Abstract
Walsh’s Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy traces the inherited, split ethos that scientists must juggle when engaged in matters of public debate and dialogue. Performing something much like a family genealogy, Walsh demonstrates how the prophetic meme both persisted and mutated by exploring several historic case studies ultimately in order to question whether this ethos can be remediated. She roots specific characteristics of this ethos construction in the Delphic Oracle, who was called upon to advise the polis’s decision making much as scientists are called on in modern American politics. Establishing links between these ancient oracles and modern scientists demonstrates the extent to which scientists as public figures now fill the roles once reserved for spiritual leaders. She performs her analysis through a number of methods, notably genealogy and case study, tracing connections between distinct cultures that inherited and shifted this ethos, and focuses each chapter on an explication and examination of which elements of this ethos “persisted” and which changed to reflect new cultural values.
Overall, Scientists as Prophets establishes both the consistent need for prophetic advisers and the ways that modern scientists are in some sense “stuck” with their inherited, fractured public ethos. Tracing this current ethos through history allows readers to understand the current difficulties scientists face when translating highly specialized knowledge for an unspecialized audience, all while balancing their projected roles as politically neutral specialists and prophetic advisers and being limited by their audience’s (impossible) demand for scientific certainty.
The book’s genealogy ultimately explores why the “deficit model” is, according to Walsh, the wrong way to look at the dialogue between scientists and lay audiences. Understanding scientific ethos as prophetic allows us to see the role of the science adviser as one that intends to start a dialogue with the public and with policy makers—one that really focuses on collective, cultural values as opposed to objective knowledge or presentation of facts. By tracing the current scientific ethos to the ethos that oracles, political advisers, and scientists have shared and constructed, Walsh establishes how the role of science adviser has always been to begin a dialogue regarding values; in this sense, closing an information gap between scientists and lay audiences is not the best way to heal a fractured ethos or to move policy discussions forward.
Using the inheritance metaphor enables Walsh to establish that, because of its deep, historical roots, the prophetic science ethos is not easily changed. But difficult is not synonymous with impossible, and Walsh does end her book with a discussion of potential shifts in current science policy debates that might change and mend this currently fractured ethos. For Walsh, scientific ethos is a historical, inherited phenomenon. Given this fundamental argument, Walsh organizes her book chronologically, beginning with ancient Greece and ending with current American debates over climate change and environmental policy.
In her earlier chapters, Walsh uses Burke’s dramatic pentad in order to locate motivations for the development of prophetic ethos. She explains how oracles established their ethos as trusted advisers largely by tapping into the key values of the polis and phrasing their prophecies and questions in ways that reflect these values back to the ruling parties. By rooting the scientific ethos in this way, Walsh argues, the conversation has really always been about values. She moves forward in time with the chapters of her book, from Delphi to Europe with Francis Bacon, to the 17th-century London Royal Society, to what she calls a “fractured” ethos of the modern science adviser in America and elsewhere.
Walsh allows for occasional gaps in time and place (particularly the jump from ancient Greece to the 17th century). These gaps are justified by the book’s scope: from a focus on the establishment of the prophetic ethos as value and dialogue centric to a focus on significant cultural shifts that mutated this ethos. Burke, for example, according to Walsh, established the new ethos of an “experimental philosopher” by combining the ethos of “natural magician” and “Protestant prophet.” In this way, religious advisers and natural scientists were able to work together to advise in certain matters of policy that affected the public sphere. Fifty years later, Walsh explains how the Royal Society drew on this established respect for an experimental ethos to further secure the role of the scientist and science in civic decision making and policy. Walsh describes this ethos that the Royal Society established as “hybrid”: part natural, experimental scientist, part prophet.
In Chapter 5, Walsh begins to describe the effects of competing values in this hybrid science–prophetic meme. As such, later chapters focus on its fractured rather than hybrid nature. To explore competing values and examine the scientist prophet ethos in argumentation, Walsh introduces stasis theory as a theoretical framework, which carries through the rest of the book. She describes and explicates this fractured ethos by focusing on the American sciences adviser and explaining that there are two competing ethos that the science adviser can adopt: the “progressive” model versus the “is/ought” model. The progressive model establishes scientists as being in the position to actually set policy because of their unique and specialized understanding of the world. The is/ought model, on the other hand, sets up a firm divide between scientists’ area of expertise (describing how the world is) and the realm that they must not transgress (describing how things should be) because the latter moves the scientist beyond objective observation and into the realm of values. As Walsh illustrates in a series of focused case studies, scientists choose one of these models, but conservative attack often comes at the boundary between what is and what ought to be, and scientists are often stuck. That is, they are called upon to advise but are accused of transgressing their disciplinary expertise and acting as prophet when their advice contradicts the values held by the audience.
Through case studies of specific, well-known scientists, Walsh demonstrates how the progressive model lost out in favor of the is/ought model. In Chapter 8, Walsh delves into the influence of mass media and the importance of metaphor in bringing science to general audiences. She focuses on Sagan, Hawking, and Gould as examples of scientist prophets who used mass media to bring ideas to the public by relying heavily on metaphor. These scientists attempted to directly engage nonscientist audiences in a dialogue concerning such important policy issues as science education and evolution. These science prophets, argues Walsh, enjoyed their status as celebrities and raised the public awareness of scientific issues partly because of a kairotic moment when the public wanted to be more engaged in an understanding of how the world worked and partly because of individual charisma. Television magic and metaphorical language together served to popularize these individuals, increase their influence on the public’s ways of seeing the world, and blur the boundaries between science specialists and nonscientist audiences. But attempts to open this dialogue also meant that certain things that were once left up to specialists were now a matter for (often contentious) public debate.
In Chapter 9, Walsh explores how new technologies worked to reconcile the fractured ethos of the scientist prophet. Because of increased certainty and the ability to look forward by looking back, modeling technologies allowed climate scientists to somewhat settle the tension between the is–ought divide in their ethos. But uncertainty is always present to an extent in scientific dialogue, and because uncertainty works against the scientist prophet ethos, Walsh explores why climate scientists were largely unable to eliminate this divide and how they were often attacked for making unsubstantiated, value-laden claims about policy. Although new technologies could in some ways stand in for the scientists’ ethos, because of the lack of certainty and because of the historical legacy of the prophetic ethos that Walsh has described, scientists are still largely open to attack when their recommendations or interpretations go against the already held values of their critics.
Scientists as Prophets presents a clear, easy to navigate, historical analysis that will interest scholars in rhetoric and technical communication who are concerned with how modern scientists position themselves in public policy dialogues. Walsh manages to balance breadth and depth through the book’s organizational method; while each chapter stands alone as an interesting case study and window into a significant piece or event that contributed in establishing this ethos, taken together, they provide a big–picture look at how this ethos might be rooted in historical conversations about values. Further, despite the dense nature of this complex topic, each chapter provides a clear, concise summary in its conclusion, and the final chapter summarizes the book’s main points of investigation, making some of the more technical aspects accessible to writing studies scholars or academics less familiar with rhetorical theory and science writing.
Besides being easy to navigate and approachable, Walsh’s genealogical approach shows the deeply rooted nature of hybrid, fractured scientific ethos. The case studies give a more in-depth analysis of specific moments in time that gave rise to a cultural shift. The text, in this way, presents almost a cause–effect paradigm; it explores not only how scientific ethos aimed at policy making is and has been constructed, but why it is and has been constructed this way.
In sum, this book is a useful text for anyone interested in ethos construction and popular science writing as well as those interested in how scientists have joined or initiated conversations with nonscientist audiences. This text might have important pedagogical implications and uses in discussing how seemingly valueless genres such as science writing are constructed and framed. The book or individual chapters could help writing students to interact with science texts and debates—in particular, to think about how metaphor and other tools are used when communicating scientific knowledge to a popular audience. Because science debates have fallen into the realm of public policy and are often, if not always, framed in terms of political rhetoric, Scientists as Prophets serves an important purpose and provides a solid basis for addressing this crisis and understanding why separating science from politics is a nearly impossible task.