Roth, Paul A. Review of William Rehg, COGENT SCIENCE IN CONTEXT. NDPR (OCTOBER 2009).

Rehg, William. Cogent Science in Context: the Science Wars, Argumentation Theory and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

Books can easily be found that offer to examine and account for the "science wars", understood as the ongoing turf battle between philosophers and sociologists. The focus of the conflict concerns how to explain what considerations actually determine what comes to be accepted as the received views in any one of the natural sciences. The main contenders consist of two apparently opposed explanatory strategies. On the one hand, some advocate the primacy of contextual factors in order to explain why a scientific community settles on a particular view. On such accounts, the norms of scientific inquiry represent only the contingent products of historical circumstance. On the other hand, "internalist" accounts typically seek to establish that evidence can be and is rationally determinative. Evaluative procedures can have validity that transcend their context. On this view, use of proper rational procedure explains what prevails and why within a scientific community. The former view denies and the latter affirms that standards of rationality simpliciter can and do explain accepted scientific views. Unfortunately, authors of such books all too typically begin by assuming the correctness of one of the usual suspects with regard to accounts of scientific rationality. William Rehg's book proceeds by urging that resources can be located for an account of rationality that embraces neither of these views and yet incorporates core contentions of each. Specifically, Rehg argues for the relevance of "argumentation theory", an area of inquiry that straddles several disciplines and with which most philosophers of science will probably be unfamiliar. The "argumentation theory" as Rehg portrays it refers to studies of argument that represent "an interdisciplinary endeavor that provides a set of categories -- drawn from logic, linguistics, dialectic, rhetoric, and so on -- for the description and evaluation of arguments" (4). Rehg offers a straightforward rationale for taking this approach: "Like other areas of human endeavor, the sciences exist and develop as social practices -- exercises in embodied social rationality . . . This trend challenged defenders of science to develop more realistic conceptions of scientific rationality" (3). Argumentation theory as Rehg conceives of it holds the promise of providing a general normative framework for the evaluation of scientific claims that is superior in specific ways to the alternatives scouted above. His book promises a sustained and detailed account of how to construct this framework. Rehg employs the term 'cogency' to connote the joint process of assessing both the psychological effect and the rational strength of an argument. The appeal to cogency arises inasmuch as no one set of factors -- logical, rhetorical, or sociological -- typically suffices to make the case in favor of one view over another. The question that Rehg poses, and the litmus test for the approach of his book, concerns whether or not Rehg's contextualist version of argumentation theory offers a more robust normative framework than any of the alternatives that Rehg finds inadequate to the task of adjudicating disputes on the cogency of scientific claims. The primary challenge to the cogency of scientific argument consists in the need to bridge what Rehg terms "Kuhn's gap", understood as "a gap between logical and social-institutional perspectives, a gap that rhetorics of science attempt to bridge" (33). More specifically, in order to close Kuhn's gap, an argumentation theory must reveal "how persuasion occurs within the transitional phase itself -- the microprocesses that generate agreement on the new paradigm" (47). Kuhn's work poses the question but provides no answer. The gap will only be closed, however, in a philosophically satisfactory way by providing an account of cogency that demonstrates that scientists were persuaded to shift theoretical allegiances for the "right" reasons, i.e., that no group made a weaker argument appear the stronger. . . .

Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17905.