Jeanne Fahnestock is a rhetorician of science and stylistics, an argumentation scholar, translator, Professor Emeritus in English, at the University of Maryland, College Park (1982 - 2012), and a Fellow of The Rhetoric Society of America. Her books include Rhetorical Figures in Science[1], Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion[2], three editions of A Rhetoric of Argument with Marie Secor[3], with whom she also edited the Readings in Argument[4] collection,The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion[5], edited with Randy Allen Harris, and the translation of Philip Melanchthon’s sixteenth-century Erotemata Dialectices [The Dialectical Questions][6].
Figural logic
Fahnestock's work in what she calls figural logic marks her most influential contributions in argumentation studies. Figural logic is a programme of argument critique anchored in the conceptual proximity of some rhetorical figures with some of Aristotle's topoi. In brief, some rhetorical figures epitomize lines of reason.[7] This is uncontroversial for metaphor and simile, which epitomize argument from analogy, but Fahnestock puts those figures completely aside, arguing in a polemical section of Rhetorical Figures in Science entitled, "The Dominance of Metaphor," that
the fixation on metaphor as a stimulus in scientific creativity, as a device in scientific argument or pedagogy ... and, finally, as an explanatory resource for textual scholars overemphasizes the role of analogy in human reasoning and begs the question of whether all or even most scientific cases can be "explained" by a core metaphor. What about the gas laws, superconductivity, electromagnetic induction, the periodic table, the positron, or retroviruses?
Fahnestock explicates the role of other rhetorical figures in argumentation through careful analyses of antithesis (opposing predications, as in the stronger leads, the weaker follows) and incrementus (a series of terms in a semantic incline, as in bronze, silver, and gold) in scientific argument. Antithesis is very prominent in argumentation, as opposing parties often frame each other in extreme terms, perhaps most obviously in the political divisions labelled with the antonyms left and right. The figure's best known role in science is perhaps with Charles Darwin's Principle of Antithesis, which suggests that many behavioural expressions take the form they do because they are conceptually opposed.[8] "[W]hen a directly opposite state of mind is induced," Darwin writes, "there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature."[9] When we are happy, we smile: our eyes open wide, our mouth turns up. When we are angry, we frown: our eyes narrow, our brows furrow, our mouth turns down. When a dog is aggressive, it is fully upright, tail extended. When it is submissive, it crouches, tail between its legs.[10]
Incrementum is also familiar in the argumentation of, and adjacent to, evolutionary theory, since evolution manifests in clines of size, specialization, characteristics of display, and other properties which relate species or chart lines of descent. Argumentation can be visual as well as verbal, and the notorious March of Progress imagery is a clear example of incrementum.
Antithesis and incrementum are semantic figures, like metaphor and simile, so their role in epitomizing conceptual relations is not an unexpected extension of figurative reasoning. But Fahnestock also analyzes several material rhetorical figures ("schemes") that are mostly unfamiliar outside of academic rhetoric studies. Antimetabole (a type of chiasmus), for instance, is the inverse repetition of words, frequently mediated by a common term, as in all for one and one for all. Fahnestock demonstrates that this figure epitomizes an argumentation scheme of reciprocity. All for one and one for all expresses reciprocal obligation. The group is obliged to defend and uphold the interests of the individual, who is in turn equally obliged defend and uphold the interests of the group. Fahnestock's millieu is scientific argumentation, and she shows how Isaac Newton encodes his third law of motion, expressing the reciprocal nature of forces between interacting bodies, even if one of them appears inert, with the following antimetabole:
Si equus lapidem funi allegatum trahit, retrahetur etiam & equus aequaliter in lapidem: nam funis utrinq; distentus eodem relaxandi se conatu urgebit Equum versus lapidem, ac lapidem versus equum.[11] [If a horse draws a stone tied to a rope, the horse (if I may so say) will be equally drawn back towards the stone: for the distended rope, by the same endeavour to relax or unbend itself, will draw the horse as much towards the stone as it does the stone towards the horse.][12][13]
The English translation loosens the antimetabole somewhat from the tighter Latin version, Equum versus lapidem, ac lapidem versus equum, '[drawing] the horse towards the stone and the stone towards the horse.' But they both express the reciprocal expenditure of forces directly in the figurative syntactico-lexical structure of the expression: "the changing syntactic order changes the grammatical relation of the two terms ... and makes, overall, reciprocal claims ... about their causal connection to each other."[14] While she does not explicitly make the connection, this argumentation use of antimetabole perfectly realizes Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of diagrammatical iconicity. Other material figures Fahnestock uses to illustrate her epitome-of-argumet-lines claims include the morpholexical figure, polyptoton (repetition of the same lexical stem with different affixes, as in hate the sin, love the sinner), which is extraordinarily common in scientific taxonomy (sulfite, sulfate; phosphite, phosphate; nitrite, nitrate), and gradatio (a series of repetitions over clausal boundaries, as in for want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost...), exemplified in this passage from Richard Feynman:
[A]ll the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the working of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways.[15]
Figural logic has been promoted in the work of philosopher Christopher Tindale, who foregrounds it in Rhetorical Argumentation: Principles of Theory and Practice[16] and returns to it regularly throughout his work. See also Abeles,[17] Harris,[18] Harris and Randhawa,[19] and Mehlenbacher.[20]
References
Fahnestock, Jeanne (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511750-9. Fahnestock, Jeanne (2011). Rhetorical style: the uses of language in persuasion. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-976412-9. Fahnestock, Jeanne; Secor, Marie (2004). A rhetoric of argument: a text and reader (3rd ed ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-303616-8. Fahnestock, Jeanne; Secor, Marie, eds. (1985). Readings in argument (1st ed ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-33155-3. Fahnestock, Jeanne; Harris, Randy Allen, eds. (2023). The Routledge handbook of language and persuasion. Routledge handbooks in linguistics. London New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 978-0-367-42335-3. Fahnestock, Jeanne (2021). Philip Melanchthon: Erotemata Dialectices. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric Series (1st ed ed.). Boston: BRILL. ISBN 978-90-04-46637-1. Fahnestock, Jeanne (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 3–44. ISBN 978-0-19-511750-9. Fahnestock, Jeanne (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-0-19-511750-9. Darwin, Charles (1915). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: D. Appleton & Co. (published 1872). p. 28.
Darwin, Charles (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: D. Appleton & Co (published 1915). pp. 52–55.
Newton, Isaac (1687). Philosophiæ naturalis principia mathematica [The mathematical principles of natural philosophy] (in Neo Latin). London: Jussu Societatis Regiae. p. 13.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link) Newton, Isaac (1803). The mathematical principles of natural philosophy. In Three Volumes [A. Motte, Trans.]. London: H.D. Symonds. p. 1.15.
Fahnestock, Jeanne (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 142–4. ISBN 978-0-19-511750-9. Fahnestock, Jeanne (1999). Rhetorical figures in science. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-19-511750-9. Feynman, Richard P. (1990). The character of physical law (16. pr ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-262-06016-5. Tindale, Christopher W., ed. (2004). Rhetorical argumentation: principles of theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4522-2229-5. Harris, Randy Allen, and Zoya Randhawa. Epanalepsis in argumentation: Pseudo tautologies. Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on Computational Models of Natural Argument, December 12th, 2025, CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073, pp. 81-92.
