ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the theory of multiple ontologies developed in science and technology studies (STS) offers a different and productive set of metaphors and analytic tools for examining the rhetorical activity involved in what A. Pickering called the "mangle of practice." It argues that the theory of multiple ontologies offers a useful alternative to incommensurability and describes a different form of rhetorical activity that is common in scientific practice. The chapter aims to contribute to the longstanding call in rhetoric of science and technical communication to enter into increased interdisciplinary dialogue with our colleagues from STS. Many of the professional and institutional concerns that surface through postplural theory are negotiated through texts and talk between technical experts in institutions. The modernist-representational ontology stages a metaphysics of pain as indexical sign and emerges from diagnostic practices. The empirical-discursive ontology emerges from the theory of evidence-based medicine and the practice of randomized controlled trials and its methodology of statistical analysis.
