ABSTRACT
Modern science and its philosophies abjure their own rhetorical practices and contend that the figures of language are not suitable for scientific discourse. Since positivism aspires to objectively valid and universally applicable knowledge, that is, knowledge without a human point of view, it also must eschew more personalized modes of expression. Thus figures in scientific writing are resisted not only because of their polyvocality, but also because they violate the proper role of the writer in scientific prose. Despite protests to the contrary, science has and does rely on rhetorical devices. Even those discourses of the philosophy of science that explicitly eschew figuration inadvertently demonstrate its pervasiveness by using figures to defend their rejection of them. To update Aristotle's theory of rhetoric, the work of Chaim Perelman is essential. His masterpiece, The New Rhetoric, written with Madame Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, sought to rehabilitate rhetoric as a discipline whose task is the analysis of persuasion in the humanities and the social sciences.
