Dr. Negative, I presume?

I’ve been engaged in a discussion of burdens on Facebook with Christian Chessman. You might find it interesting.

It begins with my status posting: “I'm worried that people say there's neg presumption in PF, and believe there's neg presumption in PF, but, maybe, there isn't any such thing.” I’m not sure what prompted me to come up with this, but probably it was something I wrote here that elicited some comment responses (I’m not going to get too archaeological in digging stuff up; if you’re that interested you can do it yourself).

Christian: “PF resolutions are either designed as truth statements (something is something else/something has done something else) or policy statements (we should do this).
In either case, you need to prove the statement true before it can be accepted as such.
Christmas is bad. ... Unless I have reasoning behind why Christmas is bad, I should not integrate that statement into my belief system. I cannot possibly endorse that statement without understanding a reason for why Christmas is bad.
And Should is the same reason why CX has negative presumption.”

Me: “Rez = Christmas is bad. Pro goes first, then maybe I'm with you. But if con goes first, haven't the alleged burdens shifted?”

Christian: “If you believe that the negative has a burden to prove the resolution false, yes.
I don't see that as how debate is structured, however. The resolution makes a truth statement (lately) or a statement of policy.
It seems prudent that the statement should have to be proven accurate before being accepted by the judge.”

I don’t know. I need to throw this into the mix: “Public Forum Debate focuses on advocacy of a position derived from the issues presented in the resolution, not a prescribed set of burdens.” That’s what NFL has to say about it.

Curiously enough, I can’t find anywhere in the NFL literature that there is a presumption for the negative in Policy. I wonder if I’m accepting that such a burden exists because I have talked to a lot of people who say that it exists, a position derived, as Christian derives his position, from a logical reading of rhetoric rather than anything set forth in the rules of adjudication.

I do recall that someone eloquently pointed out (somewhere, and once again I’m too busy to do the archaeology) that the paradigm of PF is simply convincing inexperienced judges, a call to an approach of lucidity of thought and presentation reminiscent of the earliest days of LD. This may be de facto true and, to some extent, ex officio true as well.

I default to my conundrum. If I subscribe to a negative presumption, and Con goes first, who gets the presumption? The so-called negative statement usually inherent in Con’s position, or the negative position of the Pro which has, by this theory, the burden of disproving the Con’s so-called truth statements? In either case, one side gets a distinct advantage, and the judge is removed from a position of having to do more than say, “Well, it looked like a tie to me, so whichever side I construe as the negative therefore wins by default.”

I remain unconvinced by any of this (and less convinced at this point that there’s even presumption in Policy except by common practice). In LD, there is a clear rule stating that there is no presumption, which seems to bother few judges when it comes time to base their RFDs on presumption. But if we’re using those inexperienced judges in PF, than maybe the whole question is moot. They will, in fact, judge by their guts, given no better paradigm. Whether this is good or bad is another question altogether.