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The Resources of Ambiguity: Context, Narrative, and Metaphor in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene
Debra Journet*
University of Louisville
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: debra.journet{at}louisville.edu.
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Abstract |
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Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene illustrates the power of ambiguity in scientific discourse. The rhetorical and epistemic resources that ambiguity provide are most apparent at the level of metaphor but are also central to the exigency for Dawkins's argument and to the narrative form that the argument takes. Using ratios derived from Burke's dramatistic pentad, I analyze how ambiguous language helped Dawkins to link different theoretical conceptions of the gene and consequently posit connections between genes and organisms that had not yet been empirically established. I thus demonstrate at a conceptual and textual level how ambiguity contributes to the construction of novel scientific arguments. For Dawkins, ambiguity provided a discursive space in which he could speculate on connections and developments for which he did not yet have evidence, data, or terminology. Despite his insistence that his use of figurative motive language was simply a "convenient shorthand" for more technical language, The Selfish Gene demonstrates the powerful epistemological and rhetorical role that ambiguous metaphors play in biological discourse.
First published on September 11, 2009, doi:10.1177/1050651909346930
Journal of Business and Technical Communication 2010;24:29.
A more recent version of this article appeared on January 1, 2010
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