ABSTRACT
Within the humanities, “nature” and the outcomes of “natural processes” are much more likely to be viewed as artifactual, although there is significant disagreement over the degree to which this is the case. In this chapter, the author and the evolutionary biologist, Banu Subramaniam aims to expose to cultural studies of science in graduate school, and both of their had independently developed an interest in feminist epistemologies of scientific inquiry. Those epistemologies and the political critiques that animate them were attractive to their for a variety of reasons. The author begins collaborating with an evolutionary biologist on a “rhetorical experiment.” He aims to do an analysis of the language used in an experiment in order to test some of the ways in which language and culture shape interpretations of empirical data. The author describes a group of “rhetorics” in action–linguistic choices that could be linked to particular conceptual, ideological, and empirical consequences.
