Here's a thread (unedited) from the new Legion bbd that you might find of interest. The posts accrue slowly (unlike ROTL, where everyone posts faster than a speeding Ferengi). I don't know if we're getting anywhere, but I love clearing my head through writing (as if you didn't already know that).
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From Menick
Re: Truth
I realize that this connects to the tournament policy about the resolution, but it seems to me a separate enough issue beyond policy-setting.
I am among the first people in the room to insist that debaters argue the resolution. But for some reason that I simply cannot put my finger on, the idea that the aff must prove the resolution "true" and the neg must prove it "not true" does not seem to capture what's going on. In a post to the recent interview on VBD, Dave McGinnis explains how, given the philosophic impossibility of proving truth, by this token, it is possible for the aff to always lose. ( comment #12 to http://victorybriefsdaily.com/2006/08/24/competitive-spirit/ ). This isn't my issue with the idea of truth, but then again, he is absolutely right that such a construct almost begs for a kritik.
So I look at, say, Sept-Oct. A just government should provide health care to its citizens. When I look at this, my first thought is simply that the aff must prove that a government must provide HC (whatever that means) to be just. And then I think that the negative must prove that a government can be just, or isn't unjust, if it doesn't provide HC. This feels to me like relatively equal burdens, and I do believe that both sides should have relatively equal burdens/advocacies for any resolution. The thing is, I don't approach it from an angle of truth. I don't reduce the topic, I simply take it as it is. That is, a resolution provides something to be determined, one way or the other (i.e., aff or neg), and I just take it at face value. Now, maybe one can structurally reduce all topics to...something...but is it a good idea to do so? And, if they can be reduced, then is it a proposition of truth that they can be reduced to?
I think that my big problem is that while a lot of people are out there in rounds arguing theories and reductions and spikes and T, I'm sitting around wondering whether a just government is obligated to provide health care to its citizens. And as as result, I think I must be missing something.
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From; Scott Robinson
The question that remains from your discussion is "what should we reduce the topic to?"
In the case of the current resolution, I think your reduction of the topic to a necessary conditions test (is the provision of HC necessary for a just state) is a reasonable interpretation, but there are other reasonable interpretations.
Is the resolution "false" if there is no such thing as a just government? Is it false if there is no such thing as justice?
These are reductions of the topic that I would anticipate seeing at some tournaments.
The trick is establishing that one's reduction of the topic to dichotomous burdens is superior to the alternative reduction offered by one's opponent. Students seldom seem to offer defenses of their reduction and when they do - they seem to swallow the entire debate in T or theory or whatever.
I sympathize with students who are confused. They are experience (and are told about) the strategic and intellectual advantages of clarifying or simplifying the topic. However, they are not equipped with the skills to defend their attempts to do so. If they do defend their attempts at simplification, they are criticized for focusing on T and theory.
I can definitely see how students (including many coaches) are turning to an attitude of "screw it, if you want specific I will offer a plan."
This gets back to my comment a year or so back. I think many coaches share only a false consensus on the so-called truth burden. Many like the idea of dichotomous burdens - of roughly equal threshold. However, proof of truth claims assume propositions of epistemology, ontology, and even pedagogy (in our case) on which there is little agreement.
The first panel of 5 LDEP board members that hears a debate over this topic wherein the negative claims to prove the topic false by denying that any government can be just (or denying the linguistic coherence of the concept of a just government) would likely reveal this false consensus.
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From Menick:
>>Is the resolution "false" if there is no such thing as a just government? Is it false if there is no such thing as justice? <<
Whether this answers the issue of truth being beside the point for the moment, this is exactly where I have trouble with today's LD. And why the position that sides must prove truth falls short.
We posit a resolution that says, in effect, "debate whether X (a specific action) is, somehow or other, ethical (just/moral/right/preferable -- there's a variety of options here)." Most if not all resolutions fall into this pattern, don't they? But rather than debating by proving that X is or isn't ethical, some debaters (on the negative) argue that there is: a) no such thing as the ethical consideration posited by the resolution; b) that there is no way that the ethical consideration is applicable to X, either pro or con. The affirmative, by accepting the terms of the resolution, defends a position that the negative says is meaningless on face. Of course, there are ways out of this for the affirmative, but regardless, this is hardly why I paid my money for the show in the first place. That is, going into an LD round, I'd like to know whether X is the right thing to do; but if the aff says yes, and the neg says I'm asking the wrong question, I never get a real debate of the correctness of doing or not doing X. Where's the point of that?
If one assumes that one of the points of this activity is to learn about the subjects of resolutions, then this approach at best only forces students to learn one side (the aff) of any resolution, which hardly makes for well-rounded thinkers, especially when resolutions are comparative (X is more ethical than Y). Worse, the negative can, for the most part, rely on a rather small bag of tricks decrying dichotomous thinking, and with little variation argue identically on every resolution for 4 years. I have no brief against philosophers who claim that dichotomous thinking is erroneous, but that isn't really the issue at hand in an LD round, or at least that shouldn't be the issue. The issue should be that, faced with X, what are you going to do? Saying that it's impossible to make a decision, as the nattering neg will do, doesn't help us take action, but we have to take action. The non-resolutional negative leaves us rudderless.
At least, that's what I'm telling my new judges when I train them this year (i.e., the poor parents who are the biggest sufferers in modern LD, and who are also the sine qua non of most LD, at least in the northeast, where they chaperone and judge at almost every tournament). Listen to what the debaters say, I'll be telling them (I'll also be telling them a lot of other stuff too, like explaining drops and extensions, so don't get me wrong here, I'm just distilling, but I'm putting this right at the top). At the end of the round, if you had to act on the resolution (in Sept-Oct, for instance, you get to be Dubya and you get to say we're going to it or not do it), would you or wouldn't you? It's hardly the sophisticated (?) T debate or standards debate or whatever that some debaters think should be happening, but isn't that roughly what LD set out to do when it was invented? To find the rightness or wrongness of actions, as compared to arguing the effects of various policy actions in specific situations?
So I guess my question evolves from, "What do we do when truth is not a good test of LD," to, "Is there somehow a better test of LD in asking a judge to accept the sides of debates as rationales for actions, and to choose to act on the resolution affirmatively or negatively based on the arguments from the sides?" Obviously, this is outrageously bad wording, and misses a lot of issues, but is it what LD is trying to do?
These are the thoughts in my mind as I backed away from the word truth in my tournament (Bump, Hendrick Hudson) in November.
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From: Robinson
Does a "rationale for action" justification put us squarely in the role of policy evaluators? If not, why not? It seems a safe starting assumption that an evaluator for any "rationale for action" should consider the action for which the rationale is given.
What happens, in this case, when there are competing proposals as to which action for which the affirmative is asked to provide a rationale?
Should we let the aff choose the action within the confines of the resolution? If so, we are squarely in a policy maker framework - a place in which I don't think many in LD are comfortable.
Should we compare the example action(s) of the affirmative against examples action(s) on the negative, again with the constraints of the topic? If so, we are squarely in the hypothesis testing/counter-warrant world of CEDA debate a couple of decades back. I was not around but when I ask about it - the reply from those who were around usually involves a shiver and rolled eyes.
Should we reject the notion of evaluating "actions" entirely and focus on... well, what would we focus on? If we actively forbid or discourage the evalution of action we end up defining out of the event major schools of philosophical thought like utilitarianism and pragmatism. We end up in a world where - as a Rostrum article a few years back argued - the only legitimate LD arguments are "consistency with a value" arguments of a Kantian mode. This is a limited space of arguments - and seriously misrepresents the literature on political and moral philosophy.
Is there an option I am missing between policy maker, hypothesis tester, and principle evaluation? I don't think do. As evidence I would recommend one think about the various attempts to find a magic bullet in topic wording to focus debate away from examples. Pithy attempts to get around the problems by including phrases like "on balance" or "in principle" don't actually resolve the problem. They just invite students to appeal to judge's preference without attempting to support their interpretations of the terms and their significance in the evaluation of the resolution. By far, the most common explanation I have heard for such phrases has been some form of "this means we can't debate examples and that I don't have to provide a reason why we don't debate examples. On to the value."
I am looking forward to someone setting me straight because an inability to define a clear alternative to policy-making and hypothesis-testing leaves LD without a distinct identity.
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From: Smilin’ J
Jim, I'm glad you raised this topic, but I still don't understand what your reluctance to think in terms of truth and falsehood is. To say that (e.g.) the affirmative must prove the resolution is true is simply to say that the affirmative must prove that a just government should provide health care to its citizens--i.e., that the affirmative must do exactly what you seem to think it should be doing. The truth-burden in no way limits what kinds of reasons the affirmative can give as to why just governments should provide health care. What it does do, potentially, is render irrelevant arguments to the effect that, e.g., it's socially desirable for people to believe that a just government should provide health care to its citizens. An argument to that effect would be about what beliefs about government health care have socially beneficial consequences, not about what a just government should do vis a vis providing health care to its citizens.
Truth is internal, so to speak, to the notion of academic debate--unless two people disagree over the truth of a single proposition, there is no debate. So there's no question that where there's debate, there is a disagreement over the truth of something. The only question is, what proposition will debaters disagree about? Will it be the resolution itself, or will it instead be some other proposition, such as that "It is socially desirable that people believe the resolution" or "The affirmative constructive provided a convincing proof of the resolution." Those of us who say we want students to debate the resolution usually (I think) mean that we want students to debate about whether the resolution itself is true or false--e.g., whether governments should provide health care--not about one of the these other propositions that embeds the resolution but is really about something else.
I probably disagree with you about the range of legitimate negative strategies, but I'll let that go for now to keep the focus squarely on this truth issue.
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From Eric B
As if people haven't heard enough from me about truth burdens in LD, here I go again, mainly because I worry that Jason may have missed the point Jim was trying to make. While I think that everything Jason said is accurate, Jim’s point seemed to be that the truth burden approach to LD invited a particular kind of stock NEG position on virtually every topic. Specifically, positions like moral nihilism (by which I mean a denial that any moral claims can be true because there’s no such thing as morality) and other similar stances could be used by NEG debaters to TRY to win every round where the AFF stakes out a substantive moral position.
Abstract example resolution: “X is morally better than Y.” AFF offers reasons based on moral theories and principles to support the truth of this resolution. NEG gets up and says that morality does not exist (or something like that) and so the resolution is not true, indeed it cannot be true because it is simply nonsense – nothing can be morally better than anything else.
If this kind of NEG position works for virtually every resolution, then all debaters need to do is to learn to deliver these skillfully to have a good shot at any NEG round, and (as Jim points out) we lose half of the interesting debates. [Do I have your concern right Jim?]
If Jason is also right that any debate must be (by its very nature) a disagreement over the truth of SOME proposition, then I take Jim’s challenge to be: Well, there must be some approach to LD which let’s us move from a resolution to a disagreement over a related proposition. For example, perhaps the proposition: “Since we’ve got to do something regarding the resolution, we should do X instead of Y when those are our choices.” I’m guessing that Jason might come back and say that then we might as well just keep the truth burden and adopt that as the resolution, but Scott’s remarks remind us that writing good resolutions is hard, and it’s not easy (though it may be possible) to write resolutions that stop bad debate (like the kind that vexes Jim, along with the rest of us). I see two ways to address this problem in an intellectually honest and responsible manner.
First, you can endorse the position that in a debate activity that focuses exclusively on various normative issues, there is a foundational presumption that the resolutions are talking about something – that they are meaningful, not meaningless. If the stock NEG stance against morality is right, then the resolution “X is morally better than Y” isn’t just false, it’s nonsense because the concept MORALLY BETTER is meaningless. Similarly, the proposition “The largest number is odd” is nonsense because the phrase “the largest number” is meaningless.
Second, we could just teach students to be particularly good at beating these silly incarnations of moral relativism/nihilism, which is what all these stock NEG arguments boil down to. If the stock NEG arguments lose, they will cease to be appealing strategies.
The former is the top down approach, and it involves teaching judges that they need to ignore certain kinds of NEG arguments, even if they do seem to show that the resolution is not true. (I’m still not convinced that they show the resolution to be false, but I don’t feel entirely comfortable basing the argument on a potentially contentious position in the philosophy of language. The latter is a bottom up approach and I don’t know how feasible it is. It may not be that hard to teach particular students to identify and beat these arguments, but it’s hard to teach everyone.
There are other options, but I find them unappealing. For example, one could have an explicit preamble on each topic that would forestall this kind of stock NEG argument. The resolution would then read something like: “If anything is ever morally better than another thing, then X is morally better than Y.” More generally, a preamble like this would probably always work to stop all NEG strategies of this kind: “Presuming that disputes over values are meaningful, …” Maybe this isn’t so bad, but it seems like if you are going to tag the same basic clause on each resolution, then you might as well just make it a presumption of the whole activity and save the ink – which brings us back to the former top-down solution.
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From: Menick
First, Scott correctly sees the problem with my formulation of action as I wrote it. My problem is articulating exactly what I'm thinking (which is why I'm appealing to the group). What I'm thinking is that my understanding of LD is that it is an attempt to justify action on ethical grounds, as compared to policy debate, which is an attempt to justify action on essentially consequential grounds (i.e., do this, and this will happen, which is or isn't desirable). Or, we decide to do something because (LD) it is right or wrong, or because (policy) it can or can't be done (or will or won't work). There's a big difference between not doing something because I think it's the wrong thing to do, and not doing something because it's not going to work.
As I say, I find this hard to articulate, which is why I go on at length rather than having some concise phrasing that says it in the proverbial nutshell. But I seek the nutshell: it's something to substitute for that "a proposition of value" on that NFL (or any other) ballot.
As for truth, my issue with truth as the nutshell is even harder for me to articulate. While I feel that often debaters may be arguing the truth of a resolution, I don't see truth as the absolute reduction of all resolutions. Further, a case itself perhaps could be an attempt to see the truth, so called, in a position, or maybe better the "rightness" of that position, but in the actual debating, truth sort of falls by the wayside, and I don't necessarily make an adjudication based on which side was more true. I have a feeling I'm not alone in this reluctance to reduce to truth, otherwise we wouldn't be discussing it so much.
Eric correctly points out the fears a lot of us have of off-resolutional arguments that can result from an inefficient determination of what, exactly, we expect LD debaters to do in a round. And that's the bottom line. If we feel there should be some things that are right (or right ways) to debate, and others that are not, these things or that way needs to be so clearly and precisely defined that there can be no question what is meant. And while we all seem to generally agree on examples of what we don't feel is right, we aren't coming up with the paradigm of what is right, of what LD should be. The context of the vague rules posed by NFL have led us where we are today (although some changes to those rules are in the works, and could trickle down to other venues than NFL contests). A practical reading of those vague rules resulted in the value/criterion structure, which worked well for a while (and may still work well). But those vague rules, including a provision for the two debaters making ad hoc determinations in a round of how the round should be adjudicated, have also led to debates not about the content of a resolution but about the form of debate itself, including the undebatability of the resolution at hand. If we don't like this, for whatever reasons (which need not be elucidated here), a preventative is required. And as I say, and as Scott confirmed, I don't think that arguing the truth of a resolution is enough to solve the problem.
Which, in the discussion so far, may bring us back to square one, but at least a clearer square one.
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From Eric:
My main issue with what Jim just wrote is in how he distinguishes LD and policy debate, which may or may not be central to the point he is making. LD is about ethics, but (as Jason pointed out) lots of ethics is about consequences. LD can't be good ethical debate if real world consequences don't play a role (unless we totally abandon the kinds of resolutions that have been popular, which center around current issues of public concern). Of course, they shouldn't play the only role, but consequences shouldn't play the ONLY role in policy debate either (and when it's good, they don't).
The primary distinction between LD and policy seems to be the existence of a VERY broad topic in policy debate that invites a specific plan, and then the plan (not the resolution) becomes the focus of the debate. Another important difference seems to be that LD resolutions are GENERAL claims, not specific action claims. Ideally, this generality makes specific evidence less decisive and thus encourages students to look at the broader issues at stake using theories and principles as their primary tools instead of facts and prediction (though neither kind should be entirely ignored in either event).
Would it make sense to get away from current events in LD resolutions and try to focus on more classic, perennial and abstract issues? For example: “Individual spending on luxuries is not morally justified as long as millions of people lack basic necessities for life.” I’m not sure it is the answer, but maybe it would help.
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From: Smilin’ J
One way to try to make progress on the sort of project Jim seems to have in mind (providing a concise, perspicuous statement of expectations or requirements or event-defining parameters for LD) might be to list lots of very specific examples of what you do and don't want to see LD debaters doing, and then try to isolate what, if anything, the items on each list have in common.
I predict that if we did that, considerable disagreement would emerge even among LDEP-types about how to classify various examples. I, for one, would not put making arguments for moral nihilism on the list of bad practices, but others would. If there were any hope of compiling useful lists, everyone would have to start by accepting some kind of distinction between, on the one hand, what he or she liked to hear, and, on the other hand, what he or she thought should be required or officially endorsed in the structure of the event.
For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that it's fruitful to define the essence of LD in distinction to policy debate. The notion that a plan was required, or even sufficient, to affirm a typical policy resolution would strike many competent language users as a strange use of "affirm." I agree that if there are further restrictions we (the community of event-sanctioning educators, I guess) want to put on LD beyond that students attempt to prove or disprove the resolution, we should be very clear about what those restrictions are. But I'm not yet convinced there should be any more restrictions. Why isn't it enough for students to try to prove or disprove whatever resolutions we give them using whatever arguments they can muster?
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From Mazin Sbaiti
Hi Guys . . . I'm new to LDEP and thought I'd check the boards out, and here are several old friends . . . very exciting!
I don't have much to add, but I do have a couple of questions for my own edification -- if you'll permit.
1) If I understand Jim's original question, he was basically asking whether, as a judge, there was a theoretical justification for excluding arguments that either skirt the issue presented by the topic or in other cases, collaterally attack the topic or the forum itself. i.e., to be able to say that negatives attacking the notion of a just government are properly rejected for a reason other than that Jim thinks it's a bad argument and doesn't really negate.
Assuming that sufficiently describes the point, my question is why Jim wants something more than the fact that he is a judge, and he thinks the argument is not persuasive, or that it simply does not negate given his understanding of the resolution the issue it raises? Maybe the issue is also one of on what ought a judge reasonably and legitimately base a decision. For instance, I vote strictly on persuasion -- substantively and formally -- and I'd like to understand the basis for the critcism/scrutiny that Jim is sensitive to.
2) I'm not sure I follow Scott's dichotomy of policy-maker vs. hypo-testing. I just didn't catch how they were different in a material respect. I'm not asking for a lengthy clarification, but I'm interested in seeing how that might cut given Jim's query.
I'm clearly way in over my head here in the middle of three Ph.Ds. I hope to see many of you again upon my return to Big D.
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From Menick
I love reading interpretations of what I was trying to say. Even I don't know anymore!
I think we'll all agree that LD is about ethics, which I think is a point I was trying to make. I compared it to Policy because, even in its very name, Policy is not (necessarily) about ethics but about setting courses of action (usually based on consequences). Ethics precede actions. If there is an argument about ethics, and that argument has a winner and a loser, the winner is pointing out a rationale for action. So, yes, I am saying that ethical arguments indeed have consequences, and at the moment I am training my occasional parent judges to weigh the arguments they hear in the light of actions resulting from the rationales for those actions that they've just heard.
By default, arguments that do not provide ethical constructs preceding action would, at the very least, be jejune. Or they could be sophistic in the most perjorative sense. We don't argue ethics so that at the end we sit paralyzed into inactivity, we argue ethics to help us make tough decisions. If I were to nutshell (there's a nice coinage) many of the problems with LD argumentation at the moment it would be to point out that the arguments avoid the tough decisions. They duck and weave and do everything they can not to address the issue at hand, and they certainly don't aid anyone in deciding how to take ethical actions, or make ethical decisions. In a normal world, these sort of arguments would die on the vine because of their inaptness, but somehow they have become all the rage. This is either a fad, or the end of meaningful ethical discussion in LD. If it's the latter, most of us will be coaching PFD and Extemp in a couple of years.
So I guess I've veered away from my challenge of the position that LD resolutions are to be viewed through the lens of truth, which we haven't ever (to me) sutiably proven. I know Jason isn't serious about listing all the topics for distillation purposes, and without going into any detail on this here (although it is a good subject for discussion), personally I have no terrible brief against the resolutions coming out of NFL. It's how they're being debated that's bothersome.
So in light of this, here's what I'm telling my people on Sept-Oct. On the aff, you must prove that there is something about HC that makes providing it (loose def of providing) just. On the neg, you must prove that the government is not obligated to provide for all needs of its citizens, hence a government is not unjust by not providing HC. I am telling them that arguing that HC doesn't work (which is, of course, not true globablly, and the topic is not limited to US), is beside the point. I would hope, if they argue along these or comparable lines, they will offer their judges decent rationales for agreeing or disagreeing that a just government should provide HC to its citizens. All of which is premised on what I'm saying about ethics.
Back, then, to Square One? Again?
1 comment:
can u summarize? far too long. what was the heart of the disagreement?
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