ABSTRACT
The author explores the questions: How and under what circumstances do climate scientists make appeals to their own expertise? And what types of expert appeals do they make? The author addresses these questions by analyzing a corpus of 511 oral and written testimonies crafted by climate scientists and delivered in congressional climate change hearings. The first part of this chapter describes the building of this corpus and the development of a coding scheme for appeals to expertise (phronēsis). The chapter’s second part presents descriptive and inferential statistical analyses of the corpus which test hypotheses about whether factors like previous experience at testifying before Congress, a scientist’s gender, the political party in control of the hearing, and so on might influence the frequency with which climate scientists appealed to their expertise. This large-scale empirical assessment of real-world argumentation reaffirms the use of previously theorized categories of expert appeal while identifying new ones. It also suggests that scientists regularly make appeals to their own expertise in their testimonies and that there are a few personal and contextual factors that seem to have a measurable impact on the frequency with which these types of appeals are made.
