Recognizing rhetoric in science policy arguments

Abstract

Diligent citizens must critically analyze arguments for science policy recommendations, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions or growing genetically modified food crops. Science policy articles present arguments for and against such recommendations using scientific evidence and rhetorical devices. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of argumentation and rhetorical devices in two journal articles on climate change issues. One objective was to gain a better understanding of use of rhetorical devices in this genre, as a prerequisite for designing and building a rhetorically-annotated digital corpus of full-text science policy articles. The near term objective was to inform the design of pedagogical tools to help students analyze science policy arguments.

The use of antithesis and other contrastive relations in argumentation

“…Green [7] attempted to represent discourse structure and argument structure in a single model integrating RST's Antithesis and Concession with certain causal argument schemes, but later argued for modeling argument structure independently of discourse structure [8,9]. In [10], Green analyzed the argument schemes and a variety of rhetorical devices in two of the papers from the corpus used in the current study, but did not specifically examine the argumentative uses of antithesis and concession. Harris and colleagues [16,17] encouraged computational research on rhetorical…”