TruthMapper scares me, for the same reason Objectivists I used to know who thought they knew a formal deductive proof going from "A is A" to "Taxation is slavery", justifying each step with an inference rule scared me.

See for example the proof that commercialization of fine art hurts society.

I'm not sure whether TruthMapper encourages people to be sloppy, or whether it's such a good tool that the sloppiness is just much more obvious than it would be on a message board.

But I'm inclined to lay a bit of the blame on the site itself. For one thing, the video claims that it lets people make all assumptions explicit, which I take to mean that the company behind it believes that. For another, the entire philosophy seems to be that argument should work like an Aristotelian syllogism, and that's part of the problem. For a third, I can't take them seriously with that logo. Did they pay the designer per Photoshop layer effect used?

Debategraph looks like a mind map kind of thing. I suppose if that's the way you like seeing your information organized, it could be useful. I'm just wary of the whole concept of formalizing debate too much (by formal, I mean formal as in official, not formal as in formal systems). Once you start thinking like a high school kid at Debate Club, you've already lost, and I worry these sites could encourage that mode.

The idea of truth-seeking software is a good one, but there's got to be a way to avoid aiming it at the lowest common denominator.