The basic idea is that you have opposite parties with strong interests in finding the best arguments for their own inconsistent views, and have neutral parties decide among those arguments.
Debates in HS (I was a HS debater) are a version of this process. Having to argue for something whether you believe in it or not is not such a bad thing; it may give you an appreciation for the strengths on a view you reject and the weaknesses of your own.
Debates are not a suitable model for science or humanities research, where efficiency and finality are not particularly important and truth is paramount.
In legal cases, however, justice delayed is justice denied -- you need some mechanism for getting through a dispute reasonably quickly so that a civil plaintiff can recover or a defendant be vindicated, or in a criminal case so a bad guy can be punished or an innocent person exonerated. It would be unfair and would be paralyzingly expensive to let the discussion about (say) whether OJ Simson was guilty (in the criminal case) or liable (in the civil case) go on as long and inconclusively as the discussion about whether the mind is the same as the body or whether Hitler planned the extermination of the Jews from the start or only got that idea after the war started to go bad. And in legal matters you need a final resolutions so that disputes do not go on forever, whereas that is not a problem in scholarly discussions.
Political debates are a different matter altogether. There the point is neither to find the truth, as in scholarship, or to efficiently and finally settle a dispute in a way that will be acknowledged as reasonably fair, as in law. Rather it is to let the electorate observe the candidates together and compare them on whatever dimensions the voters think important in a context where the candidate's appearance is not wholly scripted, as in a campaign speech or meeting arranged by that candidate alone. It lets people see how the opposing candidates handle things that are a bit unexpected and not wholly under their control. As such, it is not an irrational process -- that is something that matters in an elected official and which the voters might reasonably want to know.
The goals of the kinds of discussions in these three context are different, so Chomsky is, for once, quite mistaken to suppose the scientific/scholarly paradigm of endless leisurely discussion to find the truth is applicable everywhere.
--- Andy F <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/22/06, Tayssir John Gabbour <tjg at pentaside.org>
> wrote:
>
> > "Personally, I regard debates as one of the most
> irrational institutions
> > that humans have devised. In the sciences, for
> example, you don't have
> > "debates": rather, discussions, in which people
> try to come to some
> > common understanding. At least, that's the ideal,
> often approaches,
> > whereas debates, in their very nature, demand
> irrationality (you're not
> > allowed to say, "interesting point, maybe you're
> right, let's explore
> > it"). And formats such as the one you saw are
> designed to undercut the
> > possibility of reasoned discussion.
>
> What remember of the whole "debate team" format was
> that you were
> supposed to take a position and defend it by
> whatever (verbal) means
> necessary, regardless of what you thought of its
> merits. Do I have
> this wrong? It seemed profoundly cynical.
>
>
> --
> Andy
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