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> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, b

> Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind. I always felt the whole point of discussion and debate was to establish truth - given specific premises. This kind of "argue both sides" exercises seem more like practice in audience manipulation.

noteboom 3y ago
Welcome to Judaism.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
noduerme 3y ago
No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that. Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side. Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.
- bandyaboot 3y ago
  > Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    You don't. You always keep learning. What I wrote was for people who truly think there's some one truth they want to argue; to explain to them why this is valuable. The real value is that this method teaches you to see all sides, and gives you both compassion and the ability to determine and assert what you think is right in circumstances you haven't encountered before - to think on the fly without judging prematurely.
    - bandyaboot 3y ago
      So wouldn’t that mean that the part of your comment that I quoted can be simplified to: > Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs
      - noduerme 3y ago
        That's also true, if you're honest with yourself and don't become ossified. I should stipulate though that you can arrive at about 99% of your beliefs and know them thoroughly enough to know why you believe them, while still being willing to change your mind if you're given new evidence.
        bandyaboot 3y ago
        Fair enough :)
- worrycue 3y ago
  > you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do This presuppose that I even have a position to begin with ... I don't understand why anyone would adopt a position before the discussion/debate - the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position.
  - honzabe 3y ago
    It seems that you fail to see the distinction between putting yourself in the position of one who believes and actually adopting the position. You can think of it as intellectual empathy. You being able to put yourself into someone else's shoes does not mean you become them.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    >the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position. you presuppose there is a factually correct position to begin with. For the kinds of topics debate prepares you for, there often isn't.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  > You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions. This might happen when you imagine you truly hold some other position, but it is clear from the structure you describe (mostly unstructured talking to an opponent) that this is incidental learning and not the focus of the exercise. What you describe is plainly a exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.
  - edanm 3y ago
    > No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions. I disagree with this. It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but for sure mathematicians often engage in similar ways of learning. Almost always, you'd learn something new, like a new definition, by considering other ways to define the same thing and see how that affects things. And at the high level of maths, there sometimes are actual debates about which direction to go with certain axioms/etc. > What you describe is plainly an exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal. Hard disagree. Being able to switch sides is essential to being able to understand why one side is better than the other. If you're trying to decide which ice cream flavor to order, but literally cannot see one of the options, it is meaningless to say you chose not to take that one. Only by actually seeing it, tasting it, and deciding against it, have you actually made a choice that one flavor is better than another.
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      > It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but [emphasis mine] Ha! Seeing you use a literal non-sequitur to as a counter is a perfect illustration of why rhetoric exercises aren't an automatic pathway to sound logical reasoning. (Explicitly the argument by edanm goes: "I hold the proposition 'A does not do B' is not true, because A does C")
stale2002 3y ago
The point of the argue both sides exercise is that it does help get to the ultimate truth. When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true! That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.
honzabe 3y ago
Not necessarily. We were doing this in sociology seminars at college and it was not about manipulating the audience at all. It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. It is basically a practice of the skill of critical thinking. When you try to argue your opponent's side and to your surprise, you come up with arguments that seem good to yourself, that is getting closer to the truth, isn't it?
- worrycue 3y ago
  > It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. But you do this automatically when you are trying to discern the truth - invalid arguments are to be eliminated. The whole, now argue for the other side is kind of ... frankly, telling the anyone to argue for any side is ridiculous IMHO. You are pretty much putting the cart before the horse - i.e. picking a position before the arguing has even started. The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).
  - freeopinion 3y ago
    Perhaps. Or maybe there is a completely different purpose in this exercise. We could pick a topic like "Passing by reference is better than passing by value". In the end we might not care at all about "getting to the truth." The topic could be "salt tastes better than pepper." The point of this exercise could be to learn that "nine out of ten dentists" arguments are flawed and why. It could be to practice listening skills to be able to "flow" the points of discussion. These practices might not be to get at the truth of any particular argument, but to learn methods to get at the truth of any and all arguments.
    - SiempreViernes 3y ago
      To be more precise, what you are talking about is analysing the outward form of the argument, to see trough the misdirection rhetoric has provided. It is then the task of logic to examine the core propositions and determine if they mean anything.
nine_k 3y ago
The point is to learn to see through manipulation, among other things. Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any. The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse. Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.
freeopinion 3y ago
It is common in high school debate tournaments to argue the same resolution repeatedly at every tournament through the school year. Each match you are assigned one side or the other and you should be ready to go 100% on that side. You aren't trying to persuade anybody. You are trying to make as many arguments as you can, be ready and refute any arguments from the other side, identify logical fallacies, etc. The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through. These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.
- noduerme 3y ago
  >> It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. This is right on the money. That's why it's a shame to short-circuit any debate by conflating the person taking a side with the side they're taking. Come to think of it, that's also a great reason why it's good to force debaters to take both sides... because neither can be held liable as it's not "their" opinion, and they're free to use their minds without fear of being judged.
vintermann 3y ago
Yes - and it's rich to me that veterans of sophistry as a game are complaining about new tactics. Granted, I don't think highly of most of these kritik-hijackings either, but they only exposed the shallowness (or "nihilism" in the author's words) at the core.

noteboom 3y ago

Welcome to Judaism.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

noduerme 3y ago

No - particularly because these debates occurred at many tables simultaneously, like games of chess. Of course the point of rhetoric is to win an audience, but this type of training was much more than that. Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. Maybe you'll even find your own beliefs change in this process. But humility and courage of your conviction, if you have a conviction, demands that you can argue the other side better than anyone on the other side. Also, where reasonable people disagree, there are always two versions of the truth. Learning to grapple with that fact teaches one not to see everything in pure black and white. Which has the benefit of teaching one to judge practices on the merits rather than individuals on their orthodoxy.

bandyaboot 3y ago
> Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. How does one know when they completely understand the best possible case against their own belief? Or know for sure that they’ve arrived at the best possible case against it? Seems like an unattainable bar.
- noduerme 3y ago
  You don't. You always keep learning. What I wrote was for people who truly think there's some one truth they want to argue; to explain to them why this is valuable. The real value is that this method teaches you to see all sides, and gives you both compassion and the ability to determine and assert what you think is right in circumstances you haven't encountered before - to think on the fly without judging prematurely.
  - bandyaboot 3y ago
    So wouldn’t that mean that the part of your comment that I quoted can be simplified to: > Plainly put: You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs
    - noduerme 3y ago
      That's also true, if you're honest with yourself and don't become ossified. I should stipulate though that you can arrive at about 99% of your beliefs and know them thoroughly enough to know why you believe them, while still being willing to change your mind if you're given new evidence.
      - bandyaboot 3y ago
        Fair enough :)
worrycue 3y ago
> you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do This presuppose that I even have a position to begin with ... I don't understand why anyone would adopt a position before the discussion/debate - the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position.
- honzabe 3y ago
  It seems that you fail to see the distinction between putting yourself in the position of one who believes and actually adopting the position. You can think of it as intellectual empathy. You being able to put yourself into someone else's shoes does not mean you become them.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >the whole point of which is to decide what is the factually correct position. you presuppose there is a factually correct position to begin with. For the kinds of topics debate prepares you for, there often isn't.
SiempreViernes 3y ago
> You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do. No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions. This might happen when you imagine you truly hold some other position, but it is clear from the structure you describe (mostly unstructured talking to an opponent) that this is incidental learning and not the focus of the exercise. What you describe is plainly a exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.
- edanm 3y ago
  > No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions. I disagree with this. It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but for sure mathematicians often engage in similar ways of learning. Almost always, you'd learn something new, like a new definition, by considering other ways to define the same thing and see how that affects things. And at the high level of maths, there sometimes are actual debates about which direction to go with certain axioms/etc. > What you describe is plainly an exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal. Hard disagree. Being able to switch sides is essential to being able to understand why one side is better than the other. If you're trying to decide which ice cream flavor to order, but literally cannot see one of the options, it is meaningless to say you chose not to take that one. Only by actually seeing it, tasting it, and deciding against it, have you actually made a choice that one flavor is better than another.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    > It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but [emphasis mine] Ha! Seeing you use a literal non-sequitur to as a counter is a perfect illustration of why rhetoric exercises aren't an automatic pathway to sound logical reasoning. (Explicitly the argument by edanm goes: "I hold the proposition 'A does not do B' is not true, because A does C")

stale2002 3y ago

The point of the argue both sides exercise is that it does help get to the ultimate truth. When you are forced to argue for things that you disagree with, you will quickly come to realize that some of the things that your opponents say are true! That does not mean that their conclusion is ultimately correct, but doing the exercise helps you get out of common mindset that anything said by your opponents is wrong.

honzabe 3y ago

Not necessarily. We were doing this in sociology seminars at college and it was not about manipulating the audience at all. It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. It is basically a practice of the skill of critical thinking. When you try to argue your opponent's side and to your surprise, you come up with arguments that seem good to yourself, that is getting closer to the truth, isn't it?

worrycue 3y ago
> It is about stepping out of the opinion you inhabit and trying to look at it from your opponent's perspective. But you do this automatically when you are trying to discern the truth - invalid arguments are to be eliminated. The whole, now argue for the other side is kind of ... frankly, telling the anyone to argue for any side is ridiculous IMHO. You are pretty much putting the cart before the horse - i.e. picking a position before the arguing has even started. The whole point of discussion and debate should be to decide which position to pick (because it's the factually correct one).
- freeopinion 3y ago
  Perhaps. Or maybe there is a completely different purpose in this exercise. We could pick a topic like "Passing by reference is better than passing by value". In the end we might not care at all about "getting to the truth." The topic could be "salt tastes better than pepper." The point of this exercise could be to learn that "nine out of ten dentists" arguments are flawed and why. It could be to practice listening skills to be able to "flow" the points of discussion. These practices might not be to get at the truth of any particular argument, but to learn methods to get at the truth of any and all arguments.
  - SiempreViernes 3y ago
    To be more precise, what you are talking about is analysing the outward form of the argument, to see trough the misdirection rhetoric has provided. It is then the task of logic to examine the core propositions and determine if they mean anything.

nine_k 3y ago

The point is to learn to see through manipulation, among other things. Truth can only be found if both sides share axioms. Very often they don't, and the point of a debate is to detect and outline that difference, and show it to your audience, if any. The exercise is exactly to detect and pick a set of axioms that a particular character used to have, and then honestly think along those lines. It's a hugely important exercise, and not merely for disputes. It teaches you to think in terms of logic of somebody else, see their reasons, understand their feelings. That other party is not necessarily your opponent in any way; it could be your teacher or your student, your business partner, or even your spouse. Great many people are never taught how to leave the "my truth is the self-evident truth" point of view, and this results in a lot of suffering, theirs, and those who have to interact with them.

freeopinion 3y ago

It is common in high school debate tournaments to argue the same resolution repeatedly at every tournament through the school year. Each match you are assigned one side or the other and you should be ready to go 100% on that side. You aren't trying to persuade anybody. You are trying to make as many arguments as you can, be ready and refute any arguments from the other side, identify logical fallacies, etc. The point of the year long effort, in my opinion, has nothing to do with any particular topic. It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. It is so that you can spot the problems when Trump tries to sell you hogwash or when Biden tries his pitch. It is to help you stay protected when your school district or home owners' association or even you yourself use faulty reasoning to justify a bad policy. So you can not be persuaded by things you should see through. These are skills sorely lacking in most of the world where I live.

noduerme 3y ago
>> It is to improve your critical thinking and to recognize various techniques used against you in everyday life. This is right on the money. That's why it's a shame to short-circuit any debate by conflating the person taking a side with the side they're taking. Come to think of it, that's also a great reason why it's good to force debaters to take both sides... because neither can be held liable as it's not "their" opinion, and they're free to use their minds without fear of being judged.

vintermann 3y ago

Yes - and it's rich to me that veterans of sophistry as a game are complaining about new tactics. Granted, I don't think highly of most of these kritik-hijackings either, but they only exposed the shallowness (or "nihilism" in the author's words) at the core.