Abstract

Strategic maneuvering in argumentative discourse consists in reconciling two simultaneous tendencies: aiming for effectiveness and maintaining reasonableness. Analytically, three aspects can be distinguished in every strategic maneuver: making a selection from the available “topical potential,” adapting to “audience demand,” and exploiting “presentational devices.” The communicative activity types in which argumentative discourse takes place determine the institutional preconditions for strategic maneuvering. Next to general (context‐invariant) soundness criteria there are also specific (context‐dependent) soundness criteria for strategic maneuvering, which may vary to some extent according to the communicative activity type. This explains why derailments of strategic maneuvering resulting in fallacies may more easily go unnoticed when they occur in communicative activity types not really familiar to the evaluator.

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