What type of things should you know before a debate? What should you learn about your opponent beforehand?
Trey Gowdy believes that you should enter a debate armed with as much knowledge as possible about your topic and opponent. Preparedness matters more than charisma or luck and can be reliably honed through practice.
Continue reading to learn how to prepare for a debate by acquiring new knowledge.
Know Your Material
While you should strive to appear confident and likable to your opponent and (if applicable) your audience, Gowdy argues that it’s more important to appear credible—if your knowledge can be trusted, then your interpretation of that knowledge and the conclusions you draw from it naturally appear more legitimate.
(Shortform note: In contrast to Gowdy’s focus on knowledge over charisma, Scott Adams argues in Win Bigly that charisma is all that matters. Examining Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016, Adams notes that Trump’s lack of political experience and frequent factual errors didn’t diminish his popularity, but actually increased it. Trump voters valued the way he made them feel—angry but empowered—over any mistakes or dishonesty. Therefore, it may be more important to charm your audience than to prepare with factual knowledge.)
Part of Gowdy’s advice on how to prepare for a debate is to understand the facts and the arguments your opponent plans to use, so that you can emphasize your own knowledge and undermine theirs.
Know the Facts
Gowdy believes that facts provide a stronger basis for an argument than emotion because they’re fixed and can be universally understood, even by people with opposing worldviews. While facts can be attacked on the basis of their credibility (he advises that you always investigate who discovered a fact, how, and under what conditions) and alternative interpretations can be provided (he advises that you consider alternative interpretations, even if only to dismiss them as less logical than your own), they aren’t as easily twisted as appeals to emotion or to shared values.
Gowdy advises that armed with the facts about your topic, you should find ways to make those facts stick in your opponent’s and audience’s minds—namely through constant repetition, organizing your argument in such a way that you begin and end with your strongest pieces of evidence, and delivering them with emotion and sincerity. While he insists that emotion shouldn’t be the basis of an argument, establishing an emotional connection between your listeners and your facts can make a stronger impression than just a dry recitation of facts. For example, emphasizing the tragedy implied by a high drunk driving mortality rate is more memorable than simply providing the statistics without context.
Know Your Opponents
For Gowdy, knowing your opponents means not just being able to empathize with them, but also fully understanding what their arguments are, what facts they’re relying on, and what it would take to convince them to abandon their position. While much of your argument will be dedicated to articulating and defending your position, you can use your understanding of your opponent’s perspective and facts to gradually undermine them. This manifests in attacks on their credibility, their conclusions, and even their language.
Attacking your opponent’s credibility means questioning the viability of their facts or their ability to interpret them. In the same way that you should question where your own facts came from and how they were discovered, Gowdy suggests questioning where your opponent got their facts, how reliable those sources are, and whether the conclusions drawn come from those sources (for example, from the expert author of a scientific paper) or from the opponent themselves (who may be invested in the topic, but not an expert). Facts that come from a single source whose process can’t be reproduced, such as from a personal experience or eyewitness account, are particularly vulnerable to attack.
If the facts aren’t easily undermined, or if you or your opponent are working from the same facts, Gowdy suggests targeting the conclusions they draw instead. Wherever your opponent makes a logical leap—for example, by suggesting that high crime rates are caused by a weak police response—you can introduce doubt by providing alternative explanations for the same evidence; for example, that high crime rates are actually caused by a surge in unemployment. Gowdy also advises targeting hyperbolic language, such as “never,” “always,” “everybody,” and so on.
Finally, says Gowdy, you can cast doubt on your opponent’s conclusions by suggesting bias on their part—for example, questioning a coal mining CEO’s ability to objectively evaluate the industry’s environmental impact. However, Gowdy warns that this kind of direct attack on your opponent may come off as overly personal and thus backfire, undermining your own claims to objectivity.
