Introduction to Part 1
It is through rhetoric and argumentation that we will begin to explore the concept of discourse. Rhetoric is the art of persuading through speech. It is about convincing the listener or audience of what is true and what is false. The means at its disposal are based on reason or involve affect. Persuasion creates a kind of emotional climate that can lead to adherence. This climate increases the acceptability of arguments by enhancing the psychic receptivity of the listeners. Rhetoric is demiurgic insofar as it is the means by which we build and hold power over this world. It has shaped Western civilization from the 5th Century BC to the present day. Everything that people imagine and socially create is related to speech and its capacity for persuasion which influences belief, order and obedience.
In a kind of dialectical inversion, rhetoric becomes the instrument for understanding and interpreting the discourse of others. The hermeneutic method is based on rhetoric. It interprets the intentions of texts and allows the exegesis of political, religious, or other discourse. Learning to speak is also learning to think. Rhetoric supports judgment and imagines solutions because it opens to us the knowledge necessary for our world view. It develops ideas, structures thought and provides an organizational model. Learning to talk is also learning to live in, society through the ability to speak well and be understood. Without the words to express them, our ideas are sterile, inconsistent or even non-existent.
While rhetoric is an important dimension of a theoretical approach to discourse, it is through the multiple variants of discourse analysis and interpretation that discourse achieves its status as a scientific object in its own right. The emergence of an autonomous field of research on the theme of discourse is part of the evolution of language sciences and more broadly that of the human and social sciences, starting in the 1950s. Discourse analysis maintains complex relationships with these sciences, in constant redefinition. It is more of a scientific movement which is at a crossroads than a clearly defined discipline forming a homogeneous block, with its purpose, methodology and concepts. Despite the variety of approaches to discourse analysis, and of the concepts and theories used in it, all approaches agree, despite some reluctance, on a single definition of its purpose established by Madeleine Grawitz (1990) who observes that all research in this field:
To consider a text by linking it closely to its production conditions is to consider it as a discourse. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we thus review several major approaches to the analysis and interpretation of discourse originating in linguistics: the enunciative approach, the communicative approach, the conversational approach, the sociolinguistic approach, the pragmatic approach and the semiological approach. Each of these is part of a specific theoretical framework and induces a particular conception of discourse as an object.
In contrast to these approaches, two authors were only indirectly interested in discourse, although each made an essential contribution to the way in which we think about it and, subsequently, to its analysis. These are the philosophers MikhaĆÆl Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, one Russian, the other French. While unaware of each other, they both defend the view that any verbal or textual sequence is only a fragment of a larger whole: the discourse, which many authors nowadays call interdiscourse.
Then, drawing inspiration from the work of the philosopher Paul RicÅur, we will ask ourselves how discourse allows intersubjective communication. Paul RicÅur notes that:
The essential meaning of message, sender, receiver is based on an order of intentions which is only revealed by transcendental reflection (in the sense of Husserl and phenomenology; descriptive psychology becomes transcendental phenomenology).
Starting with the logical core of the discourse, we will directly access the foundation of communicability: what is first communicated by a speech is its logical character, which brings it out of itself and opens it up to another speaker. The logical theory of statements allows us to admit that a message is made communicable by the process of universalization involved in it. Nevertheless, logical theory is not the only element to consider in analyzing the communicability of speech; what is communicated in a speech is not only its logical (or propositional) sense but also its strength, in John Langshaw Austinās sense: a statement has the value of an assertion, or of an order, or of a promise. Sending a message is the delivery of a discourse with sense and strength. Finally, in reaching the last level, that of intention, communicability extends beyond sense and forces to include what the speaker communicates of themselves. This one transmits an intention of recognition.
