The New Rhetoric’s main objective is to conceptualize and explore the
verbal co-construction of the “reasonable”. A full realization of this project calls for an
analysis on the ground, thus analyzing actual exchanges in their specific setting. This
paper shows to what extent such an approach is in harmony with Perelman’s overall
enterprise, why he himself, as a philosopher, did not care to engage in case studies,
and how verbal argumentation can be accounted for by contemporary linguistic
investigation, and more specifically by (French) Discourse Analysis