Mitigation in the rhetoric creation of scientific knowledge

Abstract

The mitigation of utterance’s intensity is crucial for the rhetoric creation of scientific knowledge. It reflects the degree of certainty that authors can invest in their statements, and functions as one of a class of contextualization cues on which an ostensive-inferential process that does not generate false implicatures depends. It is an inseparable need of the scientific ethos, and explains, for instance, why Galileo, risking his life, said “And yet it moves” instead of opting for a categorical "The earth moves".