1.  Dress for success. Wear your team colors proudly.

2.  When you come to class on the day of your dialogue, you will be told which team is to initiate the dialogue. That team will offer the initial proposal. The proposal should be strong enough to initiate a productive dialogue; but you may want not to start off with your best proposal. The team offering a proposal will be the proposers. The team that is offering counterexamples will be known as the deniers. During the dialogue I may choose to reverse these jobs, asking the team that has been denying to become proposers and the team that has been proposing to become the deniers.

3.  Either team may at any time ask, preferably promptly, for a clarification. Doing this as a stalling tactic will result in penalty.

4.  When a proposal has been made, the deniers will have approximately 90 seconds in which to formulate a response. The response can be

(a) A counterexample. Counterexamples should be as compelling and as strong as possible.

(b) In the case of a ‘because’ claim, an argument that attacks centrality.

(c) A charge of vagueness or circularity. In the case of vagueness, a prompt request for clarification would usually be more appropriate than a charge of vagueness. In the case of a charge of circularity, the deniers should provide an analysis of the offending terms that justifies the charge.

(d) If the premise of an argument is itself a conceptual claim, or if it is so strong that it makes an attack on the inference pointless, you will be permitted to attack the premise. This tactic will be effective only when neither (a) nor (b) would be effective. It will also require a clear announcement that you are attacking the premise.

5.  A denial must begin with an announcement of its specific format. For example: “We will argue against the necessity of the definition by giving a direct counterexample -- describing a possible world in which something is food but it is not intended to be eaten,” or “We are going to argue against the sufficiency of the reason by giving an indirect counterexample, bolstered by a direct counterexample.”

6.  Proposers will respond (within approximately 90 seconds) to a counterexample in one of the following ways.

(a) A claim that the counterexample is of the wrong form, that it is irrelevant to the original proposal. If all goes well, this will not happen. Proposers will need to say what form a c.e. should have taken, and to do so with clarity sufficient to justify the claim of irrelevance. A claim of irrelevance will be adjudicated by Professor Bowie.

(b) A claim that the counterexample is not sufficiently compelling. This should be justified --- for example by arguing (in the case of an indirect c.e) that the truth of the premises does indeed press toward the conclusion; or (in the case of a direct c.e.) that some of the details in the imagined world compel us to think that the premises would not really be true there. A claim that a c.e. is not compelling will be adjudicated by majority vote of the audience.

(c) An acknowledgment that the c.e. is appropriate followed by blocking the counterexample. The less painful it is to block, the weaker the c.e. was. The block will create a new proposal that will be subject to a new denial. And so on.

(d) An acknowledgment that the c.e. is appropriate, followed by a concession. A concession can take one of two forms:

(i) A total concession. We give up. There’s nowhere to go. End of dialogue. This is obviously a tactic of desperation

(ii) A temporary concession. This concedes that the direction taken is hopeless (or perhaps only pointless), and is followed by an alternate proposal that proceeds along a different line. Blocking a c.e. attempts to refine and improve a proposal. A temporary concession abandons a proposal in favor of a superior one. It is a sort of tactical retreat. It is far better to concede than to burrow on in pursuit of a hopeless cause. But it is better yet not to get into that position in the first place.

(e) In the rare case of a ‘because’ claim that has been denied by an attack on centrality and in which the counterargument satisfies the requirements in (4d) for a successful attack on the premise, you may attack the premise of the counterargument.

7.  Proposers response must also begin with an announcement of its specific format.

8.  Teams will be graded as a whole. You are all in it together. Grades will be based on how appropriate and how strong proposals and denials are; on the level of participation within the team; on the success of the teamwork; on how clever the responses are (subject, of course, to the constraints of appropriateness); on how successfully teams exhibit their team colors.

      Participation will depend not only on everybody speaking, but on everybody contributing effectively to the work of the team. Obviously the role of spokesperson should be distributed. But the work of formulating and refining responses should also be distributed --- not necessarily within each round, but certainly within the dialogue as a whole.

9.  Remember that your results will be best when you engage the central issues most squarely. Attempts to divert, evade, duck, play on unintended meanings or otherwise avoid the issue will be weak under our definition, and will be penalized. You will always do best by attributing to the opposition the strongest position that you can imagine for them, and then showing that to be wrong. This is a principle of effective respect for the opposition -- generosity in service of conquest.

10. Scores will be released the day after each dialogue. Scores will be on a scale from 1-7 (possibly with pluses and minuses). I will feel free to take advantage of that entire range. There will be no obvious relationship between scores and grades; rather the scores will serve simply to rank teams. I will also give some commentary on the dialogue as a whole. When the dialogues have all been finished, I will decide what the relationship is between scores and grades and let everybody know.