The New York Sophist

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Taking a (semi) break from posting through the new year, but will be posting when I feel like it over the winter break. There’s just too much to do and work on during this break from teaching, and I find myself running out of time to post here with my normal regularity. But in January I’ll be posting 2 to 3 times a week, like always.

The break appears to be long, but isn’t. It’s an illusion. And my plan is to set up my debate course to center around questions of government. What should government do or not do seems to be a good orienting category or cabinet that we can put a ton of topics in there to play with. The recent poverty of discourse surrounding Constitutional Originalism with the Barrett hearings is my inspiration for doing it this way. We’ll look at The Federalist Papers for this part of the class, then move into the necessity of the Supreme Court – an institution that is really pushing up against its already marginal utility in a democratic order.

This course is a huge overhaul so it takes some time. The other courses are not big overhauls, but I realize I need to have about 10 times the instructional videos that I think I need for each one. So I’ll be working on making those and trying to do some things other than the chromakey, which I don’t think students like as much as I thought they would. I think instead they like a certain style of address that I think you can capture with a different shooting arrangement.

So the essays will return after the new year on a regular schedule. I still might publish something here and there over the next couple of weeks, so make sure to subscribe via email to get notified when new posts happen.

Have a very merry Christmas and a happy holiday and a great New Year’s Eve and Day!

Debate education, like debate in most democratic/capitalist countries, is set up poorly because it is set up in opposition to a way of thinking and judging. As any first year debate student can tell you, you can’t win a debate by setting up your position as “Don’t do what they want to do.”

The debate culture that most debate educators have set up through their tournament-oriented, skill-development model is one that is attractive because it is not the daily, typical way that people debate.

Photo by Artur Shamsutdinov on Unsplash

Keep in mind the majority of argumentation theorists around the world gave up this form of modeling debate after World War 2, opting instead to base prescriptive modes of debating and arguing on what people do regularly in their daily lives. Building from, not opposed, to the ways people engage disagreement, choice, and incommensurate narratives of experience are the ways that theory and practice have gone in argumentation outside of tournament-centered pedagogy. Still, this is often presented as a wish, a normative practice that stands in opposition to the natural “bad reasoning” that people tend to do.

Debate is a vital epistemic practice that is a necessary part of the human practice of thinking through words. It has to be in there. In other words, it’s a feature not a bug. We keep treating it at every turn as a bug in the software instead of an essential part of the human program of thought.

What we need from a debating culture is a debate practice that doesn’t stand in opposition as its starting point, but stands in support of good options.

Debate at its best is an exploration of what we know and how we know it. It is an art of and for exploring good choices to ensure which one is better in this context, in this moment. Debate is a practice of learning about good feelings and ideas. It’s not a practice of heightened intelligence, or a practice of finding the best evidence, or a practice of making the best decision in a choice, or a tool for proving that an option or choice or way of thought is bad. It’s none of these things.

Debate is baked in given how prevalent confirmation bias is to our modes of thinking and given how eager we are to share our ideas about what should be done the minute we figure them out. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point this out in their book The Enigma of Reason, where their research indicates that human thought, judgement, and reason is designed to occur in groups, where people can push back on what’s presented. This pushback, and this engagement of ideas in a back-and-forth communicative environment is how human knowledge is meant to be iterated and reiterated as conditions change.

Whatever models we teach and practice should be formalized expressions of what people do naturally in reason, not stand in opposition to it. Any model of debate that bolsters itself as being “better than” everyday debating is a suspicious model, most likely crafted to generate benefits other than giving us familiarity and practice with the modes of human engagement on ideas that are a part of being human.

A desirable debating culture is one where debate, as a practice we set up and do regularly on various ideas that are not necessarily associated with a big, time-sensitive decision, must be advanced based on what it provides to us and for us, not what it isn’t. Debate itself should be a good that we compare against other discourse forms because they are also good, and in this situation and context debate is well-warranted because of what it provides to our feelings, thoughts, and knowledge about an issue.

I don’t put a lot of personal stuff on here, but thought I might start doing some different kinds of posts to keep up the variety. You can of course blow past these if you are here to read my thoughts on education, debate, and rhetoric.

We had a big Noreaster -biggest one in a few years – yesterday and it was impressive. I wasn’t brave enough to go out in it last night, but here’s the tail end of it the morning after the storm hit.

This was shot with my new GoPro 9 that I was suspicious about at first but really do think is a vast improvement over my trusty GoPro 7.

The ancient question of what topics are appropriate for students to speak about, debate about, or write about is evergreen. I think about this at the end and start of every teaching term.

I see several approaches to this question that are well-warranted. It doesn’t mean that I agree with any of them though!

The Word Bank Model

Remember being in primary school and sometimes you’d have a test or exam that would feature a “word bank?” You were meant to take the words from the random collection in a box and use them to complete the test questions. It really helped a lot if you were stuck, and probably forwarded an idea of learning relationships and meanings rather than rote memorization.

The Word Bank Model as an answer to this question is when the instructor selects the potential topic areas, and the student selects from these areas in order to complete the technical or structural requirements for the assigment.

For example, in public speaking it’s quite popular to assign something like a “policy speech.” This assignment requires the student to propose and persuade an “audience” that a particular policy should be adopted or should be chosen over some set of competing policies either in place or in consideration.

An instructor might write, “Select one of the following policies: The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, Tuition-Free Higher Education, Assault Weapons or handgun ban. . .” etc.

That was a very American list wasn’t it? The point though is that the typical instructor should draw on things that are circulating, current and happening right then in the society so the students have ample discourse to root around in, embrace, and explore on these issues.

Most instructors might not feel comfortable wtih not “knowing the right answer” to some of these policy questions, but that’s ok – we are teachers of persuasion and rhetoric, not facts and truth. Instructor discomfort with such suggested topics is more indicative of instructors feeling like they are losing their classroom authority (read: authoritarianism) by not being able to definitively say what the right answer is on these questions.

The downfall of this model (there are many) is that the instructor is often only educated on controversial issues by the mass media (CNN, NBC, etc.) and does not have a grasp on the nuance or depth of these controversies, nor how to access the deeper arguments on these questions.

An invitation to a research librarian to assist the class on curating resources for these topics is definitely in order, as well as a strict ban on mass-market news sources as more than 20% of the cited sources in the presentation.

Controversy is the Source of the Topic

Even less control over the topics comes from the instructor choosing to teach the structure and habits of controversy itself rather than a particualr issue. The students are charged with finding a topic that meets the standards and definition of controversy that was defined in the classroom.

Whenever a controversy is brought up, research should be conducted by the students or participants as to what’s out there on it. This can be as broad or narrow as you want. For example, the vaccine controversy is not going to go very far as a topic for debate if you restrict it only to the scientific literature. If you expand the notion of what’s out there to include the mom bloggers and the religious folks, as well as the clean lifestyle folks, you have a debate there that becomes more about what evidence is good and appropriate, not the relatively thin and uninteresting question of “what’s the real evidence?”

Letting the controversy decide is a great way to show us how language pushes us around into the identities and positions that it wants us to hold as well. Being moved by an argument that goes completely against classroom standards of a “good source” is an experience that should be talked about as a normal part of education. Too often we get the articulation that only “stupid people” (whoever they are) will believe a position, and those on the right side of the issue understand the “facts” and “evidence.” These are all, in the end, preferred ways to understand the world and the controversy will, as it pulses along, give credibility to various positions that those opposite will be stunned by. This is what it means to argue – to be baffled by what counts in the words and meanings of your opponents.

This should also point out that those who support calls for “evidence-based debate” are not offering anything to rhetorical or debate education except a retread of a tire that just shouldn’t be driven on. Of course debate requires evidence – that’s not the controversy. It’s what counts as evidence that should be explored precisely because it moves from context to audience to situation. Contemporary debate coaches who make this appeal are simply guilty of equivocation.

The Quality Source or Professional Niche Approach

One of the defenses of teaching public speaking or debate is that it is a professional skill set that aids people in working on professionalizing. So why not have students select a controversy or disagreement from their major field and speak or debate about that?

This allows instructors to assign work for reading that might be off-base for the story they are trying to tell about their field or the topic of the course, but allows the students to discuss the differences between various publications, practicing using the thought processes, practices, terms, and culture of the field.

Such debates in class are also the heart of the model of undergraduate research, something every administrator pushes and pushes without much of a concept of what that really looks like. I had an undergraduate student who did some research for a professor that primarily involved buying him a yogurt and a banana every day from the cafeteria. Why a symbolic appointment when you can have the symbol and the work for everyone during class? Opting in shouldn’t be the model for the most important bits of education. This extends to the model of the contemporary debate team as well. If debate is such an important way to learn, why limit it to those who the coach thinks are “good,” whatever that means?

Good Citizens Can Advocate

It seems like the controversy driven model, but this model is one where larger questions about the normative, ethical, or valuable tasks or perspective on things like social issues, governance, or culture are explored. Instead of “Should we withdraw our troops from this or that place,” the topic becomes “Should governments have a standing army?”

This is a much more philosophical approach at first glance, but I’d hesitate to say that. Instead, think of this as an accounting exercise for the students where they are asked – possibly for the first time in their lives – to provide a detailed accounting for the principles of the right or the good they rely on as citizens. These are the hidden and unarticualted principles of the good they rely on for all political choices and decisions. And now we have a chance to make them plain; to investigate and examine whether they make sense when articulated socially.

Students can bring up controversies which the instructor then treats as the begged question, i.e. “What prior question must be answered before we can address this question?” Here’s an example from an assignment where I turned my whole public speaking class into a big debate

New York City should be a sanctuary city (this means that the city authorities will not cooperate with the Federal immigration authorities on any requests to detain possible undocumented people).

So the begged question is: What is the appropriate relationship between the local and national government? Or: What is the appropriate relationship governments should have to people?

You can of course derive other ones, but you can see that hidden within an answer to the sanctuary city topic there is this larger assumption there that the entire meaning of the argument or position rests on (Toulmin would call this backing for those of you still gnawing on that old chestnut – it’s December so chestnuts are the appropriate metaphor).

The practice of being a citizen should be connected to the idea that expressing your view on issues based on your own experiences is normal and welcome. It is also normal and welcome to listen to the views of others who live in your polis, whatever that might be defined as. And it’s normal and welcome to change your mind, several times, as you incorporate the lived experience and beliefs of those who share that space.

How do we encourage and get argument innovation? By allowing students huge amounts of latitude in how they articulate connections between their own experience and what they hear and read in courses. We should not be choosing topics for courses or limiting what can be said; this is the true heart of academic free expression. The ability to express ideas freely is to show one’s work, and if you are not permitting students to do this regularly within courses, you are not teaching.

One of the moments that sticks in my memory from graduate school is putting the SETI @ Home screen saver on a bunch of computers that weren’t mine.

The small room at the end of the hallway in the speech communication (now Rhetorical Studies) department in Sims Hall at Syracuse University had a few old computers in it for the use of graduate students. At the time I was obsessed with the SETI @ Home program, and wanted to crunch even more data than my little Mac laptop could handle. After about an hour, I saw all the screens in there lighting up with the distinctive red and yellow bars of potential alien signals.

Alien communication. Seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to have the computers research while nobody else was using them. I spent a long time looking at the screen as it did it’s work. On nearly every page the source of the potential alien chatter was listed: Arecibo Radio Observatory.

The loss of Arecibo Radio Observatory is nothing short of acute ear trauma for the human race. We have been listening carefully to deep space for decades. Now, the ability to listen has been destroyed. We are now alone again, surrounded by potential noise but unable to know it.

The communication breakdown is a symbolic marker of the global communication breakdown we’ve all experienced over these past few years as we all decided to ignore our capacity to hear, and instead try to broadcast our signals over the signals of others. Sabotage, not accident, has been the watchword when it comes to political communication, everyone forgetting that at some point they did not believe what they think now; someone had to persuade them that their view is right.

Arecibo was a powerful symbol for those of us who believe communication to be the most vital part of the human experience. Our ability to craft meaning for one another, and do it with a particular purpose in mind, makes us part of a large family of creatures on Earth. What separates our ability to do this is we can craft symbols that are unrelated to any material thing or extant property around us: We can send signals that only refer to other signals, those signals sent so long ago we don’t remember making them.

The symbolic power of the observatory was simple: We are listening. We want to hear you. We want to get what you are saying. The intensity of our concentrated listening to the heavens produced so much data that SETI created the screensaver software to take advantage of the resting CPU power that sat idle across the planet. We had listened so intensely that the information collected would take the best computers on Earth a generation to carefully consider what we had heard. Space that around a bunch of PCs and laptops idling away across the world, and you exponentially cut that time.

SETI @ Home and Arecibo combined in a way to symbolically present us at our best to ourselves. We are eager to hear whatever you might be saying out there. We are trying our best to hear you, and we are trying to understand it as best we can. We’re even questioning the silences as meaning something. It doesn’t get more generous than this in terms of communicative responsibility.

And yet, millions of us are capable of spending the time and money on such a project, and equally capable of mourning the loss of such a project. At the same time though, we are incredibly incapable of listening – really listening – to the variety of viewpoints that fellow human beings may hold.

The contradiction would be staggering if we weren’t familiar with human beings. Even when we are certain we learned a ton from listening carefully, we find it to be impossible to do with one another. Even more ironic: We all think we are doing it extremely well when what we are most likely doing is tuning one another out.

The collapse of Arecibo is a tragedy and horrible loss for human scientific knowledge, but perhaps we can take a moment to reflect on the symbolic collapse of our ability to listen to the most foreign, most alien creatures. They are, after all, moments to practice this all around us.