Alan G. Gross

In 1990 Harvard published Rhetoric of Science, a book that was noticed, nationally and internationally. It created a productive controversy over the limits of classical rhetoric, one that issued, eventually, in my SUNY collection, Rhetorical Hermeneutics. Since that time, Oxford has published Communicating Science, written with Argonne National Laboratory's Joseph Harmon. It is now the standard work in its field. With Joe Harmon, I have since written two other books generated by the same research program, both published by Chicago: The Scientific Literature, for general audiences, and The Craft of Scientific Communication, for scientists who want to write and to speak more effectively. Chicago just published Science from Sight to Insight: How Scientists Illustrate Meaning. It addresses a problem virtually unremarked and certainly under-researched: science communication is not just about words; it is about words and pictures. The partnership has just completed a Prospectus for their next book, "The Internet Revolution and the Two Cultures:Science and Scholarship Reconsidered," a study of the effect of the internet on scientific and scholarly communication.

Over the years, by myself and in productive partnership with others, I have produced a coherent body of work, anchored in classical and modern rhetoric--witness my co-edited collection Rereading Aristotle, and my co-authored Chaim Perelman. At the same time, I recognize the necessity of incorporating into my theoretical point of view such additional components as the hermeneutics of Heidegger, Habermas and Ricoeur and the findings of cognitive psychology.