‘There’s a liar here!’: eristic configurations of the televised debate between candidates for Brazil’s 2022 presidential election

Abstract

The 2022 presidential race in Brazil was marked by intense polarization. Based on this, this paper seeks to identify and describe the eristic strategies mobilized in the interactions of the Band's televised debate in the second round of the 2022 elections, more specifically ad hominem and ad personam arguments. This research falls within the fields of rhetoric and argumentation, focusing on authors Aristotle (2005), Schopenhauer (2009), Mateus (2018), and Amossy (2020). As a methodology, the paper is a bibliographic-documentary research of descriptive and explanatory nature. Finally, the results of the analysis indicate the frequent use, in this debate, of ad hominem and ad personam attacks, intending to discredit the opponent through different strategies, such as the use of data, the approach to reprehensible acts, the strategic management of reported speech, among other procedures, revealing a variety of different ways of carrying out the personal attack beyond what was postulated by Schopenhauer in his Treatise on Eristics (2009). In this way, a strongly adversarial and polarized interaction was exposed around pre-established convictions, these being the eristic elements that shaped the 2022 debates in general.