In the public understanding of science, rhetoric has two distinct roles: it is both a theory capable of analysing public understanding and an activity capable of creating it. In its analytical role, rhetoric reveals two dominant models of public understanding: the deficit model and the contextual model. In the deficit model, rhetoric acts in the minor role of creating public understanding by accommodating the facts and methods of science to public needs and limitations. In the contextual model, rhetoric and rhetorical analysis play major roles. Rhetorical analysis provides an independent source of evidence to secure social scientific claims; in addition, it supplies the grounds for a rhetoric of reconstruction, one that reconstitutes the fact and facts of science in the public interest.
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Macdonald and Silverstone have made rhetorical re-analysis feasible by presenting the food-poisoning panels in full. But rhetorical analysis that compares these panels to the conferences that led to their creation is necessarily partial and suggestive, because transcripts were not available. Rhetorical re-analysis of the studies of Paine and Wynne is not possible because interview transcripts were not available.
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The metaphorical use of `interaction', evident in the food-poisoning exhibit, is general in the literature of the public understanding of science. An article by John Durant, otherwise unusually sensitive to the driving force of conceptual metaphor, provides an excellent illustration. Visiting the San Francisco Exploratorium, Durant was `impressed by the quality of the interactive exhibits, and in particular by a “hands-on” neurophysiology experiment in which visitors were able to elicit electrical activity in a living nerve-muscle preparation'. In this instance, the metaphor is particularly elaborate: `interactive', `hands-on', `experiment', and `elicit', all of these expressions connote activity in a context that is in fact entirely passive. This revealing use of metaphor in an `unimportant' context—a narrative of introduction—is apt to be missed by those not vigilantly in search of verbal nuance. See Durant, J., 1992, Brain research, animal awareness, and human sensibility: scientific and social dislocations. So Human a Brain: Knowledge and Values in the Neurosciences, edited by A. Harrington (Boston: Birkhäuser), p. 179.
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Waddell thinks that these arguments exceed CERB's charge. But the first, which seems irrelevant at a first pass, actually concerns the `broader implications' to public health.
