Seizing the Occasion: Parameters for Analysing Ways of Strategic Manoeuvring

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.