A PF question to ease out of hiatus

It’s going to take me a while to get back to business. So instead of actually blogging anything…

Today’s question from the coachean mailbag is:

I am a Public Forum debater going into my second year of debate. The only experience I have had with debate is PF (unless Congress counts). I read your series on PF, and I just have some questions. I understand the value of using a BI to structure a case, but what strategy should be used in rebuttal speeches in the case that the other team is not using a BI, but three separate, less developed ideas? Furthermore, if one of our three points that make up the Big Idea is taken down in a round, would the rest of the points be enough to support our side?

Damned good question.

If your opponents aren’t using a clear Big Idea to underlie what they’re saying, you have a number of possibilities.

First, they could have a Big Idea, but not know it. The construct I’ve presented of the Big Idea is to help focus your arguments, both when you’re creating cases and when you’re debating them. Sometimes people do this intuitively. So first of all, consider what the opponents have said in their apparently unconnected ideas, and see if they tie together. If they do, then extrapolate the Big Idea from them, and show why that BI isn’t as good as your BI. Sticking to the health care example, let’s say that everything your opponent says is in aid of saving money, and your case is in aid of saving lives. Simple enough.

Of course, if they really are random ideas, and this is quite possible, especially against less polished teams, then your job is to link each of the random strands to your own BI, and demonstrate how your BI takes out those random strands. This maintains clarity of resolve on your side, refutes their side, and makes you look focused and them look random. Better yet, if you can see contradictions in their random points, there’s your main rebuttal. If one thing they say raises costs and another thing they say is in aid of reducing costs, you call them out on their conflict. There are few more satisfying wins then showing why the opponents’ case doesn’t work regardless of your own case.

The key to this, and any refutation, is listening. So few debaters really listen to what the other side says. Often people prepare blocks for things, and apply those blocks even when the blocks don’t really apply. Coming close isn’t good enough, especially if your judge is actually paying attention. In PF this does put an incredible evidentiary burden on both teams, of course, a burden that may not be able to be met in real life. That’s why focusing on the Big Idea seems to important to me. It’s the one thing that any team can do, once they know what they’re talking about. It doesn’t eliminate the need for lots of evidence, but it does make that need manageable.

As for how many legs of a tripod are necessary to hold up a Big Idea, as a general rule independent lines of analysis are obviously better than totally linked lines. Take out one, and the others should still stand. On the other hand, if you are making one straightforward argument in three parts and you lose one part, then yeah, you lost. That’s the way logic works. If your evidence is separate enough that any one is good enough for a ballot, you’ve got the best case scenario. Given that the round will probably boil down to one voter issue at the end, the more things you have that can stand alone and achieve the BI, the better when it comes to choosing what you think is the winner. Unfortunately, that’s the best case scenario. A lot will depend on the actual resolution. So the rule of thumb is, try for independent legs, and try to avoid completely dependent legs. In real life, you’ll usually come out somewhere in the middle.