ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the rhetoric of science by considering the questions, Rhetoric and Science? and Rhetoric or Science?, followed by a three-level classification scheme. The rhetoric of science can be readily understood from a three-level classification scheme. This scheme is systematic, parsimonious, comprehensive of key theoretical distinctions, and robust in highlighting the complex, subtle aspects of this topic. This natural assertion of the truth is the nexus between rhetoric and science. Such assertion in science often involves executing a careful experiment to test competing theories. The most fundamental but least obvious level of rhetoricity involves names and concepts such as phlogiston, force, and quark. Rhetoric is involved in the enterprise of science in establishing the primacy of scientific knowledge over other forms of knowledge. The intermediate and most obviously rhetorical level in which rhetoric is engaged in science is that of the continual evolution of scientific knowledge and the negotiation, advocacy, and debate which occasions this evolution.
