The New York Sophist

Relevance is a part of argumentation, not a rule or container that surrounds or determines what kinds of arguments are permitted. It’s not a referee and it’s not a boundary.

Consider relevance an ask, or an indicator, that you are not doing a very good job of sharing your view with your audience/interlocutor. They are expressing that they don’t get why you are sharing what you are sharing.

It also can be an argument itself. The claim “that’s not relevant” can be an argument that generally takes the shape of “everything you are saying I have no problem with but it doesn’t advance or help your case, your side of the argument at all.” This is the expression that the information or reason is good but the entirety of the statement is out of place.

Claims to relevance are a special class of utterance in arguments and/or debates as they are opportunities for people to shore up or patch up their position in very specific ways. Too often the response to such claims is to deny them – “Of course it is relevant!” – but these defenses rely on the arguer’s perception that what they are saying makes sense. This sort of response is a bad gesture toward what was already expressed; a bad response to someone expressing doubt about a relationship of an utterance to the argument itself.

Instead of this response, consider some alternatives:

What is this argument about?

I thought we were discussing X, why don’t you think that what I said is relevant?

What are the most important issues to you related to what we are arguing about?

Chances are from these you can pretty easily see why it is that your interlocutor doesn’t see the relevance and you can either try again in an edited form or abandon it and try something else.

Another potential move here is to move to the level of the specific from the principle or vice versa. Sometimes a very specific claim or very specific story will seem to be directly relevant to you but won’t have the right uptake for someone else.

The specific to principle move sounds like: “Yea but we were talking about X which is about [principle 1, 2, 3] and this story is related in principle.”

The inverse is also useful where you make a principled claim, e.g. Rights are a poor way to protect people, something like that, and the claim of irrelevance, “What’s that got do to with anything?” – is an invitation to tell a story about an individual or some individuals.

The goal of any statement in an argument or a debate is not to try to win, but to advance the understanding of your position. A focus on winning, or taking out/down the opposition, rendering them to silence, or whatever it is people think they are doing out there eliminates opportunities for a deeper or more comprehensive understanding of the position people are taking up and their motives for doing so.

A focus on advancing understanding means you don’t throw up immediate opposition to most of these kinds of statements, but see them instead as indicators of gaps in your reasoning. Although you don’t think there are gaps in your reasoning that is highly irrelevant when you are talking to other people. They are saying these kinds of things as repair requests. Although you know you are right, they are just hearing your utterance of these familiar words for the first time. Consider it a gift when you hear such claims as they are invitations to alter your expression and keep advancing the argument by advancing your current position on it – for that too might change, or at least has the potential to change; this is the minimum required buy in to argue with anyone.

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In this new episode of In the Bin, I chat with Will Silberman who has tabbed a ton of British Parliamentary format debate tournaments here in the United States.

We talk about the past 13 months of online debate, what questions about debate it raises, what mistakes were made, and what benefits came out of this necessary and dramatic shift of practice.

All comments welcome down below, on the Anchor site, or wherever you see this post!

The biggest problem in teaching right now is students. Not the people in the classroom who have paid (or someone paid) for them to be there, but the idea or conception of student itself. The notion of “students” as distinct from “teacher” is obvious but there are deeper implications here, such as student as different than adult, worker, person, neighbor, etc.

Having a conception of “students” that is not different from nor in opposition to other modalities of being and identity is the biggest barrier to empowering higher education. Currently, the notion of “student” is shorthand for “proto-careerist” or something like that (not exactly pleased with this naming; took a bit to settle on this naming). It reminds me of being 23 in my first job as a teacher in high school chatting with another young teacher about how difficult it was to keep conversations going with women after you answer the question “what do you do?” We tried to come up with a good synonym for “teacher” – which for a lot of good reasons really turns people off as it’s identification with a type or a kind of person out there; a stereotype perhaps but with a powerful grip on the mind’s eye – so a stereotype then. We settled on “manufacturing semi-furbished replacement parts for American society.” At the time hilarious but now the standard motive as revealed in the way that universities talk about students, each other, and themselves as institutions.

Faculty aren’t much better, spending a lot of time chatting to one another about how their students cannot seem to do anything that they would like them to do. Ironically, most faculty wish themselves into irrelevance in these conversations, most notably when teachers of writing, critical thought, or reading are upset that their students cannot do the things that it seems they are in the class to learn how to do. The “students” are incapable of assumed basic abilities and tasks that somewhere someone has assumed they would be able to do when they arrive in class. Often this seems to spill over into the job of the professor-as-teacher, which these conversations reveal most professors would be happy not to do.

Faculty talk about students as a vulgar herd of frustration punctuated with little stories about some people in the class who are “the good ones,” often only because they were obedient, or had some power to determine what the professor really wanted by being able to interpret overwrought assignment instructions, often written in a style or manner that would not pass that professor’s own standards. The idea that faculty can and often do discuss the silver lining popping through the cloudy sky of teaching should give us hope, but too often these narratives are used to reinforce this idea that the vast majority of students are problems who interfere in their own education to a point where the faculty can’t do anything about it. In short: Students come predestined for failure or success.

Is there a way to think about your students, or students, or those who are the reason the University exists – hard to hear for most faculty but perhaps the truest thing you’ll read today – that is inclusive of other identities and motives rather than exclusive? We tend to think of the student as lacking capacity and ability. Could there be a way to think of the identity of student as containing capacities rather than being the marker of an empty space?

The re-conception of the classroom as a place that is not meant for correction but construction is my favorite approach: What can we build together from what we brought with us to this place? Another way would be to ask what we can do, as an assembled group, with the time and place given to us?

These questions move us away from the diminutive “student” identification and towards the shared identification of a community, where everyone has capacities and incapacitates, abilities and inabilities, and through the mix of these various things we develop something that all the members of the community can benefit from. Of course, the nature of this thing, it’s benefits and harms, and its longevity are always the subjects of deliberation and debate in healthy communities. Since they are not known capacities, not really measurable in a way that would immediately satisfy everyone (for these joys and deficits always come to us and others in mediation) so they must consistently be discussed when the exigence is identified and made known to everyone. In this way, the class is the “diorama” of larger community behavior and practice where most of what goes on is discussion about things done and things that need to be done.

Seems like learning to me.

Here’s the latest episode of my podcast, In The Bin, where we discuss Kenneth Burke’s idea of “terministic screens.”

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below or you can record a comment or question and send it to us through the Anchor website.

This essay is one of my absolute favorites to teach in argumentation. My friend Dan and I take it on in an hour long conversation on the latest podcast.

Every year the students complain about this essay mostly because of Burke’s eccentric writing style. I’ve tried different ways of teaching it over the years, but part of the difficulty is that each time you read the essay something new pops out at you.

Burke’s essay really speaks to our moment where those involved in political argument take great pleasure from a strategy of total eradication of the other side, person, utterance – you name it. In Burke’s essay he explains why this strategy does not advance understanding.

As always feel free to leave a comment either here or at the Anchor website, where you can record an audio comment that we will play on the next show. We’d love to hear from you.