Demonstrating Scientific Taste: Aesthetic Judgment, Scientific Ethos, and Nineteenth-Century American Science

Abstract

This dissertation explores how aesthetic claims in scientific arguments help construct scientific ethos through demonstrations of the rhetor's judgment. By examining the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland, two prominent nineteenth-century American scientists, through the lens of their formal rhetorical training as students in American universities, this dissertation investigates how aesthetic judgment is enacted in scientific writing and explores the rhetorical history of the terms "simplicity," "brevity," "imagination," and "taste" and their use in scientific arguments. The aesthetic judgment that both scientists demonstrate in their written work reinforced an understanding of scientific ethos. By placing nineteenth-century scientific writing in contact with the rhetorical theories of the time, this dissertation explores the history of aesthetic judgment in rhetoric and its influence on conceptualizations of the faculty of taste. The dissertation illuminates the connections between rhetorical training and the ability to perform appropriate judgment when creating a reliable scientific ethos in writing. Constructing a scientific ethos in writing became increasingly important and complicated during the time of great institutional change in scientific research, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Scientists constructed scientific ethos through demonstrations of aesthetic judgment in order to respond to the exigencies of both institutional pressures and disciplinary expectations.