The Kathavatthu, Points of Controversy, is structured entirely differently from every other Abhidhamma book: rather than systematically enumerating and cross-referencing categories of experience, it stages over two hundred formal debates on contested points of doctrine, each opening with a disputed proposition, such as whether an arahant can fall away from full liberation, or whether everything exists in past, present and future simultaneously, that the text attributes to various rival early Buddhist schools, and then works through a structured logical refutation exposing the position's internal inconsistencies according to the orthodox Theravada view.
The disputed positions addressed range across questions of meditative attainment, the nature of the person, the status of arahantship, and the workings of karma and rebirth, effectively cataloging, through the specific arguments raised against them, a wide range of doctrinal positions held by other early Buddhist communities that split off from a shared earlier tradition in the centuries following the Buddha's death, communities whose own primary texts have in most cases not survived independently and are known today largely through exactly this kind of refutation preserved in a rival school's canon. The debates are conducted in a tightly formalized question-and-answer style, testing each contested claim against its logical consequences until the opposing position is shown to collapse into an admission its own holder would presumably reject.