The folks over at TruthMapping.com have an interesting idea. Essentially, they hope to make debate relevant again.
It works like this: instead of putting two extremists on t.v. and encouraging them to scream obscenities at each other, TruthMapping.com asks participants to reduce their arguments to a series of facts. Responses to an argument can only address the facts that support it.
The result? Real, coherent dialogue, stripped of assumptions. Put forward this way, arguments stand on their own … or they don’t.
Take, for example, one of the site’s debates on gay marriage. The argument, reduced to a series of premises, goes something like this:
– Marriage is between a man and a woman.
– From Premise 1, it follows that a man and a man cannot marry.
It takes no time at all to point out that Premise 1 is false. Even in the U.S., some states now allow two men to marry. Many other countries, including Spain, allow men to marry.
Since all additional premises proceed from that initial statement, when it implodes, so does the rest of the argument.
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