Such reflection has genuine practical significance in yielding explicit rules governing discursive communication (such as rules of argumentation), which in turn can be used for the purpose of designing and reforming deliberative and discursive institutions (Habermas 1996, 230).
As a body of discursive theory, rhetoric has traditionally offered rules that are merely articulations of contemporary attitudes toward certain kinds of prose and has tended to be identified with orations in which the specific intent to persuade is most obvious.
The important issue regarding aggregation is the "discursive dilemma": results are false, under the majority rule, whereas the same rule makes the process true and the premises true.
Such an addition of a Christian text to a discursive series was always governed by the shared "rules" of coherence of the series itself.
Synchronic emergence involves the addition of texts to a discursive series in such a way that the "rules" of the series are instantiated without significant alteration.
Meanwhile, Michel Foucault 1963, 1966, 1969, 1975), working in a French tradition, was positing the existence of "discursive formations" or epistemes, sets of deep-structural cultural rules that define the limits of discourse during a period.
The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
Third, the "collective positions" or "deliberative outputs" should satisfy certain rules for consistency, so that encountering a discursive dilemma or other constellations that indicate a lack of consistency can be avoided.
The basic justification of local democratic institutions, according to these models, is that they institutionalise a fundamental normative principle common to all discursive, participated interactions, which makes a search necessary for wider, more shared consensus compared with that deriving from the application of majority rule by elected representatives.
