Abstract
People who are engaged in argumentative discourse are characteristically not only out to conclude their differences of opinion their way but also oriented towards reaching this conclusion in a reasonable way: they may be regarded committed to norms that are instrumental in maintaining critical standards for being reasonable and to expect others to comply with the same standards. This means in practice that, while being out for the optimal rhetorical result, they may at the same time be presumed to hold at every stage of the resolution process to the dialectical objective of the stage concerned.
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An arguer may, for instance, have decided to advance a negative standpoint in response to a positive standpoint, anticipating that his position is so strong that, in addition to challenging the positive standpoint, he can defend the contradictory standpoint. This way of manoeuvring would primarily amount to making an expedient choice of the ‘confrontational’ topical potential. And if an arguer has attempted to turn a difference of opinion into a non-difference when he is confronted with a standpoint that he does not want to discuss, this way of manoeuvring would in the first place be characterised as an ‘adaptation’ to the other party’s position. And if in the argumentation stage, to mention one last example, an arguer wants to avoid a commitment to an unexpressed premise in his argumentation and attempt to achieve this by presenting the argumentation as it stands as complete, the presentational aspect of the manoeuvring would spring most to the eye. The soundness conditions for the various ways of strategic manoeuvring might be related in a general way to the three aspects of strategic manoeuvring by stipulating that: (a) each move is chosen in such a way that it enables an analytically relevant continuation at the juncture concerned in the dialectical route that is taken and can lead to one of the outcomes of the discussion stage concerned, (b) each move is in such a way adapted to the other party that it responds to the preceding move in the dialectical route that is taken, and (c) each move is formulated in such a way that it can be interpreted as enabling a relevant continuation and being responsive to the preceding move.
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This observation applies unless it must be assumed that the antagonist will consider one of the premises (or both premises) as evident, so that mentioning it will frustrate rather than further the protagonist’s attempt at convincing, as is explained in classical rhetoric.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Agnès van Rees, Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Henrike Jansen, Erik Krabbe and Corina Andone for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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van Eemeren, F.H., Houtlosser, P. (2015). Seizing the Occasion: Parameters for Analysing Ways of Strategic Manoeuvring. In: Reasonableness and Effectiveness in Argumentative Discourse. Argumentation Library, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20955-5_22
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