Science communication has gained high importance in the current knowledge and risk society. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of qualitative studies on how non-experts and experts engage in opinionated scientific debates and which linguistic devices they use to gain influence on other people’s attitudes toward a scientific issue.In our study, we examine dialogical modes of science communication (i.e. weblogs) used by bloggers and audiences to engage into opinionated discourse about scientific endeavors. As those exchanges easily lead to controversies between (...) different points of views, stances and attitudes, we focus from a rhetorically-driven linguistic perspective on devices to persuade the other participants and readers and to control the discourse. Hence, we ask which linguistic instruments are used to gain influence on influence. The aim of our study is to get deeper insights into the persuasive strategies mainly used in those forms of external science communication. (shrink)

This paper holds the view that although bullshit and obscurantism are obviously related phenomena, they should be kept distinct for conceptual reasons. It shows that whereas phenomena of bullshit tend to concentrate on speech acts and a violation of the expectations of relevance therein, obscurantism betrays an indirect move to confound while promising deep content. After an overview of studies on bullshit and a look at the different characteristics and types of obscurantism, this paper investigates why readers retain interest in (...) reading obscure texts. Interpretive charity, which is one of the reasons for this sustained interest, is found to be unsuccessful in making sense of obscurantism. Obscurantism is thus seen to be a vice more cryptic and systematic than bullshit. (shrink)