Rhetoric in the Human Sciences

Scholars of every sort inevitably make stylistic choices, name and frame issues, appeal to communal values, adapt arguments to ends, audiences and circumstances. Yet the myth persists that `good' scholarship consists of hard fact and cold logic, devoid of all rhetoric; that the assent given to scholarly claims is somehow independent of the language used to communicate and defend them.

Rhetoric in the Human Sciences demonstrates that the rhetorical dimensions of scholarly discourse can no longer be ignored. The authors illustrate the usefulness of rhetorical theory, bringing its tools and perspectives to bear on such diverse subjects as language acquisition, television viewing, ethnographic writing, psychotherapy, jurisprudence and structuralist poetics. In so doing, they open up wider questions about the role of rhetoric in the making of a discipline, about rhetoric's functions within the various disciplines, and about the potential of rhetorical theory as a unifying force across the human sciences. They show how an investigation of rhetoric can be used not just deconstructively as a way of undermining objectivist pretensions, but also reconstructively as the study of appropriate forms of persuasive language and argument in our postmodern age.