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.
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.
