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

Abstract

and Head of the Research Group on Rhetoric and linguistic Argumentation (GRAL), which she founded in 2006. She is a member of the Belgian Royal Academy, Humanities Section, and of various editorial boards of scientific journals, including Argumentation and Discourse Analysis. Following the publication of her research on the anthropological dimension of the "persuasive function" and its relationship to the notion of rationality in rhetoric, E. Danblon has been developing for the past ten years an original program of practical rhetorical exercises. This program is inspired by the Sophists' method but has been reconfigured to adapt it to the complexity and needs of the contemporary world. It challenges rhetoric in that it gives primacy to its artisanal side. This epistemic choice is closely linked to the following conviction: instead of attempting to resist the multiple causes of misunderstanding that are tearing the contemporary world apart by analyzing the argumentative strategies implemented in discourses, one of the solutions would be, on the contrary, to "exercise disagreement" (Danblon and Ferry 2017). This exercise consists in creating role-playing games in which the One undertakes to reason in the manner of the Other, and vice versa. This would enable them to rediscover a lost "taste for truth" concretely and realistically. This is why public institutions have asked E. Danblon to introduce some of their members to these exercises, to help them grapple with dilemmas concerning the truth of discourses deemed fallacious and circulating in civil society. Roselyne Koren, Professor Emerita at Bar-Ilan University, is a linguist specializing in Discourse Analysis, Argumentation and Rhetoric, author of Rhetoric and Ethics. About Value Judgments (2019). She is co-editor with Professor Ruth Amossy of Argumentation and Discourse Analysis, issue 25 (2020), entitled "Social discourses and Rationality Regimes" to which Emmanuelle Danblon contributed.