A. a truth seeking activity, engaged in by people making more-or-less modest epistemic claims, despite their willingness to take up the cudgel on behalf of one side or another of any given proposition?
Or is it better thought of as:
B. a victory seeking enterprise, pursued by people whose world views are not really on intellectual offer, engaging in a series of mutual interruptions?
If you choose A., how often does pride transform debate into B., in your experience?
And if you choose B., to what degree are we no longer engaged in the ‘Fight Against Ignorance’ in this forum?
I don’t know…It seemed like an interesting question 5 minutes ago…Maybe this isn’t even a GD.
My only other experience with posting questions in a place like this is on fantasy baseball websites. Those people think everything is interesting.
I think a lot of times, it’s a mix of both. On one hand, you are trying to persuade others and “win” the argument, OTOH, you are testing your own beliefs out on an intelligent, voracious crowd, which forces you to question and re-align those beliefs.
MB: *If you choose A., how often does pride transform debate into B., in your experience?
And if you choose B., to what degree are we no longer engaged in the ‘Fight Against Ignorance’ in this forum? *
Actually, it seems to me that in most GD threads A and B run in parallel. Somebody may start the thread for either reason—genuine curiosity and willingness to explore, or just a bad case of “I got the answers” [flashback to creationist-post thread, shudder]—but almost everybody at some time has posted something just to win a point rather than to obtain or share information. However, that doesn’t seem to stop calmer people from continuing right along with the A aspects of the thread. (Threads seem to be at their B-est when most participants get tired of them but they continue to exist as a slugfest between two tireless opponents, at which point I usually can’t be bothered with reading them any more, unless I’m one of the two opponents, of course. :))
That’s the main thing, as I see it. It’s easy to be “right” by thinking over the arguments and counterarguments by yourself or with people who agree with you. How well do your position and arguments hold up with those who do not? (Of course, you get to be the judge here as well. ). I don’t know if this fits into A or B precisely.
I don’t think the GD forum has any connection to fighting ignorance. For that matter, not much else of the SDMB does either. People like to feel good about what they are doing, and so flatter themselves that they are posting to this MB in pusuit of the higher cause of “fighting ignorance”.
A debate, to me, is like a crucible for beliefs and opinions, much like Acco noted. The debate A which falls into debate B is usually caused by a semantic distinction which is necessary to develop a point (ie- bickering over one point which is in many ways fundamental to the argument, where each side seems to think it means something else) or a pissing match between facts. This latter type I think we see in the Gun debates all the time; there are facts which supoprt both sides, and neither side (overall) is willing to concede those facts in light of their own.
In the end, however, I remain of the opinion that it is a poor “debate” that can be settled by citations alone, and thus feel that any truly heated topic will eventually dissolve into the B type nestled in semantic understanding of the facts cited when facts are cited. This, of course, causes some people to cry “semantics!” which is apparently on par with Godwin’s Law. :shrug: When there are no fact to cite, the debate becomes pretty philosophical and downright ideological and is probably the more enjoyable debates to be in for myself. I usually try to avoid citations for that reason; they only cloud the issues. If there are not true issues to cloud, then it isn’t a debate, its a query based on referencing the proper information. IMNSHO, anyway.
erl, who remembers using citations for a total of no more than 5 debates.
). I don’t know if this fits into A or B precisely.