ch4, between books and articles

 ch4, between books and articles

In this chapter, Bazerman hones in on the story of Newton's Optics. Why is this story important?

So Newton got this job at Cambridge and he developed lectures for his optics there. There, he got to be the tedious professor and fill in the details for his students. Then, he writes up his findings for the Royal Society, and he seems? to do something weird. He takes this genre convention taken from Bacon and the early days of the Royal Society--that is, a discovery narrative, like he's stumbling upon the a fact. But then he moves from the discovery account to a more theoretical account and it's not like the paper falls flat on his audience (they like it), but it's very contentious. Newton gets all of these objections, and he has to answer the objections by filling in info from the lectures. But that doesn't work for Hooke's objection. 

Part of this story is really the story of a genre ecology, the story of how book, lecture, and article are meant to interact. 

Yes, this is what I was thinking. 

Additionally, Newton's private journals indicate that the experiments were actually carried out to prove his hypotheses rather than stumbled across accidentally as the article suggests (92-93 )

So it's like re-writing something to make it more reader friendly, to hook it into a schema that will facilitate the comprehension of what you're already invented. It's a rhetorical ploy, reader centered prose. 

 However, Bazerman argues that the highly inductive structure of the experimental narrative used by Newton, accompanied by his failure to provide procedural detail, prevented such acceptance ---~----"---- "---- ------- -- 6 and is thus responsible for the degree of criticism he received concerning the "New Theory" article

I wonder if it's an inductive/deductive thing. I was thinking that he made it incoherent by using one logic and then stitching another to it without any explanation. 

Through answering the critiques of Robert Hooke, Christian Huygens, and others, Newton developed new strategies for leading others to his conclusions. He realized the importance of providing specific procedural details of his experimental evidence, and he discovered the value of providing a deductive structure for showing direct relationships between his theory and that evidence. Thus, Bazerman argues that through answering the critiques of his colleagues, Newton developed the more effective rhetorical strategies that would characterize his later work (100-110). 

So it was a deductive/inductive thing. 

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