The Need for Rhetorical Listening to Ground Scientific Objectivity

Recent work in feminist and postcolonial rhetoric demonstrates various meanings of silence (Glenn 2004). Listening rhetorically in order to comprehend silences (Ratcliffe 2006) is particularly difficult in scientific contexts, I argue, because the common ground for scientific discourse assumes a culture of disclosure. Rhetorical listening is also important to science because listening accounts for silence as well as disclosure, and so maximizes the diversity in recognized perspectives that provides scientific objectivity (Longino 1990; 2004)