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Re: Bunch's Article

> Rejected message sent to ceda-l@cornell.edu by TRAPP@WILLAMETTE.EDU
> follows.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You are right that most of the attacks on the tabula rasa paradigm are
> arguments of straw.  On the otherhand, Aaron Bunch's Argumentation and
> Advocacy essay recognizes and accepts this problem and responds at an
> entirely different level--that the tabula rasa paradigm as you (and
> Ulrich) portray it is antithetical with contemporary theories of
> argument.  Contemporary theories of argument see the audience (listner,
> reader) as active, not passive participants.
>

Prof. Trapp,

    At the risk of covering old ground, it seems that Bunch does a
very good job of proving the inapplicability of tabula rasa as a
standard for evaluating public argumentation and a less exemplary
effort of explaining how this applies to the world of academic
debate. I think that Bunch seems to recognize this late in his paper
and makes an effort to answer that problem by suggesting radical
changes in the format of debate, including pre-round interactions
with judges. He dismisses the problems of judge intervention in a
single sentence which vaguely suggests that unstipulated advantages
of more participant interaction would outweigh any drawbacks of
intervention. He totally ignores any discussion of the potential
intellectual benefits of running counter-intuitive arguments. The
majority of the article is very well written, but the final few
paragraphs seem to admit that the cost of abandoning TR may involve
changes in the very structure and format of debate. In this context,
I interpret Bunch's contribution not as the death knell for TR, but
as an argument for how academic debate can be made more analogous to
public argumentation if we have the courage to abandon format
traditions and experiment with more structured judge-participant
interaction periods. Why this is mutually exclusive with the concept
of "least intervention," as articulated here on CEDA-L, must be
totally over my head.

Michael Bryant
Weber State University
Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
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