The New York Sophist

I’ve been doing some side-research this morning, which means I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing and instead poking around in an early stage of a research project that interests me quite a bit.

I found this terrible article in the Wall Street Journal which unfortunately is a pretty good representation of the “reading public’s” view of debate. Allow me to summarize what I think the assumptions are:

1. Debate is not essential, it is trivial.

2. Debate occurs last in the educational process, never first.

3. Debate obfuscates the truth.

4. Debate is only good if the truth is revealed as an effect of it.

5. Debate is emotional, semantic and sportified – it is the opposite of reason, rationality and cooperation.

I think that’s a pretty good, narrow list. It seems people, very much like Oppenheimer, believe debate and argumentation do not require any scholarly training or research to understand, that the effects and functions of it are obvious to anyone, and that there is a pure form of debate we have abandoned.

I think Alisdair McIntyre has a good scenario he establishes for morality, but I think the analogy to rhetoric and debate is clear as well. He asks us to imagine a world where a catastrophe leaves science in disarray, and a fascist political party imprisons and kills many scientists. Later, an enlightenment movement rises and tries to recover science:

 “But all they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiement; intruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred. Nontheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology.” (from After Virtue).

People talk about debate and argumentation in the present day without much (or any) critical, scholarly or intellectual appreciation for it at all – they talk about it with a minimal amount of support. At the same time they have to talk about it because they recognize we depend on it for so much. Just like science in McIntyre’s scenario, it is necessary to have it, but people don’t quite understand what they have.

Even worse: Arguing and debating seem so natural that most attempts to intellectuallize them look trival or silly. They are audience oriented events so shouldn’t they be atheoretical? Most people wouldn’t think twice about an article in a major magazine about debating that didn’t cite one argumentation or debate or even rhetoric scholar.

So with this situation at hand I am thinking of trying to write the missing manual for debating. My first steps have been historical in nature and I am having trouble locating resources for scholastic debate practices. Today (more evidence for my point) the term “scholastic” debate is attached to any debate contest that is sanctioned by a school or university. This is not the prior meaning, and I think a recovery of that (from medevil university examination practices) would be a good first step. My suspicion is that philosophy, combined with the rise of manuscript and then print culture made debate appear anachronistic and that these technologies could accomplish what debate could in a more efficient and superior manner. Of course this is not the case, and with the transition to “secondary orality” (Ong; Havelock) debate thinking is required again in a serious way. But people cannot remember how it was done. They have charred papers and equipment without instructions (fallacies would be one example).

In the end I think that some sort of geneology or perhaps tracing of debate practices along side the history of rhetoric and philosophy would shine a bit of light on our communicative anxieties of today – flame wars, trolls, and email scams among them.

A blurry photo of one of the classrooms I teach in

Not in a teleological sense, but otherwise.

This guy thinks that the University will be irrelevant in a few years. The only question I have after reading this article is where or what would the motivation be to create all of that great digital content if the University folded?

Clearly what he means is the buildings, campus, physical presence model will no longer be relevant, but then again perhaps I’m being too charitable?

The first is that students operate with different evidentiary and proof principles than most instructors. For them, most research is good and they have little desire (not ability as most instructors attribute it) to go into evidence standards and evaluation. The reason is quite simple. With the proliferation of information available to them, there is little reason to trust the old publishing house model of trust. They look instead for texts, arguments and documents that already support their view of the world, or the view they seek to represent in class. Traditional public speaking does not adequately account for easy access analysis from many voices. It treats the public speaker (rhetor) as a singular unidirectional source of information who then disseminates the collection to a waiting crowd (I always think of this model when I am feeding my goldfish).  The students, since they are plugged into the internet most hours of the day, don’t relish or have interest in this model of information as during the speech they could conceivably look information up and get a deeper read of the speaker’s thesis.

Secondly, the students are not interested in a unidirectional, domination model of communication. The students casually interrupt the speaker, pose questions, and the speaker often times abdicates the position of authority during the speech to hear voices from the audience. I found this appalling at first, but the students always rank these speeches highest in quality and most interesting. 

Finally, our students are, for the most part, very comfortable being in front of a large audience. They have facebook accounts, blogs, youtube channels, etc.  Many don’t mind the idea of millions of people watching a video of them doing something. They just think about the embodied audience as much more of a threat than that vague audience out there somewhere. I wonder exactly what incident in life we are preparing them for when we put them up in front of a group of their peers to talk about the creation of chewing gum, politics in Saudi Arabia or campus dining hall conspiracy theories. I think these moments will be less what they do and more what people have always imagined the public speaker doing.

So what’s the solution? I think that structuring the public speaking class like a debate/criticism class is the answer. The reason why is because this model is much more prescriptive in how to engage with other ideas and less descriptive (i.e. “The successful speaker does x, y and z before arriving at the venue.”) The pace of their daily lives could be understood as a sequence of mini-speeches and as James Crosswhite has argued, we are always a part of some audience all the time. So why localize and freeze the matter and experience of daily life into an odd eccentric model of communication?

I am going to be reworking my syllabus around these ideas and around the idea of advocacy instead of speaking. I’m not sure yet what that involves, but I forsee it being more localized, tethered and connected to the present moment than assignments that fall out of the sky.  I’m curious how the research component will change, and I’m most interested in how we can pedagogically account for and work in the very different proof and evidence standards that students have.