Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Value Comparison - Michael Mangus

the value-comparison paradigm: a turn away from truth-testing
michael mangus

I. the dominant paradigm

a. groundwork. controversial as he may be, jason baldwin captured the view of a large number of coaches, judges and debaters when he asserted in a recent vbd interview that “The most important element of my view of burdens is that it’s the RESOLUTION that debaters are supposed to be trying to prove true or false.” [http://victorybriefsdaily.com/2007/01/22/the-winningest/ emphasis italic in original; changed for formatting reasons]. however, i believe that the emphasis in that sentence has been misplaced. the most fundamental question is not whether or not we ought to debate about a resolution, but rather whether we endeavor to prove that resolution true or false. while there has been some discussion on this (including this thread from the ldep message board that i uncovered in researching this article: http://www.ldep.org/viewtopic.php?t=20), it seems to me that the truth-paradigm is still dominant in how rounds are decided.

b. the rise of the a priori. this is perhaps most evident in the rise of what many debaters call 'a priori' arguments – arguments which attempt to prove the resolution true or false independent of any substantive (synthetic?) application or practical implementation. examples of these that seem particularly common are definitional strategies which impact to either tautology or contradiction. this leads to some pretty awful debates: “corporations are composed of individuals, so the resolution is tautological – they're the same thing!” vs. “no you have it all wrong, that makes the resolution incoherent – it must be rejected!” also common are skeptical arguments that deny some assumption behind affirmation of the resolution. one example is a language k which asserts that indeterminacy means we can't make objective truth claims: if we dont know what the terms in the topic mean, then you cant affirm it!

these strategies are problematic in a number of ways:

1. aff strategy skew. i am a huge fan of the spread, of tricky arguments, and of very fast debate. however, negative spreads have become horizontal rather than vertical. in other words, instead of making 40 answers to the affirmative case, negatives have taken to running multiple 'a priori' off-case positions. while i believe that off-case debate is good, aff's are in a rough place when it comes to answering these particular types of horizontal spread because each issue is a gateway argument – the affirmative must answer each position to win the debate, but they will be hard pressed to garner offense on them. in other words, if you prove language does in fact have meaning and causality does in fact exist and zeno's paradox is in fact resolvable, you will at best break even. the 1ar might be forced to spend 1.5-2 minutes answering back arguments that they have no chance of impact-turning – half of a speech dedicated to defense.

while many theory arguments are similarly gateway questions, there is a fundamental difference. when you, for example, run a case that is not topical, you have made a direct choice to engage a particular topic area and should be prepared to defend that that topic area is legitimate affirmative ground. however, you do not choose the resolution and all the accompanying assumptions thereof; it's a burden imposed on you by the topic, not by your own volition. moreover, theory arguments have impacts that can be turned: education, fairness, etc. are all implications of debatable desirability. truth, on the other hand, is not an impact that you can prove good/bad – your only option is defense: deny the internal links (no, that is not true).

2. neg strategy skew. to compensate for these horizontal a priori spreads, affirmatives have increasingly relied on hidden a priori spikes in the 1ac. as a consequence, we have some very prominent debaters who win rounds by presenting a claim in the 1ac, a warrant in the 1ar, and an impact in the 2ar. arguments are insufficiently developed and negatives have little to no indication of what arguments in the aff are important. while critical thinking and strategic prediction are valuable skills, its unreasonable to expect a negative to read and answer every sentence of the 1ac. even when spikes can be isolated, answering them is problematic because they are often so vague that a complete response is impossible.


3. irresolvable debates. instead of reaching a sortof strategically-skewed synthesis, these two forces instead create debates that leave judges dumbfounded. the affirmative will drop an overview that “proves” the resolution contradictory while the negative will drop a spike that “proves” the resolution tautological. if the judge is lucky, one of these arguments will somehow respond to or undermine the other and a decision can be rendered with some degree of fairness. oftentimes, however, there is no comparison between the arguments and no obvious interaction between them. even in the first case, this is not the pinnacle of substantive debate. in the latter case, it is a direct invitation for judge intervention. this is not isolated to the lower brackets of tournaments either – many high-powered prelims and elimination rounds feature these strategies.

4. defense-only strategies. especially on the negative, debaters increasingly defend that their opponent is wrong, not that they are right. after all, the neg gets to defend ~p. even on the affirmative, many affirmatives tend to win debates with defensive arguments: ~~p <=> p. under this framework, debaters are trained as sophists, not advocates. this also leads to debates that are difficult to adjudicate and, frankly, boring – if neither side is winning a clear impact to why their side is good (or true, under the dominant paradigm), its difficult to evaluate the winner of the round in a non-arbitrary way.

II. value-comparison as an alternative to truth-testing

a. the resolution. under a value-comparison paradigm, the resolution is the starting point for the debate rather than its end point. topics are to be viewed as a delineation of ground, not as a claim to be truth-tested by the debaters. the affirmative must defend that the world would be a better place if everyone were to do what the resolution dictates. the negative must defend that the world would be a better place if everyone were to not do what the resolution dictates.

b. offense/defense. the value-comparison paradigm endorses an offense/defense model of debate that has been lacking in traditional approaches to ld.

1. the basis. under this paradigm, a debater must win offensive impacts to win the debate. defensive answers mitigate the risk of an argument; however, there is still, of course, some risk of the impact. consequently, you need to win offense to win a debate. a 1% risk of an impact one way is going to outweigh in the absence of any impacts going the other way. even if debater x wins that there is a 0% risk of debater y's impact claims, x will not win the debate without some impact (even a very small one) in their favor.

2. presumption. there remains a question of what a judge would do if neither side is winning offensive impacts. under the current model, the case is typically made for neg presumption based on the idea that a positive statement must be proven and is otherwise presumed false. there is no intrinsic presumption for either side in the value-comparison model and instead presumption is determined by whose defense is 'more terminal.' in other words, a judge would evaluate the quality of the defensive args made and whoever has the better one wins. this is fundamentally different from how we treat presumption now (a 'failsafe' decision in the face of awful debating). however, this new approach seems more fair. in a matchup of two horrendous debaters it is unreasonable that the neg prevails by default. i do think a method for determining presumption is necessary, but i dont think that presumption has to always go one way. in the worst-case-scenarios (a round where, for example, both debaters are completely silent for 13 minutes each and waive cx) it is no worse to flip a coin than to pick whoever's neg. after all, that coinflip is more random than a side assignment.

c. the role of standards. i am not married to the idea of a value/criterion, or even of any particular standard being advanced in the debate. however, the value-comparison paradigm maintains the possibility for advancement in the community in either direction. on the one hand, standards can be a focus of the debate – they determine what it means to say that the world is 'better' or 'worse' after all, and so its possible that debates would continue to revolve around standards-based claims. however, this impact comparison can happen just as easily in later speeches with specific comparison between the impacts being extended. while i personally favor the latter, it is by no means a requirement. standards debate could continue without much change.

d. the death of the a priori. the implication of this for arguments appealing to the topic's truth or falsity should be readily apparent. since the affirmative must now defend that the maxim presented in the topic is good rather than true, definitional strategies only frame affirmative ground rather than giving a reason to accept the resolution. similarly, a negative strategy which indicts the resolution is now a meta-issue to be evaluated like other procedural or discursive objections. such objections require an offensive impact – the neg must prove that the affirmative methodology is bad rather than incomplete. this revives a space for vital impact turn ground. defense-only strategies are no longer viable – a debater must win that either their world is good or that the other side's world is bad. this mandates more impact comparison and more substantive debate rather than a repetition of non-specific skeptical claims.

e. debate in the postmodern era. it is outdated to believe that any activity, especially one like ours, could possibly establish a complete account of the truth or falsity of a statement. the value-comparison approach recognizes the contingency intrinsic to truth judgments in general and value judgments in particular by forcing a debate based on the topic's implications for action rather than any abstract metaphysical truth-content. affirmatives now have an option to 'no link' a number of k's that have guaranteed links under the truth-testing paradigm.

III. no really, its not that bad, i promise – answers to critics.

a. “this is ld, not policy!” i agree.

1. the locus of the debate. the value-comparison paradigm still endorses the key factor that makes ld unique: a focus on philosophical argument about moral issues. while policy debate asks what government institutions ought to do, ld resolutions are issues that individuals deal with outside the realm of law. the value-comparison paradigm does nothing to undercut this aspect of the discussion.

2. plans. the value-comparison paradigm does make plans feasible but it does not make them necessary (or even advisable). the affirmative could, in theory, win that a particular subset of people {x} have to do what the resolution says to stave off nuclear catastrophe and thus a negative world would be super-ultra bad. however, unlike policy debate, the value-comparison approach to ld still has the resolution as the governor of ground, not the affirmative advocacy. consequently, negatives generate uniqueness and links from the topic and affirmatives are still held to defend that topic in its entirety. thus, an extremely specific plan is a bad idea for the affirmative – it doesnt narrow the number of neg arguments that link, but it does narrow the range of impacts you can plausibly claim on the aff.

b. “resolutions must be modified!” i also agree in a limited sense. i think that for the most part resolutions as they are written now wouldnt need modification to work in this paradigm. there might be some tweaking needed to how they are interpreted. for example, just as we now imagine "it is true that..." to be implied by each resolution, we could just as easily imagine "people ought to behave based on the maxim that..." to be implied instead. there is a unique challenge to resolutions that prescribe a certain goal – for example, “democracy is best served by strict separation of church and state.” in such cases, the domain of discourse is limited – it only makes sense to address certain people taking the action prescribed by the resolution since the resolution has a particular context. prashant rai has noted that this seems to exclude impact-turn ground because it forces us to presume that democracy is the best world [http://www.theldboards.org/theboard/viewtopic.php?t=6&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25]. this doesnt pose a major threat to the paradigm advanced here for a number of reasons.

1. reciprocity. neither side of that debate actually defends that democracy is good. consequently, no one loses ground by that inability to impact turn since no one gets to say its good or bad. in other words, the debate only questions what is better when viewed through the lens of democracy – it does not require a defense of that lens as good or bad.

2. uniqueness. many topics make assumptions about the good, so if we accept that topics in general are workable under this framework then topics worded like the strict separation resolution are unproblematic. for example, “a government's obligation to protect the environment ought to take precedence over its obligation to promote economic development” probably tacitly assumes that both those obligations exist.

3. the (perhaps intrinsic) perm. we should accept the value-comparison paradigm while working to create more open-ended and clearly written topics. theory debate (particularly on a topicality level) will check abuse in the interim. at worst, this objection means there is some lack of clarity in resolutional interpretation under the proposed paradigm, not that it is in any way unworkable or bad.

c. “blippy strategy skew is inevitable.” to some extent, it is true that debaters will always compress arguments in a time-pressured debate. however, there are two mechanisms in the value-making paradigm to check against extremes.

1. we can create incentives for the direction arguments will go. by removing the incentive to go for one-sentence no-links-or-impacts-necessary a priori arguments, the value-comparison paradigm at the very least ensures that there are internal links to be contested and impacts to engage.

2. a concomitant acceptance of the offense/defense approach to evaluation means that shallow arguments are unlikely to carry much weight. if an argument is extremely briefly explained and has unclear impacts, it ought to – and probably will – fall by the wayside in the judges ultimate decision calculus.

d. “there will still be a priori definitional claims and language k's.” again, i agree. however, most of these arguments become unproblematic in a framework where they must have offensive impacts to some standard of goodness/badness instead of truth/falsity. definitional arguments lack impact unless incorporated into a meaningful procedural objection which can then be answered like any other t/theory arg. in terms of k's, i think we should embrace the theoretical legitimacy of any criticism as long as it has impacts and a (clear, non-utopian) alternative so that the aff can garner offense in response to it. the k is good and id like it to continue.

IV. implementation

a. judging and coaching. i consider (and debaters ought to consider) this article to be an aspect of my judging paradigm. i encourage others to pick any and all parts of this framework that they agree with and implement those principles in how they judge and coach. this does not mean that i am no longer willing to judge rounds in the dominant paradigm. i will not automatically vote for a debater who runs these arguments (or drop one who doesnt). with that said, this represents my default presumption. we all have our biases and, though i'll try my best, i imagine that arguing in favor of truth-testing would be an uphill battle and i would really rather it not come down to that.

b. debating. i encourage debaters to structure arguments with this paradigm in mind. i also encourage them to make framework arguments in rounds that endorse this paradigm of debate, especially if faced with an opponent who is debating on the undesirable extremes of the current model. theory change begins in rounds. only YOU can prevent bad debate.

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