ABSTRACT
Strategic maneuvering has three aspects, which affect each other mutually: selection from the topical potential, adaptation to audience demand, and exploiting presentational devices. This strategic combination of aiming for effectiveness and maintaining reasonableness is characteristic of all argumentative moves that are made in argumentative discourse. In principle, the joint pursuit of the dialectical and the rhetorical aims will manifest itself in all three aspects of strategic maneuvering. All derailments of strategic maneuvering by which the process of resolving a difference of opinion on the merits is obstructed or hindered are fallacies and all these fallacies manifest themselves in argumentative discourse as derailments of strategic maneuvering. Since fallacies are argumentative moves that are potentially treacherous because their fallacious character may not be immediately clear to all arguers, the detection of fallacies and the search for an explanation of their potential persuasiveness are of vital importance.
