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Silhouettes: rhetoric and science?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2009

K. Pinkau
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Abstract

Science as part of an open society cannot flourish if science becomes the exclusive possession of a closed set of specialists. The problem of scientific rhetoric, however, is that scientific knowledge cannot be everybody's knowledge in volume or in the concepts used and that therefore a loss of information content occurs when scientific knowledge is projected onto the screen of everyday knowledge: science then appears only as a silhouette. Even so silhouettes can convey an important message in relation to a special context under discussion. The particular silhouette selected then becomes a question of truthfulness in scientific rhetoric.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Review , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , August 1998 , pp. 327 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 1998

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