The New York Sophist

Welcome to the new blog site! I thought a change was in order after not posting for so long. 

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role and place of debate in my life. As I am assessing this, I take a lot of notes. I make a lot of lists. I think about the books that debate drew into my life, and the types of texts that debate pushes out of your life. 

Mostly what I have been considering is what I no longer find enjoyable about debate. But the more I think about it, these are things that might not be debate at all. 

If you were to make a list of all the things you wish debate would dispense with in order to improve, what would it look like? You should try it. I do it often. 

Now examine that list, and ask the basic philosophical question – which of these are necessary to debate? 

My guess will be that very few would be related necessarily to having a valuable, engaging, challenging debate. I would assume that many of the things you listed are accidental properties of debating. 

Now shift the question: How many of the practices on your list are necessary to having tournaments? I bet most of them. Most of the things we assume are debate practices are actually debate-in-tournament-setting practices. 

The next step is to try to imagine debate without tournaments. What remains? If you strip away all the tournament practices that you find distasteful, what can you have? What do you have? 

This system of questioning works well on a lot of things. I first encountered it when I was studying the works of Herbert Marcuse. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse argues that a key restriction on thought perpetuated by modern society is the loss of the ability among people to distinguish between the “ought” and the “is.” The inability to make normative claims is one thing – it takes practice. But not seeing the necessity to make them, i.e. seeing the world as set and non-fungible – is something very different. It is to the benefit of an ideology of practices that the realm where normative statements can be offered disappears.

This is where we are with debate. It seems that we have great difficulty imagining debate without tournaments. Which means that the ideology of the tournament has pasted itself onto our idea of debating. Perhaps this is why so many debaters have trouble appreciating debates that occur in public spaces. Public debates, hosted by many clubs worldwide, often engender the rhetoric among team participants or observers: “Well, if this had been a real debate. . .”

Real debate? Or real tournament debate? The elimination of conceptions of debate practice outside of a tournament model eliminates the difference. 

We don’t have the luxury of something like baseball here, where “real” baseball follows from a set of rules that are maintained by a professional league. We don’t even have the small comfort of something like mock trial or legal mooting competitions where connection to the law itself maintains some semblance of “real” practice that is not just the norms and ideology of the competition. 

What does debate have? 

We seem to have the reasonable person standard, which has transformed itself into the average reasonable voter standard, which is slowly and silently becoming the average reasonable debater standard – that is, instead of a public or simulated public evaluating our debates, it’s a simulated private. Without some external check, the norms of debating become synonymous with the norms of tournament debating. 

Connection to something other than what works at a tournament is essential to allowing debate space to change to benefit the practitioners. To allow the tournament to transpose itself onto debate is to eliminate a number of possibilities for engaging, challenging, and interesting debate practices to emerge. 

It fell out from the back of the book I was flipping through, looking for a quote for a piece I am writing about conceptualizing debate as a spiritual practice.

Upon seeing this paper, in a book on koans, of all things, made me realize that debating, for me, has always invoked a certain rhetoric of connection.

In the Buddhist traditions, statements such as “here is there, there is here” are so frequent to be commonplace. The rhetoric of such utterances is meant to de-center the comfortable position of subject vs. object when relating to the world. Instead of critiquing that position, or offering an alternative, Buddhism’s rhetoric attempts to provide a comfort with the dis-comfortable notion that such dichotomies are both constructed and real, both something that we have made and something that exists out there that we must take into our accounting. This reformation of the relationship of things to self is hardly a reformation at all in one sense. The koan acts to disrupt the belief that these relationships are not constructs simply because they are constructs. It’s moving around the items on your desk precisely to place them all back where they just were, but you know that they can be arranged.

Debate functions this way, and I’ve written some about the relationship of the koan to debating. But thinking of the entire process of debating as a pedagogical practice stretches the limits beyond just the act of debating. It stretches them to include the travel, the people, and the milling about as a part of the practice of debating. The people on this list, and me, have been moved around by debating. Are we where we were as subjects? Perhaps so, perhaps we are a little different. But the point is that we have been moved in a way that allows the chance to recognize the potential for the movement of that we consider subject and that we consider object in the world.

Does debate fundamentally change people? This seems to be something that we agree on and share narratives about. But how does it change them? The traditional explanations that it makes people critical thinkers, better lawyers, or the like become less persuasive when we try to identify the elements of debate practice that link up with critical thinking as defined by most CT scholars. When we try to find things analogous to law school or the practice of law, we find more differences and gaps present between debating and practicing law. Perhaps the practice of debate itself, in all of its elements is a koan, designed to dissociate our conception of self vs. others, subject vs. object from reality and into a space of fungibility, a place where we realize most of these relationships are posited and convincing, that they are things we have invented that have the force of the real, in all of that immutable sense we associate with reality.

This receipt tucked into this book about koans serves as a koan for me. Who were these people? Where were we going? Where are we going? Who are we now? Without debate, things would be just as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. With debate, things would be as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. The practice of debating changes everything in exactly this way.

It fell out from the back of the book I was flipping through, looking for a quote for a piece I am writing about conceptualizing debate as a spiritual practice.

Upon seeing this paper, in a book on koans, of all things, made me realize that debating, for me, has always invoked a certain rhetoric of connection.

In the Buddhist traditions, statements such as “here is there, there is here” are so frequent to be commonplace. The rhetoric of such utterances is meant to de-center the comfortable position of subject vs. object when relating to the world. Instead of critiquing that position, or offering an alternative, Buddhism’s rhetoric attempts to provide a comfort with the dis-comfortable notion that such dichotomies are both constructed and real, both something that we have made and something that exists out there that we must take into our accounting. This reformation of the relationship of things to self is hardly a reformation at all in one sense. The koan acts to disrupt the belief that these relationships are not constructs simply because they are constructs. It’s moving around the items on your desk precisely to place them all back where they just were, but you know that they can be arranged.

Debate functions this way, and I’ve written some about the relationship of the koan to debating. But thinking of the entire process of debating as a pedagogical practice stretches the limits beyond just the act of debating. It stretches them to include the travel, the people, and the milling about as a part of the practice of debating. The people on this list, and me, have been moved around by debating. Are we where we were as subjects? Perhaps so, perhaps we are a little different. But the point is that we have been moved in a way that allows the chance to recognize the potential for the movement of that we consider subject and that we consider object in the world.

Does debate fundamentally change people? This seems to be something that we agree on and share narratives about. But how does it change them? The traditional explanations that it makes people critical thinkers, better lawyers, or the like become less persuasive when we try to identify the elements of debate practice that link up with critical thinking as defined by most CT scholars. When we try to find things analogous to law school or the practice of law, we find more differences and gaps present between debating and practicing law. Perhaps the practice of debate itself, in all of its elements is a koan, designed to dissociate our conception of self vs. others, subject vs. object from reality and into a space of fungibility, a place where we realize most of these relationships are posited and convincing, that they are things we have invented that have the force of the real, in all of that immutable sense we associate with reality.

This receipt tucked into this book about koans serves as a koan for me. Who were these people? Where were we going? Where are we going? Who are we now? Without debate, things would be just as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. With debate, things would be as they are – it doesn’t have that huge an impact. The practice of debating changes everything in exactly this way.

Not everything is meant to be accessible to the public. The definition of “public intellectual” these days seems to be someone associated with a university who is a professional explainer. Someone who can reduce what research they are doing into terms that are immediately and unquestionably valuable to the general public.

This recent post about a podcast pairing comedians and academics shows the danger of limiting this definition of public intellectual. Here we have an interesting idea of smashing up two different ways of talking (and therefore knowing) about the world – comedians and scholars – in order to provide a result of understanding the scholar’s world to the audience. This heteroglossic experiment unfortunately has saddled itself with the burden of a filter – the host decides ahead of time what research is accessible to the audience, and it primarily seems to be hard science. The host is not meeting his or her own obligation of letting the dialogue craft the accessibility. It’s a trick, designed to get the sort of accessibility that he or she wants, even before the languages are allowed to combine, clash and blend.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that one speaks in a language that is permeated with other meanings from the contexts in which is it crafted – polysemy – led him to believe that novels were an amazing environment where you could pit different languages – that is, ways of speaking against one another. This would reveal how different we speak to one another for sure, but more importantly, it would result in some verbal mash-ups that might create new ways of speaking about, and therefore knowing, the social world of human beings. Humans speak differently to different people from different classes and different roles in society. This is what he means when he uses the term heteroglossia. The novel is where we become aware of these different discourses, and we become aware of our ignorance about how language works us over.

Why filter the podcast? Seems like the combination of a scholar and some comedians would work itself out, if Bakhtin is right (he has a few books that you can read if you want him to really prove his case). However, there’s a much more dangerous aspect to this podcast and the way it is set up – the podcast, under the guise of explanation, is an agent of the continuous flattening of explanation and knowledge that we face in our era: The reduction of everything to hard data.

If hard data is most accessible to people, it’s because they are comfortable with the idea of hard data, not necessarily the data. This comfort might not be warranted – any scientist will tell you that data needs a good heuristic in order to be meaningful. A bad heuristic can lead to some bad conclusions – and the heuristic is only as good as one’s knowledge about how the data was collected and in what capacity it is being measured.

The audience needs a dose of discomfort, if ethics mean anything here. That discomfort should come in the form of hearing a humanistic discourse about a contemporary problem, and watching the comedians attempt to address it using their own, inappropriate, language. The result could be a new way of understanding understanding, showing the audience that science and social science is but one way of addressing our problems. There are many ways to confront the questions we face, and some of the best lead to a deep sense of uncertainty. What better way to carefully introduce audiences comfortable with the pleasure of hard-data than through a comedic mash up with scholarly humanistic theories?

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca offer a check on the speaker, the rhetor, to ensure he or she is being ethical. They call it the Universal Audience. What it is is your imagination crafting the audience you wish to speak to, not the actual audience. You use this created audience as a check against anything you might say in order to avoid pandering to the actual audience – giving them what they want more than what they might need. The Universal Audience has the added side-effect of boosting the quality of actual audiences, providing them not only engaging material presented well, but a bit of a boost in quality, giving them something a bit more complex than they expected. We could think about this as a small puzzle, or a moment of confusion about something they might believe. This, over time, raises the quality of the audience. It also ensures that the person, or people addressing the audience hold themselves accountable for the meanings they are permeating through their rhetoric.

In this case, there’s no universal audience at play. We have pandering to the audience. And as anyone who speaks for a living – such as teachers – can tell you, what you expect your audience to be capable of is often what you get. You get it because you create it. And in this case, we are not going to get public intellectuals. We are going to get audiences comfortable that they know all about things that are probably best left uncertain, or out of reach.

Not everything is meant to be accessible to the public. The definition of “public intellectual” these days seems to be someone associated with a university who is a professional explainer. Someone who can reduce what research they are doing into terms that are immediately and unquestionably valuable to the general public.

This recent post about a podcast pairing comedians and academics shows the danger of limiting this definition of public intellectual. Here we have an interesting idea of smashing up two different ways of talking (and therefore knowing) about the world – comedians and scholars – in order to provide a result of understanding the scholar’s world to the audience. This heteroglossic experiment unfortunately has saddled itself with the burden of a filter – the host decides ahead of time what research is accessible to the audience, and it primarily seems to be hard science. The host is not meeting his or her own obligation of letting the dialogue craft the accessibility. It’s a trick, designed to get the sort of accessibility that he or she wants, even before the languages are allowed to combine, clash and blend.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea that one speaks in a language that is permeated with other meanings from the contexts in which is it crafted – polysemy – led him to believe that novels were an amazing environment where you could pit different languages – that is, ways of speaking against one another. This would reveal how different we speak to one another for sure, but more importantly, it would result in some verbal mash-ups that might create new ways of speaking about, and therefore knowing, the social world of human beings. Humans speak differently to different people from different classes and different roles in society. This is what he means when he uses the term heteroglossia. The novel is where we become aware of these different discourses, and we become aware of our ignorance about how language works us over.

Why filter the podcast? Seems like the combination of a scholar and some comedians would work itself out, if Bakhtin is right (he has a few books that you can read if you want him to really prove his case). However, there’s a much more dangerous aspect to this podcast and the way it is set up – the podcast, under the guise of explanation, is an agent of the continuous flattening of explanation and knowledge that we face in our era: The reduction of everything to hard data.

If hard data is most accessible to people, it’s because they are comfortable with the idea of hard data, not necessarily the data. This comfort might not be warranted – any scientist will tell you that data needs a good heuristic in order to be meaningful. A bad heuristic can lead to some bad conclusions – and the heuristic is only as good as one’s knowledge about how the data was collected and in what capacity it is being measured.

The audience needs a dose of discomfort, if ethics mean anything here. That discomfort should come in the form of hearing a humanistic discourse about a contemporary problem, and watching the comedians attempt to address it using their own, inappropriate, language. The result could be a new way of understanding understanding, showing the audience that science and social science is but one way of addressing our problems. There are many ways to confront the questions we face, and some of the best lead to a deep sense of uncertainty. What better way to carefully introduce audiences comfortable with the pleasure of hard-data than through a comedic mash up with scholarly humanistic theories?

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrects-Tyteca offer a check on the speaker, the rhetor, to ensure he or she is being ethical. They call it the Universal Audience. What it is is your imagination crafting the audience you wish to speak to, not the actual audience. You use this created audience as a check against anything you might say in order to avoid pandering to the actual audience – giving them what they want more than what they might need. The Universal Audience has the added side-effect of boosting the quality of actual audiences, providing them not only engaging material presented well, but a bit of a boost in quality, giving them something a bit more complex than they expected. We could think about this as a small puzzle, or a moment of confusion about something they might believe. This, over time, raises the quality of the audience. It also ensures that the person, or people addressing the audience hold themselves accountable for the meanings they are permeating through their rhetoric.

In this case, there’s no universal audience at play. We have pandering to the audience. And as anyone who speaks for a living – such as teachers – can tell you, what you expect your audience to be capable of is often what you get. You get it because you create it. And in this case, we are not going to get public intellectuals. We are going to get audiences comfortable that they know all about things that are probably best left uncertain, or out of reach.