A Brief History of the Paradox by Roy Sorensen

Author:Roy Sorensen [Sorensen, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0195159039
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2003-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

FORCED ERRORS IN A DEBATING GAME

At the University of Paris, virtually all students were in the Arts Faculty. All of these students were required to spend the first two years studying logic. As is still true, logic is taught by frequent assignments and tests. But since the costs of writing were much greater, far more of the course work was oral. Beginning students were obliged to engage in formal debating games. More advanced students participated in the contentful debates recounted by Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas. But I trace the recovery of the insolubles to the introductory-level debates.

The scholastic obligational dispute is a skeletalized descendant of the debating game Aristotle sets out to codify. He states this purpose in the opening of the Topics: “Our treatise proposes to find a line of inquiry whereby we shall be able to reason from reputable opinions about any subject presented to us, and also shall ourselves, when putting forward an argument, avoid saying anything contrary to it.” The topics indicated by Aristotle are similar to the ones still debated in high school and college debating competitions. Whereas modern debaters are judged principally on rhetorical criteria, the measure for Aristotle’s debaters was logical consistency. Since the point of the debate is to check for contradictions, Aristotle shapes the debate to make internal conflicts easier to spot and prove:

With regard to the giving of answers, we must first define what is the business of a good answerer, and of a good questioner. The business of the questioner is to develop the argument as to make the answerer utter the most implausible of the necessary consequences of his thesis; while that of the answerer is to make it appear that it is not he who is responsible for the impossibility or paradox, but only his thesis; for one may, no doubt, distinguish between the mistake of taking up a wrong thesis to start with, and that of not maintaining it properly, when once taken up.

(Topics VIII 4)

Aristotle is picturing a cooperative exchange between knowledgeable, mature individuals. The point of the dispute is to create a specimen for postgame analysis.

Medieval obligational disputes were an adaptation for a rowdy, naive crowd. The format does not presuppose any knowledge. Obligational disputes appeal to the male appetite for mock combat (which is intensified in isolated, male-only institutions such as medieval universities). Yet obligational disputes have a surprisingly pure logical structure. An obligational dispute resembles the children’s game king of the hill, in which the defender on the hill wins unless he is dislodged. But here the king’s opponent chooses the hill. Specifically, the opponent in an obligational disputation posits a proposition. If the proposition is consistent, then the respondent is obliged to consistently defend the proposition against the opponent’s cross-examination. The respondent has a limited range of answers. In the early history of the game, the only responses are “I grant it” and “I deny it.” Ockham describes a later version in which the defensive repertoire is enriched with “I doubt it” and even “I distinguish it.

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