Philosophy of Science, 73 (April 2006) pp. 175–193. 0031-8248/2006/7302-0003$10.00 Copyright 2006 by the Philosophy of Science Association. All rights reserved. 175 Rhetoric, Induction, and the Free Speech Dilemma* Jesu ´s P. Zamora Bonilla †‡ Scientists can choose different claims as interpretations of the results of their research. Scientific rhetoric is understood as the attempt to make those claims most beneficial for the scientists’ interests. A rational choice, game-theoretic model is developed to analyze how this choice can be made and to assess it from a normative point of view. The main conclusion is that ‘social’ interests (pursuit of recognition) may conflict with ‘cognitive’ ones when no constraints are put on the choices of the authors of scientific papers, as in an ‘ideal free speech situation’. Scientific institutions may help to solve this conflict. Lastly, some empirical predictions are offered that can inspire future social research of the refereeing process. 1. Introduction. ‘Rhetoric’ is the name we give to the strategic use of language. That language can be used in a strategic way means, at the very least, that we can choose what to say, and that saying different things will have different effects; on the other hand, our sayings may have dif- ferent interpretations as well, and it is usually other people who decide how to interpret what we say. As a consequence, any series of sentences arranged in an intelligent conversation will be the result of the conversants’ attempts to produce in the others some desired effects, and it becomes a suitable phenomenon to be studied from the point of view of game theory, i.e., that part of rational choice theory devoted to situations with two or *Received September 2004; revised August 2005. †To contact the author, please write to: Jesu ´s P. Zamora Bonilla, Dpto. de Lo ´ gica, Historia y F. de la Ciencia, UNED, Humanidades Paseo de Senda del Rey 7, 28040 Madrid, Spain; e-mail: jpzb@fsof.uned.es. ‡Financial support from Fundacio ´n Urrutia Elejalde and from Spanish government’s research projects PB98-0495-C08-01 and BFF2002-03353 is acknowledged. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the fourth congress of the Spanish Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and at the seventh congress of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. Comments and corrections were received from Max Albert, Paco A ´ lvarez, Christian List, Uskali Ma ¨ki, and Pascual Martı ´nez Freire, as well as from two anonymous referees.