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| Irish Times clock on the new building at Townsend Street, Dublin. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This is our second time hosting the Irish Times debate champions in New York. We were very pleased that the NPDA and the Times chose us as the anchor point for the start of this tour.
The debate we had was quite good. The Irish debaters are more Irish Times format debaters and not BP/Worlds debaters, which made for an interesting BP/Worlds debate.
Since I was hosting the debaters at my house, there was plenty of time to discuss debate and the various issues surrounding it. The best part was the critiques of BP/Worlds format offered by the Irish debaters:
1. Worlds format has too fast a delivery to be meaningful.
2. Arguments that are automatically persuasive in Worlds format would never be persuasive, or hardly ever persuasive, outside of that particular audience.
3. The debate is too technical, and people make a large amount of arguments in each speech
This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Worlds is more like Policy debate than we realized.
I suppose any style of debate, modified for competition would lean toward these issues. As the audience becomes cut off from the general public, the audience demands more specialty from the speakers. Ironically, this marking is under the rubric of “more persuasive” argumentation.
How far down does the rabbit hole go?
Here is the public debate we had with the Irish, in Worlds format. I hope you enjoy it!
Comments
One response to “The Irish Times Debate in New York”
It’s an interesting discussion and one that I’ve had with lots of Irish debaters. There’s an ongoing question as to whether “Times style” is compatible with “worlds style”. My feeling was always that they had different registers but that those registers are not in opposition to one and other, but rather are different in emphasis. I think the main difference is in the different kinds of heuristics that apply to our understanding of premises and location.
I think the major difference is actually the imagined locus of the debate. In Worlds, the locus is the amorphous “western liberal democracy”; in the Irish Times, it’s Ireland. That means that the assumptions we make at a premise level about how the world operates are quite different. When (good) speakers are aware of an assumed knowledge base on the part of an audience they normally don’t spend time on framing and exposition to establish it. That establishment is much more necessary in Worlds debates as you can lose both on the nature of the arguments/ policy but also on your framing of the debate’s locus. As that doesn’t happen in an Irish Times debate, it frees speakers to explore the issues in a slightly different way and encourages them to associate the audience’s common knowledge with their arguments. I think you can see the same phenomenon as you move from regional to national and international competitions, and it accounts for a lot of the frustration that teams feel for not winning with similar arguments than those that would win “back hopm” [more on this in the chapter I’m writing for you!]