An experiment in debate

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Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat as a bet with a friend over whether it was possible to write a complex and engaging story using only 50 words (originally, the number was 200, but Seuss decided to make the bet more interesting).

I had an idea. Can you have a coherent and complex debate on a given topic with a shared lexicon which is similarly limited and carefully defined? This would remove what I would guess as being a very large source of conflict in a debate: semantic loopholes, goalshifting, and evasion.

The terms of the debate would be as such: each party, having chosen the topic, drafts a comprehensive rant explaining their views on it.

These rants are then handed to a third party. This third party does a bit of command line magic (concatenating the rants together, splitting them to a word on each line, then sorting them). Each word in this list is then correlated with its definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the Base Lexicon.

Both parties communicate by passing their replies to this third party, who parses them to ensure that each reply uses no new words. Only after passing this test, does the reply go into the transcript (or thread).

This third party can obviously be automated by a rather simple shell script or similar text manipulation program.

The benefit of this insane and draconian process would be an argument in which the chances of semantic confusion (intentional or not) would be minimized as much as possible.

I wonder how such a rigidly rational debate would appear.*

* Obviously the next step would be to formalize each reply in symbolic logic and run it through Coq or Aqda for logical consistency. Heh.

I've had to write word-limited essays and such before, and it was so incredibly difficult.

I'm too damned verbose.

Umm... this sounds a bit like academia and peer review. They allow for new words, but each new word has to be defined well in the first place, otherwise people will criticize it, or it will be rejected as a submission. However, most fields have defined jargon, often even mathematically defined jargon, so.... I don't see the issue there.

I think that the real issue of limitations of words won't help as much. The problems are definition, not vocabulary here. And a shared lexicon of limitations is almost certainly going to result in either a very mathematical approach to debate, (think analytic philosophy where sometimes they use symbolic logic) or it is going to result in obtuse degrees of explanation for very new and different concepts in an attempt to do what a metaphor or something else would do if it were introduced to the vocabulary. I don't think it will solve much though. Interpretation is always difficult, and people are always sloppy, and so... it likely wouldn't work.

It does remind me of a paper I once read asking whether a purely formal set of laws was possible, y'know, all legislation and no interpretation. (The paper answered "Yes, but very costly and improbable in it happening, and generally a failure when tried")