Overview
Argument Clinic attempts to leverage computing power to enforce some organization in debates. The hope is that we can more carefully keep track of what is being debated, what is agreed upon, where there is still disagreement, etc. We would like to use this to reach a more full understanding of the topic than we could via traditional debate or research.
Examples
The best real-life example on the site, at the time of this writing, is the Labor Theory of Value vs Subjective Theory of Value debate. It's very academic, and still in progress, but it's gone long enough to demonstrate how subdebates, agreements, and definitions work, and how complicated topics can be broken down into smaller elements.
Subdebates
Subdebates are the main feature on Argument Clinic. They organize the debate into a tree structure, by focus of disagreement, unlike a standard linear debate, or even a traditional online threaded discussion.
more...
Conclusions
These are a few features that can be generally described as conclusions. The debaters go through a more tightly controlled process to determine whether they agree with a very specific point, come up with a set of definitions for a term that they both agree on, etc.
more...