La raison interculturelle et les conditions préliminaires de l’argumentation

Abstract

Early in The New Rhetoric, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca raise the spectre of the fanatic who “adheres to a disputed thesis for which no unquestionable proof can be furnished,” refuses to submit it for free discussion, and thereby “rejects the preliminary conditions which would make it possible to engage in argumentation” (1970: 62). One of the many interesting suggestions here is that there may be preliminary conditions that should be in place before argumentation can be engaged. In this paper, I pursue that suggestion and consider what such preliminary conditions should be, in order to address problems of dialogue between people or groups who seem to subscribe to different conceptions of rationality. I draw from some examples of confrontations between peoples for the first time (encounter rhetorics), where those involved had first to come to understand each other before argumentation between them could develop.

Keywords

• encounter rhetoric
• intercultural argumentation
• mutual cognitive environment
• otherness
• Perelman
• reasons