The demand for educational research to be "scientific' is as misguided as the requirement for social scientists to resemble physical scientists in their methods and has the same roots. Social scientists are so called mainly because, following the Era of Scientific Revolutions around the beginning of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, the idea took root that "science' was the most powerful and respectable kind of knowledge. The same historical movements have led to "science' and its derivatives having high standing as terms of rhetoric. Texts describing educational research in scientific terms are often no more than rhetorical, and here I analyse an exemplary document from the European Science Foundation in order to reveal its rhetorical status and the distortions this effects in our understanding of education and educational research.