Public Policy Argumentation and Debate

Preface

The two of us entered the world of argumentation and debate at just about the same time, both as undergraduates at Northern Illinois University (Dekalb, Illinois) studying political science in the early 1990s. We came to NIU’s debate team from similar backgrounds: both from working-class suburbs west and south of Chicago, both from families who valued education as a route to political and economic empowerment, and both interested and involved in political issues. We were very ambitious, full of outrage and discontent, and never short of opinions; but, like many undergraduate students, our elementary and secondary education experiences did not leave us with a comprehensive understanding of history, politics, and science upon which to draw conclusions with any certainty, or the research, writing, and analytical skills required to piece together alternatives to policy directions we did not support. Religion, while present in our family systems to varying degrees, was not a sensemaking force for either of us when it came to societal problems. It is not surprising to us today that our search for a system through which we could filter what we learned and enable us to determine how to solve problems would lead us to the study of argumentation and debate.←NaN | xii→

Traditions and Innovations

Our intellectual tradition can be found most vividly described in the 1963 work of Robert B. Huber, Influencing through Argument.¹ Influencing through Argument was the culmination of several years of learning and teaching argumentation by Huber, then a faculty member in the Department of Speech at the University of Vermont, and a community of colleagues and graduate students who worked with him, including the person who would become our debate coach, M. Jack Parker (the textbook was reissued in 2006 by Huber’s student, Alfred Snider²). Huber forms an inventory of objections that incorporates many of the complex rules of logic, and formal and informal fallacies, that take students years to master. His self-titled “lines of argument” approach to explaining argumentation is an “attempt,” he explains, “to translate the tests of evidence, the tests of reasoning, and the methods by which fallacies can be revealed into language readily available to the student speaker.”³ Moreover, unlike the logicians of his time, Huber is aware he is helping students both analyze proposals and speak about them.⁴ Huber’s focus on a set of ←NaN | xiii→common objections in the teaching of argumentation and debate, and his particular interest in the role of argument in policymaking, offered us a framework for engaging the world of public policy, a world in which people use argument to influence others to alter the status quo—to alleviate what Huber called “evils”⁵—or maintain the status quo.

One exceptional work that we place within the legacy of Huber’s approach is Martha Cooper’s Analyzing Public Discourse.⁶ Cooper was once a graduate assistant working for Parker and Bishop and eventually joined them on the faculty at NIU. She taught both authors and became the master’s degree advisor to Phil Dalton; and, for a brief time before her death, John Butler was her departmental colleague. In Analyzing Public Discourse, Cooper seeks to identify practical lessons from public controversies, where argumentation and debate leads to real consequences for real people, as opposed to focusing on lessons that might come from the increasingly technical practice and study of argumentation occurring in the intercollegiate competitive debate community. Consistent with Huber’s lines of argument, her text places an emphasis on the “critical tools for analyzing messages.”⁷ Huber, Cooper, and many others appreciate the challenges of teaching students to apply formal logic and logical fallacies to “everyday argument,” and seek to develop “objections that are fairly typical in the course of discussions regarding public issues” that are easy to recall and deploy.⁸