Dans le domaine des sciences cognitives, la plupart des études sur la communication humaine se sont intéressées à la manière dont on comprend la communication et non pas à la manière dont on l’évalue. D’après le cadre théorique de la vigilance épistémique (Sperber et al., 2010) les êtres humains disposent d’un ensemble de mécanismes dédiés à l’évaluation des messages qui servent à se protéger d’informations potentiellement trompeuses et qui permettent de communiquer de manière fluide et relativement honnête. D’après ce cadre théorique, le raisonnement aurait évolué pour permettre une discrimination plus fine des messages. La principale fonction du raisonnement serait argumentative : il s’agirait de trouver des arguments pour convaincre les autres et d’évaluer les arguments d’autrui afin d’acquérir des croyances plus solides (Mercier & Sperber, 2011). Si le raisonnement est le résultat d’une adaptation, ces compétences devraient être relativement universelles et on ne devrait pas avoir à les enseigner. L’universalité et le développement précoce de ces compétences permettraient donc de montrer qu’elles ne reposent pas sur un apprentissage culturel spécifique. Cependant, la plupart des études sur le raisonnement et l’argumentation chez les adultes comme chez les enfants, et par conséquent les principaux résultats qui soutiennent la théorie argumentative du raisonnement, se limitent à un échantillon restreint des sociétés humaines : les cultures occidentales. Aussi, on pourrait penser que ces caractéristiques du raisonnement sont davantage l’expression de facteurs culturels plutôt que des traits universaux. Ce travail de thèse s’intéresse à cette question en déployant une approche interculturelle (en comparant les sociétés occidentales, orientales et traditionnelles) et développementale. Les cultures traditionnelles et orientales diffèrent des cultures occidentales sur de multiples aspects - tels que la tradition philosophique, l’approche parentale ou l’accès à l’éducation formelle - qui sont particulièrement pertinents pour tester ces prédictions adaptatives. Le rôle de la discussion a souvent été sous-estimé dans le domaine du raisonnement, à l’exception de certaines études développementales très influentes (Doise & Mugny, 1984; Perret-Clermont, 1980). En coupant le raisonnement de son contexte argumentatif, les psychologues du raisonnement l’ont privé de l’une de ses forces : l’échange d’arguments avec les autres. Dans une première étude, nous avons montré que dans une population traditionnelle – les Mayas indigènes du Guatemala – la discussion en groupe amène à de meilleures performances que le raisonnement individuel. De tels résultats avaient déjà été rapportés pour des populations occidentales et orientales. Deux caractéristiques du raisonnement peuvent expliquer ces résultats : the biais vers son côté, qui empêche les individus d’améliorer leurs performances individuelles, et l’habilité à évaluer les arguments des autres, qui permettent aux individus de bénéficier des discussions de groupes (Article 1). Dans trois études exploratoires, nous avons apporté des preuves que le bénéfice de l’argumentation peut aussi s’étendre au raisonnement moral. La première étude confirme que les arguments peuvent faire changer les individus d’avis même dans des jugements moraux impliquant une forte charge émotionnelle. En revanche, les seconde et troisième études n’ont pas permis de révéler des effets notables de la discussion sur les jugements moraux (Chapitre 2). Avant l’âge de trois ans, les enfants échangent des arguments avec leurs parents et leurs frères et sœurs. Cependant, aucune expérience n’a montré que les enfants de cet âge sont sensibles à la qualité des arguments. Dans une première étude, nous fournissons des preuves expérimentales que les enfants de deux ans sont sensibles à la force des arguments (Article 3)... / Within cognitive science, most studies of communication have focused on how we understand communication and not on how we evaluate it. According to the epistemic vigilance framework (Sperber et al., 2011) a set of mechanisms would be devoted to evaluating other people's messages to protect us from potentially misleading information, allowing communication to work smoothly and to remain mostly honest. In this framework, reasoning would have evolved to allow for a finer grained discrimination of messages. The main function of reasoning would be argumentative: to find reasons in order to convince others, and to evaluate others' reasons in order to adopt better supported beliefs (Mercier & Sperber, 2011).If reasoning is an evolved adaptation, these skills should be relatively universal and they should not have to be taught. Universality and early development is suggestive of skills that do not rest on specific cultural learning. However, most of the studies on reasoning and argumentation, either with adults or children, and consequently the main results supporting the argumentative theory of reasoning, are limited to a small range of human societies: Western cultures. One can argue that the features of reasoning might be the expression of specific cultural factors rather than universals traits. The present thesis addresses this question by deploying a cross-cultural (comparing Western, Eastern, and traditional societies) and a developmental approach. Traditional and Eastern cultures differ from Western cultures in dimensions such as philosophical tradition, parenting styles, or access to formal education that are particularly relevant to test these adaptive predictions.The role of discussion has been often underestimated in the field of reasoning, with the exception of some influential developmental research (Doise & Mugny, 1984; Perret-Clermont, 1980). Cutting reasoning from its argumentative contexts, psychologists of reasoning deprived it from one of its strength, the exchange of arguments with others. In a first study we showed that, as reported in Western and Eastern populations, group discussion yields better performance than individual reasoning in a traditional population – indigenous Maya from Guatemala. Two features of reasoning can account for this improvement: the myside bias, which precludes individuals from improving their performance on their own, and the ability to soundly evaluate others’ arguments, which allows individuals to benefit from group discussions (Article 1). In three exploratory studies we brought some evidence that the benefit of argumentation could be extended to moral judgments. The first one confirms that arguments can make people change their mind even on some emotionally charged moral judgments. By contrast, the second and the third ones failed to reveal consistent effects of discussion on moral judgments (Chapter 2).Before the age of three, children exchange arguments with their parents and siblings, but no experiment has demonstrated that they are sensitive to argument quality. In a first study we provide experimental evidence that 2-year-olds are sensitive to argument strength (Article 3). However, these skills might have been fostered by the particular cultural context of Western middle- and upper-class families, to which most children studied belong. No experimental data had been gathered in Eastern or traditional societies. A series of experiments first revealed that, as reported in Western culture, Mayan (Article 4) and Japanese (Article 7) children can discriminate between a strong (perceptual) argument and a weak (circular) argument. Second, Mayan (Article 4) and Western (Article 5) children are shown to follow the testimony of a dominant over that of a subordinate while Japanese participants favor the testimony of the subordinate (Article 8). ...

La présente étude se fonde sur le postulat que le style de Platon dans le Phèdre entretient un lien nécessaire avec le contenu, que le style crée le contenu. Elle s’efforce de montrer que la description de ce lien suppose de prendre en compte les aspects énonciatifs de l’œuvre, c’est-à-dire à la fois la situation d’énonciation dans laquelle s’inscrit chaque réplique et la façon dont l’auteur s’adresse au lecteur. En effet, se fondant sur la notion bakhtinienne de dialogisme, elle définit la fonction du style par le fait d’orchestrer une pluralité linguistique : Platon représente différentes langues à l’intérieur du dialogue, la langue poétique, la langue technique des orateurs, ou encore la langue des philosophes qui l’ont précédé, et les met en dialogue, les confronte, créant ainsi une nouvelle conception de l’objet du dialogue, le discours d’abord, l’âme amoureuse ensuite. La situation d’énonciation révèle le travail sur le matériau linguistique et permet la mise en dialogue des différentes langues, tantôt en les distribuant entre différents personnages, qui deviennent chacun une source de sens pour les termes employés, tantôt en ajoutant au contexte immédiat dans lequel s’insère le mot un contexte large, qui demande, pour le même mot, un sens différent de celui qui est cohérent avec le contexte immédiat. En outre, certaines particularités de la situation d’énonciation remettent en cause les présupposés sur lesquels se fonde la compréhension d’un énoncé, notamment le principe de non-contradiction : ces particularités ne doivent pas être effacées, elles correspondent selon nous à l’intention de Platon et constituent des énigmes interprétatives qu’il pose au lecteur. / This study is based on the thesis that Plato’s style in the Phaedrus creates the content. The study attempts to show that in order to describe this interaction one has to take into consider the enunciative aspects of the text, that is the enunciative situation into which every phrase subscribes and the way the author addresses to the reader. In fact, based on Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogism, our work defines the function of the style by the means of orchestrating a linguistic plurality: Plato presents different languages inside the dialogue, such as the poetic language, the orators’ technic language or also the language of the philosophers who had preceded him; he makes them interact and confront between them, creating by this a new concept of the dialogue’s object, i.e. the speech and the enamoured soul. The enunciative situation reveals the work done on the linguistic material and permits to implement the dialogue between different languages either by attributing these languages to different characters, who become themselves a source of the sense for the terms employed, or by adding to the word’s immediate context a much larger context who demands, for the same word, a new sense different from the one who is coherent with the immediate context. In addition, some particularities of the enunciative situation question the assumptions on which is based the understanding of any statement, in particular, the principle of non-contradiction : according to our theory, these particularities shouldn’t be erased, they correspond to Plato’s intention and form the interpretative riddles that Plato addresses to the reader.

L’étude de l’argumentation dans deux romans de Michel Rio vise à proposer un certain nombre d’instruments permettant de lire le récit romanesque comme un moyen de persuasion. Il s’agit de montrer comment le récit travaille à influencer le lecteur et cherche, tantôt à le faire adhérer à une thèse précise, tantôt à orienter sa façon de percevoir la réalité ambiante. A cet effet, notre travail s’est articulé en quatre chapitres. Dans le premier, nous montrons le caractère pragmatique des récits des Jungles pensives et d’Alizés, qui, en tant que romans philosophiques et encyclopédiques, tentent de faire réfléchir le lecteur et de lui transmettre un savoir sur le monde. L’analyse du processus de persuasion des deux romans s’est fondée sur trois axes correspondant aux trois preuves rhétoriques : l’ethos, le logos et le pathos. L’étude de l’ethos narratif dans le cadre de la situation d’énonciation du récit nous a permis de dégager les moyens par lesquels l’auteur renforce l’ethos des personnages romanesques et celui du narrateur. Le troisième chapitre intitulé « le logos narratif » est consacré à l’étude des moyens par lesquels les récits pragmatiques font appel à la raison du lecteur en combinant les éléments de l’accord préalable (les faits, la doxa, les valeurs, les topiques, etc.) et les raisonnements logiques. Dans le quatrième chapitre intitulé « le pathos narratif », nous nous efforçons de dégager les procédés que l’auteur met en oeuvre pour susciter des émotions chez les lecteurs et les rendre favorables à sa thèse. Enfin, dans notre étude, nous montrons comment la rhétorique s’allie aux techniques de la narratologie, de la sémiotique, de la pragmatique et de l’analyse du discours pour permettre de saisir comment l’auteur peut exercer une influence sur le lecteur / The study of the argumentation in two novels of Michel Rio aims at proposing a certain number of instruments making it possible to read the tale as a tool of persuasion. This work intends to show how the tale influences the reader and seeks sometimes to make him adhere to a specific thesis, sometimes to direct his way of perceiving ambient reality. For this purpose, this work is divided into four chapters. In the first, we show the pragmatic character of the tale of Dreaming Jungles and Alizés, which, as philosophical and encyclopaedic novels, try to make the reader think and to transmit to him a knowledge about the world. The analysis of the process of persuasion of the two novels is based on three axes corresponding to the three main forms of rhetoric: ethos, logos and pathos. The study of the narrative ethos within the framework of the situation of enunciation in the tale enabled us to find out the means by which the author reinforces the ethos of fictional characters and of the narrator. The third chapter: "the narrative logos” examines the means by which the pragmatic tales call upon the reason of the reader by combining the preliminary points of agreement (facts, the doxa, values, topics, … etc.) and the logical reasoning. In chapter 4:“the narrative pathos”, we endeavour to point out the tools that the author uses to generate the emotions at the readers and to make them favourable to his thesis. Finally, in our study, we show how rhetoric can combine with the techniques of narratology, semiotics, pragmatic and speech analytics to allow to the author to influence the reader

À travers l’analyse du discours de Germano Celant sur l’arte povera, la présente thèse cherche à décrire et à comprendre le statut particulier du langage au sein d’un champ spécifique de l’art contemporain en prenant comme objet les stratégies argumentatives qui s’y trouvent à l’œuvre depuis l’invention du concept « pauvre » à la fin des années 1960 par le critique/historien/commissaire d’exposition italien jusqu’à aujourd’hui, tout en soulignant leur interdépendance avec l’évolution de son statut social et celle des logiques interprétatives/évaluatives qui en découlent. / Through the discourse analysis of Germano Celant on arte povera, this present thesis aims to describe and comprehend the status of the language within a specific domain of contemporary art by analysing the argumentative strategies from the invention of the “poor” concept by the italian critic/historian/curator at the 1960s until today, underlining their interdependance with the evolution of his social status and that of the interpretative/evaluative logiques which results from.

Argumentation and reasoning have been an area of research in such disciplines as philosophy, logic and artificial intelligence for quite some time now. In the area of AI, knowledge needed for reasoning can be represented using various kinds of representation systems. The natural problem posed by this fact is that of possible incompatibility between heterogeneous systems as far as communication between them is concerned. This imposes a limitation on the possibility of extending smaller knowledge bases to larger ones. In order to facilitate a common platform for exchange across the systems unified formalisms for the different approaches to knowledge representation are required. This was the motivation for Dung [11] to propose in his 1995 paper an approach that later came to be known as an abstract argumentation framework. Roughly speaking, Dung's arguments are abstract entities which are related to each other by the means of conflicts between them. An intuitive graphical representation of Dung style framework is a graph whose nodes stand for arguments and whose edges stand for conflicts. A framework postulated this way is on one hand too general to be used on its own, but on the other hand it is general enough as to allow for varied extensions increasing its expressiveness, which indeed have been proposed. They include value-based argumentation frameworks by Bench-Capon et al. [6], preference-based argumentation frameworks by Amgoud and Cayrol [1] and bipolar argumentation frameworks by Brewka and Woltran [7], to name a few. The present thesis is concerned with yet another variation of Dung's framework: the concept of splitting. It was developed by Baumann [4] with one of the underlying purposes being that the computation time in frameworks which have been split into two parts and then computed separately may show some improvement in comparison to their variant without splitting. It was one of the main tasks of my work to develop an efficient algorithm for the splitting operation based on the theoretical framework given in [4]. On the other hand I hoped to confirm the expectation that splitting can indeed make a computation perform better.

Sweden’s drug policy still invokes the ideas of zero-tolerance and prohibition despite the high reported number of drug-related deaths and arrest rates for using drugs in Sweden in the latest years. To reach knowledge about why prohibition of illegal drugs has remained such a strong staple of Swedish politics for the latest 60 years, this study asks questions about which ideas and arguments constituting the Swedish drug policy, examines the logical coherence of these, and proposes an alternative policy route which aims to mitigate the shortcomings of the current policy. The drug policy field is extensive and studies from different nations show that drug policies that move away from prohibitionist ideas have succeeded in both reducing drug-related mortality rates and reducing the stigma that is attached to either using or abusing psychoactive drugs. Because of an identified unclarity of why the prohibitionary ideas in Sweden have remained despite recent developments, this study aims to fill a gap in existing research by normatively analyzing the ideas in the policy. Since these ideas have great importance in restrictions of individual liberty and public health considerations, knowledge about them is essential to create because liberty and public health are fundamental aspects in any democratic society. The research endeavor performs an internal validity check as the methodological approach to check the internal logic and arguments of the policy and uses a theory of liberty to shed light on the trade-offs between liberty and public health. What is discovered is that the Swedish drug policy builds on inconsistent arguments and incoherent logic and has a moralizing intent that allows for restrictions on individual liberty to reach a utopian vision of a drug-free society. Also, this study shows that it is possible to create a policy that can mitigate the harms caused by the current by adhering to the principle that individual liberty should stretch as far as possible when no harm is caused to another. The implications of this are that it will be harder to justify the zero-tolerance approach in the future and that future policy must look to other policy approaches rather than build policy on assumptions based on outdated moralism.

With the discourse analysis as framework, this study focuses on the ethos, the representation of the Other and the argumentation in the discourse of religious controversy of the protestant Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. The corpus, which consists of the prefaces of two editions of the Traité de l’eucharistie (1598 and 1604), was subject to a systematic survey of the personal pronouns je, nous, vous as well as references to Duplessis-Mornay’s direct opponents, in a diachronic perspective (the two editions have been compared). The analysis has shown the discursive strategies of Duplessis-Mornay, including a subtle management of the ethos and the relationship with the Other in order to convince the reader. The build-up of an ethos by an interposed author (frequent use of quotations), observed in the edition of 1598, has increased in that of 1604. This edition is also characterized by an ethos of justification which intends to invalidate an unfavourable prediscursive ethos resulting from adverse reactions to the first edition. The ethos of caritas and the authorial ethos are also very present in the discourse of the author in both editions. In his relation to the Other, Duplessis-Mornay uses a strategic approach, alternating nous inclusif and nous exclusif, and referring most often the notion of vous dans l’erreur to authors recognized by Catholics themselves, through quotations. Only direct opponents of the author are stigmatized by their representation in the third person. Duplessis-Mornay’s discourse, in both prefaces, is characterized by a diplomatic and persuasive attitude.

Syftet med studien är att utforska och förstå de resonemang lesbiska par begagnar sig av i beslutsfattandet om reproduktionsmetod. Här ingår även berättelser kring de erfarenheter paren har av möten med professionella inom svensk sjukvård och myndighetsutövning. Studien består av tio intervjuer med lesbiska par, vilka har fått barn inom den offentliga sjukvården sedan detta blev tillgängligt den 1 juli år 2005. Materialet har analyserats med hjälp av kvalitativ metod i det diskursanalytiska fältet. Resultatet visar att parens beslut har föregåtts av en process där alternativ har vägts mot varandra. Här återfinns två typer av tolkningsrepertoarer där svensk sjukvård har fått företräde på grundval av externa omständigheter. Den ena kretsar kring ett samhällsperspektiv där olika juridiska faktorer används retoriskt för att framhäva valet som rimligt. Den andra utgår ifrån ett familjeperspektiv, där det externa synliggörs genom konsekvenserna de får för den egna familjebilden.  Resultatet visar samtidigt på de erfarenheter paren har av att genomföra assisterad befruktning i Sverige. Dels beskrivs upplevelserna utifrån utsatthet, där rollen som vårdtagare och homosexuell framställs som en dubbel sårbarhet. Dels framkommer resonemang om acceptans, genom vilken paren hanterar och föregår bristande bemötande med olika argument som reducerar potentiella stressorer.

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Abstract The struggle for Swedish foreign policy – How Swedish foreign policy was defined and established between the years 1867–1905 as a result of prevailing political power-sharing   AIMS – The aim of this master thesis is to problematize how the Swedish foreign policy was defined politically in the context of the existing constitutional power-sharing model between the bicameral parliament and the ruling monarch. The period 1867–1905 is considered an earlier phase in the political process towards modern parliamentarianism in Sweden. DESIGN – An overall theoretical perspective of a correlation between domestic- and foreign policy is applied, and complemented with a theoretical position of which actor has the priority to define Swedish foreign policy. The thesis uses a methodology of extensive argumentation analysis, with a thematic division between the internal political arena on one side, and on the other side the parliamentary arena. The first arena is analyzed by combining political programs with the monarchs’ autobiographies and memoir. The second arena uses parliamentary debate protocols, parliamentary bills. In this way the thesis generates a selection and a greater understanding of various political issues which is of concern to the actual foreign policy definition in the annual official political throne speeches of the Swedish monarch. RESULTS – A variety of political issues are regarded as of foreign political importance within the internal political arena and is distinguished by a degree of correlations with ideological, ideal and political domestic issues. Such issues are then reflected in the parliamentary arena, through debates in both first and second chambers. The range of issues addressed is not only of constitutional importance, regarding the monarch’s executive power over the different foreign policy areas, but also concerning which political approach should be applied to define the main principle of Swedish foreign policy. Together, the parliamentary debates reveals which arguments influence the definition of foreign policy and which actors who claim the priority to define Swedish foreign policy – all within the existing frame of the power-sharing system. CONCLUSIONS – The thesis concludes that the actors of various parliamentary committees, and especially the constitutional committee, not only had the crucial argument which determined the outcome of the numerous parliamentary debates. Same actors also had the priority to define the main arguments on which the foundations of the monarch’s foreign policy political guidelines where dictated.