VRAI VS VRAISEMBLABLE DANS LA PUBLICITE AUTOMOBILE CONTEMPORAINE
TRUE VS REASONABLE IN CONTEMPORARY AUTOMOTIVE ADVERTISING

Summary/Abstract: For the last several decades, advertising discourse stands out by a few psychological and social features, among them being the exploitation of inner, deep Ego, altogether with its most primal instincts and frustrations. This deep dive into the Ego and his identity troubles represents a great opportunity for advertisers to create compensatory, real-like dreams, offering solutions to solve the most intricate issues. In this paper, our main goal is to reveal a few rhetoric and argumentative techniques used by advertisers to create this fairy world of solved problems and fulfilled deepest dreams. More precisely, we try to show that even the concept of Real and Realism in terms of objective rationalism could become fallacious, an easy way to seduce the targeted audience. In order to achieve this main goal, we will use a conceptual apparatus coming from the Pragma-dialectical School, the argumentative theory and last, but not the most important, a few concepts derived from philosophy like the theory of possible worlds, empirics, or rationalism. Our efforts will concentrate on the various ways to turn argumentation from realistic, scientific, pure technical demonstration to pure seduction, in other terms from objective to subjective argumentation. As already said, one of our hypotheses would be what if rational demonstration could turn itself into a subjective-like argument, Real being decoded as Plausible. Our analysis will be made on a few advertising posters for automotive industry from the last decades.

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