What is the value of debate beyond social and intellectual contest?
Debate can become a method that we deliberately use to build a more generative relationship with ideas.
Today I want to talk about how we build good arguments.
Bo Seo is a former world debating champion. He is a Harvard debate coach and is now a lawyer. He published Good Arguments a few years ago in reaction to a culture that he saw as becoming less and less open to meaningful and thoughtful debate.
He wanted to share from his experience as a debater to see what that makes possible for public discourse.
Beyond the social contest aspect, there’s value in building arguments as an epistemic practice. Once we put them into collision with other ideas, we can encounter insights that are not available otherwise.
It can seem counterintuitive that, to develop our thinking, we might want to oppose ourselves.
As I read the book, I came to the realization that we don’t need to enroll in a debating contest to develop our ideas. We can actually develop a method and a practice of debating ourselves.
We need to see with different eyes, many eyes, to have a chance of knowing more.
We develop relationships with ideas, and those relationships can be fear-based. They can be controlling, defensive, protective, shallow. It may, in fact, not look like a great relationship at all.
Alternatively, we can develop relationships with ideas that are more exploratory, generative and vitalizing.
In any relationship, we can hold assumptions that are not shared by anyone else. It’s through asking these kinds of questions that we surface our assumptions and deepen our relationships with our ideas.
Debating ourselves has the benefit that we don’t have to risk confrontation with anyone.
And so, next I want to talk through some of the methods that are laid out in Good Arguments.
Isolate your main claim
One of these methods is taking time to isolate your main claim.
We may not really know what our main claim is.
We can complete the sentence: “I believe this because…”
I may hold a belief because I think children need protecting, or I may hold a belief because I think children need to be more prepared for adulthood.
You can ask these questions over and over about why you believe something and go many layers below the initial belief.
Switch sides
Another method we can take from Good Arguments is side switching.
Side switching asks: Can this argument survive its strongest challenge?
It means asking: What is the strongest case against my argument?
Debaters go into tournaments knowing they’re going to have to move between wildly divergent positions. These are positions that can have little to do with the debater’s own established views.
In the morning, you may be debating for something traditionally very conservative, and by the evening you may be debating for something a lot more radical.
This kind of movement generates a lot of intellectual flexibility, which lessens our capacity to fall into dogmatism.
Knowledge isn’t somewhere we arrive and then just settle in permanently.
We learn from opposing ideas by anticipating their strongest form.
When we build up the opposition’s idea and debate against that, it means we have something really robust to push against. You don’t have to be automatically limited to the level of argument that they present.
For example, we might say: “The affirmative said X, but what they could have said was Y.”
It means our rebuttal will be stronger and more meaningful, and it shows a level of intellectual integrity.
We don’t need to let the limited capacities of our opponents limit the quality of our discussion.
Find the debate within the debate
Another method we can take on in developing our arguments is looking for the debate within the debate.
We can ask: What are we actually disagreeing about here?
It can seem like we’re disagreeing about reality when really we’re disagreeing about priorities.
Maybe we agree that both things are important; we’ve just got to pick one over the other.
Debate can’t settle every disagreement because we all rank values differently.
We all interpret uncertainty differently.
We all accept different levels of risk.
And we face different consequences for our decisions.
You may be able to take risks that I can’t so easily take, and vice versa.
Many debates come down to autonomy and how much autonomy we might be willing to trade for something we consider potentially more valuable.
An argument can be good not because it resolves something, but because of how well it clarifies.
It can show us where the real disagreements lie. It shows us what values cannot be maximized simultaneously, where something has to take priority, and forces us to consider: What is it going to be?
It supports our judgment by showing us the conditions under which we may be prepared to revise our positions.
Becoming comfortable with uncertainty
If we want to avoid creating another restrictive world, we have to find ways to become collectively comfortable with uncertainty.
Confidence in developing our arguments, giving voice to our values, and listening to others and learning from them is one of those ways to develop that capacity for uncertainty together.
Debate makes us someone who is more open and capable of revising our positions.
We can truly surprise ourselves.
On some topics, we may in fact find ourselves becoming far more radical or far more conservative than we could have ever imagined. But we also know that tomorrow we may overwrite and revise those opinions because we may find better arguments.
When we know how to build good arguments, we can find that it’s possible to build better and better arguments over time, and the places where we find ideas may surprise us.
Building and refining our relationships with ideas lets us see more and more over time.
It’s wonderful to experience when life shows us there’s more for us to discover.
One hour spent with a pen and paper, sitting down debating and challenging our best ideas, may be far more generative than days and days, and months and months, pushing again and again in the same direction.
J. M. W. Turner, Phryne Going to the Public Baths as Venus: Demosthenes Taunted by Aeschines (1838)
