Contract of veridiction: operations and pathways

Abstract

The starting point of this article is the contract of veridiction, proposed by Greimas. The enunciator of the discourse chooses a verdictory regime and a way of making it seem true, in order to make his enunciatee believe. The enunciatee, who has a fundamental role in this contract, interprets the message and believes it or not. The objective is to show that these contracts go through operations and establish different verdictory pathways. The operations of assertion, negation and implication determine four paths between the metaterms of the veridictory square - truth, falsehood, lie and secret: 1) falsehood → lie → truth; 2) truth → secret → falsehood; 3) falsehood → secret →truth; 4) truth → lie → falsehood. These paths characterize differentcontracts of veridiction and different types of discourses: the path 1 is that offake news; the 2, that of false revisions of history and science and alsoconspiratorial discourses; the 3, that of humorous and poetic discourses, ingeneral; the 4, that of the “founding” poetic discourses. In Brazil, the first twopaths, in which appearance selects the essence by implication, are widely used inthe discourses of the extreme right; the paths 3 and 4, in which the essenceselects appearance, characterize those on the left.