ABSTRACT
In order to capture the strategic aspect of argumentative moves that are crafted to address several issues at the same time, an argumentative exchange in which several issues are addressed can be reconstructed as a series of several “simultaneous discussions,” each of which is about one of the issues (Mohammed, 2011, 2013b). A discussion, here, is of course not to be understood in the actual sense of a real life exchange that takes place in a specifi c time and place. Rather, it is a dialectical analytic reconstruction of a discussion, defi ned in terms of a standpoint and the argumentation advanced in support of it. Two or more discussions that are reconstructed as simultaneous can happen in one and the same real-life exchange. Two or more discussions are considered simultaneous if there is at least one argument, or one argumentative move, that plays a role in more than one discussion, without any of the discussions being subordinate to the other. The reconstruction of one exchange as several simultaneous discussions is meant to capture the specifi c role that a particular argumentative move plays in the discussion of each of the issues addressed without missing the implications this has for the other issues.
