Page 69 - Oswald Ducrot, Slovenian Lectures, Digitalna knjižnica/Digital Library, Dissertationes 6
P. 69
Lecture IV
That is what I wanted to say concerning the general character of a topos.
It is a connection between two properties, P and Q, related respectively to
argument A and to conclusion C.
***
Second characteristic: the topos is represented as a shared belief, a be-
lief that has been accepted beforehand by a community which at least the
locutor and usually also the allocutor, or addressee, belong to. That is the
property which gives the argument its constraining force. If it is reason-
able to move conclusively from the idea of warmth to the idea of a walk,
it is because the move is based on a rule which the locutor has not invent-
ed: it is represented as accepted by a certain community. Not perhaps by all
men and women but at least by a small community of reasonable men and
women whom the locutor and, he hopes, also the allocutor belong to. Fail-
ing that, the so would be completely impossible. A topos then is presented as
one of a certain community’s shared beliefs.
That explains a certain form of irony, of which, in France, there are
many examples in Voltaire, and which consists in using topoi which obvi-
ously no-one accepts. You reason (really, I should not use that word rea-
son, as I have distinguished reasoning and argumentation), you argue on
the grounds of topoi which no-one accepts, or only very few persons do.
If someone says “He’s rich, so he’s unhappy”, he thinks that he is being in-
teresting, amusing, because he has made out a certain topos to be obvious
which on the whole, society, in fact, does not accept. In Voltaire, you could
find sentences like “Mr X’s standard of morality was high: that is why he
harmed all those he knew”. Here, you posit the connection between the fact
of having a high standard of morality and the fact of doing harm as being a
topos; and you cannot do that otherwise than ironically, since you are mak-
ing out something to be obvious which generally is not considered as such,
and even which is contrary to what is obviously the case (which amounts to
being paradoxical while giving the impression of speaking like everyone).
***
I move on now to the third characteristic, the one which we will have
to speak most about, because it is the most problematical one and, for a lin-
guist, I think, the most important: scalarity. There is not much to object
about the generality and the apparent sharedness of a topos I believe. But
it is about scalarity that everyone makes objections to me and it is on that
That is what I wanted to say concerning the general character of a topos.
It is a connection between two properties, P and Q, related respectively to
argument A and to conclusion C.
***
Second characteristic: the topos is represented as a shared belief, a be-
lief that has been accepted beforehand by a community which at least the
locutor and usually also the allocutor, or addressee, belong to. That is the
property which gives the argument its constraining force. If it is reason-
able to move conclusively from the idea of warmth to the idea of a walk,
it is because the move is based on a rule which the locutor has not invent-
ed: it is represented as accepted by a certain community. Not perhaps by all
men and women but at least by a small community of reasonable men and
women whom the locutor and, he hopes, also the allocutor belong to. Fail-
ing that, the so would be completely impossible. A topos then is presented as
one of a certain community’s shared beliefs.
That explains a certain form of irony, of which, in France, there are
many examples in Voltaire, and which consists in using topoi which obvi-
ously no-one accepts. You reason (really, I should not use that word rea-
son, as I have distinguished reasoning and argumentation), you argue on
the grounds of topoi which no-one accepts, or only very few persons do.
If someone says “He’s rich, so he’s unhappy”, he thinks that he is being in-
teresting, amusing, because he has made out a certain topos to be obvious
which on the whole, society, in fact, does not accept. In Voltaire, you could
find sentences like “Mr X’s standard of morality was high: that is why he
harmed all those he knew”. Here, you posit the connection between the fact
of having a high standard of morality and the fact of doing harm as being a
topos; and you cannot do that otherwise than ironically, since you are mak-
ing out something to be obvious which generally is not considered as such,
and even which is contrary to what is obviously the case (which amounts to
being paradoxical while giving the impression of speaking like everyone).
***
I move on now to the third characteristic, the one which we will have
to speak most about, because it is the most problematical one and, for a lin-
guist, I think, the most important: scalarity. There is not much to object
about the generality and the apparent sharedness of a topos I believe. But
it is about scalarity that everyone makes objections to me and it is on that
