Formal debate is really really terrible in practice as a way to train anything resembling good philosophy, or else I’d think that a pretty good suggestion.
Specifically, all forms of debate devolve into speed-talking contests, because if you make a point that your opponent doesn’t oppose, then they’re considered by the judges to have conceded that point; so you want to make as many points as humanly possible in the time allotted. Aside from that, the game is all about coming up with clever argumentative maneuvers that have little to do with what arguments would work in real life and nothing al all to do with the truth.
Multiple attempted reforms of debate rules to get around these problems have failed, producing essentially the same result.
With respect to the distinct skills in “philosophy”—I’m not so sure. I think maybe philosophy has correctly divided itself into subfields such as ontology, ethics, and epistemology. These subfields address different sets of questions, but use similar/identical “philosophical method” in doing so. This suggests that a common set of skills are involved in many philosophical pursuits, somewhat unlike the sports analogy.
Granted, I do suspect that there’s a list of skills, which might best be trained separately. Here is an attempt to list what they might be:
Question generation.
Maybe just come up with “is a hotdog a sandwich” type questions for lots of everyday concepts?
Hypothesis generation. Given a set of “data” (usually from intuition—eg, cases where someone does, or doesn’t, seem to be behaving morally) generate a hypothesis which fits the data (eg, a theory of morality).
This might be trained by trying to come up with dictionary definitions of foreign words, given only examples.
Another exercise could involve improving dictionary definitions of familiar words.
Counterexample generation: strike down a theory by coming up with a case which clearly goes against it.
Give counterexamples to dictionary definitions.
Counterexamples in mathematics—give negative examples for false conjectures.
Just, like, a whole lot of critiquing each other’s theories.
Argumentation: clearly, precisely, and convincingly express a philosophical view, supporting it with good reasoning and avoiding missteps (eg fallacies).
Training in formal logic and other valid methods of inference such as probability and statistics.
Fallacies and biases.
Lots of writing practice with detailed critiques for clarity, accuracy, and persuasiveness.
The above three skills seem to be a bit overly anchored to a specific way of doing philosophy for my taste, but there you have it.
Yes, I was completely turned off from ‘debate’ as a formal endeavor as a high schooler, despite my love for informal debate.
One of the main problems is that debate contests are usually formulated as zero sum, whereas the typical informal debate I engage in is not.
Do you know of any formats for nonzero sum debate competitions where the competitors argue points they actually believe in? e.g. both debaters get more points if they identify a double-crux, and you win by having more points in the tournament as a whole, not by beating your opponent.
Formal debate is really really terrible in practice as a way to train anything resembling good philosophy, or else I’d think that a pretty good suggestion.
Specifically, all forms of debate devolve into speed-talking contests, because if you make a point that your opponent doesn’t oppose, then they’re considered by the judges to have conceded that point; so you want to make as many points as humanly possible in the time allotted. Aside from that, the game is all about coming up with clever argumentative maneuvers that have little to do with what arguments would work in real life and nothing al all to do with the truth.
Multiple attempted reforms of debate rules to get around these problems have failed, producing essentially the same result.
With respect to the distinct skills in “philosophy”—I’m not so sure. I think maybe philosophy has correctly divided itself into subfields such as ontology, ethics, and epistemology. These subfields address different sets of questions, but use similar/identical “philosophical method” in doing so. This suggests that a common set of skills are involved in many philosophical pursuits, somewhat unlike the sports analogy.
Granted, I do suspect that there’s a list of skills, which might best be trained separately. Here is an attempt to list what they might be:
Question generation.
Maybe just come up with “is a hotdog a sandwich” type questions for lots of everyday concepts?
Hypothesis generation. Given a set of “data” (usually from intuition—eg, cases where someone does, or doesn’t, seem to be behaving morally) generate a hypothesis which fits the data (eg, a theory of morality).
This might be trained by trying to come up with dictionary definitions of foreign words, given only examples.
Another exercise could involve improving dictionary definitions of familiar words.
Counterexample generation: strike down a theory by coming up with a case which clearly goes against it.
Give counterexamples to dictionary definitions.
Counterexamples in mathematics—give negative examples for false conjectures.
Just, like, a whole lot of critiquing each other’s theories.
Argumentation: clearly, precisely, and convincingly express a philosophical view, supporting it with good reasoning and avoiding missteps (eg fallacies).
Training in formal logic and other valid methods of inference such as probability and statistics.
Fallacies and biases.
Lots of writing practice with detailed critiques for clarity, accuracy, and persuasiveness.
The above three skills seem to be a bit overly anchored to a specific way of doing philosophy for my taste, but there you have it.
Yes, I was completely turned off from ‘debate’ as a formal endeavor as a high schooler, despite my love for informal debate.
One of the main problems is that debate contests are usually formulated as zero sum, whereas the typical informal debate I engage in is not.
Do you know of any formats for nonzero sum debate competitions where the competitors argue points they actually believe in? e.g. both debaters get more points if they identify a double-crux, and you win by having more points in the tournament as a whole, not by beating your opponent.