ABSTRACT
This chapter shows why S. Toulmin’s theory can be interpreted as rhetoric for science and technology and how that rhetoric can be adapted and applied to the relatively narrow area of research in both the sciences and technologies. Rhetoric in its contemporary sense may be defined as collective, cooperative inquiry. Contemporary rhetoric departs from the traditional association of rhetoric with an established community of belief. Conventional language theory provides a means of classifying theories of rhetoric for science and technology. A. Korzybski may be taken to represent language-oriented rhetoric. The chapter suggests that all theories of rhetoric for science and technology are more or less object-oriented with respect to other theories of rhetoric. Audience-oriented rhetorics seek to resolve inevitable controversy by denying the personal standard of judgment. Toulmin’s theory, interpreted as a context-oriented rhetoric, lends itself to a rhetorical distinction among the collective audiences, or contexts, of sciences and technologies.
