Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates
over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These science wars
take place in the public arena--with current battles over evolution and global
warming--and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have
been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific
claim merit our consideration? In Cogent Science in Context, William Rehg
examines what makes scientific arguments cogent--that is, strong and
convincing--and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of
argumentation theory, Rehg proposes a multidimensional, context-sensitive
framework both for understanding the cogency of scientific arguments and for
conducting cooperative interdisciplinary assessments of the cogency of actual
scientific arguments. Rehg closely examines Jurgen Habermas´s argumentation
theory and its implications for understanding cogency, applying it to a case
from high-energy physics. A series of problems, however, beset Habermas´s
approach. In response, Rehg outlines his own critical contextualist approach,
which uses argumentation-theory categories in a new and more context-sensitive
way inspired by ethnography of science.
