The New York Sophist

One of my most read essays is one that was unanimously rejected from every editor who has had a look at it. I’ve imagined re-writing it recently in order to make it a bit more publishable. I figure since it’s circulated a bit it might be able to find a journal home for a while, before the next iteration of it comes along (there’s always another iteration of everything you write).

For now the paper lives happily here. It gets a lot of traffic every few months. I think that this original paper has some good thoughts in it, but I think I’d like to expand the argument to consider debate itself as a singularity, not as a matter of fact but as a matter of useful pedagogical metaphor. For example, the black hole, the most popular singularity out there (or perhaps the most familiar to people) isn’t a “real” thing or even observable, but is a mathematical model and an astronomical certainty in that way. Perhaps the discourse of debate can be thought of in the same way – we can only represent debate via a very particular sort of discourse (think legal rhetoric) and we can model it, but natural debates are not observable, they do not indicate themselves or take place like other discursive phenomena, but they certainly do exist because we can “prove them” by modeling them.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

I think this is a very useful idea for a better distinction between argumentation and debate, usually lumped together in textbooks, textbook titles (as these books rarely teach anything on the cover properly), courses that we offer, and even in the professional speech of rhetoricians who probably should know to take care when lining up types of discourse as synonyms. I think a distinction between argumentation and debate is necessary and have worked to establish that distinction at my university with two separate courses in it. I want to further push the envelope by offering more composition within both too, as I feel these are modes of composition not just “angry, loud persuasive speeches” as so many of my colleagues appear to consider them through the way they are taught and written about in pedagogy.

There is also this other idea of the computer or internet singularity, the point where the artificial computer generated world is indistinguishable from “nature” and becomes the natural world for all intents and purposes. This might be a bit harder to think through. Perhaps it is useful to use debate as the singularity point for this, the point where we realize there’s no such thing as natural language, that language stands in for nature and the singularity begins and ends when we learn to speak, or when we accept speech as part of our lives (two very different points if you have ever been around children, many of which understand language, how to do it, and understand you but are very suspicious of getting too involved in speech – the smart kids really). That’s going to take some more thinking through, but might produce something worth reading.

American policy debate fundamentalists have found a new phrase to martial in their panicked defense of their practices. I don’t know why they feel so threatened; policy debate can easily co-exist with many different debating styles. But fundamentalism ensures that there is an either/or, a very significant conflict where the stakes are the highest they could be. 

Recently I’ve seen a new subtle defense surfacing in the form of the phrase “Evidence-based debate.” This is meant to differentiate policy debate, with its requirement that all arguments are supported by published material that is made available to both sides, from other debate formats that don’t require this. American policy debate fundamentalists are the ones who are circulating this term as a means of distinguishing their practice, or trying to make it superior by creating types of debate that simply do not exist either in theory or practice

There is no form of debating, academic, competitive, or otherwise, that would not be evidence based. Evidence and proof are central elements, required elements, I would say, to any model of debate that is based on reason in persuasion.

The practice of distinguishing debate and evidence-based debate is not a useful one for either production or criticism. Debate without evidence is not debate. The distinguishing feature of debate is the use of arguments that must have some sort of evidence to make the argument work. This evidence must be explained to the audience. If you accept this distinction, you open up a number of non-debate forms of speech to being called debate – such as diatribe, ranting, or just statements made to others for the point of persuasion. It explodes the category of debate to a point where it is no longer heuristically valuable. 

If we look closely at policy debate, we find it to be a paradox when it comes to evidence. It is, at the same time, a form that valorizes a level of skepticism that is a destructive level of incredulity while also holding one particular form of evidence as unquestioningly superior to all others. This practice replaces the reasonable audience with a mechanism or procedure that trumps the presence of human beings as the audience. It replaces a human audience with a very clever algorithm for decision making that people just don’t do without a lot of special training.

The second part of the paradox is an incredible, all-in attitude toward published information as being the only and the best qualification for conviction on a claim. 

It is the practice of policy debate evidence that gives the most weight to the persuasive defense of policy debate offered by Ed Panetta when he argued that the primary reason to teach policy debate is to train skilled bureaucrats. Policy change, he argued, does not happen at the level of the persuasive speaker anymore. It’s the technical master behind the scenes who can manipulate a field of complex requirements and lots of information who gets things done.

We could say all forms of debate are evidence-debate, but policy debate is evidence-dependent, that is, the artificial and alien concept of evidence forwarded by policy debate fundamentalists creates a culture of skeptic-addicts. The goal of the debate encounter is to valorize published text to the point where it atomizes. CERN in Switzerland is the metaphor for policy debate, the atomization of the category of persuadability into its sub-atomic particles. Instead of a democratic practice, we get a democratic absence, or an absence of any believable substance.  The absence of belief. 

DIscussion and the value of perspective is also not only diminished through this practice, but it’s also blatantly rejected. Anecdotally, anyone who has had policy debate experience knows the scene of finding the perfect piece of evidence for an argument, sharing it, and stating, “They’ll have nothing to say.” Perfect evidence in the world of American policy debate, creates silence instead of vibrant discussion.

One defense that might be martialed for this fundamentalist phrasing would be that there are anlogs from the professional world – evidence-based practice has been commonly written about in social work, medicine, and many other fields for years. So debate is just catching up to the real-world. There’s debate, and there’s evidence-based debate, which is better.

However the analogy breaks down once you read the work on evidence-based practices. These practices are not meant to be mechanistic, hard-and-fast rules for the use of evidence in these fields. They also do not valorize evidence, reminding practitioners that all evidence must be understood by the situation and the participants. There is no evidence that pierces through the situation, arranging all things in a way that conclusively moves opinion to one side, as evidence is ideologically meant to function in American policy debating. 

Such policy debate fundamentalism recalls models of pedagogy from the Zen Buddhist tradition, where students often get stuck halfway to enlightenment on the idea that reality is not what it appears to be. “the pencil laughs at you,” says the half-baked monk. The deep acceptance/high skeptic paradox has taken hold. 

This is merely a stopping point on the path to enlightenment. Outside of Buddhism, we could say that this is a sophomoric attitude. In my field of rhetoric, this is the point where the student frequently says, “Everything is rhetoric! The table is rhetoric! We are rhetoric!” Although an important recognition of the power of rhetoric as a perspective, this is by no means the conclusion that rhetorical studies draws, nor is it close. 

The phrase “evidence-based” debating is a panicked, defensive move that doesn’t accept the idea that debating is whatever audiences believe it to be, functioning however we allow it to in those moments. There is no such thing as “debate” per se, but that doesn’t mean that a solid, absolute definition based on some sort of arbitrary rules is needed. Instead, exploration of the notion of debate and how we allow it and disallow it to exist in particular discursive contexts would be a very valuable element to bring into our debate pedagogy. Evidence? How can you prove to be that this is evidence? Or in the words of Stephen Toulmin, “What have you got to go on?”

Currently Playing: Loreena McKennitt – An Ancient Muse

The old issues of The Journal of the American Forensic Association are some of my favorite things to leaf through to generate thinking. This journal, edited by debate teachers, was filled with the thoughts of those who immersed themselves in debating as a vocation. As the 1980s became the 1990s, the inexplicable rise of embarrassment at being a “speech teacher’ or “debate coach” infected the discipline, and the JAFA was converted into something “better,” The current journal Argumentation & Advocacy. The move was meant to make a journal about the teaching of debate a place for greater and broader insight about argumentation and issues that impact the world. I’m pretty sure that less people read A&A than they did JAFA. At least with JAFA a younger student would be motivated to have a look to see if there was something there to help them improve. 

The loss of this journal, and the other debate journals that were out there, was a blow to the practice of valuable debate via a loss of the idea of community. Now there was no forum for aspirational discussion about what teaching and coaching debate should be about. Yet the demands of the institutions for debate programs to justify themselves was directly increasing. As communication departments expanded to include those scholars who came up in cultural studies and other disciplines, the questions about debating became more common in faculty meetings. Instead of a faculty that all came up assuming debate “had to be” a part of a department, these new arrivals rightly questioned the small size of the programs, their insularity, and the trigger of cost. With the loss of a larger collection of aspirational tropes in the pages of JAFA, coaches who were caught up in the tournament slog, who thought preparing for the season was both the activity and the goal, were unable to defend themselves or their programs from this scrutiny. This was the end of the “golden age” of collegiate debate, and sparked a number of developmental conferences on debate preservation as a reaction. You could argue that Sedalia was the only semi-proactive response to the threat posed by the shifting communicative landscape in higher education. 

This brings me to one of my favorite books – Kruger’s Counterpoint, an edited collection of all of the best writing in journals like JAFA and others about the controversies that arose between thinking practitioners of debate education. In a lot of ways it reads to me today like the Hagakure, the collection of samurai wisdom put together by a former samurai who palpably felt the end of an era coming and wanted to preserve what was most important – the tropes, the points of invention for discourse about what it meant to be a samurai. Kruger’s book, published in the 1960s, was pretty far away from the very quick obliteration of debate programs twenty years in his future. Kruger, oddly enough, spent a lot of his career at C.W. Post University, a scarce 30 minutes to an hour from here in Long Island. I occasionally jot a note to myself to make an appointment with the University Archivist there to see what might be hiding out in the stacks from his work. I also happen to have his textbook, Modern Debate, in my collection as well. For me he symbolizes a time when it was a point of pride to be someone in the field of communication who not only taught speech production, oralcy, and verbal argument and debate, but who thought about it a lot, and who put their thoughts to paper to share with others. 

Such slowness of practice has immense value for the aspirational discussion about what we do when we teach debate, which then becomes a well of tropes we can draw from when times get tough. When the pressure is on from the administration to justify your cost, space, time, and energy we would have a resource. But it’s all dried up. The loss of this community has been gleefully replaced with a community of critics who wind up accidently giving credit to forms of debate and speech that probably don’t deserve that legitimation (i.e. an expert critiquing a political speech unwittingly or unwillingly confers upon it the status of “political speech” which draws some immediate borders in the imagination) and on the other side a community of people who are happy to teach eristics to their students because they have an intense faith that the practice of winning tournament after tournament is somehow going to teach them how to be excellent at crafting persuasive speeches, convincing arguments, and interesting debates. The “good” always comes later in critiques of debate teaching, that somewhere down the road debate will translate into success for them in life because it gives them “skills” or “portable skills” or “tools” or whatever. Such separation of the art of debating and oral production of argument from its context is like suggesting that a handful of false teeth is the equivalent of a mouth for chewing. Those who are interested in the teaching and learning of debate have to be satisfied with short, passing interactions in hallways of tournament competitions where a few ideas can be exchanged but only quickly as there is a round to judge, students to check on. Rarely is time given for the deep dive on the aspirational aims of debate education. In fact, we can count them! Sedalia, Sedalia 2, Quail Roost, and The Wake Forest University session. All suffer from a new fallacy I’m playing with that I call the “productive bias.” It works by assuming that if we have produced something, we’ve done something or accomplished something. All these conferences have produced similar documents that make similar claims and demands on the university. All have been similarly ignored by the University, and life goes on. 

I hoped to perhaps start a return to the slow, thoughtful exchange of ideas about the teaching of argument production. Without the recovery of teachers talking to one another in their capacity and identity as teachers, we don’t really have a chance of recovering inventional resources for the defense of debate.  My library has the full run of JAFA which I was hoping to digitize. You see, the journal exists only on microfilm or print. Since I doubt there is anyone out there willing to send me a whole print run of the journal, I thought it would be good to use one of the two microfilm machines (how things have changed) that the library owns in order to convert the run into PDF. This request was denied by the librarians, who not only are rightly concerned about the time I might spend monopolizing the machine, they also are wrongly concerned about copyright. If only it could be communicated how little my field cares about any conversation about teaching students how to make oral argument or persuade well – we are now in the business of creating critics of speeches. The turn of JAFA into A&A is pretty good evidence of what we value: commentary from expert receivers of speech instead of conversation from practitioners sharing and addressing issues in invention. 

A full PDF run of JAFA would have numerous benefits, most obviously the ability to full-text search the range of the journal for key words like “teaching” or “argument” and trace how those conversations played out over 30 or 40 years. I might still just surreptitiously begin this project with what little free time I have and just be patient.  It would eventually be worth it. More to come on this as I get ready for a day of listening to debate speeches, something that the ideological and hegemonic voices of the university and the field of communication tell me, in my head, is a waste of time, that I should be writing something for QJS. Both exercises, ironically, will involve the exact same number of people – about ten. 

When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. 

Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered catastrophic losses in debate biodiversity (assuming you are with me in the idea of an equivalent sense of biodiversity for intellectual practices). This chart, taken from Nichols & Baccus’s 1936 volume, Modern Debating, hoped to guide the reader through the dizzying array of different events that would be called debate. For students in the early 20th century, debate could take on many forms, and these forms could all co-exist. 

Today what do we have? We seem to have a number of forms, but our entire tree is structured from the roots of the tournament. CX, LD, PF, CEDA, NDT, NPDA, NPTE, APDA, EUDC, North-Ams, BP, CUSID BP Nats, USU, WUDC.  All acronyms, save one, and all derived from types of debating done for one purpose – tournament style contests. 

Take a look at the variety on the above chart and think – if such a chart were made today, there would only be one line – the argumentation line – and on it would be all the competitive formats. The persuasive line – where debaters reached out in a competitive sense to broader audiences – has evaporated. 

The division the authors make is interesting to say the least – argumentative forms are more competitive forms: These are the types of debate that focus on competition the way we understand it today. Persuasive forms are more general: They can be competitive or not – really depends on the audience.

Perhaps the division is one of audience. Persuasive forms focus on an audience with a high concentration of members of the public. Argumentative forms focus on an audience that has little to no public. However in 1936 it is hard to imagine a debate contest that wouldn’t draw community interest. Today we don’t have to expend any effort to imagine that. 

Today’s chart would be one line. Purely argumentative. We don’t even bother teaching debate students anything from the persuasion line. In fact, recent attempts to help debate pedagogically, such as the Guide to Debate produced before WUDC Malaysia, attempt to flatten the distinction: What is argumentative is persuasive, and vice versa. Why keep the distinction when the people watching and evaluating your debates are so homogeneous that the consideration of variance in how they hear you has been eliminated with a joyful medical precision?

Most current collegiate debaters would see the loss of the persuasive line as no big loss at all. Those are side projects to the “real” work of debating. Others would say the distinction is false: Contemporary debate focuses on persuasion. I wonder. What would be needed, and what would be the value, to teach all these forms in a contemporary debate program? The monopoly of tournament contest ideology is a difficult regime to break. Returning to history might be a good way to show the impermanence and newness of the “tournament as debate” model of debate instruction that is thoughtlessly reproduced pedagogically across the world.

When we think about the loss of biodiversity, it evokes the idea of loss of variety, the loss of a diversity of creatures that, in essence, share a number of common traits. They have the same genus, and from that, they specialized, adapted, and spread out into their environments. 

Here’s some evidence that we’ve suffered catastrophic losses in debate biodiversity (assuming you are with me in the idea of an equivalent sense of biodiversity for intellectual practices). This chart, taken from Nichols & Baccus’s 1936 volume, Modern Debating, hoped to guide the reader through the dizzying array of different events that would be called debate. For students in the early 20th century, debate could take on many forms, and these forms could all co-exist. 

Today what do we have? We seem to have a number of forms, but our entire tree is structured from the roots of the tournament. CX, LD, PF, CEDA, NDT, NPDA, NPTE, APDA, EUDC, North-Ams, BP, CUSID BP Nats, USU, WUDC.  All acronyms, save one, and all derived from types of debating done for one purpose – tournament style contests. 

Take a look at the variety on the above chart and think – if such a chart were made today, there would only be one line – the argumentation line – and on it would be all the competitive formats. The persuasive line – where debaters reached out in a competitive sense to broader audiences – has evaporated. 

The division the authors make is interesting to say the least – argumentative forms are more competitive forms: These are the types of debate that focus on competition the way we understand it today. Persuasive forms are more general: They can be competitive or not – really depends on the audience.

Perhaps the division is one of audience. Persuasive forms focus on an audience with a high concentration of members of the public. Argumentative forms focus on an audience that has little to no public. However in 1936 it is hard to imagine a debate contest that wouldn’t draw community interest. Today we don’t have to expend any effort to imagine that. 

Today’s chart would be one line. Purely argumentative. We don’t even bother teaching debate students anything from the persuasion line. In fact, recent attempts to help debate pedagogically, such as the Guide to Debate produced before WUDC Malaysia, attempt to flatten the distinction: What is argumentative is persuasive, and vice versa. Why keep the distinction when the people watching and evaluating your debates are so homogeneous that the consideration of variance in how they hear you has been eliminated with a joyful medical precision?

Most current collegiate debaters would see the loss of the persuasive line as no big loss at all. Those are side projects to the “real” work of debating. Others would say the distinction is false: Contemporary debate focuses on persuasion. I wonder. What would be needed, and what would be the value, to teach all these forms in a contemporary debate program? The monopoly of tournament contest ideology is a difficult regime to break. Returning to history might be a good way to show the impermanence and newness of the “tournament as debate” model of debate instruction that is thoughtlessly reproduced pedagogically across the world.