Taylor believes that language involves both the concept of activity and the production of understanding, that it simultaneously constitutes public space and facilitates discrimination among foundational human concerns. The growing employment of the vocabulary and tools of another language-based field, rhetoric, further upholds Taylor s observation. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the bulk of rhetorical criticism remained confined to the study of public address in Speech Communication departments, but, with the century s progress, rhetoric expanded beyond those bounds. In short, rhetorical terms and concepts are loosely employed by scholars throughout the academy, even though these scholars may have no formal training in, or affiliation with, Speech Communication or Rhetoric departments.
Disciplines attempt to serve as such routine, practiced spaces.
Rhetoric is, on this account, located within the practiced place, the discipline, of Speech Communication and Rhetoric departments, even as its interdisciplinary characteristics and its appropriation by other disciplines mean that its terms and employment must consistently be contested. The productive tensions between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity necessary to advance knowledge claims become particularly salient in understanding and assessing fields in which the boundaries are still being negotiated, in which consensus has yet to be obtained. As a result, examining it from the standpoint of interdisciplinarity can serve as a lens with which to illuminate not only its particular concerns, but those facing other scholars. Rhetoric of science is, after all, inherently interdisciplinary. It has, in Aristotelian terms, two parts using as it does the techne , or art, of rhetoric to comment on the episteme of science.