Analyses by Ruth Amossy and Roselyne Koren. The role of emotions in policies of welcome or rejection. To harden or to soften ? Ethics of conviction, ethics of responsibility : Max Weber to the rescue of senior civil servants faced with action. The example of Angela Merkel in August 2015. Politics or morality : the false dilemma. The principle of reciprocity. Golden rule and iron rule.
1. What does rhetoric do to the immigration debate ? Answer : more harm than good.
2. When it comes to migration, can we set facts against rhetoric, the objective results of science against the rhetoric that agitates the public arena ? Answer : yes, under certain conditions.
3. Is rhetoric, as the science of discourse and the deciphering of rhetorical devices, purely descriptive, or can it fulfil a normative function and be linked to a system of values ? Answer : rhetoric cannot be dissociated from ethics, which are linked to scientific ethics.
Opposition between science and rhetoric. Public debate aims at verisimilitude rather than truth, persuasion rather than demonstration, assertion rather than affirmation. A classic vision, increasingly called into question (cf. the demonstrative value of DNA in police cases). In the field of demography, for example, demonstrations are subject to rhetorical uses, but it is precisely the role of the researcher to sort them out. Application examples.
