The Controversy behind the Controversies: Scientific Discourse in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

In the last 20 years, two allied crises have erupted in academic and institutional science. The first, long developing but peaking recently, is the discovery that some unknown proportion of published science is faked or fraudulent and difficult to detect or prevent, a problem made worse by artificial intelligence (AI). The second is the replication crisis of the last 20 years, a heightened awareness that even reports neither faked nor fraudulent may nevertheless be irreplicable and misleading. These churning problems have given rise to a substantial literature from the scientists involved debating causes and possible remedies. Recommendations vary from open science practices to systematic replication to dramatic changes in the ways science is communicated by replacing journal articles with posted “preprints” or exchanging data directly. A rhetorical perspective offers insights into both the problems and potential solutions, but new questions for rhetoricians of science emerge about the state of scientific discourse in the twenty-first century.