Oswald, Steve 2011 This article addresses the relationship between understanding and believing from the cognitive perspective of information-processing. I promote, within the scope of the Critical Discourse Analysis agenda, the relevance of an account of belief-fixation sustained by a combination of argumentative and cognitive insights. To this end, I first argue that discursive strategies fulfilling legitimization purposes, such as evidentials (see Hart, this issue), tap into the same cognitive mechanisms as (both sound and fallacious) arguments. I then proceed to examine the idea that the most effective arguments are the ones that manage to obscure or make irrelevant counter-evidence and propose, from a cognitive pragmatic perspective, a formulation of rhetorical effectiveness as a constraint on information-selection taking place at the interpretation stage and decisively influencing the evaluation stage responsible for belief-fixation. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/323883 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/323883/files/2011-oswald-discoursestudies136.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1177/1461445611421360e info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/1461-4456 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Rights reserved Discourse Studies. - SAGE Publications. - 2011, vol. 13, no. 6, p. 806-814 Argumentation Beliefs Cognitive pragmatics Constraint Critical discourse analysis Fallacies Information-selection Interpretation Meaning info:eu-repo/classification/udc/81 From interpretation to consent: Arguments, beliefs and meaning http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501