Exploring possible future worlds with the practice of design fiction

Conspiracy speakers’ criticality: too little or too much? A Rhetorical Reflexion on Conspiracy Theories

If the well-studied phenomenon of conspiracy theories still catches our attention, it is among other reasons because it crystallizes many aspects of our society. For example, our relationship with the media, the notion of transparency, the phenomenon of fake news, but also our ability to live together and make society. In this post, we will focus on the relationship that conspiracy speakers build within their discourses with the notion of “truth” as a value. Our hypothesis is that conspiracy speakers are too confident about this notion; instead of being critical and doubtful about events – as they seem to appear at first – they are instead too sure of being right. In this perspective we will argue that within conspiracy discourses, truth as a value is paradoxically based mostly on the character of the speaker and not on the reasoning they expose.

Lucie Donckier de Donceel

Escorter le fact-checking

Indépendance, impartialité, transparence, émancipation, participation, explication : une série de paradigmes clés innerve les discours d’escorte des cellules de fact-checking. On entend mettre en lumière les récurrences figuratives, les positionnements énonciatifs et les partis-pris formels selon lesquels ces paradigmes apparaissent en discours. Notre postulat est que se dégagent de ce métadiscours de vérification, d’une part, l’expression d’une médiation revendiquée, professionnelle, correspondant à la promesse du dispositif, et d’autre part, une médiation réflexive prenant la forme d’un objectif implicite visant, par le discours sur le dispositif, la réaffirmation de ses propres codes. Ces deux premiers plans travailleraient à en opacifier un troisième, celui des médiations fondamentales, qui relèvent du traitement de l’information comme « opération sociale, technique et langagière » (Jeanneret).

Elise Schürgers