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How to Control the Truth The tendency to accord autonomy to a field of study and to the various domains within this field is particularly strong in structural linguistics, both classical and generative, as well as in analytical philosophy. It is true that this perspective is fruitful with regard to the operational idealizations that it permits ; but too often it imposes an arbitrary and narrow conceptual framework, which, even when it furnishes a formal simulation of the phenomena in question, does not allow one to discover the real principles of their organization. A important domain where the methods associated with this approach are clearly in evidence is that of «speech acts». The philosophers provide a taxonomy of these acts based on their «conditions de félicité» without seriously concerning themselves with their social context and without accounting for the grammatical properties displayed in the performance of the acts. Certain linguists, for their part, attempt to tackle these problems using tools borrowed from the study of syntax : transformational rules and underlying abstract representations. In this article we show that the principles involved here are in fact not linguistic or logical in the strict sense, but bear rather on the nature of symbolic acts and of social rituals in general. Two of the principles governing rituals and their modifications, incorporation and reduction, interact in a regular fashion with linguistic usage, producing the gamut of «explicit performative» expressions. At the same time, they account directly for the superficially paradoxical characteristics of these expressions : grammatical form, truth conditions, non-performativity (as in the case of threats and insults, etc.), and the phenomena of self-reference and auto-verification. In order to understand the great variation in illocutionary force displayed by a single linguistic expression, we must abandon the idea (which is implicit in the theory of models) of descriptive truth values conceived as applying to a static world. To the contrary, the truth values of propositions which are linked to speech acts (whatever types of acts these may be) are social-ly controlled and relativized in the rituals themselves. Thus, one does not encounter propositions existing independently of the illocutionary forces that, supposedly, are arbitrarily superimposed upon them. In other words, the meaning of expressions does not change, but their social function differs by virtue of the interaction of this meaning with the principles governing the ritual. The interpretation of a statement is thus determined simultaneously by its explicit linguistic characteristics and by highly structured social conventions applicable to the situation in which the statement appears. It is precisely these conventions that are usually relegated to a fuzzy and capricious «pragmatic» realm ruled by «common sense» and «obviousness». In this regard, we examine several texts written by Jesuists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which deal with promises, lies, and perjury. These texts are remarkable inasmuch as they scrupulously respect the narrowly «linguistic» laws of meaning while at the same time attacking the most common «pragmatic» principles of interpretation. Paradoxically, the attack launched against these principles brings to light the complexities and exigences of their organization, supporting our central thesis of the control and relativization of truth in linguistic pratice.

The Power of Narrative and Power Narrated. The text studied by this article is a document, published in 1735 in the Oeuvres diverses by Pellisson-Fontanier, written around 1670 and addressed to Colbert and indirectly to Louis XIV. The analysis attempts to demonstrate : 1) the way in which, by defining, in accordance with a stereotyped method current at the time, the manner of relating history, the author determines a new object, the history of the king, the description of absolu te power ; 2) the way in which, in order to be in a position to write this description, the author must assume a position in his discourse that is fictitiously identical to that of the political power of the king ; 3) the way in which, in order to achieve this position, the official position of king's historiographer, the author must reveal to the king and to the executive power he embodies, the very power which the description (which he will write) exerts on the contemporary reader and on future readers. In this way, writing the history of royal power means, in effective terms, giving that power the means necessary for it to be exerted absolutely by representing for him the reciprocal relationship between the power of the historian-narrator and that of the historical agent. The simulated manipulation of the reader by the narrative strategies that Pellisson illustrated is a way of manipulating in turn the political power and of catching it out by the lure of a narrative (still to be written) in which this power recognizes its own reflection because it achieves its desire for omnipotence. The analysis of the text, by listing its tactical discursive methods, may in that case, enable one to bring to light the self-image which an absolutist and totalitarian power forms of itself in its history, through the rules and norms of its description as formulated by the historiographer. Particular stress is laid on the function, concealed in historical narrative, of the eulogy, which simultaneously stands in for political discourse and proves to be the single most important political act of this narrative, or on that, equally political, of certain figures of speech such as litotes, amplification, paradoxicality or hypotyposis all of which suppose a certain concept of the writing and the reading of history.

Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Founder of Science as a Multi-national Corporation. In this article, the author examines the social factors which determined the career of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, by attempting to determine the factors of discontinuity and those of continuity beyond discontinuity. Firstly, he analyses the youth of P.F. Lazarsfeld, in relation to the socialist and Jewish milieux of Vienna. He then proceeds to examine differential reactions to the problem of emigration, basing his study particularly on a comparison of the opposing attitudes of Adorno and P.F. Lazarsfeld. He then analyses the specific abilities which have enabled P.F. Lazarsfeld to father a new form of intellectual enterprise, relying on a rational division of labour and an almost industrial organization of intellectual output, this latter being achieved by means of a positivist methodology which enables him to segment and mechanize the various operations of the intellect. To conclude, he examines the strategies by which P.F. Lazarsfeld, supported by the policy of cultural missions, has contributed to the exportation, on the scale of Eastern and Western Europe, of American empiricist sociology, while at the same time promoting a model of the relationships between social research and economic and political agents as elaborated in the United States during the nineteen twenties and thirties, via a strategy of capturing new intellectual markets at the very time when strategies of modernisation and ideological reconquest where taking place in Europe.

Illegitimate Children The interview presented here constitutes the first part of the long account in which Zahoua, an Algerian University student in her third year, recalls, both for herself and for the reader, the life of her family since its emigration to France in 1954. The interview is prefaced by a brief summary of the circumstances surrounding her family's emigration, and of the social characteristics peculiar to each member of the family, which serve to define the station assigned to them in the family structure as well as the prospects opened up for them by emigration. In the next issue, we will publish the conclusion of this account and attempt to isolate its most significant implications.