Ni normatif ni militant : le cas de l’engagement éthique du chercheur

Abstract

Most scholars in the Language Sciences (Sciences du langage) in France opt for a descriptive, neutral, and distant stance. The discourse and argumentation analyst avoids then all forms of evaluation from fear of falling into the trap of denunciation and prescription, believing that this form of neutrality is required for a valid scientific knowledge. This paper seeks to justify the following hypothesis: this type of positioning does not suit all texts; there are certain fallacious or dangerous discursive and argumentative practices which are impossible to interpret via a distant and neutral description and which require the interpreter’s evaluation. Neutrality becomes then an obstacle to the construction of knowledge which takes into account the totality of a text’s phenomena. The article shows that ethical positioning is a necessary condition for such knowledge. It first proposes a critical inventory of arguments against ideological or normative commitment (engagement) and then analyzes a series of cases where ethical commitment is required.

Keywords

• description
• ethical commitment
• explicit evaluation
• normative or ideological positioning
• scientific knowledge