Language and axiological rationality: The "non-thought" of French linguistics in the mirror of The New Rhetoric

Language philosophers, linguists, and discourse analysts are essentially interested, when dealing with ethical dilemmas, in the question of the utterer's commitment to referential truth. However, the issue of discursive responsibility is not limited to this type of commitment. We need also to take account of the ethical rectitude of value judgments and of the unavoidable interactions of vericonditional and axiological dimensions of language. American argumentation theories as well as the Amsterdam school of argumentation accord the subject of argumentative fallacies foremost importance, but this does not allow us to solve all the questions raised by the ethical constituents inherent in language and discourse. Almost all value issues are met with silence or marginalized in French language theories, which are still anchored in a narrow Cartesian conception of rationality. Ethics, moralization, and normative objectives are intermingled in these theories. Researchers who risk venturing into the dangerous territory of value judgments and exploring the axiological dimension of discourse become at once suspect of being incapable of dissociating scientific description from subjective position taking, as if the axiological subject may infect the rationalist researcher. This is where the ideas in The New Rhetoric take on an essential role. Indeed, this work is frequently cited nowadays in France in linguistic publications, placing Chaïm Perelman side by side, for example, with Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson, Louis Hjelmslev, and Noam Chomsky1 However, this is not to indicate that The New Rhetoric is a logic of values or to suggest that it could serve as a model for the conceptualization of an ethics of discourse. This essay will therefore attempt to demonstrate that Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's theory of argumentation permits an understanding of the roots of this epistemological lacuna and also to propose answers to the following questions:.