In this latest episode, I chat with the co-founders of the Canonical Debate Lab about their project to establish a way to collect, store, and provide arguments to the world to improve decision making.
I’m joined by Timothy High and Bentley Davis to talk about how computers, coding, and the internet can hopefully improve the art of argumentation and debate for all of us. See what you think!
My presentation on a panel on tournament debate pedagogy at Southern States Communication Conference, April 2021
The history of American intercollegiate debate practice is mostly the tracking of metaphors. Debate instructors and debate practice has always been connected to some metaphor that communicates the value and importance of debate as an educational practice.
Since the mid 20th century, that metaphor has only been “fair competition” and further reduced to “fair tournament competition” which governs nearly every decision made in the teaching and learning of debate.
This metaphor I of course find revolting, although there is a defense of it. Tabling that, it could probably be agreed that the presence of new and better metaphors for debate instruction and practice benefits everyone who teaches and practices debate. The more and varied ways to understand what we are doing, the more and varied ways we have to innovate, try new things, and engage in visionary practices that could benefit us.
In this paper I argue that the competitive cooking show is a great metaphor for competitive debate pedagogy. I look at three shows in this short talk and discuss how and why I think they would be good metaphors. See what you think of the talk, and later on in the week (or next week) I’ll post the full paper.
Relevance is a part of argumentation, not a rule or container that surrounds or determines what kinds of arguments are permitted. It’s not a referee and it’s not a boundary.
Consider relevance an ask, or an indicator, that you are not doing a very good job of sharing your view with your audience/interlocutor. They are expressing that they don’t get why you are sharing what you are sharing.
It also can be an argument itself. The claim “that’s not relevant” can be an argument that generally takes the shape of “everything you are saying I have no problem with but it doesn’t advance or help your case, your side of the argument at all.” This is the expression that the information or reason is good but the entirety of the statement is out of place.
Claims to relevance are a special class of utterance in arguments and/or debates as they are opportunities for people to shore up or patch up their position in very specific ways. Too often the response to such claims is to deny them – “Of course it is relevant!” – but these defenses rely on the arguer’s perception that what they are saying makes sense. This sort of response is a bad gesture toward what was already expressed; a bad response to someone expressing doubt about a relationship of an utterance to the argument itself.
Instead of this response, consider some alternatives:
What is this argument about?
I thought we were discussing X, why don’t you think that what I said is relevant?
What are the most important issues to you related to what we are arguing about?
Chances are from these you can pretty easily see why it is that your interlocutor doesn’t see the relevance and you can either try again in an edited form or abandon it and try something else.
Another potential move here is to move to the level of the specific from the principle or vice versa. Sometimes a very specific claim or very specific story will seem to be directly relevant to you but won’t have the right uptake for someone else.
The specific to principle move sounds like: “Yea but we were talking about X which is about [principle 1, 2, 3] and this story is related in principle.”
The inverse is also useful where you make a principled claim, e.g. Rights are a poor way to protect people, something like that, and the claim of irrelevance, “What’s that got do to with anything?” – is an invitation to tell a story about an individual or some individuals.
The goal of any statement in an argument or a debate is not to try to win, but to advance the understanding of your position. A focus on winning, or taking out/down the opposition, rendering them to silence, or whatever it is people think they are doing out there eliminates opportunities for a deeper or more comprehensive understanding of the position people are taking up and their motives for doing so.
A focus on advancing understanding means you don’t throw up immediate opposition to most of these kinds of statements, but see them instead as indicators of gaps in your reasoning. Although you don’t think there are gaps in your reasoning that is highly irrelevant when you are talking to other people. They are saying these kinds of things as repair requests. Although you know you are right, they are just hearing your utterance of these familiar words for the first time. Consider it a gift when you hear such claims as they are invitations to alter your expression and keep advancing the argument by advancing your current position on it – for that too might change, or at least has the potential to change; this is the minimum required buy in to argue with anyone.
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In this new episode of In the Bin, I chat with Will Silberman who has tabbed a ton of British Parliamentary format debate tournaments here in the United States.
We talk about the past 13 months of online debate, what questions about debate it raises, what mistakes were made, and what benefits came out of this necessary and dramatic shift of practice.
All comments welcome down below, on the Anchor site, or wherever you see this post!
Here’s a new episode of my podcast, In the Bin!
On this episode my friend Dan and I discuss the continued influence of the ideas of Stephen Toulmin, author of many books but most notably Uses of Argument where he introduced the world to what we now know as the Toulmin Model of Argumentation.
Listen here!