The New York Sophist

Here’s my full analysis which was posted on the great ElectionDebates Website, but some had to be removed. This is the full version of what I wrote: 

Presidential debate scholar Sydney Krause argued that Presidential debates are “joint press conferences.” This seems like an insult to those of us who think debate is an incredibly valuable form of discourse in society. But Krause’s point is not an insult. It is a warning. Krause, as many others after him, have articulated the many elements missing from Presidential debates that are necessary for debate. But the point goes further than simple accuracy. If we treat these events as debates even if they do not contain enough elements to be debates, we risk seeing what we want to, or re-assembling the event to match our expectations of reason and argument. Said in a shorter way, if you think there’s a pattern there, you’ll find one.

It’s not appropriate or productive to consider these events as debates in any formal sense. There’s no productive disagreement, i.e. there is no possibility for either speaker to have any place from which to advance or defend positions because neither is asked to take a position on a controversial issue. The question “Who is best suited to be President?” is not a debatable motion, because it can be answered in a way that avoids any engagement with the answer from the other side. There are no judges. There are no standards for evidence or proof. There’s no formal topic with which to agree or disagree. They cannot be debates, unless we wish to strip out of debates all the elements that make them different from arguing, speech, informing, negotiating, or discussing.

But these are valuable, important events. We do not discount their importance by pointing out they are not debates. The attribution is important; if we call them debates we limit our ability to respond appropriately to the entire spectrum of the event, searching for any utterances we can twist or push into the form of a reason or argument. These forms are too limited for events that do not correspond with argument and debate, and they strip away rich elements of the performance that are critical to our judgement of the candidates. Consider them situations where the candidates are required to produce agonistic rhetoric in the context of what they are being asked in the presence of their opponent. They are not addressing their opponent’s argument in a meaningful sense; they are creating argumentative speech in an unusual context for us to use to judge their ability to be President.

With that perspective, here’s my analysis of the first debate.

Both candidates had difficulty in speaking on two important issues: Framing the debate, i.e. What tools should we use to decide who won? And establishing principles, i.e. here are the things I stand for or ask myself when I’m thinking about Presidential issues. Debaters in this format need to remember it’s not about facts/truth/rightness but more about generating discourse that establishes how you think, reason, and judge. People are watching this, not machines. They will look for moments where they can identify with candidates, seeing their own reasoning present in the rhetoric of the candidate. Identification with how someone expresses reason will always beat factual accuracy in these events.

Clinton was doing well with this until she decided to attack Trump’s business practices. Turning the debate into an attack on Trump allowed him time to make some rational arguments in his comfort zone. Better to keep him fragmented and blaming “politicians” rather than sounding good on his own reasoning for running his business his way. He was not establishing principles or frameworks at all, but placing blame. Clinton’s attack inadvertently allowed him time to generate some rationalizing rhetoric to compete with her tone.

Trump should have spent a lot more time discussing infrastructure and how the US government sells this out via political deals to benefit career politicians. This argument might work pretty well for his supporters, but not in this context.  Trump needs more vision, and more principled explanation as to why he would reform taxes or improve infrastructure in those ways. Too often he blamed the current system when he could be establishing his position better.

On race relations, Trump did well using the phrase “Law & Order” without going into too much detail. Clinton did better here discussing the difficulties of doing police work and providing safety while not violating the rights of the people who live in tough areas. Trump was behind on this discussion talking more about his experiences and less about his judgement. Again, framing and principles, although loose, were more established by Clinton.

The biggest error in the debate was when Lester Holt challenged Trump on the facticity of the Stop and Frisk judgement. Instead, he should have asked Trump his thoughts about the ruling, or if he would agree with the legal reasoning behind such a judgement. This would have helped the audience with judgement a lot more than simply going back and forth on the fact itself. Clinton should have pointed out that this reasoning isn’t fit for someone who is President. One has to reason situationally to be President, she could argue. Trump favors the idea that a businessman’s mode of reason is a one-size-fits-all solution. This can be persuasive, but he needs to be more comparative on judgement to win it.

On security and nuclear weapons, Clinton did a much better job of establishing the principles of how she thinks about bilateral defense treaties, NATO, and nuclear weapons. Trump attacked the Iran treaty, but did not establish his own framework. This was a mistake – he should have set out his own thoughts first. His statement near the end would have been good: “I’m a businessman, not a politician. Here’s how I think.” This helps his statements about politicians being poor thinkers en masse make more sense.

The other topics such as the birther issue and Clinton’s appearance don’t seem as relevant to me as the other issues were, but on those Clinton’s responses were more attacks than anything else. It is probably justified, but a missed opportunity to compare modes of thought between the two people who could serve as President.

Clinton did a better job of generating valuable rhetoric in this debate, so I would declare her the “winner.”

Here’s my full analysis which was posted on the great ElectionDebates Website, but some had to be removed. This is the full version of what I wrote: 

Presidential debate scholar Sydney Krause argued that Presidential debates are “joint press conferences.” This seems like an insult to those of us who think debate is an incredibly valuable form of discourse in society. But Krause’s point is not an insult. It is a warning. Krause, as many others after him, have articulated the many elements missing from Presidential debates that are necessary for debate. But the point goes further than simple accuracy. If we treat these events as debates even if they do not contain enough elements to be debates, we risk seeing what we want to, or re-assembling the event to match our expectations of reason and argument. Said in a shorter way, if you think there’s a pattern there, you’ll find one.

It’s not appropriate or productive to consider these events as debates in any formal sense. There’s no productive disagreement, i.e. there is no possibility for either speaker to have any place from which to advance or defend positions because neither is asked to take a position on a controversial issue. The question “Who is best suited to be President?” is not a debatable motion, because it can be answered in a way that avoids any engagement with the answer from the other side. There are no judges. There are no standards for evidence or proof. There’s no formal topic with which to agree or disagree. They cannot be debates, unless we wish to strip out of debates all the elements that make them different from arguing, speech, informing, negotiating, or discussing.

But these are valuable, important events. We do not discount their importance by pointing out they are not debates. The attribution is important; if we call them debates we limit our ability to respond appropriately to the entire spectrum of the event, searching for any utterances we can twist or push into the form of a reason or argument. These forms are too limited for events that do not correspond with argument and debate, and they strip away rich elements of the performance that are critical to our judgement of the candidates. Consider them situations where the candidates are required to produce agonistic rhetoric in the context of what they are being asked in the presence of their opponent. They are not addressing their opponent’s argument in a meaningful sense; they are creating argumentative speech in an unusual context for us to use to judge their ability to be President.

With that perspective, here’s my analysis of the first debate.

Both candidates had difficulty in speaking on two important issues: Framing the debate, i.e. What tools should we use to decide who won? And establishing principles, i.e. here are the things I stand for or ask myself when I’m thinking about Presidential issues. Debaters in this format need to remember it’s not about facts/truth/rightness but more about generating discourse that establishes how you think, reason, and judge. People are watching this, not machines. They will look for moments where they can identify with candidates, seeing their own reasoning present in the rhetoric of the candidate. Identification with how someone expresses reason will always beat factual accuracy in these events.

Clinton was doing well with this until she decided to attack Trump’s business practices. Turning the debate into an attack on Trump allowed him time to make some rational arguments in his comfort zone. Better to keep him fragmented and blaming “politicians” rather than sounding good on his own reasoning for running his business his way. He was not establishing principles or frameworks at all, but placing blame. Clinton’s attack inadvertently allowed him time to generate some rationalizing rhetoric to compete with her tone.

Trump should have spent a lot more time discussing infrastructure and how the US government sells this out via political deals to benefit career politicians. This argument might work pretty well for his supporters, but not in this context.  Trump needs more vision, and more principled explanation as to why he would reform taxes or improve infrastructure in those ways. Too often he blamed the current system when he could be establishing his position better.

On race relations, Trump did well using the phrase “Law & Order” without going into too much detail. Clinton did better here discussing the difficulties of doing police work and providing safety while not violating the rights of the people who live in tough areas. Trump was behind on this discussion talking more about his experiences and less about his judgement. Again, framing and principles, although loose, were more established by Clinton.

The biggest error in the debate was when Lester Holt challenged Trump on the facticity of the Stop and Frisk judgement. Instead, he should have asked Trump his thoughts about the ruling, or if he would agree with the legal reasoning behind such a judgement. This would have helped the audience with judgement a lot more than simply going back and forth on the fact itself. Clinton should have pointed out that this reasoning isn’t fit for someone who is President. One has to reason situationally to be President, she could argue. Trump favors the idea that a businessman’s mode of reason is a one-size-fits-all solution. This can be persuasive, but he needs to be more comparative on judgement to win it.

On security and nuclear weapons, Clinton did a much better job of establishing the principles of how she thinks about bilateral defense treaties, NATO, and nuclear weapons. Trump attacked the Iran treaty, but did not establish his own framework. This was a mistake – he should have set out his own thoughts first. His statement near the end would have been good: “I’m a businessman, not a politician. Here’s how I think.” This helps his statements about politicians being poor thinkers en masse make more sense.

The other topics such as the birther issue and Clinton’s appearance don’t seem as relevant to me as the other issues were, but on those Clinton’s responses were more attacks than anything else. It is probably justified, but a missed opportunity to compare modes of thought between the two people who could serve as President.

Clinton did a better job of generating valuable rhetoric in this debate, so I would declare her the “winner.”

The time has come as it does every few years where I must watch most everyone destroy and mock the thing I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand. Debate appears to most as a very simple operation of placing facts on a conveyor belt and turning it on. The facts then go down the line and are delivered to the audience. And this is not just a model that journalists shill for. A senior faculty member of my university asked me in passing the other day, “What’s more important in debating: Facts or skill in saying things?” As if the past 30 years of critical theory, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, anthropology, history, economics, ad nauseam had not been pointing at this distinction as somewhat meaningless. At the very least, it’s not a good starting place for figuring out what debate  is. 

Everyone seems to know; nobody seems to know. I’m reminded as I write about the recent long essay The Hatred of Poetry which I blogged about last month. The Love of Debating would be a good counterpoint title for a very small series about complex forms of rhetoric that don’t get a lot of attention and are considered obvious in their means and method. I don’t like participating in events around Presidential debates nor do I like commenting on them, but I feel a weird sense of responsibility to say something about them every time they come creeping around. It’s almost like a stop and frisk policy for discourse: I’m pretty sure everything labeled debate is criminal on suspicion so I shake it down. Maybe not the best policy at all.

Tonight I have to type something up about the debates so I’ll most likely link it here. So far I’ve been thinking about the value of these events if they were not called debates, or if we understood the media idea of debate in different terms. I am leaning toward calling them antagonistic epideictic events, much like Sydney Krause’s famous conclusion to his research that these are “joint press conferences.” This sounds like an insult, but is pretty constructive: Think of them as press events where the opponent is present and can engage with whatever is said through their own speech. This doesn’t make them debates, but rich texts for us to judge and evaluate, thinking about how these people interact in situations where they are measuring response. It’s the opposite of a campaign speech, and a nice counter to it. 

There’s a nice moment in teaching, somewhere around May when the exams are nearly graded and the summer is before you where you start to think about the possibilities of next fall’s courses. 

It’s a lovely time, but a dangerous one, at least it is for me. We have strict rules at our University, spurred by the State of New York, that students need to have the earliest possible access to the book list for your course in order to save money. A good idea, I suppose, although none of my students take advantage of it. They are always buying the books the first week regardless. 

The danger here is that I start to dream. I fantasize about the cool things I can do since I have months to plan it out. The perception of endless time rolling out before me is seductive. I plan these amazing courses that require me to re-plan my course pretty much every term. And I am not sure I do a good job of it. It’s always almost here, and then suddenly, it’s here, and I have not done all the copious note taking and lecture planning I assigned myself the first week of June.

I had to change my perspective pretty early on when engaging this form of teaching, constantly being refreshed. I get inspired by new things I’ve read or been exposed to, and I assign a lot of reading that I have not done multiple times. I feel pretty ill equipped and a bit panicked at the idea of teaching such material.

This anxiety and fear is based on a model of teaching that is, without question, impoverished. Who can say they are the one who knows? From what posture can you be certain that you have a grasp of it? Perhaps the democratization of who can know is the approach to take here. That is, the students and the teacher are co-investigators, reading and questioning in order to generate principles for the recognition of knowledge, rather than the reiteration of the already-known. 

Dredging up the signs and symbols that master the order of knowing is uncomfortable. Knowing the right answer and questioning your students until one accidentally says it is comfortable. It’s familiar at least, and nobody wants to be the leader into an unfamiliar scene. We do have people like this though- they are called Principle Investigators, and they run labs over in the hard-science area of your university. No, I don’t spend any time over there either. And I rarely see them. 

A principle investigator does not know what she will find, but has a plan on how to look. And she teaches that plan and those procedures to the students working the problem with her in the lab. Anyone can generate knowledge; actually, they are all expected to do so. Conducting the daily work of the lab is the generation and creation of knowledge. Sometimes, that knowledge upsets the principle of organization, sometimes it reveals it, sometimes it does neither, and the problem must be addressed again, from a different perspective. 

Why not approach many courses this way? I am doing so this term, with semi-unfamiliar texts and strange assignments where I am not sure what will be offered. But I hope that between us we can generate something valuable.

The desire for freshness in college teaching is a good one – it’s expected by the students, it keeps the professor on her toes, and the administration seems to think such moves help the university weather the current retention storm. Is re-designing a course “engagement” in the way that all these groups think of it? There certainly can be too much reliance on the new, or the trendy. But asking questions, and having students ask and address questions where you as the teacher don’t know how to respond – that never goes out of style. 

It’s hard to find a faultless conference. But the Tokyo Argumentation Conference might just be the best model of a conference that balances a critical and serious approach to teaching with respect and space for the consideration of research developments in the field. 

The reason that this conference is one of my favorites is that it maintains a grounding in and reserves space for the direct discussion of pedagogy and teaching. The first night featured a great plenary panel, probably the highlight of the conference for me, where three scholars presented ideas and activities they do in courses when teaching various things (freedom of expression, policy making rhetoric, or rhetorical history). Nothing really provides better material for the mind to work over not only the performance and efficacy of what one does in a course, but also strips away the nonsense and gets right to the heart of the issues central to the field. It’s easy to talk for hours about what rhetorical criticism is, but very difficult to pin it down in an operable way without the context of an undergraduate course that requires timing, dialogue, and assessment. 

The entire conference was well above my expectations. I always expect to get good ideas for teaching, or at least great fodder to ponder over to improve or modify my teaching of how to argue. Speaking broadly, it seems that argumentation studies and rhetorical studies are moving away from any serious interest in the teaching of production of oral arguments, aside from teaching how to do academic or scholarly criticism. Teaching is a topic that is best avoided. Like jury duty, the teaching of speech and argument is a contradiction: An essential part of our society yet best avoided if you can get out of it.  The Tokyo conference on argumentation seems to keep front and center this idea of teaching through their choice and arrangements of keynotes, panel composition, and plenary panels. 

This is what a conference should be: A serious focus on cutting edge research in argumentation and debate never decoupled from the necessity of teaching it in some capacity to others. I obviously have a strong preference for that teaching to be centered on the improvement of the production and performance of oral argumentation, but there’s no reason it should just be limited to that. 

Here are some thoughts about this Tokyo conference in no particular order:

1. There was a lack of presence of all perspectives on argumentation studies

This is not really a problem more than it is a curious observation. Tokyo has always been considered to be one of the “big four” argumentation conferences in the world – places where people who study argument from a variety of perspectives are expected to appear in order to discuss advances in research on argumentation. This conference had no presence of Canadian school or Dutch school scholars. I’m not really sure why that is. 

Perhaps this expectation was just that, and there really is no official reason for everyone to turn up at all of these conferences. Maybe Japan is an expensive destination (next time looks particularly tricky since it will be Tokyo hosting the 2020 Olympics). Or, more cynically, perhaps it’s that this conference focuses less on the study of argument’s ontological status and more on the rhetorical tradition of aiding producing of argument within shifting cultural and social contexts. I doubt it is that one, but it does make you think. Would it be so bad if argument was split up across the globe and not beholden to each perspective each time. Still, the loss of the variety of methods does have an impact on the conference. In the end, the organizers can do nothing about this, it’s an issue the community of scholars can fix by attending.

2. The relationship between debate and argument is central

A lot of the conference papers were occupied either explicitly or implicitly with the connection between (or absence of a connection) between debate and argument. This is an incredibly good and important direction for argumentation studies. The temptation for argumentation is to spin argumentation off into a unique and complex thing that only argumentation studies scholars can understand and elucidate. This would be done through continuous academic debating in journals about the ontological status of argument (eg: it’s essential character, structure, limits, all that). The question of debate and argument can of course go that way, but it’s unlikely to do so. The reason why is because debate is primarily practice, a practice that contains within it a number of elements that meet the many definitions of argument. Concerns about this distinction speak to concerns about the nature and status of argument in general and in much better ways than attempting to pin down its ontological sense. Instead, we try to differentiate argumentation as a practice and a mode of thought and epistemology as well as a mode of being in the world. Debate becomes a lens or touchstone for such an approach, but can serve as a counterweight as well. This line of thinking I hope develops a lot more purchase as it seems very valuable to both debate and argumentation studies and pretty clearly superior to sets of criticism of expired controversies that have “broken the rules” so to speak. The value of doing it by placing debate and argument in conversation is that one has to talk about the practice of both, the doing of both, and that is connected to the teaching of both, in the sense of how we recognize and explain to others the superiority of an argument or a performance over another one.

3. The connection of historical work and educational policy is underplayed

This conference had two really shining moments for me. The first was the opening keynote where we learned that Japanese national educational policy was being shaped by debate and argumentation scholars. Secondly, I learned that there are a number of people doing archival work on debate that is being used to draw conclusions about teaching historically. I think these two lines, although unconnected now, could be implicitly serving each other on the important question of what it means to be an argumentation scholar. I think the critical missing element is to treat debate as a socially essential art. That means that we must look historically at debate and argument as having “movements” and “schools” that reinforce our ability to appreciate this art, and also there are standards and practices for the study of the art formally. We downplay our ability to be argumentation creators, often pushing our interest into descriptive after-the-fact theoretical work, but this doesn’t have to be the entire sum of what we do. I think debate across the curriculum combined with the output from the archival debate scholars creates a wonderful nexus from which one can draw on to make claims about what should be taught or practiced in order to preserve this socially essential art. 

There’s a lot more I could say here, and probably will in another post. For now I’m going to watch some more Japanese coverage of the Olympics and think. For a very long time people have considered debate or argument as analogous to a competitive game that is judged by experts. Perhaps it’s time to abandon that set of assumptions completely and think about how we produce and criticize our art of argumentation. The fact that the High School nationals of Japanese language debate were happening right across the campus says something about the proximity of scholarship, teaching, and practice in more than just physical space for this conference.