Debate for understanding

SITUATION
Presidential debates, debates in the YouTube comment section and even the so called “state of art” Oxford or Intelligence Squared debates have one thing in common – they are as popular as they are useless. People enjoy watching them rather as a wrestling match than a source of correct facts and arguments. People themselves are first to blame – as they aren’t ready to change their minds about such hotly debated topics as accepting refugees, climate change, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, sanctions against Russia. However, debaters too are guilty as most are mere pundits and spin-doctors who use rhetoric instead of logic, reply with ad hominem attacks or avoid the response altogether, even carefully craft lies to create confusion or prove their point to gullible audience.

OBJECTIVES
This training course will be based on experiential learning: experiencing different activities, facing different situations and coming to one’s own conclusions in a debate. It will promote the idea of collaborative (instead of competitive) debating, including:
– understanding the opponent’s perspective,
– helping your opponent by improving his arguments,
– trying to disprove your own argument,
– creating a practical format of real-time collaborative debating,
– using online collaborative (wiki) debating tools,
– psychology of changing minds (for good),
– philosophy of truth in the debate framework,
– being friendly, polite and ethical towards opponent,
– detecting and disarming rhetorical tricks,
– detecting logical mistakes and correcting them.

At the second half of the training participants are be expected to create their own collaborative debating event, material or tool which they must bring to their home country and organize as a follow-up activity with real audience which participant will share online with other participants as well as to the general public as widely as possible.