The New York Sophist

Me preparing my lecture for teaching mid-century NDT debate for class

I’m tagging all the posts about my emergency last-minute pick up argumentation class with the tag “pick up” so you can easily search for them if you want updates on how that’s going. This is one of them.

The only reasonable approach that I think you can take in teaching this form of debate is to root it in two large contexts. 1) The historical context of the American university after World War 2 and 2) the need to have other metrics than efficacy in order to talk about the value of argumentation.

The first one is a historical treatment of the impact the so-called “G.I. Bill” had on the American university system which was really only for elites up until the 1940s. This meant that universities were taking in a lot of veterans from very diverse places without expected educational backgrounds. The result was the formation of what we now call the core curriculum, a number of courses everyone has to take in math, science, writing, literature, and yes, speech. This also explains why speech departments and debate as they are in the U.S. have little to no correspondence with other countries. The development of NDT-style debating was a result of the rise of core courses in public speaking and argumentation. It was a flat, easy way to practice this idea of multi-positional reasoning and speaking.

The second one is an effect of the first: There needs to be a way to evaluate the quality of debates without relying on a speech actually persuading someone. There were already rumblings from philosophy and other places that this metric allowed for the association of effective arguments with “the good.” We know this isn’t always the case. The development of stock issues rules and evaluation of debates is a rubric that allows us to look at and evaluate the quality of a debate as the debate itself and not the persuasive effect.

So with those two starting points, I think we have a good frame on this type of debate for the students to use in class. We aren’t looking for the truth or for what’s right in the topic; we are looking for ways we can approach information within a controversy and expand the ways we can talk about disagreement. We can test all aspects of an argument to see if it holds up. And through this we whittle away at the various approaches until we are left with some that appear to be good approaches.

Their topic is that the U.S. should disarm the police. A good topic for sure, lots to research and learn about. On the first day I took over, a student asked if the affirmative could ban the police as a way of disarming the police. We wrote responses to this question, and through looking at a few of them and sharing them in class, it seems the students are inventing procedural arguments from the ground up. It’s much better to hear the long-form justification for their claims about what they are learning and why it matters to be able to talk about one set of ideas over another one. This seems like pretty good practice in argumentation.

On the days we aren’t having debates we will read different pieces of argumentation theory and discuss them. I already told the class the final will be one question: What is an argument? The answer should be a synthesis and discussion of a number of approaches to this question through the reading.

This was an absolute nightmare

This post originally appeared on my other older blog, sophist.nyc in 2019. I’m reposting some of my old stuff again here for archival purposes but also because I think some of it might still engender some interesting conversation. I will mark all the older reposted blogs from the past like this at the start of each post.

I’m tagging all the posts about my emergency last-minute pick up argumentation class with the tag “pick up” so you can easily search for them if you want updates on how that’s going. This is one of them.

The only reasonable approach that I think you can take in teaching this form of debate is to root it in two large contexts. 1) The historical context of the American university after World War 2 and 2) the need to have other metrics than efficacy in order to talk about the value of argumentation.

The first one is a historical treatment of the impact the so-called “G.I. Bill” had on the American university system which was really only for elites up until the 1940s. This meant that universities were taking in a lot of veterans from very diverse places without expected educational backgrounds. The result was the formation of what we now call the core curriculum, a number of courses everyone has to take in math, science, writing, literature, and yes, speech. This also explains why speech departments and debate as they are in the U.S. have little to no correspondence with other countries. The development of NDT-style debating was a result of the rise of core courses in public speaking and argumentation. It was a flat, easy way to practice this idea of multi-positional reasoning and speaking.

The second one is an effect of the first: There needs to be a way to evaluate the quality of debates without relying on a speech actually persuading someone. There were already rumblings from philosophy and other places that this metric allowed for the association of effective arguments with “the good.” We know this isn’t always the case. The development of stock issues rules and evaluation of debates is a rubric that allows us to look at and evaluate the quality of a debate as the debate itself and not the persuasive effect.

So with those two starting points, I think we have a good frame on this type of debate for the students to use in class. We aren’t looking for the truth or for what’s right in the topic; we are looking for ways we can approach information within a controversy and expand the ways we can talk about disagreement. We can test all aspects of an argument to see if it holds up. And through this we whittle away at the various approaches until we are left with some that appear to be good approaches.

Their topic is that the U.S. should disarm the police. A good topic for sure, lots to research and learn about. On the first day I took over, a student asked if the affirmative could ban the police as a way of disarming the police. We wrote responses to this question, and through looking at a few of them and sharing them in class, it seems the students are inventing procedural arguments from the ground up. It’s much better to hear the long-form justification for their claims about what they are learning and why it matters to be able to talk about one set of ideas over another one. This seems like pretty good practice in argumentation.

On the days we aren’t having debates we will read different pieces of argumentation theory and discuss them. I already told the class the final will be one question: What is an argument? The answer should be a synthesis and discussion of a number of approaches to this question through the reading.

I predict here in a short amount of time I’ll be posting some definitive news about a move happening in intercollegiate forensics and debate that will no-doubt signal the end of any sort of conflict between educationally-minded directors of debate and those who love prizes, trophies, and saying that they coached a team to win a tournament.

I don’t want to say too much, but the evidence is already everywhere that intercollegiate debate is not a place for inquiry, scholarship, or intellectual work. It’s a place for people to go to confirm their rightness, to speak at others, and win prizes.

There isn’t a role for the person who wants to teach critical thought. There is a role for the person who wants to craft a “hit” on an opposition case and then moan in frustration when the students don’t “run” their brilliant argument “right.” There’s no place for someone who wants humility and doubt to be values, but there is a place for those who believe strongly in the Truth, and that it is easily accessible from a cursory glance around the world, and even easier to communicate in 7 to 10 minutes.

Debate programs no longer have a place or space within academic departments, they should be in athletic departments, for they have as much relation to the curriculum as the basketball or football team. They teach a set of esoteric rules for esoteric acts, witnessed by few, understood by even less, and with the amount of impact and influence on the world you would expect from events taking place on a Sunday morning in a windowless classroom in a brutalist building on some state university campus.

Now is a vital time for debate directors, and those with license and interest to teach to reinvestigate debate’s place in the curriculum. This is not another call for a developmental conference; reading the one from Wake Forest University is as cringeworthy as it is repetitive (with the exception of William Keith’s paper, which, I might add, was written by someone outside the tournament-debate model). Debate is in no danger of dying or vanishing because it died a long time ago. Now there is a sport modeled off of human argumentation – kind of – that a small percentage of college students participate in and an even smaller number enjoy.

The abandonment of director positions and debate coach positions held by Ph.D.s who have an interest in scholarly activity continues to fade. Now might be a good time to revisit The Debate Authors Working Group principles and practices, published in 2010.

I was lucky enough to attend several of these sessions as a graduate student and even luckier to co-author on a paper with the group. I dare say I was a member, if only for a year or so. But the idea and the work has never left me. It was the creation of an endpoint of debating that most people don’t think about. Debate ends when you win or lose, most sportmongers think. Then come the excuses for poor performance. This model encapsulated all that as aiming toward research and publication. It gave debate a point outside of eristics, which I would argue dominates all conceptions of intercollegiate debate today.

It’s time to reconsider this fundamental essay as the purpose of intercollegiate debate, but also the purpose of any round. What is happening in this debate that is serving scholarly ends? What is happening in this speech, or these speeches, that is forwarding inquiry? What has happened in this debate that could lead to publication?

In revisiting this essay, I find too much attention placed on the idea that the humanities eschew collaborative research. I think that might be true, but the larger problem is that most debate practitioners believe they are participating in a final-form event. They do not believe in process or reiteration. They believe the debate round is the presentation of formed ideas, and the work on those ideas – the inquiry – happened somewhere else, at some prior point to the debate. The research was done, the speeches prepared, now this is the final project presentation – not a good model.

A return to the DAWG model means every debate is an incubator, and every debate discussion becomes something of an agenda item for the DAWG meeting. That might be one way to think of it.

Another approach is that this connects debate to the department as it is undergraduate research under faculty supervision. The professor who directs the program would run the working group, and all those who debate should participate in some way, if only to raise potential topics. When we met as the DAWG, this is how it went. Nobody was compelled to write on a project, but everyone should contribute to the discussion or to the suggestion of topics or venues for publication. As an undergraduate research model, I don’t think you can find a much better one.

I’m going to consider revisiting this DAWG essay as it approaches its 10 year anniversary. It’s worth taking a look at the ideas in it and seeing if they are still relevant, needed, or require a bit of editing. My initial thought after re-reading it is that things haven’t changed that much, except the university system is approaching severe crisis and people are still much more interested in enforcing grammar rules and calculating attendance in their courses than stoking intellectual spirits of doubt and wonder. The DAWG is most likely needed now more, if anything.

Before we get into it, here’s my current obsession.

I wonder why I share any of my Last FM listening stats with anyone because all you will see is me grinding a song into oblivion by listening to it over and over and over again. Today I’ve reached the point where I’m just listening to all the remixes.

This video really just makes you want to go to LA for the weekend.

We have visitors coming this week, next and then the week after that. Then I’ll be alone for a few days which is going to be weird.

This means there’s no semester left. I have an essay project I haven’t really started, one I need to send copy edits back today for, and of course the looming yet not-stressful NCA deadline.

Today’s the first day of the pick-up argumentation course so I think we’ll just have a conversation around the question “what is an argument?”

This question is a great one to start with because ideas about what an argument is/can/should be pepper human history and a lot of these ideas have trickled down to us through discourse over time. This means student understandings of argument are historical understandings, and we can create a map of where we are historically and what choices we have if we want to move understandings. Should be fun to make a map on the board, assuming it works.

I think I’ll record the chat and post it here later tonight so you can have a listen and see how it goes. I feel like one of the best things I can do these days as a professor is provide a space for some actual, thoughtful conversation where there’s no pressure to perform for some grade on some dumb assignment or something. Let’s have some inquiry; we can grade something later on.

Argumentation pedagogy is, unfortunately, homogenous across nearly the entire speech communication discipline. A textbook based on the Toulmin model – but not even the whole model, just data, warrant, and claim – and no discussion of field dependency is at the heart of it. A paper about a controversy and then the fabled “Letter to the Editor” completes the course.

I remember talking a lot with Dr. Barbara Warnick in my last year at the University of Pittsburgh (where I received my Ph.D.) about Stephen Toulmin. She was teaching an advanced undergraduate course on argumentation and had decided to use Uses of Argument as the only text in the course. Brilliant, I thought, as I was unsure how many argumentation scholars out there had read the whole book. She came up with the phrase “the basic T” to describe the poverty of the pedagogy of Toulmin that was being distributed as argumentation instruction (meaning data, warrant, and claim, and that’s it). I like to think that Toulmin would have a laugh at how rhetoricians have taken his theory and turned it into the object of argumentation theory he was attempting to deconstruct – something absolutely there, measurable, and universally meaningful.

Due to an unexpected illness I am now covering an undergraduate argumentation course, and my first thought was, “I have about a month to make sure they get everything!” My second thought was the petitio: what is everything?

I started to write some notes about what makes argumentation important. Against the model of criticizing controversy from on high with a dash of historical re-enactment of a world with engaged newspapers, I see argumentation as a course in invention and production – something that many professors might scoff at given their attitude toward student ability (“They can’t use a comma correctly!”). Producing good argument requires familiarity with theory as a guidepost, not as argumentation itself. Theory with iteration and then reiterated is the proper model for a course in argumentation that is based on rhetorical assumptions.

So, given a month, what’s most important? What theories do you teach? This is the question, and I reduced it to three essential theories for argument instruction that students should be familiar with at the end of a 15 week course (but I only have about 5, give or take what the previous instructor covered).

The Universal Audience

Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s theory that argument’s proper aim is audience, not accuracy or truth, can catch some criticism. In defending their theory they show that historically it has always been the case that the ethics and truth of argumentation has been based on the assumption that whoever encounters the argument will find the means to be persuaded. There is no objective measure of the quality of an argument, save that constructed by what the speaker knows about the specific audience and audiences like it at her location in culture, space, time, etc. The best argumentation is that which the universal audience would be able to agree with, hence, pandering is not possible to the local audience as the universal audience – coming from another place or area – wouldn’t get it.

The Enthymeme

The enthymeme is less an argument theory and more an argument modality (Conley is really sharp on this point). Instead of teaching it as a theory of understanding and critiquing argument, return to Aristotle and teach it as a chosen way to frame and deliver persuasive claims about the past (forensic) matters to audiences. It’s a powerful way to encourage people to find creative ways to share ideas with audiences and recognize that nobody constructs arguments out of the air; all argumentation is co-authored with the audience through little winks and statements of open assumption. Taught as an incomplete syllogism, the enthymeme is clearly based on invention-happening-elsewhere (the syllogism) so to talk about it as if it were a way to generate argumentation isn’t what Aristotle had in mind.

Toulmin, but not what you think

Toulmin’s biggest contribution to argumentation is field-dependency, which comes first – well before the “basic T” or any of the other structural ideas. The reason is simple: How could you reconstruct a warrant if you didn’t know the field in which the argument is taking place? Even in Uses of Argument his examples of the three understandings of “can not” indicate the intense dependence that meaning has on context. This is why when I google argumentation syllabi I’m pretty sure that very, very few teachers of argumentation have read Toulmin outside of presentation in a textbook. Field dependency encourages student creativity in both research and production as the audience becomes as important as getting the “right” information (whatever that might be). Who are you talking to and what do they believe is out there in the world? This question is the start of the field dependency discussion for the production of argumentation.

What am I missing? We’ll find out on Thursday when I meet with them the first time.