Dans une approche superficielle de l’Histoire péruvienne récente, la violence a d’abord eu pour nom Sentier Lumineux ; elle s’appelle aussi « armée » et « groupes para-militaires ». Chronologiquement, elle peut être située entre 1980 et 1992 (date de l’arrestation d’Abimael Guzmán, le leader incontesté du groupe maoïste). Une façon de dénoncer cette violence a été de faire appel à une forme discursive dont le premier sens est juridique : le témoignage. Les témoignages, alors réunis du temps de cette guerre sale (appelée aussi « conflit interne ») et dans les années qui ont suivi, ont permis à la Commission de la Vérité et de la Réconciliation (C.V.R., créée en 2001) de mettre en évidence des mécanismes qui tiennent autant à cette expérience de la violence qu’à une mise en mots de cette expérience. La réalité de ces décennies de terreur engendre donc deux réactions. Une réaction politique, journalistique et juridique (par exemple, la commission présidée par Mario Vargas Llosa en 1984, après le massacre de journalistes à Uchuraccay), d’abord. Ensuite, une réaction artistique et littéraire, souvent en décalage par rapport à la chronologie historique. Dans tous les cas, on pourrait dire que le témoignage est une forme privilégiée de ce dire. Ainsi, l’écriture des écrivains péruviens, empreinte du contexte national, tente d’informer le lecteur à l’aide de données historiographiques, journalistiques, politiques et/ou personnelles plus ou moins avérées, et au-delà cherche à réfléchir sur la crédibilité du politique, sur la légitimité du pouvoir, sur la permanence de l’Humain. Dans la plupart de ces œuvres, dont notre corpus est un échantillon, nous nous interrogeons sur les formes littéraires que peut prendre cette violence. Mêlant prose, vers et bande dessinée, on trouve chez les auteurs, d’une part, la nécessité de dire ce que l’on a vu ou entendu -le témoin de cette Histoire s’impose donc souvent comme protagoniste de l’œuvre littéraire- mais aussi, d’autre part, la nécessité de guider le lecteur dans la fiction proposée. Pour ce faire, nous avons choisi dix auteurs, consacrés ou relativement inconnus, dont une partie de l’œuvre traite de cette problématique. Ce sont les romanciers Mario Vargas Llosa (Lituma en los Andes, 1993), Alonso Cueto (La hora azul, 2005) et Santiago Roncagliolo (Abril rojo, 2007). Dans le domaine de la nouvelle, nous avons retenu aussi trois auteurs : Julián Pérez (« Los alzados », 1986), Pilar Dughi (« El cazador », 1989) et Sócrates Huaita Zuzunaga (« Ayataki », 1989). Quant à la poésie, elle est représentée ici par Rodrigo Quijano (Una procesión entera va por dentro, 1998), Rocío Silva Santisteban (Las hijas del terror, 2005) et Luis Rodríguez Castillo (El monstruo de los cerros, 2005). Enfin, nous avons sélectionné la bande dessinée de Jesús Cossío, Alfredo Villar et Luis Rossell (Rupay, 2008). / In Peru’s recent History, violence can first be superficially referred to under the name of Shining Path, or synonyms such as « army » and « paramilitary groups ». Chronologically speaking, this violence can be dated from 1980 until 1992–the year when the Maoist group’s undisputed leader, AG, was arrested. One way to denounce such violence has been to use a discursive (though originally legal) form: witness statements. All the witness statements gathered over the years of this dirty war (also named « internal conflict ») and over the following years, have made it possible for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (T. R. C., established in 2003) to highlight mechanisms owing to both the experience of violence and the voicing of such experience. The reality of these decades of terror therefore triggered two reactions: first, a political, journalistic and legal reaction–for example, the committee chaired by MVL in 1984, after some journalists were murdered in Uchurracay; then, an artistic and literary reaction often taking a distance with historical chronology. In both cases, witness statement is the form chosen to best express such commitment. The writing of Peruvian authors, relying on national context, thus wishes to inform the reader through the use of more or less reliable historiographical, journalistic, political and/or personal data. It further intends to ponder over the credibility of politics, the legitimacy of power, and human resistance. The selection from these works we have made in our corpus wishes to question the literary forms such violence can take. Writing in prose, in verse and under the form of comic books, the authors express on the one hand the necessity to say what was seen or heard–the witness of this History often becomes in this case the protagonist of the work – but also, on the other hand, the necessity to guide the reader through the fiction itself. Our selection thus includes ten established or relatively unknown authors whose work partly tackles such issue: three novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa (Lituma en los Andes, 1993), Alonso Cueto (La hora azul, 2005) and Santiago Roncagliolo (Abril rojo, 2007), and three short-story writers, Julián Pérez (Los alzados, 1986), Pilar Dughi (El cazador, 1989) and Sócrates Huaita Zuzunaga (Ayataki, 1989). Poetry is represented through the work of Rodrigo Quijano (Una procesión entera va por dentro, 1998), Rocío Silva Santisteban (Las hijas del terror, 2005) and Luis Rodríguez Castillo (El monstruo de los cerros, 2005), and the comic book we have selected is that of Jesús Cossío, Alfredo Villar and Luis Rossell (Rupay, 2008).

The chief aim of this dissertation was to establish the respective contributions of automatic and intentional memory processes to misinformation effects in 5-, 8-, and 9-year-old children. In the first two experiments children were presented with a picture story followed by misleading post-event details that were either read to participants, or were self-generated in response to semantic and perceptual hints. Children were then presented with original and suggested items and given a yes / no recognition test under inclusion or exclusion instructions. The application of Jacoby’s (1991) process dissociation procedure to children’s recognition performance revealed that the contribution of intentional processing to misinformation acceptance increased following the self-generation of suggestions. Automatic processing made a strong contribution to misinformation effects regardless of the way that misinformation was encoded. Experiment 3 extended this general pattern of results to a forced choice recognition paradigm. Experiment 4 examined the role of social demand factors in children’s suggestibility using Belli’s (1989) yes / no retrieval paradigm. Little evidence of an influence of social demand on children’s suggestible responses was found with automatic processes again the predominant factor determining suggestibility. In the final experiment, the temporal order of the original and post-event phases was reversed such that 5-year-olds were initially presented with a post-event summary containing misinformation, followed by a witnessed event. The results of this study confirmed that children’s suggestions were unlikely to be the result of trace alteration or social demand. The implications of the findings for theoretical accounts of the misinformation effect in children’s recognition and for children’s eyewitness testimony are discussed. / PhD Doctorate

This thesis examines the rhetoric of Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Published anonymously in 1839, Weld's publication became the longest antislavery tract in American history. It left its mark on the abolitionist movement itself and future antislavery literary works most notably Uncle Tom's Cabin. Despite its historical and rhetorical importance, Weld's text has been subjected to little critical exploration. This being the case, it is the goal of this study to find the dominant means of persuasion that Weld used to argue to antebellum northern audiences that slavery is evil and should be abolished. Weld accomplishes this goal by using a judicial motif throughout his tract. In his text, Weld acts as prosecutor and asks his readers to act as jurors in judging the legitimacy of slavery in the United States. In doing so, Weld relies on evidence in the form of testimony and newspaper advertisements to prove his arguments. I utilize the Hermagorian system of stasis to shed light on Weld's use of the judicial motif. This system points to four main questions, which represent the main stands of argument between a prosecutor and defense. The four main questions are the stases of conjecture, definition, quality, and objection. Under the stasis of conjecture I show that Weld demonstrates that slavery results when individuals are motivated by absolute arbitrary power. Under the stasis of definition I argue that the South offered the justifications of "necessary evil" and "positive good" in linking their way of life to the institution of slavery. Weld rejects these justifications and establishes his own account of slavery to be a thirst for absolute power over others. In the third stasis of quality I show that Weld argues that human nature is against slavery and therefore, should be abolished. In the last stasis of objection I show that Weld answers the question of whether abolitionists are justified in condemning slavery. Using The Hermagorian system of stasis shows that although each one is applicable to an analysis of Weld's tract, the stases of quality and objection are the most fruitful in establishing the effectiveness of Weld's rhetoric. By combining both emotion and logic for his jurors, Weld accomplishes his role as prosecutor in the case. Once his jurors act in accordance to the judicial motif as members of humanity and see the slaves in the same light, they are forced to bring back a just verdict of guilty because slavery is against the very essence of humanity itself. / Graduation date: 1999

<p>Much has been researched in South Africa about the trauma of losing one&rsquo / s home, one&rsquo / s community and rebuilding one&rsquo / s life in a new environment. Several books have been published tracking the lives of the forcibly removed and their responses to leaving District Six. My research focuses on a different group namely those who had been forcibly removed from the centre of Stellenbosch, called &ldquo / Die Vlakte&rdquo / during that time. Living and working with and among people who have experienced this removal, I was keen to research whether the impact of the trauma is currently&nbsp / manifesting in this specific community and if so, what the symptoms would be. This qualitative inquiry focuses on one particular individual, Mr. Hilton Biscombe. I selected him because he, who experienced the removal as a teenager, spent most of his later life determinedly collecting stories and documents relating to this incident. Mr. Biscombe is also the only person of whom I am aware who responded personally through compiling a book, making a DVD, writing poetry as well as an autobiography relating to this event. My inquiry into the ways trauma manifests in a narrative, will be based on two interviews: one conducted by a white man from the University of Stellenbosch thirty years after the event / and another interview, six years later, conducted by myself.Our understanding of trauma is usually associated with a death or injury or the possibility thereof, but it could also include the victim&rsquo / s response to extreme fear, serious harm or threat to&nbsp / family members. According to van der Merwe and Vienings, people also become traumatized when witnessing harm, physical violence or death or the sudden loss or destruction of a victim&rsquo / s home (van der Merwe &amp / Vienings, 2001). So the issue of trauma is not in question, nor the fact that forced removals cause trauma. I am exploring testimony in the form of interviews for possible current manifestations of this trauma thirty-six years down the line.</p>

We rely on science and other organized forms of inquiry to answer cardinal questions on issues varying from global warming and public health to the political economy. In my thesis, which is in the intersection of philosophy of science, social epistemology, and science and technology studies, I develop a social theory of knowledge that can help us tell when our beliefs and theories on such matters amount to knowledge, as opposed to mere opinion, speculation, or educated guess. The first two chapters discuss relevant shortcomings of mainstream analytic epistemology and the sociology of knowledge, respectively. Mainstream epistemology regards individuals, rather than communities, as the ‎bearers of knowledge or justified belief. In Chapter 1, I argue that typically, only an epistemic community can collectively possess sufficient justification required for knowledge. In Chapter 2, I present a case study in computer science that militates against the sociological understating of knowledge as mere interest-based agreement. I argue that social interests alone cannot explain the unfolding of the events in this case. Rather, we must assume that knowledge is irreducible to social dynamics and interests. In Chapter 3, I begin my positive analysis of the social conditions for knowledge. I explore the question of when a consensus is knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus. I identify three conditions – social diversity, apparent consilience of evidence, and meta agreement, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. In Chapter 4, I illustrate my argument by analyzing the recent controversy about the safety of the drug Bendectin. I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, and hence the deference to consensus to resolve this dispute was unjustified. In chapter 5, I develop a new theory of the logical relations between evidence and social values. I identify three roles social values play in evidential reasoning and justification: They influence the trust we extend to testimony, the threshold values we require for accepting evidence, and the process of combining different sorts of evidence.

We rely on science and other organized forms of inquiry to answer cardinal questions on issues varying from global warming and public health to the political economy. In my thesis, which is in the intersection of philosophy of science, social epistemology, and science and technology studies, I develop a social theory of knowledge that can help us tell when our beliefs and theories on such matters amount to knowledge, as opposed to mere opinion, speculation, or educated guess. The first two chapters discuss relevant shortcomings of mainstream analytic epistemology and the sociology of knowledge, respectively. Mainstream epistemology regards individuals, rather than communities, as the ‎bearers of knowledge or justified belief. In Chapter 1, I argue that typically, only an epistemic community can collectively possess sufficient justification required for knowledge. In Chapter 2, I present a case study in computer science that militates against the sociological understating of knowledge as mere interest-based agreement. I argue that social interests alone cannot explain the unfolding of the events in this case. Rather, we must assume that knowledge is irreducible to social dynamics and interests. In Chapter 3, I begin my positive analysis of the social conditions for knowledge. I explore the question of when a consensus is knowledge based. I argue that a consensus is knowledge based when knowledge is the best explanation of the consensus. I identify three conditions – social diversity, apparent consilience of evidence, and meta agreement, for knowledge being the best explanation of a consensus. In Chapter 4, I illustrate my argument by analyzing the recent controversy about the safety of the drug Bendectin. I argue that the consensus in this case was not knowledge based, and hence the deference to consensus to resolve this dispute was unjustified. In chapter 5, I develop a new theory of the logical relations between evidence and social values. I identify three roles social values play in evidential reasoning and justification: They influence the trust we extend to testimony, the threshold values we require for accepting evidence, and the process of combining different sorts of evidence.

Testimony flows from a story that originates long before the opportunity to be a witness about human atrocities occurs. And, ironically, testimony – the voice that is suppressed during times of state sanctioned terror – continues to flow long after the perpetrators fade from power. It is this ethereal and enduring paradox that raises the questions of what testimonial forms are, how they communicate, and whether they positively impact social justice as evidenced by enhanced communicative freedoms. The testimonial forms of this study are narratives about human rights atrocities which emerged from the 17-year military junta in Chile led by Augusto Pinochet. This project examines the development and uses of official and unofficial testimony surrounding times of transitional justice using a multi-modal analysis incorporating narrative and historical analysis, communication ethics, and critical theory which yields a meta-analysis of testimony and the context in which it functions. This research concludes that a life cycle of testimony exists that is organic and evolving. Furthermore, due to the unique circumstances of transitional justice periods, a theory of testimony ethics is called for to increase individual communicative freedoms that lead to enhanced social justice as well as to increase the success of truth commission communication processes.

This qualitative interview study explores the perceptions of five USC Shoah Foundation Master Teachers who integrate IWitness in teaching about the Holocaust. The study focused on the perceptions of teachers as their students interact with survivor and witness testimony in IWitness as well as how IWitness provides a framework for moral education in comparison to other primary sources. Data gleaned from this study demonstrates the influence of personalized learning through testimony-based education on the development of empathy in secondary students. As IWitness is a new resource that engages students with Holocaust survivor testimony in innovative ways, this study fills a gap by analyzing teacher perception of a resource that places students at the intersection of multi-literacies and citizenship education. Findings of this study suggest that the personalized nature of engaging with testimony in IWitness promotes student development of empathy through the interpersonal connections that students form with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. Participants suggest that by engaging students on the affective continuum of historical empathy, students demonstrate greater historical understanding and levels of care for the content and for people in society.

Between 1994 and 2012, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) established a contested zone of exception to neoliberal governance in southern Mexico and women's-rights-as-human-rights universalism reshaped international development and activist discourse. Within this context, Ana, Beatriz, and Celia González Pérez pressed claims against a group of Mexican Federal Army soldiers for rape at a military checkpoint in 1994. A rare instance of first-person denunciation of rape warfare, the Tseltal-Maya sisters' own powerful representation of the physical and procedural violations committed against them forms the starting point of this analysis, which proceeds from there, chapter by chapter, through communal, national, and international representations. Centering the women's speech, then moving to what are conventionally understood as broader fields of discourse produces new ways of understanding violence in relation to nation, culture, and gendered sociality. Though in 2001 the human rights commission of the Organization of American States upheld the women's claims, as of this writing (2012) the Mexican state has neither awarded reparations nor prosecuted the accused. I argue here that the women's unmet demands for collective and individual justice produce a novel language of protest which I call denuncia (denouncement) rather than testimony. Denuncia, I argue, puts the physical and the social body at the center of claims against sexual violation; enacts coraje (courage, rage) rather than petitions for recognition of truth; exposes the nationalist ideology of racial mixing that informs the production of testimony in Mexico, and establishes new audiences for its own reception despite the regimes of everyday violence it foregrounds. Formulated amid military occupation, denuncia exposes the gendered intimacy--control of the food supply, inhabitation of public-private architectural spaces, colonization of local enmities--that gave rise to military rape, which I call here "domestic violence." Denuncia emerges to refute the neoliberal discourse that links indigenous culture, gender, and violence just when the material basis of indigenous livelihood is under siege. This dissertation's method would not have been possible without almost twenty years' engagement with Tseltal and Tojolabal-Maya men and women who have formed part of the Zapatista movement. This long-range perspective has engendered a form of feminist scholarly accountability that cultivates listening to ground critique on the terrain of self-determination. / text

Ad hominem argument is an argument that attacks the defender of a claim rather than the claim in dispute. The purpose of my dissertation is to answer the question of whether ad hominem argument is fallacious. I search for the answer by exploring several areas of philosophy and discussing ad hominem argument from historical, logical, epistemological, and linguistic perspectives. I reach the following conclusions: First, since the conclusion of an ad hominem argument does not appear explicitly in actual argumentation, how to formulate the conclusion plays a crucial role in judging the legitimacy of ad hominem argument; Second, there is no type of logical fallacy unified under the name of “ad hominem” because, at least, some instances of so-called ad hominem fallacy are epistemically justifiable arguments; Third, since an ad hominem argument is used to refute a person’s testimony by attacking his trustworthiness, an ad hominem argument playing a role of undercutting defeater of a speaker’s testimony is legitimate from the perspective of epistemology of testimony; Fourth, since ad hominem argument can be treated as a speech act of argumentation, an ad hominem argument that satisfies the felicity conditions for argumentation is legitimate from the perspective of speech act theory and an ad hominem argument can be legitimately used to reveal the infelicity of the opponent’s argument. / text