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Library's collection Library's IT development CancelIn spite of similar terminology, American debates and Indonesian
debates (debat) turns out to be two culturally different concepts. Debate is an
argumentation "between two matched sides" (Webster?s Ninth Collegiate
Dictionary); whereas debat is a "discussion (perbahasan) and exchange of
opinion (pertukaran pendapat)" (Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia [the
Extensive Dictionary of the Indonesian Language]). Regardless of its format,
the existence of arguments is an indispensable factor of every debate. The
construction of arguments and its content depends on the custom and the
logical training of the arguer. The American and Indonesian people have
dissimilar customs of the freedom of speech in the media and have differing
extent of exposure to logical trainings. For that reason, this study examines
the differences in the structures and the logical errors, i.e. fallacies, within the
arguments produced by the interviewees of an episode of the Indonesian
Debat Minggu Ini (This Week?s Debate) of SCTV and the American
Crossfire of CNN, which are exemplifications of those two styles of debate.
The episodes have compatible fields at issue, i.e. law and similarly talks
about the sentence of controversial criminals in each country. In the analysis,
the processes of argument reconstruction and evaluation were performed
according to the procedure established by Bierman and Assali (1995). Then,
the argument structures are labeled delineating their complexity.
Subsequently, they are appraised for their logical correctness. For the
logically incorrect (fallacious) arguments, the fallacies are identified
according to the types denoted by Bierman and Assali (1995) as well as Copi
and Cohen (1990). The uneven distribution of complex structures in the
Indonesians? arguments compared to the Americans shows that the
differences are mainly caused by the differing extent of polarization brought
about by the different formats. For both sides, whenever extreme pole is
assumed, the argument increases in complexity. What's more, the American
interviewees are found to produce more fallacies than the Indonesian
interviewees. This result implies that more fallacies are produced when the
interviewees are assuming a more extreme position.