Merging West with East


For the past couple of weeks I have been spending a lot of time thinking and reading about debate and argumentation – the western, rhetorical tradition, as well as the teaching methods and history of the conventions of Buddhism. I am starting work on a long-term project that attempts to separate the practice of debate from western rational thought, formal logic, and reason in an attempt to re-connect it to the aesthetic, imaginative, and spiritual side of communication.

Right now my focus is on the teaching device known as the Kung-An (J. Koan). It is my belief that the pedagogical principles behind the use of Koans in Buddhist teaching can be applied to how one approaches motions in debate. One should think of the motion like a Koan.

The major change is one of mental approach. Instead of seeing the motion and thinking “What are the arguments I can win on that are related to the motion,” the debate comes as an aesthetic response to what you are presented in the terms of the motion. You articulate a response to the motion that does not seek to use it as an instrument to win its own particularities. You instead articulate persuasive belief that the motion will serve as an example.

A Koan is designed to separate you from the limits of reason, rational, and logical thinking. But this, from the point of view of a rhetorician, is merely a transition into another type of discourse. Zen and Ch’an masters are not looking for the correct answer, for a check box when they are evaluating what students say when responding to a Koan. They are looking for a much deeper understanding, something away from the discourses of predictable, limited, everyday thought.

This is not to say it’s way out there. Instead, it is rooted in the experiences of the everyday, but articulates these experiences and this information differently. It attempts to flip the standard position of master and student on its head. Why not approach the motion in this manner: It is an example of the obvious, persuasive understanding that you advocate?

This might be a bit esoteric, so let’s ground it with some analysis of what Zen and Ch’an masters look for to determine if a monk has reached satori, or enlightenment. Did they provide the sort of answer that distinguishes them as “getting it?” Here are some of the principles of evaluation gleaned from literary analysis of Koan dialogues by T. Griffith Foulk in the essay “The Form and Function of Koan Literature: A Historical Overview”:

1. “The ‘awakened’ person naturally refuses to occupy the position of disciple, whose commentary is ipso facto ‘deluded.’ He insists rather on seizing and holding the position of master in the dialogue, which means that he must be prepared not only to comment on the root case, but to pass critical judgment on his teacher’ remarks as well when the teacher tries the usual gambit of putting him in his place. The confidence to stand one’s ground in this situation comes from understanding the basic message of Chou-chou’s ‘not’ (and many other Ch’an/Zen dialogues) which is simply that words and signs utterly fail to convey the true dharma.” (41)
The origin of the term Koan is a legal one, meaning “public case” – something like the modern practice of stare decisis, where case law is commented upon to point out its validity or to apply it to a contemporary legal question. So one can think of Koans, at least in their origin, as an argumentation game – can you provide a commentary that both re-explains this idea anew, while keeping in tone with the previous ruling? This spiritual stare decisis is the pedagogical tool of the master to see if the student is “getting it” – are they awake? Are they making sense within the “rules” of Ch’an? And finally, are they making a valuable contribution with their words to the understanding of those who hear? Are they making an impact on the thought of those who are listening? For the koan test is not mere mental gaming, but an important step in the training of the mind for the direct transformation of the world into something better. It is not necessary to describe the similarity to debate that is apparent here.

The koan in question here is the famous Chou-Chou koan: Does a dog have a buddha nature? To which Chou-Chou replied, “Not!” This is the root of the koan, but a response must keep in mind what the audience expects to hear.

Foulk points out that the first step is to “stand one’s ground,” to occupy the position of the teacher, and to speak with confidence. What is important for my analogy between koans and motions here, is that the confidence stems fro understanding the “basic message” of the koan and making sure all your remarks are relevant to that.

How frequent is it to see a debate where the “basic message” is not only lost, but since it is absent, the speaker fails to perform even the most basic elements of confidence? Confidence comes not from what you think you know, but from your approach to the motion. Do you allow the basics of the motion to inform your speech, or do you allow your confrontation with the motion to determine your speech? Which would the monk choose?

2. Foulk’s second criteria he describes as a reversal of, “the prohibition against the interpretation of koans as symbol systems. All authoritative commentary, as modeled in the discourse records and koan collections, is grounded in the principle that the language of the old cases is figurative and the actions they report are symbolic. Clever commentary may acknowledge and play with the literal meaning of a saying, but it must never fail to interpret and respond to the figurative meaning. By the same token, the comments themselves must be couched in indirect speech. The real sin of intellectualism or discursive thought does not consist in the act of interpretation, as Ch’an/Zen masters like to pretend, but in the expression of one’s interpretation in direct, expository language.” (41)

This is going to be controversial, but I believe this means that we should treat motions as if they were open. Why? Too often, the debater is imprisoned by the directness and simplicity of the motion – they merely argue what they think the motion logically includes. But with the first step in mind, with basic understanding and the confidence of the teacher in mind, why not approach the motion as something that is the base, not the telos, of one’s argumentation. The “sin of intellectualism” might not apply to debaters, but perhaps it does in altered form – nobody likes a debate that sounds “debate-y.” People like a debate that sounds persuasive. They like speakers that clearly make their point and back it up with interesting, relevant words. They like someone who speaks with the sound and appearance of the master. The sin of direct language, as Foulk puts it, is an indictment of directness. There is something to be said about stylistic remarks, the use of metaphor, analogy, and narrative, and the richness of the persuasive moment that is not served when one attempts to speak like an equation. Logic is in service to the debater, reason and rationality are too, but how often are they mutated into the end result of a speech? Treating the motion as open allows you to use it as an example for your points, and argue something that the example would prove. This will help debaters access those larger principles, values, and ideas that good debates revolve around.


3. “Finally, the satori that gives one master over koans is traditionally expressed in statements to the effect that tone will never again be tricked or sucked in by the words of the patriarchs, which is to say, by the koan genre itself. . . Not to be sucked in is to realize that the words could not possibly embody or convey awakening, and that their imputed profundity is actually a function of the literary frame in which they appear. To fully master the koan genre, in other words, one must realize that it is in fact a literary genre with a distinct set of structures and rules, and furthermore that it is a product of the poetic and philosophical imagination.” (41)

The final step indicates to the master that the student realizes that truth is always an “arm’s length” away. This is the realization that the requirements of form, genre, and appropriateness deserve due deference no matter what the arguments in the debate become. I have written about this idea before, which I call the “Righteous Four” – and here in the koan tradition, there is nothing above, nothing superior, to the format of the koan interview. Why would this be valuable?

One speculative answer is that the training must be specific. If one is dealing with something as important and precious as enlightenment, one better not ignore the things that make human judgment possible – things like culture, community norms, and the like. In rhetoric, these are the most important considerations: Appropriateness, Decorum, and Timeliness (or Timing). They make meaningful speech possible. And when one only has limited words to convey what should be felt, believed, or done, what could be more important?

Debate is a game, debate is not a game. Both things are true here. Deference to the genre helps us realize the limits in both statements. It helps us understand the interconnectivity. Opposites become essential to each other. Like the yin-yang we find debate as advocacy training and debate as competitive intellectual game. The same is true for the koan – at once school exercise/graduation requirement and what you will be doing for the rest of your life as a zen master. There is no distinction between the exam and the practice – and I feel debate, as a training for the public intellectual, or the intelligent, caring civic-minded person, should be no different.

I feel the comparison is valuable and opens a different understanding of how to approach debating. It is an essential part of the task of recognizing the often discarded side of debate as aesthetic, cultural, human practice. Without it, we are left with a mere language game that encourages corruption under the guise of objective truth seeking.

Responding to General Criticisms of Debate

I find it very strange that there are still critiques that are alive and well of the practice of the art of debate. You would think that in an era of tea parties, conservative talk (shout?) radio, and a collection of some of the most incapable public officials in the art of justification, explanation and argument that these criticisms would be diminished to the point where they are, at the least, back-burnered in the face of our crumbling ability to advocate our feelings, thoughts, and beliefs to one another.
So this post is an attempt to craft a bare-bones defense for each of these major criticisms of teaching debate. Before I get into establishing and then responding to each of the criticisms, there are some really excellent background readings that will help bring the debate about debate into a clearer resolution (maybe not 1080p, but at least you will be able to see the trees in the distance as our protagonists engage with one another).
First, it is vital to read the Platonic dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus to get a sense of the critique of teaching the art of debate at its limit and then in its more moderate form. In Gorgias we find Socrates objecting to Gorgias teaching an ability to persuade, argue and prove because it has no sense of absolute essence. It has no core to it, so it is difficult to determine if it is a good or bad art. Socrates confines “rhetorike” (as Plato calls it in the dialogue we might say “rhetoric” but the word in Attic Greek is a person not a noun; an orator, not oratory, but Plato tries to fix this with this word). In Phaedrus the need for rhetoric is acknowledged, but as in the speeches about love, only a love for true wisdom can craft proper rhetoric. In both dialogues though there is the concern with placing semblance or mere appearance in the place of the real or absolute.
Moving forward a few thousand years we find this same concern replicated in the very nice article by Hicks and Green on the controversy over switch-side debating in 1950s America. To give a brief summary, the choice of the national topic – that the US should recognize the communist government of China – forced a split between coaches who believed that good training in debate was centered around development of extant belief in students and coaches that believed that assigning sides to students regardless of personal belief was the best way to go. Of course, switch-side debating is not only the American standard now, but the international one (some of you are probably scratching your heads quite puzzled that this was even an issue in the U.S. at one time) and additionally, the idea that someone would need to believe one side or the other in order to participate effectively on a debate team is quite simply laughable to the majority of debate instructors, teachers and coaches in America today I would bet. The article shows how the idea of switch-side debate became not only the norm but an essential element in the defense of democracy. The ability to debate both sides of a question entered democratic ideology in the place of strong personal convictions about right and wrong articulated well as the cornerstone of good democratic practice.
All of the criticisms of the teaching and practice of debate can be seen better through the lenses provided by a bit of the history of this long debate. With those somewhat in mind, here are the most common critiques of debate practice – possibly the most common, they are the ones I hear pretty frequently.
1) Debate encourages people to game and toy with the ideas of others, rendering the most vital beliefs of other people as playthings.
2) Debate thwarts the ability of people to accept or entertain the beliefs of others as they are, seeing them as something that must be dissected, cut open, or like Napoleon looking at the Sphinx’s nose – target practice.
I hope these are representative and fair depictions of the criticisms. This is how I have summarized them after hearing them so frequently. I hope in the comments you might suggest alternate phrasings and alternate criticisms if you don’t think these are accurate or well formed.
1) This criticism assumes a lot.
It assumes that the game of debate, or the things learned there laterally shift over into mainstream discourse. Of course it is somewhat true that ideas are treated as instrumentality in debate. I believe though that this is a good thing. It allows for ideas that one would not normally approach to become closely understood. It also means that people have to respond to ideas they would probably ignore in daily life. Most importantly, it provides the practitioner with a wealth of perspective. Perspectives that he or she would not normally think about. Whether or not they adopt them as their own belief, I take the agnostic Gorgian position – none of my business. Gaming with ideas and views is a great way to lower the stakes and really engage these views. The recalcitrance of debate is that many views, once explored, are hard to forget. And the practitioner, although in the game doesn’t have much trouble distancing herself, will be confronted from time to time with the limits of her own beliefs outside of the forum.
Another assumption in this criticism is one that holds some beliefs or values as real things that are somehow discounted or diminished because they are “played with.” This might be true, but the subtle nuances of good debate require one to listen, hear, and understand the intricacies of positions. Compare this to the non-practicioner, the one untrained in the arts, who “won’t hear” or refuse to engage a position that is “dead wrong.” Even if the motives are “impure” or someone is on a crusade to convert the other, the requirement of good debate – to understand the position opposite – has the risk of infecting the interlocutors thought. Engaging with the ideas of the other in an attempt to convert them over to your side paradoxically risks the entire enterprise. For every time something is explained, it is re-created. Every alteration helps to define it. And if the debater investigating the opposite position encounters a good argument, they are likely to change their own mind. There is real risk in engagement, there is no risk, and increased polarization in the refusal to engage with “deeply held” or “important” ideas of other people. Treating ideas like pieces in a game might be abhorrent, but not if the game is recognized as such, and the goal of it is training in subtleties and to value what works – understanding and engagement of the linkages within the others’ arguments.
2) This criticism is closely related to Kenneth Burke’s idea of “trained incapacity” or “occupational psychosis” – the idea that one is trained to do things and therefore out of the ability to do things, and tends to see the world in terms of their occupation, since they are always wanting to see things through that lens anyway.
I would argue that debate training is the necessary check against such an occupational psychosis. Of course, once you are trained in something it is really exciting to try to use it all over the place – young martial arts students must be carefully taught that not everything in the house deserves a kick – and debate has this training built in, generally called the “audience.” Not every trick a student discovers will always work or always apply because the audience, the judges, must be persuaded, and they have biases as to what the good argument consists of.
In the interpersonal realm, the opponent is also the audience. This changes things around so much that the person who approaches each disagreement as if it were a debate quickly runs out of friends. Debate holds above anything else that the audience must be adapted to in order to persuade. “Occupational Psychosis” in this situation becomes self-correcting. If the audience doesn’t like aggressive debate attacks, switch the discourse to something more like a discussion, or questioning.
Is it the function of debate to teach each student to treat all people as valuable? Not directly, no. But since audiences can be vastly different, with polarities one has never thought of, debate training encourages increased respect for other people as more than targets. They are sources of inspiration and information. They help one overcome difficulties in phrasing and developing arguments. Also, most debate is a humanistic endeavor, teaching that there are some common assumptions under the surface of everyone that generally mean certain forms of arguments will sway them. But that “generally” is debate’s anti-humanistic element, the element that says there is nothing so dangerous as grouping all humans together under an essential label. So in the end, the skills that teach people to possibly see all opinions as target practice also encourage serious investigation of these opinions to see what is holding them up.
What’s the alternative here? Non-engagement? Acceptance of all ideas? I think that these would be much worse. Accepting people as flawed beings is a different thing than accepting them with their flaws. The acceptance of people as flawed is not a weakness to those trained in debate. It is a source of salvation in a sense. It means that there is always a chance to convince people who are doing bad under the name of the good, or who believe in ways that harm society to change their mind. The skills that are taught in debate naively appear to be simple zero-sum games where we start with the idea that the other person is wrong. Instead, the practitioners of debate assume that nobody is right, but perhaps through discourse we can become more right. At least in this situation and this issue. And when the situation changes, we can always return, because we are all somewhat wrong, all the time.
Going around correcting others with “truth” is an activity that looks like debate, but it’s not debate that causes that. The lack of such training is what allows such behavior to occur. They take the name of debate in order to provide a false sense of fairness. But the practitioner of debate will often call her art “discussion” or “conversation” in order to ensure the debate continues. Within debate is a respect for other ideas that is essential to master in order to win. It is a much more complex symbol system than it often gets credit for. Moving away from debate training ensures more thoughtless treatment of the ideas of others than simply using them to hone complex rhetorical accumen.
Perhaps this is a bit too rough to publish, but I thought I would give it a try. Through this exercise, I noticed I used the word Practitioner to refer to students of debate rather than debater. I think this was purely accidental, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Not as flat as debater is. More on that another time.
For now, what other criticisms of debate need addressing? I am sure there are more, but these are the ones that I think are most common, and in most need of responses.

Closed Adjudication and the Ballance of Learning


Things are ramping up toward the white party tonight and the grand final round of WUDC 2010. Great tournament and great people.

Been thinking a bit about the final closed rounds. Closed adjudication is something we rarely, if ever do in the Northeast BP region of the United States. I have usually been against it, only supporting it as a cultural norm from IONA, or the global BP community tradition.

Closed adjudication seems to be a terrible overvaluing of the competitive elements of debate over the pedagogical. Its function seems to be to keep debaters puzzled and hanging on to hope while their chances to learn something from their judges quickly bleed away as the time at the tournaament diminishes into socials and other important things.

This is my standard view of closed adjudication, but here at Koc Worlds I have been presented with some of the reasons for it, and I find them convincing.

First, closed adjudication ensures that teams don’t give up and leave. Here we are in a great, exotic locale, why bother debating on if there’s no chance to clear? Many teams would simply withdraw from the tab and be running around the city. Seems a bit far fetched to me, but I think that there would be some teams who might just decide to hang out at the bar once it was statistically impossible for them to break. The tournament certainly cannot provide enough swing teams to cover all of these possibilities.

An additional concern is that some teams might be bitter about their non-breaking status and deliberately ruin the debates that they are in. This of course destroys the chances of the teams left in the rooms to break and hurts their ability to enjoy the challenge of the round.

Finally, there is the element of surprise, where they want to make sure that the teams are very excited and thrilled to know that they broke. The emotional tension and excitement should be high on break night and everyone should be screaming and jumping around.

These are the most convincing arguments I’ve heard for it, and I agree partially. I think that these reasons are important, however, they are all in the service of “sportifying” debate instead of keeping debate on the educational and critical keel that is important long term.

I know that many people don’t particularly care to get feedback from closed rounds. It’s hard when the chairs have little to no memory of the round by the time the break is released, and additionally when the moment of decision is hours old. This is of course if you can find the people judging you at the party and talk to them coherently due to the noise or other things.

These rounds are closed because they are important: They are the rounds that can decide the break and are some of the closest rounds held at any tournament. This is also a reason they should be open: They are close adjudications, and the teams involved could learn a lot from the feedback they could get about their performance in a tight room.

I don’t think closed adjudication is going away anytime soon but here are a couple of fixes that should be implimented so the educational elements are not trumped by these competitive elements.

First idea: chairs should have to provide written decisions that then could be emailed and kept by the tab. These decisions then could be downloaded on demand or emailed to the teams involved in the round. Not suggesting this as a DCA job, but more of a chair job perhaps. The decision and comments should be written out with the chairs present.

Second idea: With the cheapness of digital video, the decision should be filmed and recorded immediately after the round by a runner or some other tournament official. These can then be saved and accessed via internet after the break. This preserves the immediacy and freshness of the comments and allows teams to relax a bit and not have to chase down the judges before they forget or leave the tournament.

Final Idea: A room set aside that is quiet and comfortable for those judges and debaters who want to discuss the closed rooms during the party. I doubt many would use it, but the option would be available for those who wanted to get feedback right after the break.

I think these are nice ways of preserving closed adjudication for its minor benefits of creating excitement and its major benefit of preserving interest for teams that would actively or passively ruin the debating experience for teams that still care about doing their best. The current system sits too far over on the side of sport and not enough on the side of learning.

Argumentation Books I Can’t Do Without

Chatting with a friend of mine online the other day and he asked me for my favorite argumentation\debate books. Thought I would list them here as well.

Here’s the list I came up with:

The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation by Perelman and Olbrects-Tyteca

A masterwork, read it only 2 times all the way through because it is both massive and technical. Many of the examples don’t resonate with modern American readers since they are all mid 20th century European social science or literary examples. And many of them are somewhat obscure even if you think you are pretty well-read.

The plus sides of the book far outweigh. Here is a comprehensive attempt to map in totality the common topoi of contemporary argument from a purely inductive basis. No discursive stone is left unturned – philosophy, courtrooms, literature, sociology, and more are examined for the presence of the new rhetorical forms.

If the book intimidates, check out Perelman’s later book The Realm of Rhetoric for a boiled down approach to what is in the Treatise.

Uses of Argument by Stephen Toulmin

Essential, game-changing study for rhetoricians that study argumentation. For philosophers or others who study argument, the book is not so revolutionary. For people involved in academic debate or intercollegiate debate, the Toulmin model is almost not a model, but the right way that arguments are made.

More important of a contribution, I think, is the situatedness of argument that Tolumin suggests. The idea that argumentation is field dependent is a vital concept that places real importance on the method of argument over the truth of the argument. This allows for evaluation of argument away from tools from empirical science, or analytic philosophy.

Informal Logic by Douglas Walton

This is a nice treatment of the formal, validity-based discipline of logical reasoning in the terms of the Toulmin turn, or the turn toward the study of argument that has some resonance with the daily practice of argument. One critique that can be lodged at philosophers who study argumentation is that there’s too much theory, not enough practice in their analysis. Not a lot of discussion of the daily practices of argument and the way people reason in and out of arguments all day long. This book bridges the gap between the situatedness study of rhetoricians and the theoretical structures of the philosophers interested in argument.

Rhetorical Argumentation by Christopher Tindale

A great attempt at looking through the eyes of argumentation studies at rhetoric, and then at argumentation studies through rhetoric’s eyes. A wonderful read, very lucid, and with plenty of ideas for praxis between the two fields. The idea of argument as object in recent years, brought about by many field’s attention to argumentation, finds some needed complication in the pages of this good book.

But these are scholarly treatments of argument! What about teaching it to debaters or potential debaters?

I always havethe Art of Deception by Capaldi hanging around. Great intro to formal reasoning, critical thinking, emotional appeals, formal fallacies, and causal reasoning. Cheap and easy to read with tons of examples and exercises. A fantastic book for anyone interested in improving his or her argumentative skill.

Also perhaps Argumentation Schemes by Walton might be good for teaching, but it’s fairly technical and complex, and mostly for argument analysis. But there are some good ways in that book of breaking down arguments into structural forms or elements just to see how they work.

Mandatory Debate Training?

Here is an article by Susan Herbst advocating for mandatory debate training as a return to the principles of the civic in the U.S.
Of course, this article oversimplifies. But the conection between participation in debate and the practice of civility seem questionable.
For the general public, I think the connection is axiomatic. Of course training in “how the other side sees the argument” is perhaps what civil discourse and the political are founded upon to the modern lay mind.

But further than all of this is the idea I forward that debate is training to a new way of life – a self-discipline and an attitude toward the world and the self that is not just revolutionary or some sort of skill development, but a self-renewing revolutionary perspective that allows one to shift and adapt no matter the moment. Something like martial arts and something a bit more rigorous than generic spirituality is what I’m after.

So I like the article, but it’s only scratching the surface, or perhaps it damns with faint praise, and limits the potential of argument and debate.