ABSTRACT Argumentation theory tends to treat the distinction between intentional and unintentional fallacies—sophisms and paralogisms—as unimportant for the evaluation of argumentation. The article author believes this is so because argumentation theory tends to be focused on the epistemic functions of argumentation and fallacious arguments pose the same threat to the production of epistemic goods whether they are intentional or not, so the distinction is not needed for the epistemic evaluation of argumentation. This article argues that argumentation has a special connection to respect for autonomy, one that enables it to also produce distinctly moral goods. Sophisms, but not paralogisms, spoil these goods. Worse—sophisms produce potentially continuing moral harms, while paralogisms do not. Therefore, the paralogism/sophism distinction should be reintegrated into argumentation theory’s evaluative toolbox.

ABSTRACT This introductory article discusses the state of the art in contemporary argumentation theory regarding the relationship between autonomy and argumentation. It introduces the contributions to the special section and discusses their relationship to each other and to the broader debate.

ABSTRACT One way in which we may be able to legitimately determine the norms that will guide our arguments is by using meta-dialogues. Unfortunately, situations where meta-dialogues are actually needed are also often situations of power inequality so that arguers may feel that it is too risky to attempt initiating a meta-dialogue. I argue that argumentative smothering is a high risk here, and that we therefore cannot rely on meta-dialogues to solve the problems of determining argumentative norms.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.