>
> Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably
> responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the
> average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the
> arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the
> extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at
> committee-meetings, and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of
> acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that
> most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you
> ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?
Dorothy Sayers is wise. My heart is indeed sinking here because (with my
own modest abilities in debate: I don't advocate not having such
abilities, just that they aren't the only ones to settle for) I would
propose that the advocates of clear thinking and debate have, in my
estimation, failed to speak to Tannen's point (or my construal -- which
has not been called into question either), have not met or refuted her
arguments (although I have tried to put arguments presented against hers
and found them mostly not to be at odds, although they are framed so), and
have included a high incidence of irrelevant material (as I have been
trying to point out). I don't give a whatever about winning this
non-debate, its the process that has been championed so eloquently that
interests me.
I say non-debate with care. I am happy to abandon my illusion that we are
discussing her argument about the culture of argument and acknowledge that
instead we have left discussing Tannen a long time ago and are now
wandering in different fields. I can wander happily too, just don't
pretend that we are still addressing Tannen. It seems to me that there is
a fallacy (don't remember the name, just the principle) that discrediting
one piece of evidence doesn't necessarily disprove the whole argument.
We seem to be taking one piece to respond to and avoiding the overall
argument. (Her argument seems to be falling victim to its own prediction;
we're doing piecemeal dismantling.)
If I am the only one to be bothered by this, then I will withdraw. Can
someone give me a hint, here or backstage, that you think I should?
I did a little study with my advisor on the use of turn-initial "I think"
in critical thinking classrooms, and discovered (among other things) that
it serves particularly well to separate each contribution from the
previous one, denying that its position in the sequence [I do sequential
analysis as a conversation analyst] is meaningful. It works. After an
hour of talking, a lot has been said to the discussion facilitators, not
to each other, and nothing gets clarified much, but (and this is my
interpretation, not Bob's) they have done what they were REALLY there to
do: keep talking. Really useful device, I THINK.
Hopefully?,
Alena
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:08 PDT