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RHETORIC OF SCIENCE AND INFORMAL LOGIC

I. Griftsova

Abstract

The concept of the rhetoric of science remains open to debate, although it has been acknowledged as a research area and an academic discipline in the literature and by universities across the world. This article aims primarily to justify the treatment of the rhetoric of science as an independent research area, to place it in the historical context of the evolution of logic, rhetoric, and philosophy, and to demonstrate the relationship between the possibility of a rhetorical interpretation of science and its interpretation as a communicative venture. Such an approach places scientific argumentation at the centre of any research. Out of many current concepts and models of argumentation, the framework for scientific argumentation modelling provided by informal logic is of special interest. Having emerged as a movement among professors of logic rather than a concept, informal logic is rarely considered in such a context. At the same time, informal logic offers new ways to elucidate the logical-methodological aspects and the argumentative structure of scientific knowledge, since it incorporates a technique for structuring and analysing reasoning. This technique takes into account both anthropological and communicative parameters. In this case, informal logic turns into an instance of argumentation theory or the logic of argumentation. This results in a revision of scientific justification as such, in the logic of argumentation – rather than apodictic logic – coming to the fore, and in the treatment of strict formal methods of justification with logical consequence at heart as merely individual cases of the logic of argumentation.

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