In Varietate Concordia—United in Diversity European Parliamentary Debate as an Argumentative Activity Type

In Varietate Concordia—United in Diversity, the motto of the European Union printed proudly on all official paperwork of the European Parliament, proves a smart choice now so many Europeans are ambivalent about the European project. On the one hand the Europeans are afraid that they will lose control over their own national identities as a consequence of the rapidly increasing power of Europe’s central administration; on the other hand they realize that the European Union brings more prosperity and makes it possible to fight the financial and economic crisis much more effectively

Is There a Role for Adversariality in Teaching Critical Thinking?

Although there has been considerable recent debate on the topic of adversariality in argumentation, this debate has rarely found its way into work on critical thinking theory and instruction. This paper focuses on the implications of the adversariality debate for teaching critical thinking. Is there a role for adversarial argumentation in critical thinking instruction? Is there a way to incorporate the benefits of adversarial argumentation while mitigating the problems

Forensics as Scholarship: Testing Zarefsky's Bold Hypothesis in a Digital Age

The tables of contents from the 1915–1917 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking reveal how the field of communication's academic lineage can be traced back to the forensic debating tradition. In the U.S., that tradition's practical roots were established by hundreds of contracts between universities to hold intercollegiate debates for public audiences. Later in the 20th century, the advent of organized debate tournaments turned forensics into a specialized laboratory for argumentation, where contest round practice yielded first a stock-issues model of argument, followed by multiple debate paradigms, and then a series of critical rhetorics. We envision a next evolutionary step where forensics moves to seize novel opportunities offered by the digital age to refresh its practice as a “participatory culture. “Key to this evolution is recognition of David Zarefsky's insights into the relationship between argument, criticism, and judgment. We illustrate the potential of debate to model strategies of new media literacy through adaptation of his hypothesis-testing model of argument to digital contexts