The Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric Project

Front matter

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RHETORIC

The Intellectual

and Cultural Origins

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project (NRP) "The Single Most Important Event in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory" 1

1 The Intellectual Origins of the New Rhetoric Project: Toward a Logic of Values 19 Translation and Commentary Perelman, Chaim “De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance". Archives de la Société Belge de Philosophie 5:3 (1933) 5-44 34

Chapter 1

The Intellectual Origins of the New Rhetoric Project: Toward a Logic of Values

Chaim Perelman was only 21 years old when he secured a subvention from the Université libre de Bruxelles to publish his 1933 “De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance” [On the Arbitrary in Knowledge], which was published by the Maurice Lamertin publishing house based in Brussels.! “De l'arbitraire” follows Perelman’s brief 6-page article on “Le statut social des jugements de vérité” [The Social Status of Truth Judgments], which appeared in a 1933 issue of Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie Solvay and which we consider as an initial formulation of “De l'arbitraire"? Harvard's T. H. Costello's 1934 review of Perelman's article in the Journal of Philosophy asserts that Perelman had not developed his postulates, “nor has he succeeded in expounding them very well"? Yet for a Harvard professor to offer a review— even one that was negative—in one of the premier philosophy journals of a young Belgian student's overview on reason and logic suggests that the article was noteworthy and that it had earned attention in philosophical circles. Other, present-day scholars, more appreciative of Perelman's work, place "De l'arbitraire" in the context of Perelman's fifty-two-year body of scholarship. We believe that this article offers the reader insight into the evolution of his thought.

The article is also prescient, anticipating Quine and the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy, and beyond Quine, the intellectual roots of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project. Many of the issues and concepts Perelman introduces and populates in this 1933 article are fleshed out by 1958 in the Traité.^ At the outset of “De l'arbitraire”, Perelman announces his theme: the putative opposition between reality judgments and value judgments

1 This chapter is based on M. K. Bolduc, and D. A. Frank's “An Introduction to and Translation of Chaim Perelman's 1933 ‘De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance’ [On the Arbitrary in Knowledge]" Advances in the History of Rhetoric 22. 3 (2019) 232-275.

2 C.Perelman, “Le statut social des jugements de vérité”, Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie 1 (1933) 17-23.

3 T.H.Costello, “Review of Perelman's ‘De l'arbitraire dans la connaissance”, Journal of Philosophy 36 (1934) 613.

4 C.Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, La nouvelle rhétorique: Traité de l'argumentation (Paris, 1958); C. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. J. Wilkinson and P. Weaver (Notre Dame, IN, 1969).

© MICHELLE BOLDUC AND DAVID A. FRANK, 2023 | D01:10.1163/9789004537439. 003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

accepted by most philosophers, and especially by those in the nineteenth century. This opposition rested on the claim that reality judgments (later truth judgments) are necessary, and value judgments are arbitrary. In the first section, Perelman shows that reality judgments and truth judgments ultimately hinge on the arbitrary. He demonstrates this through an analysis of several patterns of reasoning: deduction; induction; inductive reasoning in science, classical logic, and law; and finally, reasoning by analogy and by appeals to authority. He concludes that all methods of verification are in some sense arbitrary: all judgments are value judgments; all truth claims presuppose the arbitrary.

In the second section, Perelman examines the subject-object problem and the problem of error. The subject-object correspondence—that the perception of an object corresponds to our cognition of it—depends on the arbitrary assumption that all people over time share the same perception. At this point, Perelman returns to the idea of necessity, and concludes, drawing on the work of Eugène Dupréel, that what is necessary is what appears to be necessary. Perelman acknowledges that it is part of our human nature (part of what he calls “universal reason”) to posit some universal “truths” as necessary. However, universal reason is not posited as necessary on logical grounds but on psychological grounds; that is, human nature requires that we all posit the existence of universal rules. Perelman places himself with those who consider truth claims as “rational” and thus “explicable by something other than itself^5 but points out that this something is “logically precarious’, not logically necessary. Perelman considers the problem of error in the context of pragmatism. For pragmatists, what is true becomes so as it is shown to be useful to the person(s)

nu who believes it. This makes “truth” “an individual affair”. If Perelman agrees with the pragmatists that truth cannot be logically necessary in absolute terms, he nevertheless argues that it cannot be individual or private as it can be for pragmatists. “Truth” is grounded in a relative necessity, which is constituted by arbitrary but accepted rules. All statements accepted as true—including moral rules as well as rules set forth as means of verification—depend on a conformity to group-shared assumptions. Therefore, as Perelman writes, “in order to communicate [truth], we must take someone else’s point of view”. As a consequence, and it is here that Perelman concludes, it follows that “tolerance between groups, all of which are established by means of value judgments, is the most immediate practical consequence of our theory”.

“De l'arbitraire” is an audacious attempt by the very young Perelman to seek a rapprochement between logical positivism and sociology, one that sought to identify the roles played by logic, rationality, and reason in social life. In

5 All quotations here from “De l'arbitraire” may be found in our translation, below.

this article, Perelman both embraces and confronts the positions taken by the main proponents of logical positivism, who dominated philosophical thought in the time period in which Perelman wrote the article.

Logical positivists aimed at developing a system of science that could escape the province of the social, which they viewed as the source of irrational, emotive, and metaphysical impulses undermining rationality. In this article, Perelman takes an “intermediate position” to bring reason into alignment with the social world. In developing this realignment, he focuses on the questions of the arbitrary, necessary, and absolute in judgments of truth and value. Perelman maintains that all modes of reasoning and judgments of truth and value must at some point rely on arbitrary and necessary premises. The arbitrary and the necessary, however, need not be absolute; they can be modified through experience and an appreciation of the social contexts that produce human understanding. All groups, Perelman concludes, use value judgments that may be necessary but not absolute to define themselves and others: “It is the arbitrary that is the soul of a group; it is because of this very arbitrariness that there are multiple groups: the arbitrary leads to pluralism’.

“De l'arbitraire” and Perelman’s scholarship of the 1930s have been in the main neglected by historians of rhetoric, although there is scholarship on Perelman’s intellectual trajectory offered by French (Guillaume Vannier) and Italian (Laetitia Gianformaggio) scholars that captures some of the nuances we identify here.9 This neglect was encouraged by Perelman himself: he rarely cited articles from this period as he matured as a scholar, and in his histories of his intellectual trajectory, he would either begin with his first postwar book, On Justice, eliding the 1930s, or quickly dismiss his work of the 1930s as that of a logical positivist in despair about the possibility of reasoning about values. Indeed, Perelman later reported that after having finished his book on justice in 1945, he could not see how value judgments “could have any foundation or justification” in logic or reason.”

During this period, Perelman labeled himself both a logical empiricist and a logical positivist. Logical empiricism/positivism was in part a response to the horrors of World War 1, which positivists believed were the result of Hegelian German idealism, impulses, and uncontrolled passions. Perelman had been a student of the leading logicians at the center of the empiricist positivist

6 G. Vannier, Argumentation et droit: Introduction à la nouvelle rhétorique de Perelman (Paris, 2001); L. Gianformaggio, “La tolérance libérale dans la pensée de Chaim Perelman’, in G. Haarscher (ed.), Chaim Perelman et la pensée contemporaine (Brussels, 1993), 643-661.

7 C. Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays On Rhetoric and its Applications (Dordrecht, 1979), 8.

movement of the 1930s: Gottlob Frege, Kurt Godel, and Alfred Tarski. His 1938 dissertation focused on Frege's system of mathematical logic;® he contested Gódel's proof in a 1936 article that created some controversy? and he was Tarski's student for a year in Poland.!?

In the brutal aftermath of World War 1, prominent scientists and philosophers concluded that “cultures were incapable of the necessary reform and renewal because people were in effect enslaved by unscientific, metaphysical ways of thinking"! Logical empiricism identified mathematical logic and experience as the appropriate sources of reasoning, rejected metaphysical thinking, and endorsed the fact/value dichotomy.? Values were deemed “meaningless" because they lacked an anchor in reason or logic. While working from within the assumptions of logical positivism and empiricism (or in Uebel and Richard's terms, *neopositivism"), Perelman, beginning with his first article in 1931, sought to challenge the assumption that values were, by nature, meaningless and beyond the pale of reason.

Scholars of the trajectories of Perelman's thought often miss the diachronic consistency in his scholarship that targeted, from the beginning of his intellectual journey, a rapprochement between reason and values, rationality and the empirical world. Carlin Romano, in his positive review of Perelman's philosophy, writes that Perelman’s “early training and writings screamed ‘logical empiricist —another of those ‘we can't argue about values’ types influenced by A. J. Ayer and the Vienna Circle” Gross and Dearin, in the most complete survey of Perelman’s intellectual trajectories in English, Chaim Perelman, concur with Romano and observe,

8 Perelman wrote a brief PhD dissertation on Frege in Polish under the supervision of Tadeusz Kotarbinski, which was published as C. Perelman, “Metafizyka Fregego” [Frege's metaphysics], Kwartalnik Filozoficzny 14 (1937) 19-142. See J. Wolenski, “The reception of Frege in Poland”, History and Philosophy of Logic 251 (2004) 47.

9 See C. Perelman, “Lantinomie de M. Godel’, Bulletin de l'Académie royale de Belgique (Classe des sciences) 6 (1936) 730-736.

i0 J-P Schreiber, Chaim Perelman et double fidélité, undated manuscript (Brussels).

11 R. Creath, “Logical Empiricism” (2011), https:/ /plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/.

12 H. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

13 T. E. Uebel and A. W. Richardson, The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), 1.

14 C. Romano, “Rhetorically Speaking: Chaim Perelman Rediscovers Western Philosophy’, Village Voice, May 17,1983, 47.

[f]or the most part, Perelman’s writings at the end of the 1930s remained strongly anchored in the intellectual currents of that era: Cartesian rationalism, logical positivism, and empiricism. His analysis of several logical paradoxes and antinomies in law had shaken his faith in these doctrines, but his attachments to the orthodoxy of his age had not been completely severed.!5

Very few scholars seem to have read Perelman's pre-1947 scholarship, and it is clear, based on our translations and commentaries, that Romano is no exception. But even those scholars who have read this pre-1947 work, including Gross and Dearin, do not detect the effort to create a rapprochement between logical positivism and sociology in his scholarship of the 1930s.

We do not hear Perelman "screaming" in celebration of logical empiricism in our reading of the fourteen articles and doctoral dissertation that he wrote during the 1930s. The volume and tenor of his scholarly voice is in the main carefully modulated: he strongly endorses the value of reason and finds worth in logical empiricism, while interrogating the assumptions undergirding the doctrine and straining against the intellectual currents of his era in order to expand the range of reason to include values. The Université libre de Bruxelles has now archived Perelman's writings and notebooks, and our extensive review of the materials in the archives and a close reading of Perelman's articles published prior to 1947 suggest that Perelman's postwar turn to rhetoric was more of a progression than a conversion, despite how he and others portray his "rhetorical turn".

Perelman did not so much reject logical empiricism as broaden its reach; moreover, he remained loyal to the central premise of logical empiricism—the commitment to reason and logic. Our work may be seen as complementing that of such scholars as Guillaume Vannier and Laetitia Gianformaggio. Vannier identifies two phases in Perelman's response to positivism: the criticism of particular dimensions of logical positivism (tied to the Vienna Circle, and Grzegorczyk's irrational emotivism) prior to 1945, and the criticism of all forms of positivism tout court thereafter. Gianformaggio, on the other hand, identifies four phases in Perelman's philosophy—the pluralist (1933-1945), the emotivist (1946-1948), the dialectical (1948-1950), and the rhetorical (1950 forwards) (429-50). In contrast, we see, beginning with “De l'arbitraire”, a dominant diachronic pattern in Perelman's response to the problem of logical

15 A. G. Gross and R. D. Dearin, Chaim Perelman, SUNY Series, Rhetoric in the Modern Era (Albany, NY, 2003), 2.

positivism and rationality, which is distinguished by his effort to construct a link between reason and the social world.

Perelman's writings in the 1930s document his efforts both to understand and to critique the doctrines of his time. These early intellectual journeys allowed him to navigate between and among the major dominant schools of thought, beginning with his mentors Marcel Barzin, the mathematician, and Eugène Dupréel, the sociologist. His studies with the major Polish scholars of logic and his dissertation on the German mathematician Frege also allowed him to command the language of mathematics and the tools of logical positivism and empiricism.

Throughout this period, it is clear he remained true to the agenda he had outlined in his 1931 inaugural article, in which he argues for a logic of values, advancing that social groups could coexist in a spirit of tolerance, and that reason could, if properly defined and understood, inform human action. His criticism of logical positivism was never cast as a rejection of its commitment to reason; rather, he saw the logical positivists as unduly limiting reason to the realms of mathematics and geometry. The criticism was meant to justify the expansion of reason into the realms of values and action. "De l'arbitraire" constitutes the 1933 launch of Perelman's attempt to yoke reason to the social world, an effort that unfolds into a complete vision in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958 Traité.

At the time of publishing “De l'arbitraire”, Perelman had already published three articles: "Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs" [Outline of a Logistics of Values] (1931); “A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel" [On Dupréel's Philosophy] (1932); and a brief article "Le statut social de jugements de vérité" [The Social Status of Truth Judgments] (1933).16 In his 1931 article “Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs’, Perelman establishes his scholarly agenda, describes his quest for a logic of values, and establishes a research program targeting the fact/value dichotomy, which was accepted as an article of faith by many within the logical positivist movement." Two years later, Perelman follows this agenda with two articles. In the very brief "Statut social de jugements de vérité”, which he explicitly identifies in a note to “De l'arbitraire” as the latter's foundation, Perelman briefly outlines how the social adherence to

16 C. Perelman, “Esquisse d'une logistique des valeurs”, Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 3-4 (1931) 486-496; C. Perelman, “A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel”, Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles 3 (1932) 385—399; C. Perelman, “Le statut social des jugements de vérité”, Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie 1 (1933) 17-23.

17 Perelman's daughter notes rightly that her father outlines the blueprint of his subsequent scholarly career in this article. N. Perelman Mattis, “Personal Interview", by David Frank any particular value judgment functions as an underlying precondition for a judgment to be considered factual.!? In “De l'arbitraire”, he expands on this notion, elaborating a framework for a logic of values and offering a vocabulary for dissociating the fact/value paradigm that would later find its way into the architecture of the NRP.

One foundational anchor of Perelman’s effort to bring reason into contact with the social world can be found in the thinking and writings of his mentor, Eugène Dupréel. Dupréel (1879-1967) taught at ULB from 1906-1949 and advocated value pluralism. In a 1932 article on Dupréel’s philosophy, Perelman uses Dupréel’s theory of consolidation to discuss absolute versus relative values.? Although Perelman would later criticize Dupréel for failing not only to recognize the need for persuasion and argument but also to secure means for reasoning about values, he readily acknowledged that Dupréel had developed a powerful sociological theory of pluralism and the reasonable.?° Dupréel’s thought was an important presence not only in “De l'arbitraire”, but in twentieth-century European philosophy generally. The Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers summarizes Dupréel's philosophy by describing its four major principles:

(1) Values and concepts are defined by and “related to their contraries".

(2) Values are “multiple and in tension’.

(3) Philosophy offers reason to help mediate the tension between and among values.

(4) Modern societies sponsor value pluralism in which there is continuous “moral tension, conflict, debate, and accommodation. ...”

Unsurprisingly, Dupréel had little sympathy for political systems which propose

universally valid value systems.?! Perelman's “De l'arbitraire” reflects Dupréel's

significant influence. In a footnote to "De l'arbitraire" Perelman describes

Dupréel as having made an “indelible” imprint on him; he also declares that

his ideas were tightly “interwoven” with Dupréel's philosophy.

While Perelman acknowledges both of his mentors in "De l'arbitraire" (Barzin would serve as Perelman's dissertation advisor; see also Perelman's 1961 tribute to Barzin??), in this article he celebrates Dupréel, citing from Dupréel's De la nécessité [On Necessity] (1928), "Convention et Raison" [Agreement

18 Perelman, “Le statut social des jugements de vérité”.

19 Perelman, ‘À propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel" 391.

20 See Perelman, “L'originalité de la pensée d'Eugéne Dupréel" 70.

21 S.C. Brown, D. Collinson, and R. Wilkinson, Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, Routledge reference, (London, 1996), 206.

22 C. Perelman, “Le philosophe Marcel Barzin”, Le Flambeau 3-4 (1961) 171-176.

and Reason] (1925), Traité de morale [Treatise on Morality] (1932), and Le Renoncement [Renunciation] (1929-1930), as well as Dupréel’s unpublished course on metaphysics, for which as a student he had taken careful notes.” In “De l'arbitraire”, Perelman engages directly with Dupréel's thinking on values and pluralism, which he adopts and transforms. Perelman explicitly quotes in “De l'arbitraire” from Dupréel's “Convention et raison" (“In order to debate, we must be in agreement about something"). He also observes in a footnote to this article that the "idea of reality [as developed in the article] as a social construction comes from Dupréel's unpublished 'Course on Metaphysics." His ideas on the psychological nature of necessity, Perelman points out, derive from Dupréel’s De la nécessité.

Careful attention to Perelman's language also reveals important implicit allusions to Dupréel. His description of how adopting one particular metaphysic’s definition in the search of a definition of reality would limit the generality—the généralité nécessaire—of the definition originally sought, for example, acknowledges the influence of Dupréel’s De la nécessité. Perelman will later state in his 1968 article “À propos d'Eugène Dupréel" that he had developed his notion of the accord des esprits—the meeting of minds—from Dupréel.?^ Perelman draws from Dupréel's thought in order to position the human community, rather than an abstract conceptualization of reason and logic, as the foundation of judgment. Unlike those within the logical positivist movement who sought to reduce knowledge to mathematical and deductive principles, placing questions of ontology and epistemology outside the reach of the human audience, Perelman asserts in "De l'arbitraire" that “an object exists only through the agreement of several people and through the possibility of such an agreement".

Perelman's elaboration of Dupréel's thought in "De l'arbitraire" functions as a common thread underlying the major topics Perelman introduces here: the interrogation of what comes to be known as the fact/value dichotomy; the development of a nonformal expression of reason; the use of dissociation; and the implications of these for social tolerance. And yet these topics are not mere embellishments of Dupréel's thought. Perelman will later criticize Dupréel for simply settling for the conclusion that values are multiple without setting forth a means to deal with value disagreement, despite his

23 E. Dupréel, De la nécessité (Bruxelles, 1928); E. Dupréel, "Convention et raison" Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 32. 3 (1925) 283-310; E. Dupréel, Traité de morale, 2 vols. (Brussels, 1932); E. Dupréel, "Le renoncement’, Archives de la Société Belge de Philosophie 2. 2 (1930) 1-36. See C. Perelman, “A propos de la philosophie de M. Dupréel" 390-391.

24 C. Perelman, “A propos d'Eugène Dupréel’, 236.

many discussions of persuasion, common sense, a meeting of minds, and the reasonable.”° To prepare the reader for the translation that follows this commentary, we highlight four themes developed in "De l'arbitraire":

1 The Interrogation and Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy

Perelman uses “De l'arbitraire" to question what is best known as the fact/value dichotomy. Hilary Putnam, in the definitive book on the subject, writes that "the fact/value dichotomy ('is' versus ‘ought’) and the analytic/synthetic dichotomy (‘matters of fact’ versus ‘relations of ideas’), was foundational for classical empiricism as well as for its twentieth-century heir, logical positivism"26 Putnam's book chronicles the history of this dichotomy, which he suggests “collapsed in the face of criticisms by Quine and others early in the second half of the twentieth century"? Quine offered his critique in 1951; Perelman, influenced by Dupréel, produced a dissociation (a creative and new pairing of values) of this pair in the early 1930s. However, it is important to note that in this early article, Perelman does not use the language of "fact/value", as readers of our translation will note. Although Perelman continues to maintain a careful distinction between the real and truth,?8 he will later engage explicitly with the lexicon of facts versus values as described by Putnam. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca devote significant attention in the Traité in sections 17, 18, 19 to the relationship between and among facts, values, and truth.

In “De l'arbitraire” Perelman puts into play three types of judgments: reality judgments, truth judgments, and value judgments. Perelman follows Dupréel and the sociological impulse (and even anticipates Dupréel's work on values) in order to define value judgments, but he quickly jettisons reality judgments for truth judgments as a means of defining them, declaring, “Judgments of reality could be considered as those that bear on reality, but what is reality? Every metaphysics will respond differently. ... Yet for us a broad agreement is essential”. He then asserts that truth judgments are a better means of defining value judgments—truth judgments are, he says, “easy ... to define"—but carefully points out that “truth judgments can ... be just as false as they are true, but

25 C. Perelman, “L'originalité de la pensée d'Eugène Dupréel (à l'occasion du centenaire de sa naissance)", Bulletins de l'Académie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique 65.3-4 (1979) 70-71.

26 Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy 9.

27 Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy 61.

28 See, for example, C. Perelman, “La méthode dialectique et le rôle de l'interlocuteur dans le dialogue", Revue de métaphysique et de morale 60.1 (1955) 28.

it is necessary that they be demonstrated as such”. In fact, we might say that Perelman ties truth (and truth judgments) to their verification, which is core to this article, and which will lead to Perelman’s concern with the justification of value judgments.

To understand Perelman’s use of truth judgments and reality judgments, and his oscillation from the latter to the former, we must recall the intellectual context in which he is writing and to which he responds in “De l'arbitraire”. His definition of “reality judgment” derives from the Dupréelian sociological context (itself originating in Durkheim) in which this work originates; however, with “truth judgment’, Perelman explicitly addresses logicians and philosophers. That is, unlike Dupréel, Perelman here addresses philosophers rather than sociologists;?9 his use of examples from the hard sciences (chemistry) and his insistence on verification move the subject of this article away from sociology into the field of analytical philosophy.

Our translation here maintains Perelman's original formulation, distinguishing these three types of judgment as a means of insisting on the important nuances of his thought. Our decision to preserve the specific characteristics of Perelman's types of judgment also drives our endeavor to sustain the distinctions he makes among different kinds of facts in our translation that follows. Perelman separates sense-data—the immediate objects of the senses, of sensory awareness as described by William James and later refined by Bertrand Russell—from facts by using the synonymous terms le donné and les données in opposition to faits [facts], which are tied to the construction of truth and, by extension, to truth judgments.?? This distinction is important to maintain, for Perelman also characterizes in this 1933 article sense-data as confused notions, which he later develops as an explicit alternative to Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas" developed in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's "Use and Abuse of Confused Notions"?! The idea of a confused notion will serve as the foundation for Perelman's first book on justice.?? Furthermore, Perelman will later describe agreements [accords], which form premises available to the orator, as données upon which future arguments will be based, and thereby highlight that adherence is the aim of argumentation.??

29 C. W. Tindale, “Ways of Being Reasonable: Perelman and the Philosophers’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 43. 4 (2010) 337-361.

30 See William James's 1897 "The Sentiment of Rationality’, originally published in Mind, and reprinted in A. Castell (ed.), Essays on Pragmatism (New York, 1948), 3-36; B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford, 1912).

31 C. Perelman, "The Use and Abuse of Confused Notions”, Et Cetera 36 (1979) 313-24.

32 C. Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (New York, 1963).

33 Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traité $15-43.

THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE NEW RHETORIC PROJECT 29 2 The Emergence of a Nonformal Expression of Reason

In “De l'arbitraire”, we also see Perelman’s initial efforts to challenge the restrictions placed on reason by formal logic. From the beginning of his intellectual explorations, Perelman sought to expand the range of reason. He would write in 1979 that “the claim has even been made that all nonformal reasoning, to the extent that it cannot be formalized, no longer belongs to logic. This conception of reason leads to a genuine impoverishment of logic as well as to a narrow conception of reason"?^ In “De l'arbitraire”, we see this broadening of logic not only as a general theme but also in Perelman’s rather idiosyncratic use of such positivist terms as expérience and expérimenter. Here, these terms fall between their usual meanings, so that they mean, respectively, both “experiment” and “experience’, and “to conduct an experiment” and “to experience”. In our translation, we try to capture the fluidity of Perelman's thought by not choosing one meaning over the other, but by using that which best fits the specific context; “De l'arbitraire” is, after all, Perelman’s initial effort to argue for a more nuanced and supple definition of reason that is tied to the human experience of values and the search for how to reason about them.

Perelman’s early critique of Descartes and of Kant in this article serves as a springboard to reflections on the arbitrary, which he distinguishes from necessity. “To posit universality is to assert its necessity”, Perelman writes. “Yet Kant, as well as Descartes, cannot posit it except by means of an arbitrary judgment”. In contrast to Descartes and Kant, he contends that logic and reason cannot be absolute, as they must begin somewhere or fall prey to the problem of infinite regress. Quoting Dupréel, Perelman writes, “All truth presupposes the arbitrary. In order to debate or to seek agreement on truth judgments, something arbitrary must have been accepted beforehand”. Perelman not only points out the role of the arbitrary in determining truths and knowledge, but also asserts that the method of verification or the rules used to assess facts or values result from an arbitrary choice. Furthermore, he signals that the arbitrary and the necessary—in the guise of a relative necessity rather than an absolute necessity—are both operative in agreement.

Perelman dissociates the concept of necessity in “De l'arbitraire”, suggesting that the arbitrary differs from absolute necessity because the latter is immutable, beyond the reach of time and debate. Truth may depend on certain rules that are logically arbitrary, he argues, but these are not necessary, and we are therefore not required to accept them. Perelman hints in this article at the “regressive philosophy” he will later develop in opposition to the First Philosophy of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks (which held to timeless truths),

34 Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities, vii.

which is the focus of his 1949 article “Philosophies premières et philosophie régressive"35 A regressive philosophy assumes some arbitrary points in any philosophy, but it continues to test these points through a rational dialogue that uncovers and interrogates the underlying claims that serve as justification for them.

There are three additional descriptions and modifications of formal logic offered in this 1933 article that become significant in the NR»: deduction, induction, and analogy. Perelman begins by confronting deduction as formal logic's preferred means of verification, pointing out that deduction is not simply arbitrary but also sterile as it prevents the development of reasoning. He then posits induction and analogy as more fruitful means of verification. Concerning induction, Perelman writes in “De l'arbitraire", “Fundamentally, it constitutes the most fruitful aspect of every syllogism [...] it is the basis of a syllogism's fecundity" Here, Perelman identifies the crucial role played by experience in syllogistic reasoning, which then has the capacity to challenge the major premise making up a deduction. It is through induction that a minor premise creates a major premise in a syllogism.