The Truth Fairy

The Winningest Winner Since the Invention of Winning has an article on truth in LD in last month’s Rostrum, which I was reading this morning. Smilin’ J and I had a bunch of correspondence back in the day when he was pushing truth as the paradigm for resolutionality with the Legion of Doom. I didn’t buy it then and I don’t buy it now, for none of the reasons he suggests as those of the nay-sayers. The thing is, I agree with him pretty much on the whole resolutionality issue, and I understand what he’s saying, but his saying of it just doesn’t do the job.

The issue is not, of course, truth per se, but LDers arguing the resolution. The position, with which SJ and I both agree, is that LD is most valuable when the debaters concentrate on seriously debating the content of a resolution. This would mean, for instance, in March and April of this year that debaters would argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, or that they should not do so. In this instance, it is not hard to deduce that if the affirmative argues that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty, the exact opposite argument that the negative might offer is that the UN ought to prioritize maintaining national sovereignty over solving human rights abuses. Argued this way, there are clear and directly opposed advocacies on both sides, and the nature of the subject (protecting rights across borders) insures that you can’t defend one side without attacking the other.

Putting aside the issue of truth for the moment and sticking to the content of this one very good resolution, it is pretty certain that in March-April the affirmative has little choice but to argue that the UN ought to prioritize solving human rights abuses over maintaining national sovereignty. The literal wording of the resolution offers no reasonable alternative that I can see. The negative, on the other hand, does have alternatives to direct opposition (although I see the direct opposite as the best and most interesting, and debatable, position). That is, not only could the negative simply argue that sovereignty > rights protection, but the negative could choose to argue, for instance, that the two should be protected equally. Personally I consider this a bad argument, but few topic periods elapse without some batch of yabbos arguing on the negative a position that merely puts the word “not” into the resolution and develops logic along those lines, offering very little true advocacy of their own. It’s probably harder to do that with this UN topic than with some others, but people will. I always maintain that this is the absolute weakest strategy a negative can take, as it is not a positive advocacy, but merely the lack of any advocacy. In effect, it is running inertia, which may be very Newtonian but is hardly Lincoln-Douglasian.

There are other possible negative strategies with this resolution. One could argue that the UN has no obligations, or that it does not have either of the obligations supposed by the resolution. I have always maintained that the language of a resolution includes presumptions (in this case that the UN has these two obligations) and that one should accept them; this will naturally lead to arguments that strongly argue interesting content on both sides. Plenty of people I respect disagree with this. For the sake of better debate, I think I’m right, but they think they’re right, for the same reason. I won’t argue it here now, but suffice it to say that non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution means that you can attack the presumptions, which certainly means that no longer would you be arguing whether the UN should choose between X or Y, but you would be arguing instead whether the UN has to choose, or is able to choose, or is justified in choosing, between X or Y. If nothing else, non-acceptance of the presumptions of a resolution certainly opens up a lot more ground for debate, if one accepts the concept of non-acceptance.

Along these same lines, but even further out on the continuum of the normative (don’t you love language like that?) is negative positioning that would simply critique the UN as a body absent the content of the resolution. Or a position would critique the concepts of rights and/or sovereignty. At this point we’re probably saying that the UN ought not to exist, or that rights and/or sovereignty should not or do not exist, and I can imagine a variety of arguments that could be used to support these positions. In fact, the variety is so large, since theoretically there is no contextual limit to a critique, that this sort of negative argumentation could be, virtually, anything.

So as we look at that continuum of possible debate ground, we start with a pretty straightforward reading of the resolution, with one side defending rights and the other side defending sovereignty, with the UN as the agent of action. I think that there are a lot of lines of argumentation that one could take with this straightforward reading that would allow for some very interesting debate. It’s not as if the straightforward approach limits creativity; far from it. It simply sets boundaries within which that creativity must take place. In an educational context, two months to discuss and argue the UN in an extracurricular activity, with that sort of boundary, ought to make for reasonable learning in a large group of LDers. Most high school students have never thought about the UN before in their lives; does it make sense that we should examine the most extreme positions one could take on the organization, or should be concentrate on the real issues facing the organization on a daily basis? Which will lead to the most learning? Obviously, I say that it is that latter.

As we move along the continuum from straightforward to critique, one thing that becomes clear is that there is more and more possible ground for debate, if one accepts the premises at that point in the continuum. So at the final point in the continuum, the critique of the resolution, the possible ground for debate is, theoretically, infinite, or at least infinite enough in the concept of a two-month period of NFL applicability. The problem here is, however, that this infinity is one-sided. The affirmative always must run the relatively straightforward rights > sovereignty analysis, while the negative can run • (that’s an infinity symbol as I’m typing this). Competitively speaking, this puts the affirmative at an enormous disadvantage. The negative always knows what the affirmative will run, while the affirmative never knows what the negative will run. This is unlikely to lead to substantive debate (at least in situations where both sides are not lugging 5 or 6 RubberMaid tubs with them from round to round to cover every contingency). Usually the result of such a round is in the mindset of the judge, who accepts or doesn’t accept the validity of critiques, rather than in anything said or done in the round by the debaters. Certainly no one will have learned anything about the UN, or come to any agreement that such and such is the best action the UN should take. The energy in the round will have been spent performatively deciding what a round should be. From an educational viewpoint, however, learning about the UN > learning about what an LD round should be. Few legitimate educators would disagree with that statement.

So where does the truth come into all of this? Well, JB believes that if you limit argumentation to the truth on both sides of the resolution, you will get resolutional debating, and like me, he believes that resolutional debating is better than anything-goes debating. So he wants to legislate some wording to that effect, and has done so with the Legion of Doom, and he argues his reasons in that Rostrum article. The problem I’ve always had with his position is that it doesn’t really clearly solve the resolutionality issue, nor does it clearly apply, at least in the various iterations of it that I’ve seen. He makes it clear in the article what he means by truth, and I accept that and agree with it. But none of what I’ve said here is a measure of truth, as I normally understand it. I don’t argue a position on March-April because it is true and because the opposition is false, except in the most tortured and complex terms of analysis. I do, according to JB’s logic, but I really don’t. I argue that my position is preferable, more desirable, more practical, more a lot of things, but not more true. Of course, JB’s not saying that one side is true and the other isn’t true (read the article), but simply that debate clash requires competing claims of truth. But how do you apply this in practical terms?

Well, you can’t just say that “Both sides will argue that their position is true,” because that hardly ever applies. “More true” is a philosophical construct that would send heads rolling in more ways than one. So what we end up with is, to paraphrase the Legion’s (and JB’s) wording, that the affirmative will argue that an affirmation of the resolution is true, and the negative will argue that a negation of the resolution is true.

Yeah, well… Sort of…

And that’s my problem. The language is absolutely tortured because the concept of truth almost applies to resolutionality. But linguistically, as Mark Twain put it, it is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. The wrong word may come really, really close, but it is still the wrong word. The concept of truth comes really, really close to setting resolutional boundaries in LD, but it is still the wrong concept.

Of course, I’ve done no better, and come up with no paradigm that is a better fit. I tell my new judges, i.e., parents, to listen to a round and make their decision on which side best convinced them that, if they had to take action on the resolution immediately, they should take that particular side. That’s far from elegant, but it does help them make a decision. Elegance, which is what JB is trying for, is better. But I don’t think that elegance resides in a concept of truth. Or if it’s truth, JB still hasn’t pinned it down with wording that I can point to and say, Do this, and everyone will do it with no questions asked. He doesn’t, in other words, solve the problem. If he were solving it, I don’t think he’d get so much resistance from people like me who agree with him. God knows, I’ve got plenty of people in the debate universe with whom to disagree, so I’m not going out of my way to disagree with the ones I agree with.

So the problem remains, how do you clearly define what resolutionality is in an LD round? I’ve explained here why I want it, and I certainly know it when I see it, but I can’t distill it into one short sentence. Neither can JB. And until we can, we leave open the competitive and unfair (and uneducational) possibility of infinite debate ground vs limited debate ground. I go back to the NFL’s new LD rules as pretty good on this, but they sort of take a Potter Stewart know-it-when-I-see-it approach as well. If we could do better than that, we’d have a great breakthrough. Till then (if ever), we continue to muddle along.