The article views catergoricalness as a communicative category functioning in the scientific discourse and adversely affecting the process of scientific communication. The results of the conducted discourse and contextual analysis of categoricalness revealed its correlation with the communicative categories of politeness, authoritativeness, confidence, subjectivity, and emotionality. The analysis of the texts of scientific reviews and oral scientific discussions and disputes allowed the authors to conclude that Russian scientific communication is characterized by a high level of categoricalness, which suggests potential conflictogenity in such type of interaction. The article discusses ways of neutralizing catergoricalness through the use of a number of mitigation devices, including lexico-stylistic and syntactical ones, whose main purpose is to eliminate destructive component from scientific communication.