Whenever there’s a controversy – gun violence, racism, sexism, or any of the things that occur in the United States with frightening regularity – there is always the call for vibrant national debate on the issues. I have always wondered what journalists mean when they call for “national debate” on a particular issue. Very much like the giant Fezzik in The Princess Bride, I usually think “that word you keep using, I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

The call for national debate is a call for engagement, for persuasion on the issues. That much seems clear. Where I lose the thread is the question of what debate can bring to a controversy that is immediate, hot, and problematic. The combination of those three things is the characteristic invitation to public discourse (somewhat connected to Kenneth Burke’s idea of the characteristic invitation to rhetoric: Identification so close to division that you cannot spot the difference). The call is a hopeful one; a call for clarity, a call for positions that will address the issue and address the need for there to be some action, some response, something to do to ensure some sort of prohibition on the event so it never happens again.

Additionally the rhetoric of such a proposal should explain and calcify the event so that audiences feel that they are safe, that there’s some sort of stability, and the event will never happen again (even though you careful readers have already noticed that I mentioned these events happen with regularity). Do you remember when your parental figure – dad or mom or whoever – would blow on your wounds, the one’s you’d get from falling, failing to ride your bike, or other crazy child activities? That blowing is medically unnecessary – probably even harmful given the bacterial count of the average human mouth – but it helped you feel like things were better. It was an important ritual of healing, and without it you just couldn’t feel better. That’s an essential part of that sort of rhetoric.

So half of the call is a call for clarity through discourse and healing through the act of public discourse. But we still haven’t figured out why there’s a call for national debate. What is it in particular about debate that captures the political imagination here? Why is debate the solution when things are hot, immediate, and frightening?

I think most people recognize in debate a power to provide clarity, or at least clear alternatives in a situation. People also recognize debate as a place where reasons are brought to the surface in a lot more detail than they are in other forms of discourse. It is this twin recognition that pushes people to call for “national debate” when something grabs our attention.

Even though I’m a huge supporter of debate, particularly around public policy questions, I think these calls are misguided. What journalists and others really want is national conversation about these issues, or even national argument. The reason why is that the positions are for our opponents to accept. One of the limits of debate as a discourse is that it is always for an audience who, through tacit agreement in attending the debate or listening to it, does not have an opinion during the course of the debate – or they suspend that view until the end where they will be forced to compare it to what transpired in the debate.

Whenever a trauma occurs in the national scene, we really need discussion or dialogue in order to sort the positions. Debate is only valuable to determine differences between refined positions. Debate does not work very well at refining the positions that could exist in a controversy. Discussion and dialogue do that well. Debate takes those possible positions to the extreme. A debater is obligated to provide the strongest case they can for their take on their side. This helps the audience see plain the motives being articulated and the resulting attitude. This will always invite reticulation in their own mind, or among friends or family, about the layers of the issue.

Whenever there’s a call for more national debate we should pause and consider what it is specifically that debate does for us. What is debate’s strength? What is its weakness? Most of the time we don’t really know the positions and we certainly don’t want corporate media or newsreaders establishing those for us. We need time and we need to wade through some words before we are ready to debate. And we know we are ready to debate when we are ironically certain that we are uncertain about the strength of opposed positions. Debate will very quickly help us sort them and bring other possibilities to the front of our minds.