PF 2009 Part 2

I have a new project that’s going to be keeping me busy, and away from the debate universe, for a bit of the summer, so forgive me if entries become erratic. (Erratic in appearance, that is; they’re already erratic in content.) Feed items will continue as I’ve been doing them, annotated here, and raw (and in greater numbers) on the straight feed itself.

Here’s a rule of thumb I propose for Pfffters: Never open your mouth unless there’s a piece of evidence in it. If nothing else separates PF from LD, then let it be this (although, of course, there are plenty of other separation points as well, but this one is key). This is not to say that PF need be nothing more than dueling facts, of course; my point is that simply saying something without evidentiary support is a sure way to lose a round. In LD, solid analytics derived from evidence or even concepts can take the day, especially in areas where one is discussing something ephemeral like justice or societal obligation. Interpretation of those issues, in LD, can be as important as application of those issues to specific circumstances. But, as a general rule, it’s the other way around in PF, where application and circumstances usually come first. Analysis is important, obviously, but if you’re arguing, for instance, that we should have nationalized health care, what will win the day is healthier people. Healthier people will result from better health care, national or non-national. And this structure applies most of the time.

The speeches in PF are like an inverted unmultiplied factorial or something, going from 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 minute (and, I guess, to 0 minutes when it’s all over, which is totally non-factorial in that all results would equal zero, but that is soooo beside the point). None of these is particularly long, but at least in the first speech you get a chance to present a reasonable, and in LD terms, normal length constructive. After that, things get progressively tighter. Clarity and word economy are obviously of great importance. But so is argument structure. If you’re going to refute what the opponent has said, this is where you can’t open your mouth without a piece of evidence in it. But that evidence must be in the classic Toulmin argument structure of claim/evidence/warrant. Here’s a loosey goosey example: “[claim] If we enact a national health care plan, it will result in people dropping like flies. [evidence] According to the the Onion, 87% of all people who have been in a similar plan in Kush Behar have instantly contacted the yaws and collapsed in a heap. [warrant] Since our plan is no different than theirs, we can expect the same result.” Even the NFL documentation discusses what they call the “Art of Argumentation” in this fashion.

This sort of presentation is simple enough in a written out case, but it must also come out in rebuttals. In a way, the evidence part of the equation is the easiest to come up with, assuming you’ve done your research. That is, a fact is a fact is a fact. Claims can be scurrilous, and warrants can be elusive, but as Mr. Gradgrind would happily point out, facts are facts and there you are. The problem is, it is tempting to leave out facts in refutations, especially if one’s background is LD where the warrant and claim (and impact) are often sufficient to win a point. (Alternately, it might also be tempting to go so facty on us that one leaves out the literal arguing—the claim and warrant—beyond a mere dusting. That’s no good either.) That’s why I say that, for the former LDer especially, not opening your mouth unless there’s evidence in it is important. The temptation is to argue other ways, but I don’t think that that will work very often. Smart arguing on warrants is intriguing in some contexts, but in the PF round, at the end the judge is looking for (in my example) the most health, and the most health is probably going to result from demonstration of facts applied logically rather than demonstration of logic applied without factual basis.

Curiously, much of my thinking is based on CatNats where they were arguing more often than not social contract. Winners of fact fights were those who actually knew something about the social contract. Which is, of course, not a fact but merely a philosophical construct. Whatever. You had to, first, get the philosophical construct right, i.e., know what soc con actually is, theoretically, before you could do anything else. Very bizarre. Come to think of it, CatNats was also about health care, I think, but the arguments were mostly about societal obligations. So very LD, so not PF. But, I think, the conclusions remain accurate.