ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a distinct separation between our emotional alignment toward an object—our feelings for it of like or dislike, attraction or repulsion—and our verbalized rationale, our set of articulated reasons for that alignment. People in homophilic relationships share common beliefs, values, and other characteristics, making communication and relationship formation easier. Homophily limits people's social worlds in terms of the material they receive, their attitudes and beliefs, and their experiences. Persistent fear that vaccine causes autism (or other abnormalities in children) is a recent example of homophily, sustained by self-reinforcing networks of young parents. As the lines are drawn in a technical controversy and positions become polarized, each side develops a rhetoric, an articulated ideology that is more or less shared by partisans. Social structural features of a controversy can shape the content of rhetoric in explicit ways, so if two controversies have similar structures, they may show rhetorical similarities.
