Epistemic Rhetoric

The most philosophically provocative development in 20th-century rhetoric was the epistemic turn — the argument that rhetoric is not merely a vehicle for communicating knowledge that exists independently of it, but a constitutive force in the production of knowledge itself. This claim, first systematically articulated in Robert Scott's landmark 1967 essay "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," transformed the discipline's self-understanding and provoked sustained controversy that continues today.

The Classical Problem: Rhetoric vs. Knowledge

The relationship between rhetoric and knowledge has been contested since antiquity. Plato's foundational attack on the Sophists charged that rhetoric was epistemically irresponsible: it aimed at producing belief, not knowledge, and was indifferent to whether its conclusions were true. A good rhetorician could argue either side of any question — which meant, for Plato, that rhetoric was fundamentally detached from truth.

Aristotle's response was more nuanced: rhetoric deals with probable matters — the realm where certainty is not available and judgment must operate under uncertainty. But even Aristotle positioned rhetoric as applying knowledge generated elsewhere (in philosophy, science, ethics) rather than generating it. The standard picture through the 19th century: knowledge is discovered by reason and observation; rhetoric communicates that knowledge to audiences.

Scott's Challenge: Rhetoric as Epistemic

Robert Scott's 1967 essay "On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic" challenged this picture directly. Scott argued that in human affairs — where certainty is rarely available and decisions must still be made — truth is not pre-given but comes into being through the process of rhetorical deliberation. Rhetoric is not the servant of knowledge but one of its conditions of possibility.

Scott's key move: truth in the human domain is not like truth in mathematics. There is no algorithm that produces the correct policy on healthcare, the right verdict in a complex legal case, or the true evaluation of a historical event. These "truths" — if that word applies — emerge from processes of argument, deliberation, and social negotiation. And those processes are rhetorical.

Social Construction and the Rhetoric of Science

Scott's epistemic claim found reinforcement from an unexpected direction: the sociology and philosophy of science. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life (1979) — an ethnographic study of a biochemistry laboratory — showed that even natural scientific facts are not simply read off from nature but constructed through social processes: inscription, argument, citation, credibility establishment, and negotiation. Scientific papers are rhetorical documents that seek to create facts by enrolling readers' belief.

This does not mean science is arbitrary or that its results are mere rhetoric — Latour's point is more subtle. It means that the process by which scientific claims become established facts is a social and rhetorical process, not a purely logical or empirical one. The rhetoric of science — the analysis of how scientists write, argue, establish credibility, and construct knowledge claims — became one of the most active research areas in late-20th-century rhetoric.

The Strong and Weak Versions

Epistemic rhetoric encompasses importantly different positions that are often conflated:

The Weak Version

In domains of genuine uncertainty — politics, ethics, policy, history — there is no pre-rhetorical truth waiting to be communicated. Truth in these domains is constructed through deliberation, argument, and social negotiation. Rhetoric is therefore epistemic: it participates in the construction of the knowledge claims that orient collective action. This version is relatively uncontroversial among contemporary rhetoricians.

The Strong Version

All knowledge — including natural scientific knowledge — is socially and rhetorically constructed. There is no unmediated access to reality; all "facts" are theory-laden, discourse-dependent, and rhetorical through and through. Truth is not discovered but made. This version is highly controversial, accused of collapsing into relativism and of providing intellectual cover for the dismissal of scientific consensus.

The Relativism Problem

The most serious objection to epistemic rhetoric is the charge of relativism: if truth is constructed through rhetoric rather than discovered through reason and observation, then there are no objective standards for preferring one claim to another. All arguments become equally valid. This seems to have alarming practical consequences: it could justify climate change denial, anti-vaccine rhetoric, or historical revisionism simply by deploying it as "alternative knowledge construction."

Defenders of epistemic rhetoric have developed several responses. Michael Leff argued that epistemic rhetoric need not be relativist: it can maintain that some rhetorical constructions are better — more coherent, more responsive to evidence, more genuinely attentive to the situation — than others without appealing to a pre-rhetorical truth as the standard. Thomas Farrell developed a "social knowledge" framework that grounds rhetorical judgment in the tested, shared understandings of actual communities rather than either abstract reason or mere consensus.

Applications: Medicine, Law, and Deliberative Democracy

Epistemic rhetoric has proved particularly illuminating in applied contexts. In medicine, the insight that diagnosis is partly a rhetorical act — that the "facts" of a patient's condition are constructed through case presentation, consultation, and argument — has contributed to better training in clinical communication. In law, the understanding that legal facts are not simply discovered but rhetorically constructed has informed both legal theory and trial advocacy. In democratic theory, epistemic rhetoric supports the claim that public deliberation is not merely a procedure for aggregating preferences but a process that actually generates better collective understanding — a claim with significant implications for how we design democratic institutions.

Epistemic Rhetoric Today

The epistemic turn's most urgent contemporary application may be in the analysis of post-truth rhetoric — the systematic use of epistemic uncertainty to delegitimize inconvenient knowledge claims. If all truths are constructed, the argument goes, then the scientific consensus on climate change, vaccine safety, or electoral integrity is merely the rhetorical construction of one community among many, no more privileged than any other.

Countering this move requires a sophisticated epistemic rhetoric: one that acknowledges the constructed, contested character of knowledge without abandoning the distinction between better and worse construction, between evidence-responsive deliberation and strategic deception.