ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the shape and direction of rhetoric of science's (RS’s) break from what D. P. Gaonkar might have called a colonial analogy for the relationship between rhetoric and science. It argues that the primary difference between RS’s contemporary idea of science and its predecessors is that scholars of rhetoric have begun to describe science in terms of its differences from public life. The chapter demonstrates how G. Thomas Goodnight’s landmark essay, first published in 1982, on the personal, technical, and public spheres of argument makes possible a new analogy for the relationship between rhetoric and science. The theoretical globalization of rhetoric in RS thus required an analogy wherein a given scientific community resembled a Greek polis, namely, the appearance of rhetoric. To notice the “double transformation” of rhetoric in RS is therefore to notice the double meaning of the word “globalization” in Gaonkar’s account.
