For Charney (1993), the issue is the fact that Gragson and Selzer (1990) argue that "Gould and Lewontin's rhetorical strategies invite scientists to depart from their usual reading strategies, to read as more than 'mere' biologists. ... Are they willing or able to abandon their 'biological prejudices,' to become the unconventional readers that the discourse requires?" (p. 206, not my emphasis). That is, Charney's (1993) goal in this piece is to determine if this invitation will withstand empirical scrutiny. As a kind of passing note, the "biological prejudices" aspect is important because the whole reason Gould and Lewontin opt for the non-biological analogies at the beginning of their unconventional article is--and I know Patricia Roberts-Miller does this too--to enable evolutionists to get a sense of the argument without importing a biological prejudice that would come through the use of more conventional examples.
But why does Charney's argument need to be made? What's so important about this replication? In a way, and in retrospect, I think this kind of argument is guilty of Muckelbauer's criticism of the rhetoric of science, which is to say, that the whole goal of the analysis is to determine that science is rhetorical (rather than basing analyses off of science's rhetoricity as a given). We do see that move in this piece, especially given how "remarkably tolerant" the participants in Charney's study were to Gould and Lewontin's "unusual rhetorical moves" (Charney, 1993, p. 226). That is, expert readers tend not to dismiss obviously rhetorical arguments as being "unscientific." So, at the end of the day, the day, it's not merely the case that the expert readers "were more prone to treat the text rhetorically" (p. 228, not my emphasis), an obviously rhetorical argument gets flagged as "normal" science. You can even see Charney probing this aspect in her interviews: "Is that what you would normally do with this kind of article?" (214). Again, her goal is to show that, even when scientists employ rhetoric self-consciously, expert readers treat that employment normally. Thus what holds for this exceptional case must hold in normal circumstances as well. But my point is, at a high level of scale, and looking at Charney's piece through the field of rhetoric's history, you can see that this kind of work is symptomatic of the paranoia to prove science is rhetorical, which is arguably not very interesting, if we take a long view of rhetoric's history. Still, if we try to read this piece on its own terms, we might reask: why does this argument matter? Charney herself suggests that its value might lie in how it maps the uptake of a scientific argument (p. 206). That is, where do readers balk? and why? or where is there smooth sailing and why? what kind of readers balk where? and so on. In sum, the value lies in its being a reception study--or maybe reader-response study would be more accurate--rather than mere rhetorical criticism, of which there is already a lot in the rhetoric of science (see, for example, Fahnestock & Secor 1982). At the level of the implication of the finding (rather than set-up of the argument), the value also lies in the fact that Charney is able to further differentiate between expert readers: graduate students aren't nearly as evaluative as faculty. At one point, Charney (1993) says, "...students may require acculturation to the strategies of scientific literacy. This study begins to address these questions by comparing the kinds and quantities of comments from different participants in the act of reading" (p. 208).
In terms of the method, she enrolls seven evolutionists (four graduate students and three professors), since it is those folks who are invited to abandon their "biological prejudices" (Charney, 1993, p. 206, 226). After training participants in think-aloud protocols, she has them read the text aloud and react to it, making sure to not only mark where in the text they react ("hot spots"), but also code what kind of reaction they have. Participants only read for 30min, after which they are interviewed. Charney observes while participants read, linking observations to questions in the interview (i.e., triangulation). At one point, she defends herself from the objection that the readers are reading this article through the lens of history, rather than for the first time. She segments the language into continuous episodes (n = 664), rather than t-units or sentences or clauses. All in all, she asks the questions:
1. how did the participants go about reading the article? Is there any evidence that they accepted the textual invitation described by Grayson and Selzer to abandon their normal scientific reading strategies?
2. what aspects of the article provoked reactions from the participants? in particular, did participants react to the unusual rhetorical devices?
3. how did the participants react? did they act as dispassionate logicians or inflamed partisans? on what basis did they accept or reject Gould and Lewontin’s points?
I also might note that she partly lifts her categorization scheme from a number of previous researchers (Bereiter & Bird; Olsen).
As I was saying earlier, she finds that graduate students are much more likely to read the article on its own terms, which is to say, linearly. Recall, too, that this article is one that asks to be read linearly in a way that other articles don't, due to the analogical reasoning at the article's beginning. Likewise, graduate students were much more likely to interpret the text on the basis of personal knowledge, whereas faculty were much more likely to enter the "rhetorical fray" (Charney, 1993, p. 217), as it were. Both groups displayed roughy the same amount of comprehension comments (grads, n = 44; faculty, n = 57), though faculty evidence roughly triple in terms of evaluation, genre/structure, and meta-comments. But the main thing is, to go back to Gragson and Selzer (1990), there was little evidence to suggest experts took up Gould and Lewontin's invitation to become a rebellious reader.
This is a neither-here-nor-there passage--just some interesting context:
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