Structured debate

About

Political arguments often become very complex, requiring accurate conclusions from a variety of fields. Most – perhaps all – people do not have sufficient time to acquire all the necessary knowledge, much less the memory capacity to be aware of all the given facts at one time.

Worse, political interests will often imply or state falsehoods regarding these facts, interpret ambiguity in their favor, or claim ambiguity where none exists – leading even those with the best of intentions into conclusions that are false and actions that are likely to be destructive or wasteful.

Furthermore, in a typical discussion, many points may be left unanswered. A debater who does not scrupulously itemize every point made by her/his opponent and answer them one by one may even leave onlookers with the impression that every opposing point has been answered when in fact s/he cannot satisfactorily answer them.

It is therefore necessary to have some kind of system for keeping track of the structure of an argument in order to be certain that all points raised are answered. Making this structure publicly editable allows those with specialized knowledge to do fact-checking in their area of knowledge, and to make sure that no incorrect assertions are allowed to stand unanswered.

This is the purpose of the debate mapper module of InstaGov, and the purpose of the proposed /rules. In theory, a structured debate can be held in an unstructured plaintext discussion environment such as Google+; rules and an example for doing this are here.