Is the Distinction Between “Cooperative” and “Strategic” Crucial for Jurisprudence and Argumentative Theory? Commentary on Goltzberg’s Cooperation in Legal Discourse

The basic points in S. Goltzberg’s account are the following: 1. (in general) to what extent legal discourses can be said “cooperative” 2. (in particular) if legal discourses are “cooperative” even when they conclude with seemingly absurd statements – and if not: are they non-cooperative in Andrei Marmor’s sense of “strategic”? (Marmor, 2008, 2014). In my view, all of these questions imply a set of further clarifications about (at least): the meaning of “absurd” when concerning a statement in a single communicative context, compared with its meanings in different communicative contexts; the philosophical substance (and practical usefulness) of Marmor’s distinction between “cooperative” and “strategic”, in the light of Grice’s principle of cooperation and his well-known Four Maxims (Grice, 1991); the peculiar kind of reasonableness involved in legal argumentation (recently: Van Eemeren, 2011).