Risk, Controversy, and Rhetoric: Response to Goodnight

It makes sense to use controversy as a way for argumentation and rhetorical studies to contribute to the study of science and technology, for controversy is central to both. Controversy provides occasions and strategies for rhetoric. "Contrarianism is of the essence in rhetoric," according to Thomas Sloane (3), and he draws out its presence throughout the rhetorical tradition--in disputation, Ciceronian controversia, pro and con thinking, the dissoi logoi, the Erasmian via diversa, argument in utramque partem, and so forth. Burke puts the idea a little differently, emphasizing the divisions that make rhetoric necessary: "the Scramble, the Wrangle of the MarketPlace, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, ... the Logomachy" (23). Although traditional views of science held that scientific method obviates controversy, more recent views put controversy at the center of scientific progress. (1) Karl Popper, for example, characterized science as "conjectures and refutations," reasoning that because we cannot verify a proposition by any number of observations, we instead conjecture, or "jump to conclusions" from a limited number of observations and then subject the conclusion to subsequent observations in an attempt to falsify or refute it. Thomas Kuhn described science as a sequence of activities, from normal puzzle-solving and the accumulation of anomalies to crisis and revolution, with controversy characterizing the last two of these. As Professor Goodnight notes, other STS scholars have emphasized the policy issues and public controversies that science and technology can instigate. Controversy thus can be seen both as an engine internal to science and as an external consequence of its epistemic innovations (and the artifactual innovations of technology) as they diffuse beyond the forums and enclaves of the scientific community and the skunk-works of technological RD lawsuits and public hearings open the files; disagreements between experts disturb the seamless surface of unquestioned facts; competition between proprietors or between products challenges culturally embedded technical systems. But Professor Goodnight means to point out more than these possibly commonplace notions about how controversy makes the rhetorical study of science and technology possible. Controversy, he emphasizes, also is the persistent condition that makes such studies useful and important, both in understanding the continuing operations of modernity and in addressing critical public problems. In what follows, I offer some observations based on two recent studies of my own that substantiate some of Professor Goodnight's contentions and suggest some additions to his agenda. I've looked in some detail at the nuclear power controversy of the 1970s and at the more recent controversy about the biological effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields (EMFs) ("Presumptions"; "Novelty"). The early controversy over nuclear power is represented in the 1975 Reactor Safety Study, also known as the Rasmussen report, prepared for the Atomic Energy Commission. Now understood as the first real risk analysis, it was begun in anticipation of Congressional controversy over the renewal of the Price-Anderson Act, which protected electric utilities from liability in the case of a nuclear reactor accident. The report, however, did little to quell controversy, but rather became a subject of controversy itself, both inside and outside the expert community. In one sense, this controversy was lost by the experts to public opinion and economic conditions: although the Price-Anderson Act was renewed in late 1975, nuclear power became a moribund technology, with no new plants ordered after 1978 and all 41 orders placed after 1973 canceled or rejected by state regulators. (3) In another sense, however, experts prevailed in making the risk analysis methods of the Rasmussen report the basis for decision making in a large number of other areas of science-based controversy. …