Rhetoric of Effortlessness

When I say "rhetoric of effortlessness," what do you think of? Do you think of rhetoric that "consists in conveying the impression that, whereas a particular investigator was responsible for a finding, establishing that finding cost that investigator little mental, physical or social effort" (McAllister 148)? Because if you do, then you are absolutely correct! Rhetoric of effortlessness, developed by James McAllister, is pretty self-explanatory. It's rhetoric that makes scientific discoveries seem as though they were made, well, without effort. It's related to, but different from, two other rhetorical concepts, which McAllister calls rhetoric of effort and rhetoric of self-effacemnent. I'm not talking about either of those things in the next post, so I won't go into the nitty gritty details. All you need to know is that rhetoric of effort makes it seem like the scientist poured their heart and soul into a finding, whereas rhetoric of self-effacement is almost the complete opposite; it implies that the scientist put in no effort, and that they basically just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the discovery decided to make itself known to the world.

Rhetoric of effortlessness, then, differs in the regard that it portrays effort as still being required to discover something, and the scientist is as still the one who discovered it, but the amount of effort required is very clearly minimal.

Rhetoric of effortlessness that is successfully executed (i.e. rhetoric that the audience believes) results in the discovery having more credibility as "objective" and "true," the scientist having a better reputation for being skilled enough to come upon the discovery without overexerting her/himself, and science in general being seen in a more positive light as a result of the first two.

According to McAllister, these effects occur for three main reasons.

The first reason depends on the assumption that "truths are natural and discovered, whereas departures from the truth are artificial and constructed" (148). If that is the case, truths are perceived to be easy to discover, because "[additional] effort would raise suspicions that one had constructed a falsehood instead" (148). For instance, it wasn't hard to discover that a particular plant was poisonous if ingested; it really only took one sucker to die from eating a berry for the whole village to be like, "Okay, not that one." These kinds of truths were learned through common sense and/or observation. However, more "artificial" truths are met with more resistance because they are less obvious and often involve technical aspects that the average person doesn't necessarily understand. (I still only sort of know how gene splicing works, and I've taken two classes that were specifically about genetics.) This way of thinking is similar to a "resistance to the artificial" that people feel towards inventions such as GMOs or artificial intelligence when evaluating risk (Kolodziejski). Ease, and the implied "naturalness" that presupposes it, makes discoveries more credible as "natural truths."

In a similar vein, the second reason assumes that effortless discoveries are the natural direction of progression when researching that thing. If something is effortless, people assume that there were likely no unexpected obstacles, complicated problems, or alternatives that would require additional effort to untangle and solve. Those additional factors lead to more chances for error and uncertainty, and since the average person can't possibly know whether or not a study accounted for every single error or potential for uncertainty, the potential of existing errors/uncertainties makes the discovery less credible. Therefore, if a scientist expends little or no effort, the finding is more credible.

The last reason builds off of the second one to give credibility to the scientist: if a researcher was able to discover something in such a fashion that requires very little effort, then they must be incredibly talented and intelligent. And because they chose a direction of research that didn't involve many extraneous problems, and therefore produced something with (presumably) very few errors. These assumptions make the scientist (as opposed to his/her discovery) seem more trustworthy.

References (listed by order of reference)

McAllister, James W. "Rhetoric Of Effortlessness In Science." Perspectives On Science 24.2 (2016): 145-166. Academic Search Premier. Web.

Kolodziejski, Lauren A. "ROSTM & Risk Communication." California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Building 186-C201, San Luis Obipso, CA. 25 Apr. 2016. Lecture.