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The essay focuses on controversies where the debated issues are complex, the exchange involves several participants, and extends over long periods. Examples include the Methodenstreit, the Hering-Helmholtz controversy (Turner 1994) or the debates over Newton's or Darwin's views. In these cases controversies lasted for several generations, and polarisation is a recurring trait of the exchanges. The reconstructions and evaluations of the partly (but not only) polemical exchanges also exhibit heterogeneity and polarisation. Although I pick an early example of the Newtonian controversies, Darwin's argument in The Origin of Species can also be variously reconstructed (Morrison 2000: 192–196). When scientific controversies that involve complex utterances (i.e. not single claims) are investigated, a specific problem arises, as in these situations the protagonist presenting a bundle of claims to a non-unified audience cannot fully control meaning-attribution of his utterances, and, given what we know about individual cognition, the more heterogeneous audience he succeeds in persuading, the less clear the meaning becomes. While the acceptance of a position increases potential for action, the growth in consent comes together with a fuzzy content. To problematise the role of polarisation, the significance of this description with respect to knowledge-production is investigated from both an individual and a social epistemological standpoint to answer the question: How is rhetoric epistemic in cases when at least two views on a given issue are seen as persuasively supported by communities? If engaging in a controversy is a means-to-an-end activity aimed at persuasion, directed at achieving attitude-change in recipients, how does the argumentative goal of an individual translate to epistémé in extended scientific controversies?

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41978-7_5

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