What Is The Point of Debate?

"The highest form of debate isn't about one person declaring victory. It's about both people making a discovery. The goal isn't to defend your reasons and attack theirs. It's to sharpen your reasoning. Good arguments shift what you think. Great arguments change how you think." From a tweet by Adam Grant- March 18th, 2022.

Adam Grant’s post got a lot wrong, in the very short space of a single tweet. Needless to say, I disagree with him. Written in a single tweet, the verbiage of the sentiment relies on folksy warmth — it’s not about winning! — or one could say, about losing — but about discovery…

The highest form of debate isn’t about one person declaring victory. It’s about both people making a discovery.

That is, BOTH people making a discovery. But this implies that every participant in a debate is on an equal footing. Could the “discovery” be that one person knows absolutely nothing about the subject at hand? That they are lacking as a spokesperson for their own viewpoints? Is the discovery potentially to acknowledge, through the viewpoints, a correct way of viewing the resolution at hand?

The discovery could very well be that one of you is completely and utterly wrong. Which you haven’t ruled out, per your tweet, but doesn't quite meet the equitable subtext of Adam’s message that all debaters and viewpoints are “equal”—pure nonsense.

A debate is simply an argumentation between two opposing sides of a resolution. There cannot be a true “winner” or “loser” in concrete terms, but the resolutions being debated are abstractions, open-ended, and largely based on interpretations of facts, rather than the facts themselves.

However, one can still “win” or “lose” a debate, based on the principles of argumentation, sound logic, a command for the nuances of the discussion, and statistical knowledge of the resolution and its surrounding counterparts. Many contemporary debates actually declare a winner (and therefore a loser) by tracking the audience’s “pre” and “post” debate stance in the form of a poll. You could declare victory by understanding whose arguments were more persuasive through the polling data, and by tracking the persuasion percentage.

A victory could be declared, but not always — say, in the rare case the audience remains unmoved in its persuasion. This does not mean, however, that the victor of the debate is correct — it means that in the sport of debate, they were the most persuasive. 

They “won the debate”, they didn’t “win the resolution”.

The goal isn’t to defend your reasons and attack theirs. It’s to sharpen your reasoning.

Are we sure about this? Defending one’s reasons and attacking the other person's reasons is practically a working definition of debate. The entire exercise is exactly that. Precisely that. Now one could quibble about whether that was the stated goal. But we must then ask ourselves, is the goal of the debaters the same as the goal of the witnesses, say, the audience? In some sense, learning that a debater, prepared to argue their case before the audience, is there to learn, rather than say teach, illuminate, or critique an idea, feels a bit pandering. Now on your point (“It’s to sharpen your reasoning”) I can’t formulate a disagreement, because ultimately, your reasoning will sharpen when given the chance to “defend your viewpoints and attack theirs.”

However, if “defending your viewpoints and attacking theirs” is not the goal, then what is the value of sharpening your reason? It may be useful to understand that debates are based on opposing, binary solutions — meaning, “to defend your viewpoints IS to attack theirs.

Good arguments shift what you think, great arguments change how you think.

Now, this is interesting, and I probably agree with Adam on this. The difference between “what you think” and “how you think” is crucial. But by what means? How does this shift or change occur? Well, one could say, by defending your own viewpoints and attacking theirs! But then again, one needs to ask, “what is a good argument?” and “what is a great argument?”. By what means do we determine such categories?

If I am inspired, or required, to identify a great argument inside a debate, I should also be able to identify bad ones, too. But what is then a “great argument”? Well, it could be said that a great argument is a “successful attack on someone’s viewpoints, in defense of their own”. (on another note, one can easily “shift” or “change” their thinking plenty by recognizing bad arguments, as much as they can from witnessing good ones)

I am all for civil debate. We would do ourselves well learning how to do it properly, absence of ad hominem, snark, and ill-logic. But the audience must be respected, and the debaters must take on that responsibility, by being thorough, decent, educated, but most of all, they should be prepared to “defend their own viewpoints and attack their opponent’s”.

In a serious, educated, formal discussion, we should learn to become stronger, not weaker. It’s a war of the intellect, based on attack and defense. I would say “leave the warm sentiments for the afterparty, but inside the debate, go for the jugular”. If you believe in the good of your own argument, and the harm caused by your opponent’s argument, it is your obligation (as per the “sport” of debate) to “win”. It is not necessarily your stated objective to “learn” — it is to rise to the responsibility of now that you see that we disagree, by what method would you formulate a rebuttal? How could one pen a response without attacking my viewpoints while defending their own?