Arguing in the Grooves: Genre and Language Constraints in Scientific Controverises1 Jeanne Fahnestock University of Maryland I want to open with an example of a minor controversy that provides the stunning

image below, and I invite you to consider how you would describe this image in words,

without knowing what it is.

In 2011 the journal Science published a "Report" (their genre label) arguing that amber

nodules found in Late Cretaceous sediments in Canada preserved both dinosaur and bird

feathers (McKellar, Chatterton, Wolfe, Currie, 2011). Bird feathers were not surprising,

but the dinosaur feather identifications were, as the paper mixed claims with different

burdens of proof. Supporting evidence for the dinosaur feather label amounted to

matching structures inferred from sophisticated micrographs of inclusions in the amber

(like that in the image) to a five-stage model of feather evolution. A lengthy supplement

                                                                                                               1  Paper presented at ISSA [International Society for the Study of Argumentation] July 2014. To appear in Proceedings volume, 2015, without the images.  

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to the print article argued against identifying the inclusions in the two purported dinosaur

specimens as hair or plant material, leaving feathers by the logic of elimination

(McKellar et al., 2011).

Five months later a "Technical Comment" challenging the identification of

dinosaur feathers appeared in Science (Dove and Straker, 2012). A "Technical Comment"

is a tightly controlled genre, limited to 1000 words, two figures or tables and 15

references, restricted to addressing only the core conclusions and methodology of the

original argument, minus any mention of new data or unpublished work not accessible to

the original authors; comments only see publication if their authors have first

corresponded with the original authors (see “Information for Authors,” 2012). Focusing

on the two putative dinosaur specimens, the two challenging authors cast detailed doubt

on the visual interpretations, proposed that the protofeathers were more likely to be plant

material, and emphasized that without destructive analysis (that is analysis by mass

spectroscopy) the material could not be convincingly identified anyway. The original

authors replied in the “Response to Comment” genre (McKellar et al., 2012), answering

some of the charges with descriptions of the "taphonomy" or embedding particularities of

the specimens, pointing out that a suggested plant did not exist at the time, and repeating

that destructive analysis of such rare specimens was not possible. And there as far as the

specialist literature is concerned, the matter ended: standpoint - challenge – answer.

There was no place in Science for continuing this discussion to a mutually acceptable

conclusion.

This modest disagreement never made it into the news, but the original report

certainly did. Online, Science's own news website correctly reflected the divided nature

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of the original report, the much less certain attribution of protofeathers to dinosaurs in

two of the specimens and the less doubtful identification of bird feathers in other samples

(Perkins, 2011). But this distinction did not survive in other online science news sourced

to National Geographic (Photo Gallery, 2011), Wired (Keim, 2011), and Discover

Magazine (Draxler, 2013) where more striking images of the undisputed bird feathers are

associated with (literally are visually contiguous with) verbal claims about dinosaur

feathers.2

In these cases, the typical format of the online news report, associating a headline with

one salient image (with or without caption) in a single screen view, contributed to a

misrepresentation of the original argument, as did the well-known practice, across news

genres, of making titles more certain than the content they represent.

                                                                                                               2 The image selected for the Wired web page appears in the original report (McKellar et al., 2011, p. 1621, Fig 3. F). The discussion in the report’s caption and text (pp. 1621-1622) attributes these specimens to Late Cretaceous birds.

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Still another difference between the original and news versions of this case brings

us back to the opening question of how to label those items. For reference options, the

English lexicon typically offers alternative labels from more general to more particular

terms, hypernyms to hyponyms (e.g., the more general pet and the less general dog can

refer to the same individual animal). At different points in their argument, the original

authors use all the following terms to refer to the inclusions seen in the amber; here they

are organized according to their level of generality:

filamentous structures - filaments - plumage - feathers - protofeathers - Stage I/II

morphotypes [varieties of protofeathers]

For material that is unidentified but described by its physical shape, filament seems an

appropriate choice, and the authors could have stayed with this or even more general

terms (like inclusion) until they had made the case for their definition. But they prefer the

bottom terms and indeed in their Supporting Online Material, they use the most specific

labels Stage I/ Stage II Morphotype as headings for sections describing the “dinosaur”

specimens. The refuting authors use filaments a few times but amber specimens and

fibers more often; fibers is also a plausible label for the observed structures, and, in

keeping with their doubts, fiber is less associated with feathers than filament is.

Of the terms used in the original research report, feather has the widest currency

in general usage, as indicated by its 2368 appearances in the 450 million word Corpus of

Contemporary American English compared to 369 for filament and 0 for protofeather and

morphotype. So not surprisingly, in the everyday register of the news, feather is the

preferred label in summaries of the original research report. But to refer to the embedded

entities as feathers accepts the conclusion, and it further favors selection of those pictures

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that look most like canonical feathers as representative images. Here something

analogous to linguistic prototypes, the preference for salient members in a category,

seems to take effect, since what most people think of as a "feather” does not look

anything like what the original authors call dinosaur protofeathers or morphotypes. Here

again a genre constraint – the use of terms in wider usage in news reports – potentially

interferes with the argument.

Genre and Language Constraints

This brief look at a minor controversy highlights my topic today: the importance

of genre conventions and the visual and verbal practices that follow from them in

argument production and analysis. Genres, akin to activity-types in Pragma-Dialectics

(van Eemeren and Houtlosser, 2005), reflect recurring and often institutionalized

audience-address situations, and texts assigned to genres follow the rules for a particular

kind of language game, prescribing, among other features, a prevailing register, ways of

addressing the audience, even different average sentence lengths. In print and online

genres, there is also a visual component to generic stability. Texts in a certain genre are

supposed to look a certain way in page layout and font, and they use visuals in

predictable ways. Genres also change over time (as we'll see later) and individual

instances sometimes flaunt genre conventions (also coming). Most important in rhetorical

terms, different genres favor arguments in different stases and access different topics and

appeals, and they tolerate different presentational devices in their strategic maneuvering –

even as they address different audiences.

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How can genres be categorized and labeled? Rhetorical theory offers three broad

metagenres or genera dicendi, the forensic, epideictic and deliberative, and these fit well

over the on-the-ground genres that have convenient labels like the horoscope or the

commencement address or the newspaper editorial. My method is to follow the same

claim through different genres, noting the generic constraints and options and, in some

cases, identifying where problems occur because of them. What I want to do in the

remainder of this presentation is first to discuss types of controversies in the sciences and

how they typically end. Then I will look at three individual controversies, following them

from the specialist literature into different kinds of genres and isolating some of the

stylistic and argumentative features tolerated in those genres. I end with an open question

on how best to characterize what could be called multi-genre arguing.

Types of Controversies and their Resolution: But first, the label "controversy" can cover different kinds of contention in the

sciences so some sorting out is needed (Giere 1987; Baltas 2000). I am going to set aside

those better described as "deliberative" or policy controversies, though they involve

scientific content, as for example the debate over whether to publish research on

increasing the transmissibility of the potentially pandemic H5N1 virus (Patterson, et al.

2013). No one challenged the science, just the wisdom of doing or publishing it. My

focus is instead on disagreements over entities and processes in nature, though these can

and often do involve deliberative consequences (as we'll see). For disagreements over

natural entities and processes, the label “controversy” can still cover different kinds of

contention. It is sometimes used when different researchers offer competing explanations

of a new phenomenon or one that has resisted explanation. Competing arguments sprang

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up over antibody formation in the 1940s (Cambrosio, et al., 2005), over the nature of

gene coding in the 1950s (Judson, 1979), or recently over the origins of the moon

(Canup, 2013; Clery, 2013). In these cases there is consensus about a gap in knowledge

that needs to be filled, if not on how to fill it, and these arguments need not address each

other.

Other controversies occur when non-expert publics resist the scientific consensus,

as in the case of the autism/vaccination connection (Oldstone, 2004), or the claim that an

XMRV virus causes Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a connection that has not survived the

scrutiny of experts though it was held by some patient advocacy groups (Cohen and

Enserink, 2011; Callaway, 2011). It is also called a controversy when an individual

scientist or an isolated research group persists in withholding agreement from the

mainstream, like Peter Duesberg doubting the HIV/AIDS connection (Corbyn, 2012), or

Laura Manuelidis questioning the consensus on prions as the cause of spongiform

encephalopathies (Couzin-Frankel, 2011). Loner holdouts grab media attention, but rarely

change the course of research. There are also cases of challenge and denial mimicking

controversies in their early stages that eventually unravel as cases of fraud, as in the

human cloning scandal of a few years ago (Cyranoski, 2006), or the faked Archaeoraptor

fossil of a feathered dinosaur (Rowe, et al. 2001). Or an error is discovered, as in the case

of the faster-than-light neutrinos traced to a loose cable connection in a detector (Reich,

2012).

All these are worth studying, but I am focusing on controversies closer to the

requirements of a critical discussion, like my opening example. These feature a

standpoint and challenge among stakeholders with similar qualifications, who follow

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essentially the same rules of evidence, who publish in journals of similar status, and who

proceed in good faith through fully articulated arguments until they "resolve a difference

of opinion on the merits" (van Eemeren, 2010, p. 1; van Eemeren and Garssen, 2013, p.

521).

But it is difficult to isolate or contain controversies at this level of purity and

cleanly resolve them on the merits because they spill out into other forums, publications

and media. Scientists themselves often seek out other genres addressing wider, less expert

audiences to promote their views, and, increasingly, blogs, discussion groups, twitter

feeds and facebook postings refract the issues and arguments, the way substances with

different refractive indices bend light. Furthermore, since there is a cultural place for

science news with professional science journalists as well as an associated publicity

industry, scientists themselves are not the only arguers involved. High profile science

claims are especially likely to expand into orbiting genres where they are amplified as

new, amazing, overturning widely-held beliefs, and having potentially important

consequences.

Furthermore, the options for resolution or closure have some special features in

the sciences (Beauchamp 1987; McMullin 1987), outside the resolution methods of

adjudication, mediation and negotiation identified in pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren and

Houtlosser, 2009). The first and second methods, adjudication before a recognized

tribunal and mediation before a neutral third party, are not typically practiced in the

sciences. Though a science court was proposed in the 1970s (Mazur, 1987), there is no

recognized entity issuing binding decisions on the correctness of one knowledge claim

over another. And the case of Lysenko, where state tribunals banned his opponents in the

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1940s and then condemned his views in the 1960s, is not one that scientists are eager to

imitate (Graham, 1987). There are of course quasi-adjudicating bodies such as granting

agencies and peer-reviewed journals, and occasionally discipline-based societies may

resolve contentions, as the International Union of Geological Sciences did in 2009 when

it moved the boundary between the Pliocene and Pleistocene by almost a billion years

(Kerr, 2008; Kerr, 2009). Or sometimes a standing committee is assigned or a special

committee is convened to reach a decision on a scientific claim where fraud could be

involved (see the cases of Frank Sauer [McNutt, 2014], or of Marc Hauser [Carpenter,

2012; “Hauser report released,” 2014]). But these interventions are rare.

The third method, resolution by negotiation, requires each side to make

concessions in order to reach a settlement. But give and take seems an unlikely way to

settle factual disagreements, though there are a few cases that play out like negotiated

settlements. The controversy over whether humans crossed over from Asia to the

Americas early by water or later by land could be settled by accepting multiple dates and

routes (Pringle, 2011), and the controversy over whether dinosaurs were hot blooded or

cold-blooded has a potential bridge in the suggestion that they were something in

between, able to raise their core temperatures but not maintain them (Balter, 2014).]

Given the refraction of science arguments across genres and media, and the

relative inapplicability of resolution by adjudication, mediation and negotiation, how are

controversies in the sciences typically managed or resolved? Direct confrontation of the

contending parties can be avoided. As is the case with other academic specialties,

disagreeing research groups can simply ignore each other and operate in parallel

universes, forming their own societies, publishing in their own journals, and attending

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their own meetings. That was the situation in the seventies and eighties between

researchers who did not believe in the kinematics of cell pores and those who continually

postulated them (Fahnestock, 2005), and in physical anthropology between those who

used early methods of DNA analysis and those who considered all the results artifacts of

contamination (Marchant, 2011). There is no pressing need for closure on these matters

as there is in deliberative arguments. In fact it is often preferable if they are left open as

an exigence for further funding.

Yet while arguing in the sciences is in some ways unregulated, it does have one

draconian form of closure and that is the formal published Retraction. A retraction is a

special kind of speech act performed in the written genre of a letter published in the

journal that printed the offending article. Usually the author retracts after an admission of

error (see for example Lee et al., 2013); sometimes retractions do not represent all

authors (Buck, 2010). When none of the authors is willing, the journal may issue a

preemptive "expression of concern" (see for example Alberts, 2011) or, as in the case of

Sauer cited above, take the initiative and issue the retraction itself (McNutt, 2014).

Better than the public shaming of retraction is resolution by disengagement and

silence, perhaps the most common way that controversies end in the natural sciences.

They are abandoned without a formal declaration of victory on one side or any

concession or retraction on the other (McMullin, 1987, p. 81). But while the

disagreement may be dropped by specialists arguing in disciplinary journals, it may be

carried on in other genres and forums, and it is not uncommon for scientists to find other

outlets where controversies can be sustained in different publications over months, years,

and even decades. Such complications across genres are features of the three cases I want

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to sample. They involve specialist disagreements refracted in different genres. In each

case, for purposes of illustration, I am going to emphasize one of the attendant genres and

isolate certain language features differing from genre to genre.

That Woodpecker

I begin with a case that actually involves the violation of genre norms. In April of

2005, the head of the Cornell University Ornithology Lab, two of his staff and the US

Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture held a press conference to

announce the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the largest woodpecker species

ever to live in North America and one that had presumably been extinct for over fifty

years. On the day of the news conference, following protocol that press releases should

not precede peer-reviewed publication, a research report on the ivorybill was published in

Science Online and the print article appeared a week later (Fitzpatrick et al., 2005) with

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considerable amplification in the genres available in that journal itself including a cover

image, an editorial from then editor Donald Kennedy, who declared himself a lifelong

birder (Kennedy, 2005), and a "Perspectives" piece by David Wilcove (2005) who had

written an earlier work declaring the ivory-bill extinct, and, oddly showing up in the same

issue though without an explicit connection to the woodpecker story, a news piece on

how reliable Cornell's birding volunteers are (Bhattacharjee, 2005).

The title of the Science piece makes the claim with unhedged force: “Ivory-billed

Woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) Persists in Continental North America.” The

abstract affirms that the bird “has been rediscovered” and that observations and video

“confirm” its existence (p. 1460). A significant but unusual stylistic choice in this title is

its use of a full predication, subject and tensed verb. Though this genre convention may

be changing, none of the other research reports in that 2005 issue of Science, or in most

issues, or in any science journal use more than a noun phrase in their titles announcing

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their topic. Using a noun phrase allows authors to punt on the modality of their claim

which the use of a tensed verb in a full predication does not allow. So from the start this

argument departed from a genre norm in both the fullness and the unhedged strength of

the claim boldly made in its title.3

How was the case made for the certain existence of this bird in the original

research report? The article explains that after an initial report from a credible

outdoorsman reached the attention of Cornell University ornithologists, via two dedicated

ivorybill hunters, they assembled a team of experienced birders who spent months in

2004 searching narrow strips of bottomland forest in Arkansas. Members of this team

reported several individual sightings, and one searcher, almost by accident, caught a

video image of a large bird flying away in the flooded woods. A link to the video and the

testimony of the sightings appear in the Supporting Online Material [SOM] to the Science

article. The typescript format of the sightings gives the particulars of time, place, and

person, but all observers report the same species-diagnostic feature in precisely the same

terms: they all saw broad white trailing edges to/of wings. Here as Perelman and

Olbrechts-Tyteca would put it, the instances have been “pruned,” disciplined into a

groove of figured repetition to underscore their applicability (1969, p. 358), but at the

same time with considerable loss in the impression of spontaneity and therefore

genuineness. At the opposite extreme, preserving spontaneity, the SOM also contains raw

data in the form of the immediate journal entries from the two birders who sparked the

search.

                                                                                                               3  There is a substantial literature establishing the prevalence of hedging from science communication scholars (see e.g., Hyland, 1998).  

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However, again, this evidence is off in the SOM. Personal testimony has great weight

among birders, but it apparently counts less than the video that is the only item of

evidence accessible to outsiders. So its analysis -- requiring a translation into diagrams --

occupies most of the main article (see Dove, 2010 analyzing the visual argument in this

case). If one thinks of scientific reports being accessed entirely online, it seems odd to

modularize a case this way. Why are there different levels in this argument, with some

material in the main report and some off elsewhere?

I want to digress for a moment here to observe that the genre of the science article

has been in flux for several years now because of online publishing in both subscription

and open access venues, and because of the relatively recent tendency to offload parts of

an argument into the Supporting Online Materials. In online publishing, the limiting

features of the print journal have been swept away, namely periodicity in publication and

fixed length. An article can appear any time and theoretically at any length online.

(Indeed early PLOS articles were often significantly longer than their print analogues –

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even 50 pages instead of the usual 3 to 5.) But oddly, SOMS are used even for articles

that are published only online, creating different sections that are sometimes marked by

differences in formatting, sometimes not. Typically, the Materials and Methods section,

once second in the invariant arrangement of the science article, is now demoted from the

main article, and there is also a tendency to put data in undigested forms in the SOM.

Even as it destabilizes in length and modularity, the genre of the science article

still requires the containing background of a journal as a presumed guarantor of editorial

control and peer review. The notion of the durable journal is oddly on display in an ad

from one of the world's largest for-profit online publishers. Here Hindawi offers images

of the covers of its journals in the aspect ratio of a print publication rather than that of a

computer screen, though these journals have only an electronic existence.

To return to the woodpecker case:

Within a few months, refutations focusing on the video began to appear in print,

the first within months from two Brazilian ornithologists who suggested that the

identification of the bird in the video could only be considered a hypothesis not a

certainty (see Jackson, 2006, pp. 7-8); a British researcher also submitted a disagreement

with the definitive identification in 2006, though it was not published until the following

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year (Collinson, 2007). Most important, Science itself published a "Technical Comment"

with David Sibley of the Sibley bird books as the lead author (Sibley et al., 2006). This

challenge was answered with the expected “Response to Comment” from the original

authors (Fitzpatrick et al., 2006).

The Sibley group agrees that there is a bird in the video, but the point of

contention comes down to whether that bird is an ivorybill or a pileated woodpecker, a

surviving species almost as big as an ivorybill but lacking that diagnostic white on the

trailing edge of its wings. So as engaged, this controversy occurs in the stasis of

definition and since there are two possibilities, the arguments inevitably use the topic of

opposites, which can be and occasionally was epitomized in the figure antithesis in this

comment and response.4 One side maintains the video bird has the distinctive features of

the ivorybill; the other side says it does not or that no conclusion is possible. The Cornell

group had anticipated this competition, and their original article reports a flight

simulation using wooden models of each bird that the Sibley group refutes as lacking the

suppleness of a living wing in flight. Yet despite their undermining of the Cornell case,

Sibley and his co-authors do not conclude with a contradiction, "The ivory bill does not

persist"; instead they claim, "Ivory-billed woodpeckers may persist in the southern

United States, and we believe that conservation efforts on their behalf should continue."

(Sibley et al., 2006, p. 4). The only difference between this conclusion and the original                                                                                                                4  From the Sibley, et al. “Response” 17 March 2006: “The almost complete absence of white is consistent with the dark dorsal surface of the pileated woodpecker, and not [consistent with] the entirely white secondaries of the ivory-billed woodpecker.” From the Fitzpatrick et al “Response” 17 March 2006: “The ivory-billed model yielded images strikingly similar to those in the Luneau video, but comparable images of a pileated model revealed the expected black trailing edge and were incompatible with the Luneau video.” An approach through “figural logic” can certainly be pursued in these controversies (see Fahnestock, 1999), but that is not the agenda in this paper.    

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article's title is the little modal auxiliary may. A dimension of this controversy, therefore,

has to do with the response of other experts to the degree of certainty expressed by the

original authors in light of the evidence they offered. Why then did those authors not

hedge their claim?

A possible answer comes from a harsh critique that appeared in The Auk, the

official journal of the American Ornithological Union, six months after the original

report, from Jerome A. Jackson, a woodpecker expert and non-consenting author of an

earlier critique that his fellow authors withdrew. After also making the case for the

likelihood of a pileated woodpecker in the video, Jackson asks why, given the

inconclusiveness of the video, these Arkansas sightings were treated so differently from

similar unconfirmed reports in the past: “The answer, I believe, is that it is not necessarily

the quality of the evidence but the attendant publicity and aura of authority associated

with the announcement, that has raised the profile of the Arkansas reports” (Jackson,

2006, p. 5). Thus Jackson moves the controversy to the fourth or translational stasis,

turning it into an argument over methods, procedures and conduct violating potent if

undefined standards of science: “For scientists to label sight reports and questionable

photographs as “proof” of such an extraordinary record is delving into ‘faith-based’

ornithology and doing a disservice to science” (p.10). As Jackson critiques the case, the

Cornell authors had pressing deliberative goals in getting habitat set aside and funding for

continued research, and these action goals led to a necessary overstatement of their core

forensic claim. As Jackson puts this point with wonderfully figured force: “[H]ow many

major donors, how many granting agencies, how many government officials would

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contribute to the more than $10 million associated with this effort, if the message had

been only ‘There might be Ivory-billed Woodpeckers out there’?” (p. 10).

As far as the specialist literature is concerned, the woodpecker controversy

disappeared. The original article stands un-retracted though its force has declined

dramatically over time with no further evidence forthcoming. But the case for the

ivorybill’s survival traveled to other genres, and it is worth asking how the level of

certainty in the bird's survival, so problematic in the expert discourse, was expressed in

these other genres.

Predictably, news outlets covered the woodpecker story extensively. Science

news reports can be seen as essentially forensic arguments at one remove; they

paraphrase others' arguments and, as Jackson observed, “the report of ‘confirmation’ by

scientists is often accepted at face value by nonscientists” (2006, p. 9). So one would

expect that news reports would express the certainty of the ivorybill’s existence. But

curiously another hedging option is available in news coverage thanks to the language

conventions of the news genre.5 News articles can, and often do, report the speech act of

the original arguers as well as the content of their statement. Consider the difference in

degree of certainty between these headlines from reports on the woodpecker: “In the

Swamp, ‘Extinct’ Woodpecker Lives” from the New York Times (Gorman, 2005a), and

“’Extinct’ woodpecker found in Arkansas, Experts Say” the headline in National

                                                                                                               5 Hedging options in English have various linguistic correlates, beyond the use of may or sourcing as a speech act mentioned above: 1. Modal auxiliaries (e.g., may, might, could); 2. Adverbial modification (e.g., possibly, probably, almost certainly); 3. Adjectival inflection (e.g., putative, apparent, seeming) 4. Tentative verbs (e.g., seem, appear, suggest, hypothesize); 5. Phrasal markers of less certain status (e.g., for the most part, so to say). 6. Sourcing as a speech act (e.g., Experts say…, NASA reported that…); 7. Vagueness of scope (e.g., to sustain growth (which could refer to both metabolism and replication); 8. Attribution of a claim to its support (e.g., the results indicate that).

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Geographic News online (Owen, 2005). Citing the speech act of a source as in the second

headline has the rhetorical effect of hedging a claim.6 It is like giving the GPS

coordinates of a point of view making it local rather than universal. Of course variants in

the reporting verb (e.g., state vs suggest) and the source cited (e.g., an individual vs an

institution) inflect the degree of the reported claim. But whatever the nuances of

presentation, sourcing a claim as a speech act, routine in news reports, is a form of

hedging.

Another genre that circulates high-profile science stories is the commentary piece,

usually in the form of an editorial or feature story. These arguments represent a shift in

primary rhetorical genre from the forensic to the epideictic as they celebrate the

significance of the discovery. Notable examples include a feature piece by James

Gorman, “Found in Arkansas: Hope with Wings” (2005b), and an Op-Ed piece titled

“The Woodpecker in All of Us,” by Jonathan Rosen (2005), both in The New York Times.

These commentary pieces were ecstatic about the announced rediscovery, and they

deserve analysis for their quasi-religious appeals. But as far as the modality of the central

claim is concerned, under the rhetorical exigence of celebrating the significance the

ivorybill’s recovery, the existence of the bird is taken as certain. We rarely celebrate

probabilities.

Still another genre perpetuated the ivorybill case, and that is the book length

account of the ivorybill rediscovery. The author of The Grail Bird (2005) focusing on the

Arkansas ivorybill was Tim Gallagher, one of the two birders whose early sighting

initiated the extensive search. Another, The Ivorybill Hunters (2007), came from an

                                                                                                               6 The text of the New York Times article does include speech act attributions, and the Times gave extensive coverage to the ensuing debate about the bird’s existence.  

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academic expert not connected with the Cornell search, Geoffrey Hill of Auburn

University. The resources available for arguing in different genres and their stylistic

correlates are dramatically on view in both these books, but for convenience I am going

to concentrate on Hill's work.

Inspired by the reports from Arkansas and by other informants, Hill and two

graduate students, almost on a lark, went camping and looking for ivorybills in the

panhandle of Florida in 2005. In 2006 Hill's group published an article in the Canadian

journal Avian Conservation and Ecology with the modest title “Evidence Suggesting that

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers (Campephilus principalis) Exist in Florida” (Hill et al., 2006).

The evidence consisted of reported sightings, sound recordings of presumably distinctive

knocks and calls, and trees with cavities and feeding signs suggestive of the bird’s

presence. Most of these items of evidence are carefully hedged in the article: e.g., “Twice

we recorded series of putative double knocks that appear to have been produced by two

different individuals” (Hill et al., 2006, p. 6). However, in the following year, Hill

published the book-length account of this search that is anything but hedged in its claims

for the ivorybill’s persistence. By the end of the book, Hill claims an extensive

population of ivorybill pairs along the Choctawhatchee river basin in Florida. In between,

Hill is able to construct support in ways not available in the genre of the research report

but amply available in the extended discursive space and open-ended format of the first

person nature narrative. Nature writing, a vibrant tradition in US literature, is in some

ways a complex multi-genre in itself, but such narratives have some common features:

they are based on a journey or sojourn in a natural setting, filled with encounters and

descriptions of natural kinds, animal, vegetable and mineral, and studded with

  21  

informative or moral digressions. Hill's book details the camp established by his graduate

students, their experiences and mishaps, his many trips there, his gear, the setting up of

sound recording stations, his improvised devices, his funding problems, his discussions

with colleagues, and even his judgments of the Cornell case for the ivorybill. The sum of

these narrative parts is a different argument for the bird's existence.

To give one example of the kind of argument that Hill can access in his narrative:

Several episodes in The Ivorybill Hunters recount getting lost in the maze of bog and

hammock along Florida's Choctawhatchee River basin (e.g., pp. 22-30; 74-84; 121-122).

These are tense events with narrative force, but they are also indirect arguments. For one

of the main criticisms against the likelihood of the ivorybill’s persistence is the loss of its

habitat thanks to drainage and clear cutting in the southern US. So Hill's accounts of

getting lost indirectly establish the extent and inaccessibility of the Choctawhatchee

swamps. The reader is left with the impression that large tracts of ivorybill-friendly

habitat survive and, given the inaccessibility of this terrain, it is not surprising that no one

has found the birds before.

Among other persuasive effects in this genre, the primary sightings of the bird

acquire a textual "presence" in The New Rhetoric's terms that is denied to them by the

conventional requirement for stripped down language in a research report (Perelman and

Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, pp. 115-120). The sightings last only a few seconds (Hill, 2007,

pp. 38-39; 40-42; 174-81; 225-227), but they occupy paragraphs of build-up, a sudden

surprising appearance and a shock of excited recognition, followed by justifications as to

why the sighting was not as good as it might have been (view partially impeded, camera

  22  

not quickly available, observer in an unstable kayak, etc.). Though compromised and

fleeting, these sightings seem more certain.

Perhaps the strongest appeal of the nature narrative overall is the stylistic choice

of the first person singular I as a grammatical agent, a choice that personalizes the arguer

in ways not directly possible in the scientific literature (though that literature is never

voiceless and the use of the first person plural is now conventional). Of course a first-

person focus could shrink a case to a partial view, but it has compensations. It invites the

reader’s identification with the text’s speaker, in classical rhetorical terms an appeal from

ethos but considerably stronger than what argument scholars usually mean by an ethotic

argument (see Burke, 1969, pp. 55-59). Through identification the reader participates in

the narrator's process of becoming convinced. Hill in fact portrays himself as highly

skeptical in the beginning, the one to ask hard questions of his young assistants. There is

even a whole chapter devoted to interviewing a rural Arkansas man who claimed to spot

an ivorybill in his backyard and whose account Hill finds less than convincing, leading

him to question his own standards of evidence (pp. 85-95). He engages in digressions

revealing his internal debates over different kinds of evidence (pp. 126-128; 144-147)

and finds much to criticize in the Cornell group’s case for Arkansas ivorybills (pp. 43-45,

84, 133-141). He has conversations with experts on distinctive bird calls (pp. 167-170).

He mulls over the literature (pp. 66-67; 71-72), seeks support from a doubting friend and

fellow naturalist (pp. 187-192), tests his evidence with government biologists (pp. 210-

218). As Hill overcomes his skepticism and hones his case, his conversion narrative

models the process of becoming convinced for his readers.

  23  

The arguments available in a book-length treatment like Hill's can be summarized

or paraphrased, as I have just done. But that is not how they are experienced by readers of

its almost 250 pages. The overall length and the division into chapters extend the

narrative pace, and this representation of the passage of time itself argues for the

discovery. A research report presents its arguments synchronically, as though all present

and cogent at the same time, while the narrative presents its arguments diachronically,

developing over time as experienced.

Which of these arguments from the same arguer, the stripped down version

satisfying the genre constraints of the research report addressed to specialists or the

capacious version at book-length addressed to a larger undefined public represents the

best argument that could be made for the Choctawhatchee ivorybills?

Arsenic-incorporating bacteria

The next controversy I want to look at also features arguments spilling over into

the available grooves of surrounding genres. It began with a tantalizing announcement

from NASA of a news conference related to the search for life on other planets (NASA,

2010).

  24  

At the conference itself, the lead author of an article in Science, published online at the

start of the conference, reported isolation of a strain of bacteria that could not only grow

in an arsenic-rich environment but could even incorporate arsenic into its DNA in place

of phosphorus, a revolutionary finding, widely covered in the news, suggesting

biochemical processes never before seen on earth (Wolfe-Simon et al., 2010). But six

months later, Science published eight Technical Comments along with the original

authors’ response, the largest number of such challenges ever published for one paper

(“Technical Comments,” 2011). A full year later in July 2012, two papers appeared in

Science reporting failed attempts to replicate the results and further tests to show that the

claims of arsenic incorporation were false (Erb, et al., 2012; Reaves et al., 2012).

Publishing negative results is unusual and testifies to the high profile of this controversy.

But these formal, published challenges represented the tip of an iceberg of

criticism that was carried out in other genres, and this time I want to focus on the genre of

blog posts and attached comments, beginning with a blog posted within two days of

online publication by Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British

Columbia. Her critique received over 200 comments within a few days, some with further

substantive criticisms (Redfield, 2010). This criticism was picked up by a professional

science journalist, Carl Zimmer, author of Discover Magazine's blog “The Loom.”

Passing along the criticisms to well known scientists, Zimmer received mostly critical

responses (Zimmer, 2010b) including the assessment, "This paper should not have been

published" which he duly used as the title for a piece in Slate.com (Zimmer, 2010a).

Zimmer's critics and Redfield and her commentators noted that the culturing medium

  25  

contained sufficient phosphorus for growth, that the reported methods of DNA

purification were inadequate, that arsenic compounds are unstable in water making it

highly unlikely that they would survive in any cell, and that straightforward procedures

for isolating the DNA and testing for arsenic had not been followed.

Zimmer sent the criticisms he had elicited to the lead and last authors of the paper

soliciting their comments. They responded by refusing to respond, the last author

observing that, "when scientists involved in a research finding published in [a] scientific

journal use the media to debate the questions or comments of others, they have crossed a

sacred boundary” (Zimmer, 2010a). The lead author, Wolfe-Simon, also requested that

Zimmer, “honor the way scientific work must be conducted. Any discourse will have to

be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process

so that all discussion is properly moderated” (Zimmer, 2010a). In short, the authors

refused to debate through other genres, though they had initially used these genres to

circulate their work.

Like an agent provocateur, Zimmer included these “no-response” comments in his

Slate piece, fueling further arguments (Zimmer, 2010a; for a time line see Zimmer,

2011). Most of those commenting on both his and Redfield's site were annoyed by the

“sacred boundary” label and vigorously defended post publication peer review conducted

online. For some, blog posts and comments amounted to a new, honest, open, and even

democratic science. A few comments to Redfield and Zimmer dissented, claiming that

the authors should not have been pressured to respond immediately and objecting to

having “’mob rule’ equated with peer-review in the Blogosphere since, “the Internet is an

incubator for misinformation due to the innate lack of accountability” (Zimmer, 2011, p.

  26  

15). So overall the controversy shifted to the issue of how such debates should be

conducted and whether the rapid refraction of commentary on the web represented an

asset or liability to the conduct of science.7 Also on the blogs, with their linguistic license

and occasional flaming, arguments surfaced on the personality, competence, and motives

of the authors, of NASA, of the journal reviewers, and of the bloggers themselves. On the

authors, questions about the quality of their research transferred easily into questions

about their quality as researchers, and indeed Redfield ended her original posting by

asking if the arsenic authors were just "bad scientists” (Redfield, 2010, p. 5), a remark

that drew sharp criticism in some comments to her blog.

Given this turn from the research to the researchers, one language feature worth

examining is how agency for the research (i.e., who did what) is characterized in the

formal versus the informal online genres. Here we can back up for a reminder that

English presents its users with a constitutive constraint: sentences need subjects and

verbs, and the predication patterns in English are fixed, Sentences can be stative (using

linking verbs), or have active or passive verbs, or use so-called existential subjects or

cleft constructions. The required subjects of sentences in any of these forms also come

from predictable categories; in science writing these include 1.) human agents 2.) entities

in nature 3.) processes, whether experimental or natural, and 4.) what Susan Peck

MacDonald in her study of academic writing called "epistemic" subjects, namely terms

like data, research, results, etc. (MacDonald, 1994, pp. 154-169). Genres differ in their

mix of these, especially where human agents are concerned, and of all the possible

permutations, active verbs attributed to human actors produce the strongest agency.

                                                                                                               7  As of September 2011, a Scientific American blogger had collected links to 190 blogs discussing the arsenic bacteria case (Zivkovic, 2011).  

  27  

To attribute actions to human agents, the original research report, following genre

conventions, uses the “we” of plural authorship. In fact “we” appears as the subject and

agent in almost 25% of the 97 independent clause predications in the original arsenic

paper, higher than typical, as in this sentence from the abstract: “Here, we describe a

bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California,

that is able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth.”8 In the technical

comments and the later refutations published in Science, the agency goes to corporate

authorship, but in a conventional locution that actually singles out the lead author: e.g.,

“Wolfe-Simon et al. further reported that arsenic was incorporated into the DNA

backbone of GFAJ-1” (Reaves, 2012, p. 470).

In news reports and in online commentary, the agency sometimes went to the

multiple authors but often devolved to Wolfe-Simon alone, a not implausible reduction

because she appeared as the sole speaker in the NASA news conference, and multiple

authors cannot speak as a chorus. The blogs, however, could be relentless in their

personal focus on one responsible agent: “Felisa Wolfe-Simon Does NOT Get it ”

(Bracher, 2011); “Felisa Wolfe-Simon (of arsenic infamy) is no more convincing in

person than in print” (Eisner, 2011); and "Is Felisa Wolfe-Simon and Alien?" (Redfield,

2011). This personal spin may have been stimulated by the public attention Wolfe-Simon

received, including a short piece in Glamour (“Five-Minute Mentor,” 2011) and mention

in Time Magazine’s “100 Important People” of 2011 (Kluger, 2011).

                                                                                                               8  Notably this sentence is not hedged, but it is somewhat vague because of the generality of the phrase to sustain its growth, so the scope of this claim could involve only metabolism as opposed to metabolism and replication. See fn 4 above.  

  28  

In informal genres, closer in register to everyday conversation, humans as

grammatical agents and therefore human agency, which always involves intention and

responsibility, is common. And while the conventions of assigning agency in scientific

arguments mitigate the personal and construct ethos as institutional or collective, more

popular genres reveal the strong act/person association, tacit in the disciplinary literature,

that underlies the credibility of arguments in the sciences (on the act/person association

see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969, pp. 293-316).

Because of the attention focused on the lead author, one more unusual genre

appeared in this case: The personal criticism of Felisa Wolfe-Simon elicited a defense in

the form of an apologia, an epideictic sub-genre of biography. In “Scientist in a Strange

Land” Tim

  29  

Clynes, writing in Popular Science, reports on extended interviews with a now media-

wary Wolfe-Simon, and uses the classic qualitative stasis defense of remotio criminis,

shifting the charge and blaming someone else – in this case NASA public relations

officials (Clynes, 2011). This defense is quite deft, opening with a real event rendered as

an allegorical scene of Wolfe-Simon on the shore of Mono Lake, attacked by gulls and

sinking in the mud. It also reconstructs the research program with GFAJ-1 and the

resulting Science article defensively. Responses to this apologia by bloggers

acknowledge its effectiveness (e.g., Koerth-Baker, 2011), but there are also complaints

that it rejuvenates the arsenic case and casts Wolfe-Simon in the prepared role of the

heroic but misunderstood loner (Dobbs, 2011; Zimmer, 2011). The comments indicate

that the believability of the science in the case is crucially affected by the reputation of

the scientist, and reputation depends in part on the construction of agency in popular

genres.9

The Hobbit

The final controversy I want to discuss has been the sharpest and the most often

reported as a controversy, and it has involved many more expert-to-expert arguments as

well as media exposure, spinning off book-length popularizations and even NOVA and

National Geographic documentaries. In 2003, Australian and Indonesian archaeologists

were excavating a cave on the island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago when they

came across a skull, mandible and some limb bones apparently from a single individual

                                                                                                               9 The reputation/ethos of a person is also constructed by the images of that person in circulation. A comparison of the image from the press conference with Wolfe-Simon on the far left, and from the photo accompanying the Popular Science article can be fruitfully compared in terms of the viewing angle from which the subject is seen. On the possible meaning of such differences in viewing angle, see Kress and vanLeeuwen, 1996, pp. 146-148.

  30  

(called LB1) as well as scattered isolated bones later attributed to from seven to thirteen

different individuals.

The LB1 remains presented contradictory features: small stature (approximately 3

and a half feet) and a surprisingly small brain case, about one third that of a modern

human. Tooth eruption and wear indicated an adult and the pelvic shape suggested a

female. The researchers submitted two reports published in Nature with simultaneous

news conferences in Indonesia and Australia (Brown et al., 2004; Morwood et al., 2004).

These received the full apparatus of a major discovery, complete with cover image and an

introductory piece in the same issue, as well as world-wide press coverage.

The stakes were high, not only because of the unusual features of the find but also

because the authors argued that LB1, found in sediment dated to between only 18 and 12

thousand years ago, represented a new species in the genus homo. The authors also

  31  

speculated that the specimen’s diminutive size was due to the phenomenon well-known

among animals of island dwarfing, probably from an original population of homo erectus.

Not the find itself but the new species designation has been challenged in print by

different groups with several different lines of argument, among them the common thread

that LB1 is not a new species but a pathologically dwarfed modern human: A leading

Indonesian archaeologist and his Australian collaborators suggested in PNAS in 2006 that

LB1 was a microcephalic modern human related to a local group of pygmies living on

Flores (Jacob, et al., 2006). In 2007 came the argument that LB1 might have suffered

from the genetic disorder Laron’s syndrome, an hypothesis that could be tested by DNA

analysis, apparently never successfully done (Hershkovitz, et al., 2007). Next in 2008,

another group charged that the specimen suffered from cretinism caused by

hypothyroidism, endemic among the local population (Obendorf, et al., 2008). This

condition, the authors argue, explains some of the anomalous features of the remains such

as a relatively untwisted arm bone compared to modern humans, oddly rooted molars and

a primitive wrist. Meanwhile, other authors have argued against pathological

explanations and, analyzing casts of the skull, the wrist bones and the feet, have

supported the new species designation based on the uniqueness of these features (Falk et

al., 2005; Falk, et al., 2007; Tocheri, et al., 2007; Jungers, et al., 2009). The refuters'

strategy is to take the metrics of anatomical features and to show that they are within the

range of variation of established homo species, albeit of diseased ones; rebuttals take

them out again. Back and forth, these are arguments depending on gradations, on where

the specimens fall on various quantitative scales by having more or less of a certain trait,

and on what constitutes an appropriate scale to begin with.

  32  

The language choices in texts from this controversy, in both the original research

reports and the pieces addressed to wider audiences, reveal the same features discussed so

far so -- the term substitutions, the hedging variations, the characterizations of agents and

therefore of agency for the science. However, the linguistic groove I want to examine this

time is a difficult one to trace. It concerns what happens to claims when they fall out of

the main predication and into embedded structures. Embedded structures include

dependent clauses, various phrasal modifiers such as participial phrases or appositives,

and even prepositional phrases. Embedded structures are lower profile places that can beg

the question for the status of their content. Consider these examples of predications, one

containing content inside and one outside what most people would find believable: The

pond froze over. The alien landed. Combining these by demoting one into a subordinate

clause, can subtly alter the status of the backgrounded predication: When the alien

landed, the pond froze over.

When knowledge becomes more “taken for granted” it can show up in embedded

structures unhedged; presumptions are in effect lodged in linguistic crevices. This

incorporation can occur in stages across a single text since the status of claims tends to

change in the course of an argument. But it can also occur when content travels to texts

that are on allied topics. To appreciate this process of syntactic backgrounding into the

status of “taken for granted” it is worth taking a look at a rare example of the opposite.

This occurs in an editorial specifically on the Hobbit in 2009 in the New York Times

which opens with the following suspension of judgment: “We’re not sure exactly what to

make of Homo floresiensis” (“Hobbits and Hominids,” 2009). But an article from the

New York Times, not on homo floresiensis but on DNA analysis of ancient remains,

  33  

contains the following after referencing the existence of the species: “This means that our

modern era, since H. floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million-year human

history that just one type of human has been alive” (Mitchell, 2012). And another article

in the same paper on the David H. Koch “Hall of Human Origins” at the Smithsonian

moves to the same off-hand incorporation: “Unlike Darwin, the hall reminds us, we know

that there have been multiple human species, including Homo floresiensis, Homo

neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, Paranthropus boisei,

Paranthropus robustus, Australopithecus afarensis and Sahelanthropus tchadensis”

(Rothstein, 2010). Homo floresiensis occurs in a participial phrase here, and more

important, it occurs in a series, bracketed with other undisputed ancient species. Series

create arguments for genus inclusion; they construct default grammatical categories for

their members, and the status of the majority of items can spill over to a problematic

item. These examples of backgrounding suggest that embedded in the grammar means

embedded in the culture as endoxa. The particular placement in the textual series reflects

the physical placement of homo floresiensis among other busts reconstructing fossil

hominids in the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins, depicted in a photomontage of

these busts from the Smithsonian website. (Homo floresiensis is on the bottom right,

staring out at the viewer.) Things that are seen or touched acquire a certainty that is

difficult to hedge or refute.

  34  

Conclusion It is easy to generate data about language, but not always easy to give it meaning.

Adding the filter of genre helps to manage the richness and, at a minimum, tracing the

same claim across genres reveals their conventions and constraints and so sharpens

argument analysis when we stay with the original expression.

But what is the bigger picture here? How should this multi-genre arguing, this

refraction of a case be characterized? On one view, the proliferation is background noise

in an echo chamber, often garbling the original arguments. What counts is the case

following best practices and made in the disciplinary literature to the most qualified

audience. Genres that address larger publics are only better or worse approximations of

the disciplinary argument. But the scientific article is currently changing dramatically,

downplaying replicability conditions and at the same time regressing into undigested

data. Furthermore, scientists themselves write in those other genres to further their views,

and they pay attention to the news reports and websites.

  35  

From another viewpoint, the genuine arguing occurs in the larger more public

forums. News reports based on interviews with the authors, commentary pieces, book-

length narratives and blogs pull out details relevant to the assessment of the case, details

not mentioned in the research literature -- that there was an leucistic or anomalously

white pileated woodpecker in those Arkansas woods, that a cesium chloride wash is the

standard technique for purifying DNA from a gel, that the author of one of the Hobbit

papers maintained until the last minute that the specimen was ape and not human. The

research literature is too artificial and constrained and what convinces even the specialists

are these often omitted details.

On still another view there is one mega-case that encompasses both the

disciplinary literature and the more public genres. Arguments in the research literature,

under the strictest genre constraints, represent a distilled version of the available

arguments, but the refracting genres give a fuller account, especially the post publication

peer review, of what actually persuades an audience. I have long been a proponent of the

first view, but I am no longer so sure. No matter what the final characterization, attention

to genre and language conventions has analytic payoffs in the study of controversies, and

in the spirit of Pragma-Dialectics, it may have normative ones as well.

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