The Prerequisites of Debate

Elliot Temple
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What should you have before a debate?

First, someone involved should have an idea of what they're doing. Someone should understand what a productive debate looks like. Simplifying, you should either have a debate moderator or a debate participant who is capable of being a debate moderator. If no one knows how to do that, your debate is likely to be disorganized and unproductive. Meeting this prerequisite doesn't guarantee a good debate, but it gives you a better chance. If you don't meet this prerequisite, consider collaboration instead. If you don't meet this prerequisite and have strong disagreements and adversarial attitudes, consider aborting or finding a moderator.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://criticalfallibilism.com/the-prerequisites-of-debate/
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Here I wanna try making essay paragraphs to try to describe stuff objectively:

In the article, Temple stated that, first, people involved in debates should have an idea of what their doing. What Temple means here is that people should have an idea about what to do on a debate. One can see Temple’s statement as a response to the question what should you have before a debate? How one participates in a debate is important for answering that question. To clarify what he says, Temple stated someone should know what a productive debate looks like. This clarifies how to view debates-it’s about success, success at how it goes. How the debate goes means both sides are fair, not talking over each other, being genuine, and not hostile.

What i think i could work on:
  • The paragraph doesn’t seem to flow well to me like after I bring up the question what should you have before a debate? I think I bring up another topic that can be in a paragraph maybe. It seems that what I wrote after the sentence doesn’t connect well with what I wrote before the question
  • More paragraphs. I just did one. Why not many? Seems like slow progress to me. What’s my goal?
  • Know if it’s ok to write a question down like I did in the paragraph without adding a colon to introduce it.
  • Is clarify the right word in the 5th sentence?
  • Reading the paragraph after writing once doesn’t sound the same as when I wrote it. Is it an English issue? like grammar or does it have to do with using more writing as a I speak more?
  • Use more em dashes instead of just hyphens. Also know if em dashes are appropriate
  • Why couldn’t I find something better to say than, “success at how it goes.” in the second to last sentence? Is it an issue related to vocab? Do I needa fix my English? Why’d I take so long rewriting that part? I didn’t know how to fix it. It was hard to relate success at something to how a productive debate looks like.
  • Who’s the audience?
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First, someone involved should have an idea of what they’re doing. Someone should understand what a productive debate looks like. Simplifying, you should either have a debate moderator or a debate participant who is capable of being a debate moderator. If no one knows how to do that, your debate is likely to be disorganized and unproductive. Meeting this prerequisite doesn’t guarantee a good debate, but it gives you a better chance. If you don’t meet this prerequisite, consider collaboration instead. If you don’t meet this prerequisite and have strong disagreements and adversarial attitudes, consider aborting or finding a moderator.

That makes sense. At least one person in the debate should know what they are doing. I assume this has more so to do with knowing how to handle debates themselves. People should know about the topics they’re debating and the arguments they will make, but thats a bit different from knowing how to conduct a proper debate.

I wonder what a proper debate even looks like. Like Elliot has commented on a lot of debates being bad and not productive, but I wonder if he’s at least scene any that had a reasonable structure (but maybe not reasonable arguments).

If things are adversarial enough an independent moderator is probably best. The unmoderating(?) party might see the moderating party as being biased and bad when he may really not be.

Second, you should be interested in the topic. You should think it’s important and want to spend some time on it. Debate is best if everyone wants to try to reach a conclusion instead of stopping early. That may not happen for a variety of reasons, but it should at least be people’s preference that they’d like to do if everything goes smoothly.

Along with that you need to be open to being wrong. I think there are some people interested in a topic but not interested in being corrected about that topic.

I wonder if not desiring error correction is something that comes over time. I feel like people newer to something are typically more open to being wrong because they know they are new versus people who have been doing something for a while aren’t that open even if they really have no good reason to not be so sure.

By conclusive I mean fallibly and tentatively: the best knowledge we have now, and enough to conclude and move on instead of continuing to consider the issue. But after we reach a conclusion, it’s still open to revision and reconsideration in the future, especially if we think of relevant new arguments or get new evidence.

Possibilities are different from relevant new arguments/new evidence? I was just thinking of some of the stuff I heard about the OJ case. Stuff like blood could have gotten mixed up at a lab. No evidence to that, but thats a possibility. Should people address these possibilities? For example, by providing security camera footage? I think that would maybe be sufficient back then, but as time goes on what about the possibility of the footage being AI generated or something?

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It’s hard to find good moderators that the debaters both agree are good. People who are adversarial, or are losing debates, often claim the moderator is bad or biased.

Sometimes a moderator is pretty hands-off, in which case debaters on both sides are more likely to think the moderator is fair, but then the moderator isn’t very effective since they aren’t doing much.

You can revise things after thinking of new possibilities. You can critically evaluate whether the possibilities merit reopening an issue and spending more time on it.

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~yeah, I’ve seen that kind of thing. like if one debater is being moderated more than the other, people just see the extra moderation and not the reasons for the extra moderation and assume bias and stuff. lame.

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