I always look in wonder at how americans are so in argumentation. I mean, you even have a whole set of tools and now a "markdown of sorts" for argumentation.
As an european, this never ceases to amaze me.
As an european, this never ceases to amaze me.
You can see this throughout the culture, from the legal system, to robust support for free speech, to the quite frankly Christian morality (a belief that there is original sin in the body politic that must be atoned for) that permeates even the most hardcore progressive, atheistic left.
You don't see this in countries with many political parties that each grab only a small piece of the pie.
This is a relatively new phenomenon that will hopefully not be around for long.
There are plenty of americans who will form their opinion of you based on which sports team you like, as well.
I think your observation is not so much one of politics permeating all aspects as it is that our current culture is superficially tribalistic in nature, with many tribal signifiers being used.
Most public policy debate is so empty as to be worthless, and these tools don't change that. The typical English-language dialectic debate suffers from poor metaphysics and ontology, and in the USA this is compounded by a society that shuns math and logic skills. The typical USA debate is about feelings, not about evidence.
There are two investigations into philosophy, namely speech acts and pragmatics, which happened in English-language philosophy first, and may be due to English itself.
And Christian Voigt apparently resides in Berlin.
* Pragma-dialectic school (Amsterdam, F. van Eemeren) [1]
* Argumentation Schemes & Informal logic, Univ. of Windsor, D. Walton [2,3]
* Rhethorics and Argumentation, Univ. of Waterloo, C. Tindale [4,5]
* Switzerland, Lugano Group (IALS) [7]
* Lisbon ArgLab Group, New Univ. of Lisbon, M. Lewinski, F. Macagno [6]
* Germany, Research Group for Nonmonotonic Logic and Formal Argumentation, Univ. Bochum [8]
* Germany, KIT Group, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology [9]
The last two groups are more to my taste, and there is also Chris Reed and his team in the UK. The prevalent theoretical traditions are argumentation schemes and informal logic in Canada, developed by Walton and his scholars, and the pragma-dialectic tradition in Amsterdam, developed by van Eemeren and his many scholars.
[1] https://gsh.uva.nl/content/research-masters/argumentation-rh... [2] https://www.dougwalton.ca/ [3] http://www.uwindsor.ca/crrar/ [4] http://www.uwindsor.ca/argumentationstudies/ [5] http://www.uwindsor.ca/crrar/ [6] https://www.arglab.ifilnova.pt/en [7] https://search.usi.ch/en/organisational-units/332/institute-... [8] http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/defeasible-reasoning/inde... [9] http://debatelab.philosophie.kit.edu/
I gather it's a mix of sociology,philosophy,communication and logic?
I don't think, looking at the history of fields like logic, people from the US (guessing you meant that, not Americans in general) have more representation than other countries. Take a look at this list for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logicians
I don't think that debating and abstract logic are very related fields.
Taking a topic, splitting into two teams and fighting it out with words until the victor remains is the exact opposite of what you want to do to reach any useful conclusion on any topic.
On the other hand, I don't think rhetoric matters more than facts. At least in my country, most of the arguments in the debate have to be based on some data/studies to be taken seriously. You still have to be a good speaker, of course, because you have to get the point across, but you can't win the debate without a prepared case just because you are charismatic.
Lots of times we had to argue for both sides during the tournament; the topics were chosen accordingly, as not to be "solvable". Of course in normal world you probably want to find some kind of compromise, but to be able to do that, you have to assess what each course of action will achieve. And debating helps you build the skillset to do just that.
For example, most of the debates we have done in high school we did from both sides; I don't think the general message was supposed to be "just argue loud enough and you'll be right", but rather "hey, look at this problem from these two sides. Crazy how both of them are partly true, isn't it?".
I think the human default is to stick to whatever your opinion is at the moment. Most of the people will never look from other POV. Maybe they won't even realise that the other POV can be right, when they are so sure they themselves are right.
I agree only if the debate's intention is to declare a winner and a loser. Having a formal session to discuss topic with opposing sides allows for well-planned arguments. OFf-the-cuff discussion, while useful, can only get you so far.