Structured debate

Overview

A structured debate is an argumentative discussion in which the pieces of the argument are broken down into the smallest arguable chunks ("points"), and the dependencies between supporting points and the larger points which depend on them are clearly indicated.

This helps to prevent a number of common problems with discussions of complex issues:

• accidentally (or deliberately) taking opposing points out of context, and answering them as if the context didn't exist
• the feeling of getting "lost" in the argument due to not knowing what has been settled and what remains to be discussed
• significant points falling by the wayside and remaining unanswered
• conflating multiple points into a single point, which leads easily to making logical fallacies

Goals

Any set of rules for truth-driven debate must satisfy a number of criteria, including:

• It must be possible to determine, at any given moment, which items are agreed upon and which are still in dispute
• It should be easy to spot when a debater is changing the subject rather than answering a point
• It should be possible to "unbundle" any point which involves a chain of suppositions (i.e. depends upon multiple sub-points) so that the individual suppositions can be discussed separately

Interface

Ideally, a structured debate is represented in a manner which provides visual cues for:

• which side of the argument is being advocated by a particular piece of text
• whether a given point has been defeated or called into question
• the dependency structure (which parent-point is being attacked or defended by any given sub-point)

Proposed Rules

There may be many sets of rules which would meet these goals, but here is a proposed set:

• Every argument starts with a claim (the root claim) which states one side of the debate as fact.
• Any claim (the "parent claim") may have zero or more sub-claims
• Any claim may consist of one or more sub-claims, all of which must be true in order for the claim to be valid (e.g. claim: Socrates is mortal due to being a man; supporting sub-claim: All men are mortal; supporting sub-claim: Socrates is a man.)
• Any claim may be answered by zero or more response arguments
• All response arguments must relate to the parent claim in one of the following ways:
  • Support: an argument that the parent claim is true
  • Counter: an argument that the parent claim is false
• Any claim is disabled if it has no active (non-disabled) sub-claims and at least one active counter-claim
• Participants in a debate may indicate their approval or disagreement with an item
  • This agreement is strictly binary (agree/disagree); if a participant wishes to draw a finer distinction, s/he should create a claim with which s/he can agree or disagree unilaterally (this rule is somewhat fuzzy at the moment and needs to have some examples to look at)
  • Whenever a participant's agreement/disagreement does not match the logical outcome of the debate (e.g. disagreeing with an item with no active counterpoints, or agreeing with an item which has been refuted), resolving the discrepancy should be somehow included in a to-do list for that participant. Participants may be disqualified or downgraded for allowing discrepancies to remain unanswered for too long (exact details to be worked out later).
• The outcome of another debate may be used as the argument for a claim, in which case the children of that debate's root claim become children of the current claim, and the same rules apply

Some further refinements will be necessary when adapting this system for making time-dependent decisions (see InstaGov).

Issuepedia

Issuepedia provides argumenticons and associated templates for the purpose of documenting structured debates. We are working on tools for managing and conducting structured debates between two or more participants in realtime.

See also category:debates – as of this writing, all of the pages in this category contain structured debates.