Situação Estásica E Ethos Coletivo: Múltiplas Faces Do Papel Argumentativo Do Terceiro Em Deliberações Do Stf

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze argumentation in trial sessions of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the highest court of the Brazilian Judiciary System, composed of eleven ministers who make decisions in a collegiate manner. This is an extremely intriguing environment for the argumentation field due to the fact that it constitutes, in itself, an ambience prone to debate, enabling the occurrence of conflicting episodes between judges. In this scenario, the notion of image (ethos and face) also gains prominence, given the social relevance of the referred court. From this research context, we were guided by the following motivating question: “Does the role of the President of the STF result in a stasis control mechanism that preserves the collective ethos of the Supreme Court ministers?”. In order to answer this investigative question, we based on Plantin's Dialogic Model of Argumentation/MDA (2008, 2018), mobilizing concepts such as stasis (conflict), argumentative question and actantial roles of the Proponent (the one who proposes something), the Opponent (the one who opposes) and the Third Party (the one who sustains the doubt). We delve especially deeply into the figure of the Third Party, going beyond the MDA, using perceptions from other authors on the topic, such as those of Charaudeau (2004) and Damasceno-Morais (2022), in which stands out the concept of the Third mediator, the one responsible for assisting the parties to resolve a conflict. Likewise, we worked on the notion of image based on the concepts of ethos and face. The ethos, originally formulated by Aristotle in Rhetoric, reinforced in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric (2005), and currently explored in other fields such as discourse and enunciation, consists of the discursive character constructed before an audience, in which stands out specifically the notion of collective ethos (Charaudeau, 2008, Maingueneau, 2020), that is here used to designate the image of ministers as a whole in front of their audience, which is Brazilian society. The face, in turn, was initially explored by Goffman (1967) and, later, by Brown and Levinson (1987) in their politeness model – which was more recently complemented by Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2006) –, consisting of the constructed image in an interaction. In order to constitute the corpus, we selected five trial sessions from the recording collection available on the STF's official You Tube channel, from which we cut and transcribed excerpts containing conflicting situations between judges, with the main objective of analyzing the role of the President of the STF. As a result, we found, in a first moment of analysis, that the figure of the President acts as a Third mediator, in which we found the subtypes Third neutralizer, Third appeaser, Third refuter, Third imposing and Third imposing-justificative. In a second moment, we verified that, through mediation, the President sought the cessation of the atypical stasic situation – which deviates from what is expected of the rite as it is centered on an intervening issue unrelated to the trial, that culminates in an environment of face attacks unfavorable to the collective ethos –, aiming, therefore, to return to the typical stasic situation, which consists of an environment of face respect favorable to the collective ethos of the Supreme Court ministers. Therefore, we conclude that, in the analyzed situations, the role of the President of the STF results in a stasis control mechanism aiming to preserve the ethos.