Emmanuelle Danblon: Rhetorical exercises, or the art of rediscovering “the taste for truth”

Abstract

After having theorized an anthropological approach to the persuasive function and explored the issues at stake in the rationality regimes of practical reason, Emmanuelle Danblon has devoted the last ten years to a realistic, “artisanal” approach to rhetoric practiced in the context of rhetorical exercises. The aim of these exercises is to revive a lost “taste” for truth. Rather than taking fallacious arguments as their object, and giving primacy to descriptive theoretical deciphering of "alternative" truths and statements deemed irrational, Emmanuelle Danblon proposes that participants in these exercises first undergo a collective initiation to a typology of arguments, followed by role-playing in which they try to defend positions contrary to their own, or which seem paradoxical, difficult to imagine or irrational, against other participants defending the opposite points of view. The stakes are both cognitive and ethical: understanding the Other from the inside rather than judging him or her, making progress in self-knowledge and working in a craft mode to rediscover a taste for truth.

Keywords

• truth
• Perelman
• verisimilitude
• Aristotle
• exercises in rhetoric
• rhetoric and citizenship