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DOI 10.52172/2587-6945_2021_18_4_75

Abstract

The article deals with some issues of linguistic pragmatics that are not yet carefully elaborated in the scientific literature. The author touches on the problem of innate coherency of such fundamental regulatory principles of discursive communication as "rationalism" and "humanism". How indelibly contradictory is their interconnection? Is it necessary that a rationally well-organized, logically correct and pragmatically effective (due to its highly argumentative persuasiveness) type of discourse has inevitably to be flawed, inhumane and discriminatory in ethic and anthropologic aspects to the interests of its addressee, and the impeccable from a moral and humanistic point of view discourse has to be a logically loose, weakly convincing and ineffective for achieving the subjective goals of the speaker? Is a human mind by its own nature only an ethically neutral tool of achieving any, including openly egoistic, immoral and inhumane goals of the subject using it? Is it only an instrument of manipulative impact on the communication partner, or, due to some of its attributive logical features, this mind itself necessarily imposes sufficient and unrecoverable restrictions on the goals of its communicative use, at the same time turning a rationally organized and pragmatically effective way of building discursive communication into a non-discriminatory one for all its participants and, respectively, quite humane and ethically impeccable.

The analysis of the most common models of interpersonal discursive communication (tentatively named as «Ethical», «Metaphysical» and «Rational») leads the author of this article to the conclusion about the fundamental inescapable friendliness of its rationally organized model for human beings, about the low effectiveness of human Ratio as an instrument of immoral manipulative pressure on the social partner, and about its explicit capacity to be a reliable bulwark of existential human originality and dignity, an effective tool for protecting the inalienable rights and personal interests of the individual, who skillfully uses it.

Keywords

Humanism, rationality, argumentation, discourse, соmmunication.