“DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAF”:

SCIENCE AS A SHIELD

Abstract

Based on French discourse analysis, with this essay, I aim to analyze the speeches of Caroline de Toni, federal deputy for the Liberal Party of Santa Catarina, and José Geraldo de Souza, senior professor and researcher at the University of Brasília (UnB), at the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI in Portuguese) on the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST in Portuguese), which took place in 2023. I intend to verify the discrepancy and cleavage between them and examine what constitutes the functioning of each one. Finally, I focus on what motivates their appeal to science since it appears overdetermined by an effect of protecting ideological affiliations, which means that, sometimes, when removed from its purely demonstrative terrain, science is used to defend points of view.