The Art And Science Of Debate

The standard model of debate that is taught in university is antiquated partly because of its scholastic origins, and partly because it has not kept pace with analytical rigor and our understanding of economics, but mostly because of the condition of our current cultural divide.

In this article I try to correct the existing timid approach to argument and provide a method for approaching political debate, by providing more than a dozen basic principles to follow.

A few examples of extending the analytical method into the economic method.

In “Degrees of Political Argument” I’ve tried add something valuable to the technology of political debate by developing a ranking system for different forms of debate, rather than to categorize arguments as a long list of errors.

Political ideologies are best understood as the means by which one class gains power over the others. In this article I try to put these political ideologies in their class contexts.

Using extensions to Propertarian ethics I’ve tried to answer a number of common political problems, to both illustrate that they are resolvable, and that the Propertarian ethic has broad explanatory power.

The Big 3: 1) Statistical Misrepresentation, 2) Failure to Account for Hidden Costs or Hidden Transfers, 3) Correlation is not Causation.
Plus a number of other common Errors.

Using an alternative to standard class analysis, I’ve tried to explain how classes and their elites function in society and how they affect our political process.

The human mind still retains it’s pre-cognitive biases, and those biases affect all of our thinking. This list is useful in helping you identify errors in your thinking as well as in your opponent’s thinking.

I’ve tried to approach logical fallacies from a more utilitarian point of view, by elaborating on some of the most common errors in political debate.