An Introduction to and Translation of Chaïm Perelman’s 1933 De l’arbitraire dans laconnaissance [On the Arbitrary in Knowledge]

Abstract

Chaïm Perelman declared, after he had earned fame for the New Rhetoric Project (NRP) and his 1958 collaboration with Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, that he had been a logical positivist before his turn to rhetoric in 1947. Between 1931and 1947 Perelman published a host of articles on questions raised by philosophers and intellectuals about the status of reason in the aftermath of World War I. His 1933 article on the role of the arbitrary in knowledge is his first comprehensive effort to explore these questions, which include the status of truth, facts, values, and the sociological nature of knowledge. We offer, in this manuscript, the first English translation of this article and couple it with a commentary and annotated footnotes designed to illuminate its meaning. Historians of rhetoric will be surprised by themes Perelman develops in this article as he displays lines of reasoning inconsistent with logical positivism. We identify seven themes in the article that emerge as prominent touchstones of the NRP, help form the foundational philosophy of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique, and remain relevant to contemporary rhetorical theory.