ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the rhetorical and linguistic underpinnings of how tensions between competing expertises in public engagements with complex technical issues arise, from mis-aligned expectations, judgments, and practices about who holds legitimate expertise and how expertise ought to be enacted. The chapter outlines a potential new perspective on how to think about such tensions, grounded in theories of justificatory logics, stasis, and topoi, and advanced through computational methods of semantic topic modeling.
