Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 18:01:16 -0500 (EST)
From: Phil Kerpen <pgkst5@imap.pitt.edu>
To: National Forensic League <nfl@mail.wiscnet.net>
Subject: Submission for The Rostrum
DEBATE THEORY OSSIFICATION
Philip G Kerpen
INTRODUCTION
Debate theory grows out of practice. Because of its pragmatic roots, it
is typically supremely rational. Through time, however, justification for
theoretical constructs are lost, and soundly justified procedures become
ossified into anti-educational semi-rules, or even immutable rules in the
eyes of some people.
This is what has happened to most of the stock issues. The stock issues
were designed for a judicial model of debate. While such a model
certainly has its merits (Ulrich comes to mind), it is not descriptive of
debate as currently practiced. In a judicial model, it makes sense for
there to be clearly established burdens that the affirmative must overcome
with a high degree of certainty. When debate shifts to a
Congressional/legislative model, however, those burdens become far less
certain. A requirement of unqualified solvency, for example, just doesn't
make any sense for a policy maker. If students are learning how to
determine whether a policy should be adopted, then they should learn that
a policy with a uncertain chance of solving should be adopted if it would
have no adverse effects.
In the face of policy making, most regions of the country have yielded and
given up stock issues as absolutes, with the possible exception of
topicality. In some areas, however, the shift in practice has not been
accommodated by theory, but rather outdated theory has been codified and
has ossified to approach the rule status. This is the worst possible
contingency, since it forces arbitrary burdens and irrational
argumentation; debaters don't have any *impact* to why inherency is
important, and yet they commit a large amount of time to it, because it is
given arbitrarily inflated status by the system of rules. This not only
diverts time from policy arguments with clear implication, but it also
fails to teach the real reasons that stock issues may be important.
REVIVING STOCK ISSUES BY REPEALING THEIR SPECIAL STATUS.
There are, in fact, some good arguments in favor of stock issues-type
argumentation in some contexts. The critical move, however, to restoring
their pedagogical and competitive value is to remove any mystique that
they have as a result of being privileged by authority. Stripped of the
status of rules, most of the stock issues can make a lot of sense when
justified in terms of the ballot by the debaters in the round. For my
purposes, I'll discuss the stock issues in three sections-- inherency,
solvency and harms, and topicality.
INHERENCY
Inherency is the abomination of debate theory. The amount of theoretical
work devoted to this one concept swamps all others, and yet its basis--
that the problem must be both endemic and identifiable with a particular
cause, is wholly unwarranted. Argumentation theory in general, and
specifically argumentation in policy making contexts, long ago came to the
conclusion that it is entirely possible to solve a problem without fully
identifying the cause; do you refuse medication from a doctor who is
treating symptoms when the infectious agent is unknown? That would be
irrational decision making, and teaching it would be unsound pedagogy.
But affirmatives have taken terribly unfair advantage of the death of
inherency. Inherency is important as a divider of ground; as a way to
prevent the aff from being so close to status quo that there is not
adequate disad ground. The issue is not so much resolutional
justification, as it is simple fairness. If affirmatives are permitted to
simply extend policies that already exist, or to change funding levels
slightly, then they fail to provide the negative with any unique disad
ground. Some say that this only makes the case strategic, but that's a
silly argument. It is *always* strategic to attempt to abuse the other
team; that's why we need to place theoretical constraints on debate in
order to create some parity of ground.
Inherency as a quest to require the affirmative to prove barriers and jump
through other hoops to prove causality is an absurdity. It shifts the
focus of the debate away from the plan, and the resolution, and to debates
about mechanisms and intricacies that are irrelevant to the extent that
the problem is shown to exist and the plan is shown to solve it. As a
pure procedural, however, with a ground impact, inherency can be a
critical tool against cases that attempt to avoid all unique disad ground.
SOLVENCY AND HARMS
Arbitrary standards that solvency must be absolute and harms must be
significant are another hallmark of ossified stock issues debate. When
cost benefit analysis is applied, these concepts fall apart, and this is
largely what has happened with comparative advantage cases. While it has
been effectively argued that comparative advantage cases are substantively
no different from traditional need cases (notably Zarefsky), they did
shift the way we look at the issues. It is difficult to argue with the
seemingly correct analysis that any risk of an advantage justifies action
when there is no disadvantage. Thus the ``any risk aff'' theory was born.
Upon further investigation, the ``any risk'' theory is terrible. it
presupposes that there is no value to the resources that exist in the
legislative and administrative process, and as a result it reaches flawed
conclusions; there is a tradeoff cost in the enactment of *any* policy. A
stronger presumption may be the most important way to end the aff skew
that plagues most debate areas under modern theory. The challenge is to
weigh tradeoff costs in some nonarbitrary way. The best is probably
through spending tradeoff disadvantages, when a specific scenario can be
outlined. Other times it is more difficult. We need to develop a
mechanism for determining the value inherent in legislative and
administrative resources as a decidely nonzero automatic weight to place
against affirmative advantages. This is an area that needs to be
investigated further.
TOPICALITY
Topicality has survived in all theories and will probably always. It is
the single most important check on aff advocacy to ensure predictability
and ground, and to ensure that the topic is in fact debated. As such, it
is largely unnecessary to explain its value absent a rule status. The
importance of topicality derives not from arbitrary rule but from its
logical status as necessary to determine the limits of affirmative ground.
Most compelling topicality arguments focus on the abuse entailed by
affirmative interpretation of a particular word, and as such, it makes no
sense to conceptualize the impact of topicality as a rules-based voting
issue. Instead, the reasons to prefer the neg interpretation also entail
a reason to vote, since they prove the affirmative interpretation is in
some way bad for debate. A rules-based reason to vote on topicality would
ignore these real, ground-based impacts in favor of an unprovable claim,
since the aff should always be able to find a definition they meet,
satisfying this nominal burden.
CONCLUSION
Stock issues can be argued in a rational way that will have understandable
impacts in terms of both ground and the resolution of substantive impacts
within the debate. When they are ossified and become rules, however, they
not only undermine solidly impacted argumentation but also lose all of
their own potential value. With this in mind, I recommend that stock
issues be taught only as adjuncts to a general cost benefit approach to
evaluating debates, and never as rules that must be followed. If the
reasons behind a stock issues perspective, whether they be mine or more
traditional ones, are in fact valid, then debaters should defend them
within the debate; there is no need to impose them as external rules.
There is nothing that can be gained from the ossification of debate
practice into rules; let the debaters debate.
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