The New York Sophist

Power in international relations (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This recent article in Foreign Policy is about the insular nature of international relations departments, and how there are two default tracks within those departments. Some departments try to encourage more outreach or impact by indicating tenure standards that look to see if the faculty member’s work has had “real world impacts.” The issue is that many foreign policy experts are perceived to have very little interest in talking to foreign policy makers.

This makes me wonder if it would not be productive to have two tracks for debate – one for those who just like to debate internally, and talk to one another, and another track for those who want to influence the decision makers and influencers in the world.  If we think of our tournaments as the places where we do our work – much like the university is for the professoriate – how are we doing at reaching those who want to benefit from the expertise we are developing in competition? Similarly, it seems to me that most debaters want to talk to other debaters about their argumentative insights.

We could create two tracks, or two divisions within tournaments. The two tracks would have different judging standards. One would be judging by and for debaters and debate audiences, where the motions will encourage the technical moves and argumentative tropes that debaters love and appreciate, pegging the value of these speeches to debate itself. This is the status quo at most tournaments, so it wouldn’t require much alteration.

The other division would feature a radically different judging pool, one that incorporated people other than successful debaters to judge the competition. People from various agencies and other avenues would be recruited to help judge debates, and the debaters would try to adapt to the types of arguments that these people would find persuasive. This would have to happen quite quickly. Or perhaps the judges could have a non-traditional briefing – a Q&A – where they ask the judges what sort of things appeal to them. This could take the shape of something like a voir dire process, such as they have in American jury trials, just to see what the potential jurors’ thought process might be like.

It might not solve the problems with debate running off into some cloistered corner of argumentation, like it tends to do when formalized into a competition. The new and strange division would most likely generate a large amount of text through discussion and accounting of various strategies that worked or didn’t work in front of particular judges. And RFDs would relate much more to audiences that are outside of debating competitions rather than inside.

You would definitely see the premium on really bombastic or extreme arguments fall away in favor of something more nuanced and incremental. I am not certain I like this possible outcome. There’s something very productive argumentatively and pedagogically about principled debate, which I think is at its best when a team takes a very hard line. Now, it is true that a “very hard line” is a rhetorical construction, and it would appear to be different things given the contingent nature of the debate, the motion, the speeches of the other teams, etc. But I don’t think that external judges would be very interested in hearing debates that center around whether or not an opening government team would “also support policy X” where policy X is something completely outlandish but logically follows from the principle that team advocated. This might be a dealbreaker for some, as there are great competitive and pedagogical benefits from this norm.

There would be substantial debate and discussion about how to form the judging pools. This would probably rage on in some circuits, but eventually it would have to be tested to see how it worked. Most importantly, and also most controversially, this would probably put an end to our marathon debate tournament scheduling – no more four or five rounds on a Saturday. The sort of people we would want as judges simply would not be able to invest that amount of time all at once. Perhaps we will see debate competitions shift to more local venues, occurring over several days or weeks. Or things could shift to a smaller amount of rounds, held with larger planned breaks between them, keeping the break stricter.

I am not sure exactly what it would look like, but the idea is a very appealing one. This way, people could move back and forth between divisions as they see fit. People who like good debate can be in the debate-oriented division. People who want debates that appeal to a variety of different audiences can be in the new division. I believe nobody will stick to just one for too long – the temptation to try out a different style will have some appeal. It is the cross-fertilization between divisions that will generate some great benefits both for the development of argumentation and the development of a broader type of persuasion.

The reasonable person standard is quickly evaporating, being replaced with a standard that is more in line with something from the positivists – arguments are good that reflect external, eternal standards of what a good argument should do. People incorporate theorists such as Aristotle and Stephen Toulmin, who are writing directly against this concept, as those providing the theoretical support beams for this theory. It’s totally bizarre. This suggestion means a return to a more rhetorical conception of argumentation and less a positivistic one. The incorporation of audiences that vary and attend to issues unmarked by the particular perspectives debaters bring to them help us return to the productive and quite right shift from positivistic conceptions of argumentation to the audience-centered theories of argumentation developed in the post-war years. This will help orient debating toward the work being done by contemporary argumentation theorists, who are conceiving of how argument works in courtrooms and legislative bodies worldwide. It’s a good connection to establish, and one that mirrors some contemporary (and very highly respected) departments of international relations.

My public speaking class has not been doing a very good job with a recent assignment, and I can’t find many resources to help them out.

The assignment seems easy to us – find an article that makes a claim that you think is ridiculously wrong. Prove to the audience how wrong that claim is by taking apart and analyzing the arguments of the article. They are allowed to do research on their own to debunk the claims, but I’m not such a fan of straight debunking – I want them to talk about the problems with the belief in general.

Many of the students have been using anecdotal evidence as an attempt to argue against research studies – “well everyone I know isn’t like that, so the study must be wrong.” This is, of course, not an answer to a research study. I’ve also been suggesting that moving to the realm of the political is a good way of dealing with serious studies – placing the results in conflict with our deepest principles is a way to get the audience to ignore the power of the study – “Does this study mean we need to require people to take drugs even if they choose not to?” Putting things in the terms of freedom or free choice vs. medical necessity or fact is a good way to get the power of the scientific research diminished.

I did some looking around on the internet, maybe not the best or most thorough research, and all I was able to find for students are guides to ensure that they are choosing good sources for their own research – the traditional “tests of evidence” we might call them in debate or argumentation studies. There are no sources out there for students to help them generate arguments against good research, or how to create doubt as to the credibility of a study they might have found that goes against their thesis.

A guide to crafting good arguments, or refutation of good points, is a pretty big lacunae in the educational support materials of the university. This is exactly the sort of gap that the debate society or debate team could fill.  The debate society could produce a series of short videos on how to address gaps in the invention of argument. Students might find tons of information on how to support claims, but might be very intimidated with the idea of how to engage or disprove claims.

I’ve been thinking and collecting ideas on how to convert a debate team into something internal from something external. The realities of university finances, the continued mounting pressure on university students to be in class and the demands of poorly thought out course design, as well as the increasing problem of poorly managed tournaments that are little more than a thin veneer for a social club necessitate those who care about debate to think of alternatives to the tournament-driven model of debate we are currently bound by.  Thinking of the debate team as an undergraduate research program, teaching people how to understand and engage with serious scholarly research is one way, and a way that I believe will be very persuasive to university administration.

What would this intervention into research assistance look like? Perhaps the materials will involve the following:

1. Discussion on Burkean circumference – how to magnify or reduce the impact of competing claims.
2. Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca’s notion of dissociation – how do we rhetorically create distance and peel arguments apart from one another.
3. Burke’s limitations on debunking – how proving something wrong by eliminating all of the fundamental conditions for the position to exist is never a good way to argue against something
4. Distilled guides as to how social scientists look at research – what are the elements of a good study, and how do social scientists argue against a study in the literature or at a conference?

This would be good for the debaters to review, as is the case in tournament competitions, these things are relatively automatic and uncritically applied or used by debaters. They often do it well and smartly, but there’s no time to really reflect on what they are doing and why. It would be a great resource for faculty who are often not taught how to teach things like engagement with ideas – they just learn it for the specific requirements of publishing in their field. It would increase peer learning, something that all universities in the US agree is incredibly valuable, increasing retention as well as increasing the connections between students and reinforcing skills and ideas that come from the core curriculum.

I could imagine my public speaking students doing much better after seeing some of their peers take on arguments in a critical and competent way, showing them the power of words to diminish or strengthen any belief for an audience.  This is far superior to traditional lecturing, and it also allows debaters to use their developed abilities and skills in ways outside or different from a competitive tournament. It can certainly help debaters make unusual and very real connections to things that debate experience allows them to do that they might not have considered before.

This also brings up questions of defending debate within a university. Might it make more sense, or provide some compelling evidence through some project like this one, that the debate society should be housed in an academic department instead of student activities? Perhaps the proper home for a debate society is the university library, or the writing center (in so much as they might be divided on a campus). This provides a new context from which to view and consider the potential agency of debating, and also provides debaters with opportunities to get faculty and administrators on the side of the debate program, willing to defend it if a situation should arise where the university is considering removing funding or canceling it. This also provides a nice justification for tournament travel – it is the thing that allows the debaters to train so they can then produce teaching documents and experiences such as this one for the rest of the student body.

considering and reconsidering the role of the debate program at the university becomes very productive and a good investment for the debate society who is interested in expanding its influence while also expanding the metaphor of what debate practice is about. Instead of just lawyer or politician training (tired and old metaphors that really don’t do much for us) perhaps the metaphor of training everyone in the community of learners how to value, process, and respond to normative claims based off of researched information.

My public speaking class has not been doing a very good job with a recent assignment, and I can’t find many resources to help them out.

The assignment seems easy to us – find an article that makes a claim that you think is ridiculously wrong. Prove to the audience how wrong that claim is by taking apart and analyzing the arguments of the article. They are allowed to do research on their own to debunk the claims, but I’m not such a fan of straight debunking – I want them to talk about the problems with the belief in general.

Many of the students have been using anecdotal evidence as an attempt to argue against research studies – “well everyone I know isn’t like that, so the study must be wrong.” This is, of course, not an answer to a research study. I’ve also been suggesting that moving to the realm of the political is a good way of dealing with serious studies – placing the results in conflict with our deepest principles is a way to get the audience to ignore the power of the study – “Does this study mean we need to require people to take drugs even if they choose not to?” Putting things in the terms of freedom or free choice vs. medical necessity or fact is a good way to get the power of the scientific research diminished.

I did some looking around on the internet, maybe not the best or most thorough research, and all I was able to find for students are guides to ensure that they are choosing good sources for their own research – the traditional “tests of evidence” we might call them in debate or argumentation studies. There are no sources out there for students to help them generate arguments against good research, or how to create doubt as to the credibility of a study they might have found that goes against their thesis.

A guide to crafting good arguments, or refutation of good points, is a pretty big lacunae in the educational support materials of the university. This is exactly the sort of gap that the debate society or debate team could fill.  The debate society could produce a series of short videos on how to address gaps in the invention of argument. Students might find tons of information on how to support claims, but might be very intimidated with the idea of how to engage or disprove claims.

I’ve been thinking and collecting ideas on how to convert a debate team into something internal from something external. The realities of university finances, the continued mounting pressure on university students to be in class and the demands of poorly thought out course design, as well as the increasing problem of poorly managed tournaments that are little more than a thin veneer for a social club necessitate those who care about debate to think of alternatives to the tournament-driven model of debate we are currently bound by.  Thinking of the debate team as an undergraduate research program, teaching people how to understand and engage with serious scholarly research is one way, and a way that I believe will be very persuasive to university administration.

What would this intervention into research assistance look like? Perhaps the materials will involve the following:

1. Discussion on Burkean circumference – how to magnify or reduce the impact of competing claims.
2. Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca’s notion of dissociation – how do we rhetorically create distance and peel arguments apart from one another.
3. Burke’s limitations on debunking – how proving something wrong by eliminating all of the fundamental conditions for the position to exist is never a good way to argue against something
4. Distilled guides as to how social scientists look at research – what are the elements of a good study, and how do social scientists argue against a study in the literature or at a conference?

This would be good for the debaters to review, as is the case in tournament competitions, these things are relatively automatic and uncritically applied or used by debaters. They often do it well and smartly, but there’s no time to really reflect on what they are doing and why. It would be a great resource for faculty who are often not taught how to teach things like engagement with ideas – they just learn it for the specific requirements of publishing in their field. It would increase peer learning, something that all universities in the US agree is incredibly valuable, increasing retention as well as increasing the connections between students and reinforcing skills and ideas that come from the core curriculum.

I could imagine my public speaking students doing much better after seeing some of their peers take on arguments in a critical and competent way, showing them the power of words to diminish or strengthen any belief for an audience.  This is far superior to traditional lecturing, and it also allows debaters to use their developed abilities and skills in ways outside or different from a competitive tournament. It can certainly help debaters make unusual and very real connections to things that debate experience allows them to do that they might not have considered before.

This also brings up questions of defending debate within a university. Might it make more sense, or provide some compelling evidence through some project like this one, that the debate society should be housed in an academic department instead of student activities? Perhaps the proper home for a debate society is the university library, or the writing center (in so much as they might be divided on a campus). This provides a new context from which to view and consider the potential agency of debating, and also provides debaters with opportunities to get faculty and administrators on the side of the debate program, willing to defend it if a situation should arise where the university is considering removing funding or canceling it. This also provides a nice justification for tournament travel – it is the thing that allows the debaters to train so they can then produce teaching documents and experiences such as this one for the rest of the student body.

considering and reconsidering the role of the debate program at the university becomes very productive and a good investment for the debate society who is interested in expanding its influence while also expanding the metaphor of what debate practice is about. Instead of just lawyer or politician training (tired and old metaphors that really don’t do much for us) perhaps the metaphor of training everyone in the community of learners how to value, process, and respond to normative claims based off of researched information.

The Vienna IV seems like a competition that time forgot. It’s a competition that reaches back to European debate the way it was long before I got involved in it, to a time when the more weird or inside-joke funny the motion was, the better the tournament. These are examples of motions and procedures that operated debate societies before the current trend of making competitions tied at least somewhat to the tone and direction of the WUDC.

 What I recall the most is how the adjudication team at both Vienna IVs are incredibly autocratic – they cannot stand the idea of a debate going in a direction that they did not directly desire or imagine it would go. They generate tons of rules about how one ought to approach a debate, and what is allowed or not allowed when a particular type of motion appears. Here I present a case-study of the desire of the adjudication team, the work of the teams in a debate to create persuasive discourse, and the role of the person meant to evaluate the quality of that discourse – the chair. I believe that instead of chairs striving to get calls “right,” chairs need to get calls “ethical” – that is they need to work hard to make sure that all of the people in the debate are attended to well. Of course, the ethical is not easy, and people love to call people out for breaking the rules. I wonder which one will win.

In round two, a motion appeared that we were warned about in the long and repetitive briefings. We were told that there were some motions that were meant to force a choice – they were mutually exclusive by fiat of the adjudication team, and therefore the teams could not claim that they would be able to get both of the options.  The motion was something to the effect that if a doctor was faced with prolonging a life and causing indefinite pain or ending the life then and there, he or she should end the life.  Not sure about the exact wording, but the motion is carefully hinting that the debate should be, according to the adjudication core, about the choice between death and a painful life without a clear end in sight. The point to keep in mind is that the doctor had to choose between prolonging the life painfully, or ending it immediately.

In the room I was judging in (a wing, blessedly, for all of the rounds I was able to judge – thank you Vienna IV tab room, you really get me) the closing government offered the following argument: If we keep the person alive as long as possible, we might have a shot at getting both a reduction in pain and a long life because we will learn more about how to treat the condition. Compared to the Opening Government’s argument of “Only God can take a life” and an interpretation that the Hippocratic oath forces doctors to keep people alive “no matter the cost” – I thought it was pretty clear their argument was at least better than opening’s.

Our chair could not even let one of the wings finish talking about the debate before she excitedly talked about how the closing government, in spite of the numerous instructions from the “A-team” (as she called them, made me think George Peppard was hanging around somewhere) and that they deserved a four for ignoring the instructions on how to debate the motion.

I tried a couple of times to offer the idea that perhaps we should evaluate what the teams said in context with what the other teams said – to which the chair always responded, “It’s a shame we have to waste time on this.” This was the only response she gave me – I think that it was because I was, in her view, also deliberately ignoring the rules of the A-team (confession: I was).

But a waste of time to examine context? What are we meant to be doing otherwise? This is where the distinction between chairing and ethical chairing came into my mind.

This was a moment that made me realize that judges who enforce abstract rules about good debating are not straw people. They actually exist, and are given enormous authority by the rules of BP to enact their rule interpretations upon speakers. What I suggest a chair should do is understand that good discourse is only discernible within a context. This chair refused to consider their discourse as even potentially good, mainly because they “broke the rules.”

An alternate defense she gave of ranking them four was that the closing opposition made the argument that the closing government was trying to “do both things, which the A-team (where’s Face?) told us we couldn’t do.” Not only is this argument unexplained, it is an appeal to authority, which I believe not many reasonable people would just accept without asking the reasonable question, “should they win because they pointed out a broken rule?”

I felt that the opening opposition was ignored in this approach, who did a good job answering the poor arguments of the opening government. Under this chair’s rubric, that part of the debate no longer mattered for determining a winner – the team that points out the broken rule should win, and that’s that. Good contextual argument, although not the best in the world, is always trumped by a team who repeatedly points out “the team across from us broke the rule we heard about in the briefing.”

The ethics of chairing involve attending to each team’s contribution. This is only possible within the context of what was said in the debate before us. Otherwise, we could have judges sit in different rooms than the debaters and come up with decisions on whatever merits they wished. What this decision reinforced is an approach to debating that I call “gotcha!” debate – the team that wins is the one that most solidly points out the mistakes of the other team. Whoever does this best, should win. Until this round, I always thought that this was a novice debater attempt to make good arguments. It’s no longer a straw position, as I’ve found someone who actually judges this way. It’s amazing to find one.

What’s wrong with this position? Shouldn’t rules be followed?

They should, of course. They make a competition fair and generate the motives we like from competitive debating. The problem arises – as it did in Vienna last year – when adjudication teams offer their own rules on-the-fly for how the motions should be approached. These rules are motivated from a good place. They are worried that the debates on the motions they set will be bad unless they are approached in a particular way – the only way they could imagine. It is never assumed by such adjudication teams that anyone could think through a motion in a different, or more creative manner. They assume their way of approaching it is the only possible good one. So they legislate the approach, cutting off the debaters’ access to their own imaginative approaches to debating a motion.

On the other hand, the adjudication team could be motivated by the idea that somehow the debates are going to be bad, because the debaters will be unable to see how to make the debate “good.” This also motivates adjudication teams to make up their own motion rules, often legislated spuriously via a “context slide” or other such device. All this serves to do is flatten the debate experience, homogenize it, and kill the desire of the debaters to try creative, persuasive approaches that might make adjudicators nod and think, “didn’t expect that!” – this is the experience that a lot of adjudicators want, but don’t necessarily get.

I’ve written in more detail about how bad game design is design that is meant to improve the player’s experience by limiting options. All it does is limit the experience of the game, which comes from play – the player must be allowed to interact with the game in ways the designer cannot foresee. This is where the value of a well-designed game arises.

But what role does the chair have in good game design?

I see great value coming from a chair who is aware of the adjudication team’s desire for a good debate, but also willing to assume that the teams are attempting to reach that desire through the environment they face. This means that the chair does not read, as mine did, the debaters as trying to “get away” with something, as trying to “break the rules” but instead trying to reach the goal of a persuasive argument in order to fulfill the obligation of creating a good debate. This is the ethical approach – assuming that the other humans in the debate, by virtue of their presence, want a good debate as well – and it is the starting point for chairing. It frames the chair’s approach to listening and helping wings articulate why they might like one team over another one. That reason is always because they improved the debate by responding to and dealing with the context in which their speech emanates.

It is something we valorize when a persuasive speaker is able to use restrictions such as rules and skirt them – especially rules like I’ve seen at Vienna which curtail freedom of speech and expression: “one must speak this way, given a motion worded with these terms, etc.”  Those who are clever and can read the rules back against themselves in their argumentation might be teams that are deserving of winning a debate. These things take careful skill and great rhetorical prowess, but these are the moments – or at least the promise of these moments – that keep us returning to debate, even after we’ve had a frustrating experience. As chairs, people must keep an eye and ear open to such moves, understanding that the reasonable audience in the world of controversy and deliberation, often is moved by those who use satire, equivocation, and sarcasm to expose the rules for what they can be – ideological restrictions that assume the speaking subjects are malformed or incapable of persuasive speech.

While they write their context slides and briefing rules for how to “not mess up a debate,” these adjudication teams share with each other the latest humor from John Stewart or Stephen Colbert with one another, blissfully unaware that they are crafting and imposing the same sort of discourse cut from the same molds that are the fodder for these comedians’ critiques of bad governance. It would be hilariously ironic if it didn’t exclude the very sorts of speech that most reasonable people, including debaters, love.

My experience at Vienna was cut short unfortunately by a need to wander to every pharmacy in Vienna to get medicine for my sick friend who was isolated in the hotel, wondering if she had consumption. But I am glad for this experience in round 2. Whoever that chair was opened my eyes to how persuasive the desire is, even among intelligent people, to punish others for breaking the rules handed down from the master. As debate chairs and judges, we should support rules that allow the competition to take place. All other rules, including motions, are fodder for creative debaters to do with as they wish – very much like how political speeches operate in the sphere of everyday discourse. To believe that the rule breaking team should be ranked lower than a team that advocated unanalyzed ideology is a strange one. But it is true that this happens in our political systems with a horrifying frequency. Even debaters are prisoners of the historical moment sometimes.

When chairing, remember that everyone wants a good debate. When teaching, remember students want to learn something. They are not there to try to trick you, or get away with something, or create chaos by breaking your rules. They are present and they are clever – at least as clever as you are. And you have an obligation to listen to them in the context that they speak. Why? Because you too are a human, and as a reasonable listener, you owe it to them. You owe it to debating. And you are going to go into each debate believing this. For the chair’s Hippocratic oath is not to keep the idea of a potentially good debate alive as long as possible – no, just like the real Hippocratic oath, the chair’s mantra is simple: Do no harm. We do no harm when we attend to context before we attend to the desires and ideology of the adjudication team when we evaluate the quality of debate speeches.

The newest issue of Contemporary Argumentation and Debate has just been published online and via open access. If you are interested in debating at all, you should read it.

The editors have done an amazing job with this issue – and for international readers it will give you a sense of where the attention of American debate is right now. My essay is an outlier, absolutely. European readers will be fascinated by the areas of attention that American debate practitioners who write find important.

Looking at this journal side-by-side with the recent Monash Debate Review is a cool way to see where the loci of importance live in the international debating culture and the American one (as very distinct from the American one that is venturing into BP).

Yes, it’s amazing – debate is subject to the general articulation of material and cultural concerns before its identity and value can be spoken. Proven yet again!