Debate flowchart

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I’ve wanted to do this for a while but I would need help and I’m not sure a flowchart is a suitable design.

The idea is to take a debate like say, gun control, or gay marriage, or problem of evil, and put the point / counterpoints in a bubbly simple to understand chart that people can reference. This way if you’re having the same online debate for the 4000th time, you just point to the chart and pick up where the debate is interesting. Or when you start to cycle through the logic of an argument with someone who refuses to accept any of the points, you just point the chart and let them run in circles for however long it takes for them to come up with an interesting point. It’s like a chess book for philosophy. There is a book of all the games ever played that people can study. There is an impossible number of potential games to play in chess, like debates in philosophy, but once you get “out of book”, the discussion, or game, is much more fun. It would be cool to quantify and chart out victories and defeats but that probably won’t work for debates.

Anyway, my question for those interested is

  1. How much cliched debate can you recite without throwing up? I’d love to get a mock debate going on a topic and kinda work through the different perspectives.

  2. Has anyone seen debate flow chart type designs. Something like this or better?

2

I’ve not seen that before, but it looks to be a useful tool. Not for summarising entire debates, as I think it would soon spread out to fill any given sheet with arguments and counter-arguments, and probably become unreadable from cross-linkages and so on, but as a method to identify circularities in arguments in clear and visible ways, so that work can then be diverted to sorting out the underlying assumptions that cause the circularities.

3

I would like to make it beautiful as well as a useful tool. Maybe I’ll just start one and check to see if anyone on the internet has additions they’d like to make.

4

I had a professor in college who had us make those over basic moral issues 1st year. Great times.