This article explores the usefulness of identifying the stasis of an argument, that is, whether it concerns an issue of fact, definition, cause, value, or action. The stasis of an argument can be seen as a component that has to be justified. An author must either assume or overtly appeal to the value of addressing a particular audience on a topic in a particular stasis. Once this principle of rhetorical analysis is in place, it is especially useful as an approach in the current enterprise of analyzing the rhetoric of the disciplines. While arguments in public forums naturally exploit the full stases, arguments in disciplinary contexts usually concern only the first two. “Exemplary” arguments in representative issues of Science and PMLA are then analyzed for their stasis and how they justify arguing over the issues they address. While science articles open and reopen questions of fact, classification, and cause while assuming the value of their enterprise, articles in literary criticism are problematic. They concern issues of value that are to a great extent already granted by their audience.

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of articles appearing in Science and Nature that introduces research reports appearing later in the issue. These pieces refer explicitly to a research report in the same issue, and in addition to their own agendas, re-present the researchers' claims and supporting evidence. To investigate how the core of an argument survives, the expression claims and lines of support in epitomizing figures are compared. The articles sampled suggest that the figure antithesis, embodying single-difference arguments, often persists from version to version. But in the process of perfecting a figured expression, arguments may be subtly changed in subsequent versions.

From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, scientists such as Kekule, Mendel, Lavoisier and Harvey argued for insights that depended critically on antithetical expressions and reasoning. The heuristic and persuasive use of devices like the antithesis has roots in the in combined grammatical, rhetorical and dialectical training established during the early modern educational reforms of the humanists. While the entire array of figures includes devices which inscribe all the rhetorical appeals, the set of devices derived from parallel phrasing illustrates how certain figures of speech express lines of reasoning iconically. But the continued use of such devices invites a general rationale for their persuasiveness based on the importance of pattern completion in language processing. Resume: Des Ie 17 iomo et pendant Ie 19 ic "", certains arguments de savants tels que Kekule, Mendel, Lavoisier et Harvey dependaient serieusement sur des expressions et des raisonnements antithetiques. L'usage educatif et persuasif de stratagemes comme I' antithese trouve ses racines dans un entrainement grammaticaL rhetorique et dialectique etabli au debut des rHormes educatives humanistes. Bien que la gamme entiere de figures inclut toutes les approches rhetoriques, I' ensemble des expressions etablies sur les tournures paralleles illustre comment certaine figures de rhetorique expriment des raisonnements iconiques. Mais la persuasion qui resulte de I 'usage continuel de telles figures invite une explication generale fondee sur I' importance de l"achevement des structures linguistiques dans la comprehension d'un langage.