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. However, its instantiation is much more complex than this simple distillation reveals. After all, rhetoric, as demonstrated above, is not only a discipline, but inherently interdisciplinary. And science cannot be viewed as a single discipline, but as many, ranging from the quantitative to the qualitative, from the physical to the social. If scholars working in the physical sciences have attained a high level of agreement on basic assumptions and definitions, typically centered around quantitative analysis, the human sciences, in particular, have remained resistant to such all-encompassing quantification.