The New York Sophist

I am in the process of cleaning out my apartment, which honestly I have never done, or perhaps never done well. I kept a lot of junk. Not sure why I have so much, but I think that’s what happens to you through living.

I have been digging around for some paper copies of materials I used to teach a form of debate called Irish Times Format, or “Times debating,” or “Irish debate.” In that process I found a wealth of old debate material, including one that has nothing to do with Irish debating at all, but really struck a chord. Once I realized what it was, I was transported back to that debate, 1999, somewhere in Austin, Texas.

I was judging a high school policy debate round, known in some parts of the U.S. as “Cross-Examination Debate” (a historical hold-out from the old arguments that split the NDT around 1982 and created a new organization called CEDA – the Cross Examination Debate Association). One of the members of the team walked around the semifinal room and handed out green slips of paper to everyone before the debate started, saying nothing except, “Does everyone have one?” and making sure to catch everyone who came in a bit late.

It was a powerful document, so powerful that it shaped our perception of what was being said in the debate. Once you are handed something, you generally read it. This conducted a sense of familiarity and urgency to us about the issues that were going to come up in that debate. The other team had no such contextualization, and also had to fight against the immediacy that the green slips continued to convey about the issue for the duration of the debate.

I still have mine. I kept it, as it was one of the most unique moments of argumentation I’ve experienced in a tournament debate.

I’ve zoomed in on it a bit so you can read the smaller print text. I think it’s from 1999, but not quite sure about that. I remember the room and the debate team that handed it to me. But other than that, this is really my only reccolection is this handout.

This moment stands out because it is the sort of rhetorical innovation in debating that should be a regular occurrence in debate education. However, debate education focuses on the edges of the rules and the denotation of proceedure in order to generate strategy. Any innovation is going to be kept to and within the margins of the rules.

Are there rules against handouts? None of us were sure, but it didn’t matter. This was done before the debate started when everyone was assembling to watch it. It was never referred to in any speech by the team that distributed it. It was not used as evidence during the debate. It was the perfect demonstration, in my mind, of how to connect the limitations of tournament debating with the nearly borderless world of debate.

How can debate coaches and rhetoric educators encourage this kind of invention? How can this become a norm, not an exception that stands out across 20 years of listening to and evaluating various debate contests?

Part of the solution is removing pedagogy from the drive to win the tournament. Reversing the relationship between strategies and the winning of the round or ballot is essential. Most of the time, arguments and strategies are developed in order to win debates. Consider developing arguments and strategies that you think are powerful, meaningful, important interventions in the world. Deploy them and reflect on the win or loss, or the comments and discussion after the debate as review of your argument. Make changes as needed to compensate for the position’s failure (or success that is less than you hoped). Repeat.

Using the debate tournament like an exam or the dreaded higher education word “assessment” is the clearest path to redeeming the weekend tournament. It won’t fully redeem what goes on there, but it’s a step toward the kind of innovation in argumentation that we’d expect to get from such a vast investment of time and other resources into tournament oriented debate practice.

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?”

Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.

The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.

Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:

1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.

2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.

3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech

This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.

I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.

How far down does the rabbit hole go?

Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!

Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.

The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.

Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:

1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.

2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.

3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech

This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.

I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.

How far down does the rabbit hole go?

Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!

Giving a talk today via Skype to a policy debate team about Worlds style debating. The question that I am using to orient my comments is one that might be a bit Lacanian: What’s left out? Or, since it’s a format that was created in Britain perhaps the better lecture title might be “Mind the Gap.”

Using this as the principle of constructing how this format works and why it might be valuable to practice seems a better approach than a lot of the head-on, scorched Earth style discussions that many people expect/lament/enjoy/instigate. My feeling is that exposure to one format when one is from another only increases the chances that one might understand the grammar of one’s home format a bit better, becoming a better debater in both formats (over time of course).

What I think happens is the same as in learning a foreign language – you become better able to understand how your own language works when learning a foreign tongue via the weird structural approach that we use in language teaching. This is why many schools report better test results on grammar and reading comprehension when they require Latin in the curriculum.

But it goes a bit deeper. Gadamer in Truth and Method relied on the classics department as his model of a humanities program that doesn’t always go begging to the social sciences for justification on the level of method. The reason why is that these grammars are invented, and one can always interrogate and question the order of the order. Translations in context or out of context or within addendums and modifications to the grammar rules are always in play. This type of fluid understanding is one of the few means to keep truth alive and useful – by keeping it in play, keeping it fluid, keeping it breathing. Dare I say: Keeping it alive.

Debate formats should be like this. Even if you disagree, time is against you. Culture is against you. Show me a policy debate round and I will use the same example to prove that it is not policy debate. Worlds is also changing/changed. These flows and pulses will happen. Do we want to be swept up by the waves or do we want to ride them? Better still, let’s learn how to surf. Enjoy your symptom, as Zizek would say.

Mind the gap when exiting or entering the format.