-doned as a result of having failed an application of criticism.”11 Assum-ing that Black was right about that, one could hardly argue on that basis that critics had sold out to the methods or standards of science. Yet the nod in the direction of science was clear enough.



Rhetoricizing Science

If rhetorical criticism had really subordinated itself to certain scienti! c ideals, then it was a relatively short time before scholars in the ! eld started looking ambitiously toward the domain of science as a hunting ground for rhetorical analysis. If rhetoricians had in some sense been colonized by social sciences, there were also rhetoricians who were ready enough to show that they could reverse that process and “colonize” the sciences. Some of this was justi! ed by new theoretical moves, and some of it by reference to very traditional assumptions about rhetoric. John Camp-bell’s highly respected work on Charles Darwin as a rhetor, for example, was in many cases couched in the familiar terms of traditional rhetorical theory, even as it edged into theoretical innovations, such as that of a “cultural grammar.”12 If developments such as the widespread reading of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scienti! c Revolutions were used as justi! cations for approaching science with the eye of a critic,13 it would be misleading to suggest that there was a single impulse, still less a single theoretical rationale behind this increased interest in scienti! c discourse. Part of the explanation, perhaps, is the instinct of rhetoricians to look to where the power in society is (and is not). In a society supported and pervaded by science, and rife with science-based controversies that hinge on moral questions, it would be an odd self-limitation indeed if the ! eld did not manifest some interest in the ways science and applied science were working as persuasion. Indeed, Bower Aly had written about this as early as 1936.14 I do not know whether Brockriede would have been pleased to see the particular direction of later literatures about rhetoric and science, but this development did add a new wrinkle to the story of two cultures.

There are two broad rubrics, rhetoric of inquiry and rhetoric of sci-ence, that were used in our ! eld to help secure conceptual and institu-tional space for the rhetorical investigation of science. The “rhetoric of inquiry” developed in the 1980s around the theme of how those who practice the discourses of knowledge argue, invent, and persuade—be they natural scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, or policy advocates.15 This was a pluralistic program, born of an interdisciplinary coalition.16 By focusing on the practices of disciplines and the rhetorical strategies that cut across them or move outward from disciplinarity alto-gether, this literature pushed rhetorical studies beyond its usual habitat. But it is a point of some signi! cance that it also recruited some scholars from other disciplines, including social scienti! c disciplines, to the idea of rhetoric. A rhetorical turn in economics, for instance, was one of the ! rst fruits of the rhetoric of inquiry, and it is one that continues to be generative.17 And there were advocates for rhetoric in ! elds such as soci-ology, history, and law.18


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Far from subordinating itself to science, rhetoric gained impetus as a tool of inquiry with independent purchase on scienti! c discourse. The zeitgeist was not to think of rhetoric as perfectable or correctable by sci-ence, but rather to think of science as subject to rhetorical criticism—not “the science of rhetoric,” but “the rhetoric of science.” This developed on several fronts, and produced a wide variety of scholarship, including rhetorical analysis of major scienti! c ! gures;19 the rhetoric of scienti! c genres;20 inventional practices in science;21 the rhetoric of science-related controversies;22 major episodes in the history of science;23 public appro-priations of scienti! c terms;24 language and ! gures in science;25 incom-mensurability and the relationships among disciplines;26 rhetoric and philosophical rationality;27 and the uses of expertise.28

As was the case with rhetoric of inquiry, this trend was not without its critics. Yet the responses of the critics produced some of the most inter-esting re" ections on the nature of rhetoric in recent decades. Prominent among these was a vigorous debate about the “globalization” of rhetoric as an interpretive approach to science.29 A critical juncture was reached when Dilip Gaonkar called into question the “globalization” of rhetoric as an interpretive apparatus that knew no bounds, and from this " owed a series of questions. If rhetoric were to be a universal hermeneutic, applicable even to the sciences, might this represent a kind of overreach-ing for an art that had historically been about production rather than interpretation? And might it stretch to the breaking point a conception of rhetoric that had historically been bound up with certain assump-tions about individual agency? Perhaps everything under the sun could be viewed through the rhetorical lens—but by aspiring to be everywhere might rhetoric wind up being not exactly anywhere? Of what avail would it be if rhetoric gained the entire world only to lose its soul? Even as that debate has been thematized, however, the idea that there is utility in approaching various technical ! elds from the vantage of rhetoric seems only to be gathering steam, especially in those areas of applied sciences and technical ! elds, such as the ! eld of medicine, where the rhetorical issues loom large,30 as well as the rhetoric of law.31

Looking back over the four decades since Wingspread, it could be said that the ! eld did experiment with a conception of rhetoric that linked it to the goals of science; but it also experimented with a conception of science that linked it to the goals of rhetoric. If rhetoric at one point and to some degree yielded to science envy, then in at least part of the ! eld the pendulum then swung the other way, in the direction of science criticism. These developments shared the temper of their times, which were alive with ambitious theorizing and ferment. And the rhetoricians were not alone in wanting to gain critical purchase on the sciences, as parallel developments occurred in cultural studies and elsewhere. But there are surely ways of thinking about these matters that are not quite



so redolent of ontology—of claims about what rhetoric or science can and cannot be. Instead of thinking of rhetoric and science as two world-views vying for theoretical dominance, or even as two cultures playing out their inherent missions, we might do well in the current climate to think of these as variable in" ections within a broader culture that is saturated with both rhetoric and science—of a pervasive, manipulable duality without an ontological dualism. It might be productive at this juncture to pointedly interfere with the “two cultures” trope by suggest-ing that both cultures can thrive in the same petri dish—or that they do as a matter of fact “blend,” to use Brockriede’s term. In our technologi-cal society, perhaps we could, at least as a benevolent rhetorical exercise, adopt a dictum that “we are all critics, we are all scientists.” In some respects, at least, citizens and academics manage the tensions between science and rhetorical quite regularly.32

A Third Culture

Even in its ! rst articulation, the notion of “two cultures” was already connected with the idea that some third culture might emerge, one not so divided by practices, methods, prejudices, and ideology. This does not mean that we must fail to take account of the differences between science and the humanities; for there is no denying that the practices of science can be worlds apart from, say, the arena of political rhetoric, or that one might be literate within the humanities but not in the sciences, or vice versa. But these categories are regularly crisscrossed, overlapped, and confounded, both in the mode of production and in the mode of interpretation, inside and outside the academy. Moreover, we encounter them in public discourses that bid for our adherence on the assumption that we respect science and that we respect rhetorical argument. So we would want a conception of a third culture, if it is to be an honori! c term, which recognizes this.

The two cultures model, at least as it might pertain to our ! eld, has in some vicinities been weakened by developments such as those associ-ated with the rhetoric of science. That is not to deny its durability as a trope—partly straw man, partly historical artifact, and partly a tenden-tious play in what we might think of as academic politics. But the model does not do as much work for us in describing the cultural dilemmas of the rhetorician as it might have in the past. As Brockriede notes, C. P. Snow’s famous argument about the two cultures was based on a polar-ity he saw between scientists and “literary intellectuals.”33 One can only imagine what the social demeanor of literary intellectuals in the elite Brit-ish universities was like in 1959, but I suspect the atmosphere was rather different from what we ! nd at American universities these days. One can certainly ! nd professors in the humanities who disdain science, but even


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they, exceptions not withstanding, would probably blush at being called literary intellectuals. In much of the humanities, it is a widespread prac-tice to assume that both science and “literature” are embedded in a more general culture. And in particular reference to departments of communi-cation, home to a range of methodological approaches, one ! nds a good deal of pragmatism, by which I mean a willingness to use whatever tools are available—which certainly should make sense to those who are will-ing to consider the available means of persuasion. Indeed, some of our most visible scholars have worked comfortably with both quantitative and qualitative methods and have succeeded as public intellectuals in no small part because they have done this.34

In the spirit of Brockriede’s advice on regarding scientists as argu-ers, I turn now to the challenge of de! ning a third culture in which the relationship between science and the humanities is conceived as a public rhetorical relationship, subject to the sort of invention and manipulation found in other rhetorical relationships. One cannot approach the notion of a third culture without recognizing the energetic advocacy of John Brockman. By editing a series of books that put highly visible scientists into conversation, directly or indirectly, he has endeavored not only to tell us about what he regards as a meaningful third culture, but to show us.35 Brockman is interested not just to de! ne a third culture, however, but to give it a particular intellectual vector. And this means that he is selective about what scientists and what themes are to be engaged. He is struck by the emergence of several important themes in the writings of physicists, biologists, psychologists, and others of a comprehensive evo-lutionary framework. It becomes the frame of frames, in that according to Brockman, and some of the others whom he heralds, the evolutionary view in the twentieth century came to be understood as applying to the universe as a whole. Then, he argues, there are two essential themes that related to the evolutionary theme—those of self-organization and complexity. In other words, Brockman sees a third culture comprising not just an intellectual space for conversations that bridge between the sciences and the humanities, but also as a milieu in which certain broad scienti! c doctrines are shared. He might also be said to use the term as an honori! c title, applying it to those scientist-humanists who are mak-ing certain kinds of contributions to the discourses of knowledge.

The value of Brockman’s ongoing conversations among scientists is not in its rigor of analysis, for it is not a systematic examination of any particular scienti! c theories. In fact, it is a bit of a hodge-podge of diverse observations by some prominent names among science popular-izers. It includes largely un! ltered comments re" ecting their hopes and concerns, as well as comments about other scientists. In one volume, for instance, each participant is asked to respond to the question “What do you believe that you can’t prove?” In another they are asked what



they have changed their mind about, while another has them address the question of what they are optimistic about.36 This has the effect of giving a very personal cast to the discussions, and the voice of the individual scientists emerges rather clearly. One sees ego and ethos, argument and attachment. In short, these volumes are rhetorically fascinating, because they so clearly show the persons who are trading in the currency of sci-ence, thinking at the edge of their expertise, and grappling to have it make sense to nondisciplinary audiences. These thinkers are to a large extent engaged in metacommentary on and criticism of the theories and bodies of knowledge that they purport to have partial custody of, pro-viding somewhat unguarded observations about what seems to matter in the overall scope of things. At its best moments, this forum pres-ents ! rst rate minds seemingly thinking out loud and leaving evidence of what makes them tick. They also give us a sense of the narratives they live by, and through which they see their work and the work of other scientists.37

While the results of these efforts are highly stimulating, I believe that there may be ways of conceiving of a “third culture” that do not have a built-in alignment with particular scienti! c doctrines or developments, and which may include a broader swath of participants. In fact, I think a good deal of work that has been done under the rubrics of rhetoric of science, rhetoric of inquiry, and social epistemology has pointed to such a conception.38 So let me suggest some contours of such a concept, that is to say, a conception of a culture of inquiry that transcends the division between scienti! c and humanistic modes of investigation, without denying the very real and important function of experts. Our tack is to conceive of a third culture largely in terms of audiences. And from that perspective, a rhetorically informed third culture would be a culture that is:

1. Constituted by both experts and nonexperts; 2. Marked by a shared interest in the social reception of technical

knowledge; 3. Characterized by the presence of arguers who assume that they are

addressing, ultimately if not immediately, an audience that includes both experts and nonexperts;

4. Brought into focus by the presence of distinct voices; 5. Hospitable to rhetorical argument, narrativity, and persuasive

representation; 6. Constituted in such a way that effective participation requires accept-

ing the legitimacy of both empirical and interpretive methods.

In sketching out this conception, we are not required to assume that participants in the third culture are always on the side of the angels, or that they use their status in ways that bene! t society—only that they


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sustain a rhetorical space and capacity for interaction with broad audi-ences. Unlike Brockman, they would not be lined up according to their participation in speci! c scienti! c developments (or participation in his literary projects). But they would be people who come to the table with some scienti! c knowledge, or at least some openness to it, and some record of addressing a wider public.

To illustrate some of the ways that the third culture motif might be useful, I want to sketch the performative pro! les of three different writ-ers who not only ! t our criteria but also seem self-consciously to in" ect the rhetoric–science relationship to their public purposes. Each speaks from a platform of science, which seems to support their ethos; yet pre-cisely when each is acting qua scientist and qua rhetorician is unclear. In one case, we have a social scientist who forthrightly advocates “rheto-ric,” not merely as an interpretive vocabulary, but as a way of doing and thinking about certain social scienti! c problems. In the second case we have an interpreter of public opinion whose credibility rests directly on his use of presumably scienti! c techniques—and yet he is also playing the roles of critic (in the mode of interpretation) and persuader (in the mode of production). And in the third we have someone who enters a scienti! c debate by rhetorically in" ecting it toward a debate over pref-erences and the ends our society ought to pursue. I make no judgment about the validity of their claims but offer them as exemplars of what can be done in the performance space of the third culture.

Social–Psychological Border Crossings

I ! rst consider a social scientist who invokes rhetoric by its name, and indeed, who ! nds a measure of salvation in the rhetorical approach to inquiry. He represents our criteria for third culture status quite well, including the “distinctive voice” criterion. Perhaps no one has been a bet-ter representative of a professional move from empirical social science to rhetoric than the British social psychologist, Michael Billig. Among his numerous works is a fascinating book, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetor-ical Approach to Social Psychology, which is a story of the complicated relationship between rhetoric and science in the discourses of academic knowledge.39 It is also as a personal story about a journey of discovery—a journey from social science to rhetoric—made all the more interesting because of how rare it is to see the journey go in that direction rather than the reverse. Rhetoricians-turned-social scientists we have seen; but those who went to rhetoric from social scienti! c practices were and have been few and far between. Billig plays out the symbiosis persuasively. He makes a virtue of his social scienti! c skills even while recognizing their limitations in producing stable knowledge about human discursive



practices. Somewhat like Richard Rorty, who preceded him by moving from received philosophical methods to the vagaries of “conversation,”40 Billig speaks as a master of the idioms of the social scienti! c research that he is ostensibly criticizing, and he is therefore not easily dismissed by skeptics in those quarters.

Billig’s self-presentation is highly re" exive and it is given a signi! cant place in his narrative. He had made a reputation as a social scientist interested in attitude change. Then he “discovered” rhetoric—not the one-sided rhetoric of marketing, but the “antiquarian” rhetoric of Pro-tagoras, the sophist. This is the rhetoric of the implied dialogue, where every argument has a counterargument. In this framework, things do not settle down so easily into the mold of objectivity, because there is always another side to the story. Whether the other side is told, and how it gets told, is in many ways a function of the context of argument, the relationship between interlocutors, and even the desire to have the last word. Beliefs can be understood only insofar as they have contexts for interpretive activation; and those contexts, Billig shows, are often actual or implied argumentative exchanges. One of the strengths of his analysis is that he shows how people may enter an argument oppositionally or supportively, depending on what is at stake, or how the other person comes across. Billig challenges the assumption that people who believe mostly the same things are unlikely to argue. The emblematic counter-examples to this assumption are found in stories about rabbinical schol-ars arguing about the Talmud. Here one ! nds a community of strongly articulated shared beliefs, and yet there seems no end to the possibilities for argument.41

This embrace of rhetoric as an explanatory model " ies in the face of those programs of psychological research that would make a science out of explaining beliefs and persuasion. For Billig makes a virtue of anti-quarian and unscienti! c approach:

If nothing else, this current popularity of cognitive theory suggests that it might be an opportune moment to hitch the creaking old wagons of rhetoric to the computer-powered limousines of the cog-nitive psychologists…. However, despite all the expensive machin-ery at the disposal of the cognitive psychologists and despite the utmost modernity of their theoretical models and diagrams, it is the reverse, and certainly inopportune, strategy, which this chapter will recommend.42

As a credentialed social scientist, Billig is by no means antiempirical. Rather, he is a good example of an academic who meets our criteria for being an exemplar of the third culture. He is a scientist and he is


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a rhetorician, and his bold move is to display his own “conversion” to rhetoric as a way of getting at the limitations of prevalent psychologi-cal models of persuasion. The voice that he assumes in his elegant and witty prose is not muf" ed by obscurity. His writing is accessible to the nonexpert, even as it speaks to academics, and he makes a substantial set of argumentatively based claims about the fundamental nature of beliefs and attitudes. He speaks to a common focus of concern for psycholo-gists, sociologist, and rhetoricians, who are too often divided by their methodological assumptions.

One of the reasons Billig is so compelling is that he exploits terms and concepts that have currency both in the literature of the social sci-ences and in the discourses of common sense. The cognitive operations of categorizing and particularizing, for example, are explored in their social scienti! c context, but then placed in the broader frame of every-day life, where these are deployed as rhetorical moves, one countering the other. This is not to say that these are conceived merely in strategic terms by their users; only that they provide ways of moving an argu-ment in one direction or another, or of moving things forward. They are manifest in exercises of “witcraft,” the inventional capacity of the mind in contexts where circumstances and timing can be everything. More-over, Billig shows, the interplay of categorization and particularization as argumentative moves occurs in research traditions at a macrolevel, where theorists make their name by adducing generalizations, then under pressure to particularize wind up qualifying their own theoreti-cal positions to the point that, in answering their critics, they move the locus of argument to more the attenuated and inconsequential. “Com-mon sense” is explored, not as a more reliable form of reason, but as a space for the play of witcraft, and the counterposing of opposites, as, for example, the deployment of commonplaces that on their face seem perfectly contradictory.

In going rhetorical, has Billig sold out the social sciences that he has used to gain a forum? Some might say so, especially if they buy into the sharp distinction between the humanities and the sciences. But Bil-lig is the object of our interest here because he seems so successfully to frustrate such sharp distinctions. To the extent that there are two cul-tures being crisscrossed, he is a laudable example of an academic who is actively helping to construct a third culture—an audience capable of appreciating the lively interplay of expertise and common understand-ing. His language choices, both in the work I have just been discuss-ing and elsewhere,43 are both sophisticated and accessible, and he does nothing to disparage the motives of either scientists or humanists. In the mode of scientist-as-arguer, he displays the virtues that one might wish to see in a discourse of the third culture.



Reading Audiences Scientifi cally

The blending of science and criticism is not the exclusive preserve of aca-demics, nor even for the highly educated. Indeed, it thrives in the public eye, especially during election cycles, when polling and focus groups become the presumably objective measures of public opinion. Perhaps no one has been more visible as an “interpreter” of sentiments within the electorate than Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and focus group guru who also contributes political analysis on television, most notable for the Fox News channel. His expert services have been sought out by national campaigns, and yet his techniques are fully displayed in his analyses on television. Luntz’s trademark approach is to gather a group of ordinary citizens—often the ones who present themselves as “undecideds”—and have them observe the rhetorical performances of political candidates. And from this exercise he extracts conclusions that have the earmarks of empirical calibration, even as they produce interpretive conclusions. Empirical and interpretive methods go hand-in-hand in a way that seems perfectly accessible to audiences of all kinds. As Luntz stands before the group whose opinions are being monitored, he is the scientist-interpreter who tells us what these opinions are and what they mean. During the watching of a political ad, speech, or debate, the participants register instantaneous feedback by a dial, with which they can indicate negativ-ity or positivity in the desired degree. Afterwards, Luntz asks the group questions, letting members attach words to their respective views. The record of the reactions provides topoi for discussion.

Luntz’s persona is somewhat reminiscent of Phil Donohue, who pioneered the style of interaction with the audience, where there is an interactive relationship with the audience, whose views are elicited and commented upon. In this sense Luntz is an interpreter of what the group is thinking. Members of the group can react to his interpretation by disagreeing or agreeing with it, or by modifying or adding to it. This is manifestly a dialogical relationship between the moderator and the group, but it is also framed as a scienti! c one, in which the moderator is eliciting and observing data, which is presumed to reside already in the minds of the group members. But Luntz is able to “read” these thoughts, based on the objective data from the reaction dials and any comments from the group. In that respect he is also acting as a textual critic, mak-ing sense out of what is observed, but by making manifest with his instruments and methods the feelings of the group.44 The assumption is that these feelings, together with their respective intensities, are objec-tively in the minds of the group members and only caught in glimpses, which sometimes come as elicited follow-ups. In Luntz’s performances, the compelling presence of the “data” tends to make the exercise seem like a simple observation of the surrogate audience’s reactions, when it is


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instead a complex triangulation, as well as a process of bringing to ver-bal expression “positions” that are ! rst measured as though they were impulses. Luntz is weaving a new text out of the verbal and nonverbal data, and is in that sense meshing scienti! c and critical styles.

In his best-selling book, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear, Luntz lays out his thoughts and summarizes his experience observing the way words are received.45 He recounts politi-cal, corporate, and personal case studies and bears the news of his own successes. The book could be read as a tract on rhetoric, or more speci! cally, on the rhetoric of words and phrases, but Luntz is rhetori-cally savvy enough not to feature the word rhetoric. As is the cases with each of our three exemplars, he is a critic of other people’s science. For example:

[T]oo many polls report what voters or consumers think without explaining how they feel—and why. They measure thoughts and opinions, but they don’t provide a deeper understanding of the mind—and the heart. Feelings and emotions are what generate words that work.46

Again, one may or may not be enthusiastic about Luntz’s approach, but it serves to represent the third cultural scientist-critic, tempering interpretation with measurable data, and giving meaning to that which is measured by presenting it persuasively. We come away with the sense that we have been provided with a scienti! c account, and yet the plau-sibility of what we have been told comes from its rhetorical craftedness and commonsense appeal. Luntz has a doubly clever strategy—his sci-ence conceals his rhetoric, and his rhetoric conceals his science.

It is important that rhetorical critics and students of the rhetoric of science track third cultural ! gures like Luntz. His advice to political cli-ents shapes their discourse ways that are persuasive to mass audiences. He therefore plays an in" uential role in shaping public discourse about major issues, such as health care reform. He is doing it by deploying a strategically effective mix of rhetoric and social scienti! c techniques, and his stature as an expert is critically dependent on his ability to maintain and display that mix. One would be hard pressed to say either that the scientist or the critic is dominant in Lutz’s work, for he is both. More-over, he has made for himself a distinct voice in our political culture.

The Vocal Skeptic

My third case in point is the Danish economist, Bjørn Lomborg who is widely known for his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he



takes on the advocates of a strong response to global warming.47 For this he is known as a climate change skeptic (or less kindly, “denier”). And he has become famous. Indeed, he was recently named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the one hundred top public intellectuals in the world today.48 This is because he has found himself the occupier of a bully pul-pit, partly of his own making and partly the making of others. He is the favorite expert of those who smell a liberal plot behind Al Gore’s global warming agenda. He was invited to testify before a committee of the U.S. Senate, at the behest of Senator Inhoffe (R-Oklahoma), as an expert on the issues surrounding climate change.49 He is quoted on talk radio, and he is an impressive guest on panels and at conferences. In his home country, where he has found favor with the Danish Prime Minister, he was given responsibility for the Environmental Assessment Institute, at the University of Aarhus, in Copenhagen, jumping over more senior colleagues. After heading the Institute from 2002 to 2004, he stepped down in the wake of controversy stirred up by his work. He now spends a good deal of time in American think tanks and in extending his pub-lication record. A more recent book by Lomborg, entitled Cool It, takes the cause of climate change skepticism to a more general audience.50

Suf! ce it to say that Lomborg has been the focal point for much con-troversy. He was even pronounced guilty of scienti! c dishonesty by the Danish Committee for Scienti! c Dishonesty [sic], if for reasons that would make American scholar-advocates associated with think tanks shudder. Although the ! ndings of the DCSD were later to be annulled, it found the various published reports of his Institute to re" ect “cherry-picking of studies,” “systematically biased representation,” and not to represent scienti! c work or methods “in the traditional scienti! c sense”—a judgment that might pose troubling questions for any work by a scientist seeking to be persuasive with a broad audience.51 But Lom-borg has also been the focal point for a conjunction of sociopolitical and scienti! c issues that play out on a broader ! eld than any given ! eld of expertise. He earned his PhD in political science, specializing in game theory. By writing about a wide range of factors pertaining to global warming as an economic, political, and sociological challenge, Lomborg is in that sense playing the role of the public intellectual, drawing on his scienti! c knowledge, albeit of contested relevance, to enter the fray of public controversy. And I believe it is fair to say that he has gained some mastery of the art of rhetorical criticism. Indeed, this appears to be an important factor in his success in leading those who are looking for a dissenting voice in the climate change debate. He has shown a facility for analyzing—some would say debunking—the rhetoric of climate change that has broad circulation within our culture. He has become a supplier of tropes and arguments, of rhetoric that critically confronts rhetoric.


146 John Lyne

Let us begin with the book that made him famous, The Skeptical Environmentalist. It is loaded with data and charts, and it is making an argument on what are essentially economic grounds. That is, Lomborg contends that cost–bene! t ratios have been largely left out of the equa-tion in discussions of environmental initiatives, such as the Kyoto Treaty. And he systematically presses the case that the climate change advocates have exaggerated or made one-sided claims. Lomborg might be placed within a tradition of “debunkers,” who question the rhetorical platitudes of other scientists and of public and political ! gures who cite them.52 This is not to say that his stance is entirely negative, for he does coun-terbalance the critique with various constructive suggestions for making life on the planet more habitable and healthy. But it is the critique that has most captured popular attention.

An important part of Lomborg’s performance as a critic is in his performance of a certain persona. The ! rst thing that strikes one upon seeing him, whether in testifying before congressional committees or appearing on talk shows, is that his physical appearance and manner play against type for the scienti! c expert. He is almost boyish looking and likes to wear casual, tight-! tting shirts; with his blonde hair and casual demeanor, he might be mistaken for a laid-back surfer. Unlike others who have entered the fray on climate change, his supporters might tell you, he does not speak in a preachy or condescending manner. His persona is that of a man who has scienti! c data at his command, but who seems to speak with the voice of common sense. His voice and aura bespeak balance and perspective, as if he is telling us in code that he subordinates science to human priorities, not the reverse, as some of his opponents sometimes seem to do. His tonalities suggest caution rather than urgency, and practicality rather than purity. His strategies are of the “yes, but” and “even if” variety, rather than the strident and the unequivocal.

All of this works in a subtly dialogical fashion. For each of these virtues, carried by the persona, one is invited to infer a corresponding vice on the side of his opponents—vices masked by rhetorical manipula-tions, such as to implying certainty when there are grounds for doubt, or railroading the public to ends that are best approached with caution. Lomborg seems intuitively to understand that scienti! c experts, in the language of the rhetorical critic, are wont to engage in rampant synec-doche, extrapolating to the whole on the basis of the part that they have isolated and measured. For the politicians and commercial interests who have found him so useful to their purposes, he lends support to their view that those who promote the global warming “agenda” bury the value-ladenness of their claims beneath the rhetoric of facticity and exalt the “natural” over the human.



Lomborg is in one sense a critic of the science behind global warming advocates, but he is in a broader sense a critic of the way such science is rhetorically cast to seem compelling and action-worthy. He also has the cachet of someone who has been subjected to attempts to silence him in the name of good science. He is cast as the embattled man of science who dares to speak against an establishment that has exploited science for purposes of control. Love him or hate him, Lomborg is in a sense an exemplar of a rhetorically shaped “third culture.” He speaks as a social scientist to a general public—an educated public, some would say. He is also an example of a blending of science and criticism. The fact that he is controversial helps to throw into relief the rhetorical character of his performance. As much as we would like to think that scienti! c ques-tions are settled by the facts, the question always remains—which facts? The very way that Lomborg marshals facts to his ends engages him as a critic, questioning priorities, weighing the implications for action, and engaging in persuasion. Those who want to disqualify his science would do well to notice the skill with which he plays the role of the rhetor and the critic.

Available Means

I have sketched the pro! les of three social scientists who have become not just experts but rhetorical performers who parlay their scienti! c understanding into social, and even rhetorical, critique. One could read-ily ! nd examples of natural scientists who play a similar role.53 Now that we have become accustomed to seeing rhetoricians tackling scienti! c discourse and science-related controversies, and ! nding scientists per-forming rhetorically, we should take the next step and acknowledge that scientists are not only arguers, as Brockriede pointed out, but that they can also perform as rhetorical critics in the public eye. Their ability to do this often depends on their skill at establishing a scienti! c ethos while also engaging in the dialect of a literate “common sense.” In such cases, it is futile to declare which parts of their performances are a part of the discourse of scienti! c expertise and which are part of the discourse of more general audiences. The “two cultures” are bridged, for better or for worse, in what can be described as a symbiotic third culture. The trope of the two cultures remains available as a way of drawing con-trasts, upholding different frames of accountability, and describing rifts to be bridged, which is another way of saying that conjuncture and dis-juncture are available means of persuasion, managed with more or less skill—and that culture can be a messy environment for the ontology of domains, spheres, and dualisms.


148 John Lyne

Notes 1. Those of us who remember could recite stories about the clash of sensibili-

ties, territorial grabs, and so on, just as we could also tell stories of schol-ars who took a pluralistic attitude on the question of method. Whether the competition was friendly or not, there was a pervasive sense that the quantitative methods of the social sciences were on the march and that traditionalists were in danger of being declared irrelevant (a term with considerable clout at the time). Brockriede is not so much concerned about changes in the objects of inquiry as about how the methods of the respec-tive cultures could be constructively harnessed toward common goals. And his observations accurately forecast some of the subsequent responses to the question of competing methods and the cultural divide.

2. Likewise, empiricist has as a term undergone some vicissitudes in reputa-tion and meaning, especially in light of the now widely accepted view that empirical observations are in some ways (and there is a wide spectrum of opinion on those ways) theory-laden, or at least value-laden. There has also been a development of “qualitative” methods that, while empirical, are also interpretive.

3. The scientist and novelist’s 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University was published in book form by Cambridge University Press under the title, The Two Cultures and the Scienti! c Revolution that same year, and there-after became what we might now call a cultural meme (a term coined by third culture stalwart, Richard Dawkins). Not only has the term/concept achieved general circulation throughout academic culture, it remains the focus of continued discussion. For example, ! fty years later, in May 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a symposium on “The Two Cultures and the 21st Century.” E. O. Wilson, who presented the key-note address, is another example of a scientist who has staked out a role for himself as an arguer and critic within what might be called a third culture.

4. “When the inhabitants of the two cultures begin to cross the boundaries and to communicate with one another, they may recognize that their goal relationship is equivalent. Then they can seek knowledge together to the pro! t of themselves and their discipline”; Wayne Brockriede, “Trends in the Study of Rhetoric: Toward a Blending of Criticism and Science,” in The Prospect of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer and Edwin Black (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), 138.

5. Brockriede, “Trends,” 131–32. 6. See William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, “Profes-

sionalization and the Eclipse of Critical Invention,” in Critical Questions: Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media, ed. Wil-liam L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 15–63.

7. Ibid., 31. 8. Ibid., 34. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Ibid., 39. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. See, for instance, John A. Campbell, “The Polemical Mr. Darwin,” Quar-

terly Journal of Speech 60 (1975): 442–49; “Scienti! c Revolution and the Grammar of Culture: The Case of Darwin’s Origin, Quarterly Journal of



Speech 72 (1986): 351–76; “Scienti! c Discovery and Rhetorical Invention: Darwin’s Path to Natural Selection,” in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 58–89.

13. For a discussion of the importance of Kuhn’s work to the rhetoric of science movement, see Randy Allen Harris, ed., Rhetoric and Incommensurabil-ity (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2005), esp. introduction, 3–149.

14. Bower Aly, “The Scientist’s Debt to Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 22 (1936): 584–90.

15. See John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and D.N. McCloskey, eds. Rhetoric of the Human Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; Simons, The Rhetorical; Herbert W. Simons, ed. Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1989), John Lyne, “Rhetorics of Inquiry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71 (1975): 65–73.

16. The Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI) developed at the University of Iowa in the 1980s, beginning with a fortnightly interdisciplinary seminar, in which rhetorical practices of their respective ! elds were discussed by participants from a variety of ! elds, including political science, history, economics, communication, philosophy, English, law, urban and regional planning, American studies, women’s studies, ! lm studies, business, and others. POROI would go on to host a number of scholarly conferences, produce a series of books through the University of Wisconsin Press, develop an of! cial set of course offerings, and offer an interdisciplinary graduate certi! cate program.

17. See Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Knowledge and Persuasion in Eco-nomics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Edward M. Clift, ed. How Language Is Used to Do Business: Essays On the Rhetoric of Economics (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008).

18. See, e.g., Richard Harvey Brown, Society As Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Lan-guage, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Heracles’ Bow: Essays on Rhetoric & Poetics of the Law (Madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

19. See, e.g., Campbell, “The Polemical”; Leah Ceccarelli, Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schroedinger, and Wilson (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); G. Mitchell Reyes, “The Rheto-ric in Mathematics: Newton, Leibniz, Their Calculus, and the Rhetoric of the In! nitesimal,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 163–88; Dale Sullivan, “Galileo’s Apparent Orthodoxy in The Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” Rhetorica 12 (1994): 237–64; J. Zappen, “Francis Bacon and the Historiography of Scienti! c Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 8 (1989): 74–90.

20. See, e.g., Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge (Madison: Uni-versity of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Greg Meyers, Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scienti! c Knowledge (Madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).


150 John Lyne

21. Alan Gross, J. E. Harmon, and M. Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scienti! c Article From the 17th Century to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Lawrence Prelli, A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scienti! c Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Simons, The Rhetorical.

22. See, e.g., Thomas Lessl, “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the Politics of Science,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1985): 18–34; John Lyne and Henry F. Howe, “Punctuated Equilibria: Rhetorical Dynamics of a Scienti! c Controversy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1985): 18–34; Gordon Mitchell, Strategic Deception: Rhetoric, Science, and Policy in Defense Advocacy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000).

23. See, e.g., Campbell, “The Case”; Jean D. Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Jack Selzer, ed., Understanding Scienti! c Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

24. See, e.g., Celeste Condit, The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates about Human Heredity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Henry K. Howe and John Lyne, “Gene Talk in Sociobiology,” Social Epistemol-ogy 6 (1992): 1–54.

25. See, e.g., Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); E. F. Keller, Re! guring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Scott Montgomery, The Scienti! c Voice (New York: Guilford Press, 1996); Carol Reeves, The Language of Science (London: Routledge, 2005).

26. Randy Allen Harris, The Rhetoric of Incommensurability (West Lafay-ette, IN: Parlor Press, 1997).

27. See, e.g., M. A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning: Rhetori-cal Foundations of Logic and Scienti! c Method (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1980); Henry Krips, J. E. McGuire, and Trevor Melia, eds., Sci-ence, Reason and Rhetoric (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Jean D. Moss and W. A. Wallace, Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003); M. Pera and W. R. Shea, Persuading Science: The Art of Scienti! c Rhetoric (Canton, MA: Science History, 1991).

28. See, e.g., Thomas B. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Accidental Rhet-oric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island,” Communication Mono-graphs 48 (1981): 270–300; Steven Fuller and James Collier, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge,2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003); John Lyne and Henry F. Howe, “Rhetorics of Expertise: E. O. Wilson and Sociobiology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 134–51.

29. See Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith, eds., Rhetorical Hermeneu-tics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). This collection of essays focuses on an essay by Dilip Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” 25–88, and responses to it by a dozen prominent scholars of rhetoric.

30. See, e.g., Michael Hyde and J. McSpiritt, “Coming to Terms With Perfec-tion: The Case of Terri Schiavo, Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 150–78; Lisa Keranen, “‘Cause Some Day We All Die’: And the Case of the ‘Patient’ Preferences Worksheet,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 179–210; John Lyne, “Contours of Intervention: How Rhetoric Matters



to Biomedicine,” in “Rhetoric and Medicine” ed. John Lyne, special issue, Journal of Medical Humanities 22 (2001): 3–13; Judy Z. Segal, Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2005); Celeste Condit, “Women’s Reproductive Choices and the Genetic Model of Medicine,” in M. M. Lay, L. J. Gurak, C. Gravon, and C. Myntti, eds., Body Talk: Rhetoric, Technology, Reproduction (Madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 125–41.

31. See, e.g., Robert Hariman, Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1993); Marouf Hasian, Legal Memories and Amnesias in America’s Legal Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Neil MacCormick, Rhetoric and the Rule of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Clarke Rountree, Judging the Supreme Court: Constructions of Motives in Bush v. Gore (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007); Clarke Rountree, ed., Brown v. The Board at Fifty: A Rhetorical Retrospective (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004); James Boyd White, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cul-tural and Legal Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

32. For a conception of modern rhetoric as engaged with managing the ten-sions between science and culture, see Michael C. McGee and John Lyne, “What Are Nice Folks Like You Doing In a Place Like This? Some Entail-ments of Treating Knowledge Claims Rhetorically,” in Rhetoric of the Human Science, eds. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and D. N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, 381–406.

33. Brockriede, “Trends,” 130. 34. Pragmatism, traceable to persons such as Everett Lee Hunt, so evident

in the work of the Wingspread Conference’s chief investigator, Lloyd Bitzer, and in much of the twentieth century tradition of rhetoric, does not encourage aspirations to methodological purity.

35. Books edited by John Brockman include The Third Culture: Beyond the Scienti! c Revolution (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991); The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-! rst Century (New York: Vintage Press, 2002); What is your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Lead-ing Thinkers On the Unthinkable (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

36. See John Brockman, ed., What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today’s Leading Minds Rethink Everything (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); What Are You Optimistic About?: Today’s Leading Thinkers On Why things Are Good And Getting Better (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

37. These scientists do not live and work outside narrativity; the relationship of their science to a narrative paradigm, most prominently theorized by Walter Fisher, would be an interesting question to explore.

38. The interdisciplinary journal, Social Epistemology, published by Taylor & Francis, has proven a rich resource for rhetoricians interested in the role of rhetoric in constructing, deploying, and critiquing knowledge. The current editor, Joan Leach, is a scholar in the ! eld of rhetoric.

39. Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology, rev. ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

40. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).


152 John Lyne

41. This is referenced throughout Billig, Arguing. 42. Ibid., 148. 43. See, e.g., Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,

1994); Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Laughter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).

44. The term feelings is interesting here, because it ambiguously covers both emotional and cognitive reactions, all tallied up according to a positive or negative valence, a feeling of agreement or disagreement. Thus, the direc-tion of the feeling and its relative valence are measured and accounted for by the broadened rhetorical context of the group discussion.

45. Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (New York: Hyperion Press, 2006).

46. Ibid., 74. 47. Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real

State of the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 48. Foreign Policy and the British journal, Prospect, list their polling results

for the one hundred top intellectuals in a Web site posting dated Septem-ber 2005, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249.

49. See Shailagh Murray, “Gore Returns to Capitol Hill a Hero and a Tar-get: Skeptics of Global Warming Hope to Test the Former Vice President’s Mettle,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2007, A06.

50. Bjørn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

51. These were among the ! ndings of the DCSD, announced in January of 2003. Lomborg appealed the decision shortly thereafter to the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, which annulled the DCSD ! ndings in December 2003.

52. The predecessor Lomborg most resembles is Julian Simon, a PhD in business economics, who became a proli! c critic of claims of global overpopulation.

53. Leading candidates for “third culture” status from the nature candidates would include E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, and the late Carl Sagan.


Rhetoric and the Third Culture: Scientists and Arguers and Critics

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