The core function of argumentation in a democratic setting must be to constitute a modality for citizens to engage differences of opinion constructively – for the present but also in future exchanges. To enable this function requires acceptance of the basic conditions of public debate: that consensus is often an illusory goal which should be replaced by better mastery of living with dissent and compromise. Furthermore, it calls for an understanding of the complexity of real-life public debate which is an intermixture of claims of fact, definition, value, and policy, each of which calls for an awareness of the greater ‘debate environment’ of which particular deliberative exchanges are part. We introduce a rhetorical meta-norm as an evaluation criterion for public debate. In continuation of previous scholarship concerned with how to create room for differences of opinion and how to foster a sustainable debate culture, we work from a civically oriented conception of rhetoric. This conception is less instrumental and more concerned with the role of communication in public life and the maintenance of the democratic state. A rhetorical meta-norm of public argumentation is useful when evaluating public argumentation – not as the only norm, but integrated with specific norms from rhetoric, pragma-dialectics, and formal logic. We contextualise our claims through an example of authentic contemporary public argumentation: a debate over a biogas generator in rural Denmark.

民主环境中辩论的核心功能必须是为公民建设性地处理意见分歧提供一种模式——无论是在当前还是在未来的交流中。要实现这一功能，需要接受公共辩论的基本条件：共识往往是一个虚幻的目标，应该被更好地驾驭异议和妥协的生活所取代。此外，它要求理解现实生活中公共辩论的复杂性，这种辩论是事实、定义、价值和政策主张的混合体，每一项都要求对更大的“辩论环境”的认识，其中特定的审议交流是一部分。我们引入修辞元规范作为公共辩论的评估标准。延续之前的学术研究，关注如何为意见分歧创造空间以及如何培育可持续的辩论文化，我们从以公民为导向的修辞概念出发。这一概念的工具性较小，更关注传播在公共生活中的作用和民主国家的维护。公共论证的修辞元规范在评估公共论证时非常有用——不是唯一的规范，而是与修辞、语用辩证法和形式逻辑的具体规范相结合。我们通过一个真实的当代公共争论的例子来阐述我们的主张：关于丹麦农村沼气发电机的辩论。