par Ferry, Victor 
Référence Argumentation and advocacy, 49, 2, page (144-147)
Publication Publié, 2012-12-01
Référence Argumentation and advocacy, 49, 2, page (144-147)
Publication Publié, 2012-12-01
Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | As defined by Aristotle, rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (Rhetoric I:2 rev. Oxford trans., 1355b:27–28). The inquiry on the means of persuasion is the very purpose of rhetoric since this discipline emerged from the needs of the citizens to win their cases in the new democratic institutions of ancient Greece (Kennedy, 1998, pp. 191–214). The problem, as Perelman and Obrechts-Tyteca (1958) put it, is that the force of an argument is not only uneasy to define (is it a normative or a descriptive concept?) but it would be also difficult to study since it depends both on the aim of the discussion and on the nature of the audience (pp. 610–617). In the introduction of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas (1984) uses several times the concept of the “force of the better argument” (e.g., pp. 24, 25, 28, 36, 42). One might therefore expect Habermas’s reflection on argumentation to be of great help for rhetoricians. However, as conceived by Habermas (1984), the “force of the better argument” refers not only to a rhetoric-free force but also to a force that can only exist in the absence of rhetoric. The aim of this paper is to reflect on this incompatibility between rhetoric and argumentation in the Habermasian approach. |
