American Debate Sediment 3: Argument “theory”

For those unfamiliar with American debating formats, you might be surprised to learn that built into several formats is the ability to engage your opponent on the rules of debate itself. You can argue that the argument your opponent(s) made violates the rules of good debating, hurts either your ability to debate fairly or your ability to “get something” out of the debate, or both, and they should lose because of it. This is called “argument theory,” but I like to put scare quotes around the “theory” part because I am deeply suspicious of the ability of this body of common beliefs and practices to serve as theory in any academic use of the term.

This type of debating we sometimes call meta-debate – debating about the rules of the debate – doesn’t happen that often in our big political debates. Occasionally you will find it – Newt Gingrich announcing that the purpose of the Republican debate a few weeks ago was not to have Republicans attack one another but to jointly attack Obama would be one moment. Perhaps another one would be whether or not we should televise certain trials, mostly because of the effect it would have on the arguments within the courtroom (audience, even one you are ignoring, has big impacts on how you do things).

In your interpersonal arguments, there’s much more meta-debate. Is it fair to bring up that time two years ago when you were particularly insensitive in this argument right now? Perhaps it is, if it’s evidence of a trend. But it might not be if it’s just a way to derail the deliberation you and your partner are having now. In the end, both partners are very interested in reaching some sort of agreement, or solving the issue in front of them, and accessing past arguments might not work like stare decisis. It more works as a way to communicate your anger or pain with your interlocutor.

Worlds format does not have any space for the meta-debate. There are places like this blog, or the Worlds Forum that was held in Botswana and will be held in Manila too. There are all those conversations we have in the hallways of tournaments, or in briefings about how debate should work. But these are nothing compared to having the meta during a debate, where you are also debating about the issue. Think of it as a big “even/if” argument: Even if you don’t think this argument is bad for debate, we still beat it for other reasons. All of this happening at once is like the pre-trial motions, the trial, and the sentencing happening at once. It can get hairy.

Debate “theory” is the collection of norms and practices that help keep debate fair, but more often than not they are a part of the strategy a team will deploy in order to win. The “theory” is more of a collection of normative debate “ideals” that can be accessed in order to create arguments that must be responded to by the other side or they lose. This “theory” doesn’t help advance the construction of arguments, but helps teams advance innovative ways to avoid argument – if you can’t respond to what I have said, you will lose. Unlike the way most people use the term theory – a way of constructing and understanding the relationship between highly complex ideas or practices – debate “theory” serves as a system of complex norms that participants must learn in order to find victory. It models bureaucracy and legal systems but without the backing or the historical formations that led to the analogues. It’s great training in order to learn an abstract system that is difficult to care about, but essential in order to advance your position within such an environment.

Compare debate “theory” to argumentation theory to get a sense of the difference. Debate theory is inward looking and attempts to craft arguments good for debate. Argumentation theory looks outward and is always changing itself to account for nuance and unexplained moves people make in debates. It is elastic to change based on discourse. Debate theory alters discourse to serve it; it forces adaptation in speaking style. Sometimes these changes are incredibly difficult to undo, if you have encountered long term debaters after the fact. I’m very skeptical that debate theory is a “theory” in the intellectual sense of things due to it’s function. It’s more like ideology, or better yet – a collection of norms and practices – like you would find in a religious order. And what works as very persuasive and symbolically salient within the order does not work too well outside the walls of the monastery.

An example of this is watching any NPDA team who is new to Worlds attempt to prop a motion. They define everything as narrowly as possible, to a very specific case almost and then claim that they only have to defend this small area of the motion. Principled arguments, or arguments about defending the larger parts of the motion are dismissed as not relevant, because they established what they would defend, and expect the opposition to follow suit.

This theory is called “parametrics” and it is not “theory” in so much as it helps us understand relationships within and around argument, but more about fairness. Policy debate, probably the oldest of the formats, uses one motion for the whole tournament season. In this environment, fairness is defended by allowing proposition teams the ability to narrow the debate to keep it interesting, and not to have to defend against every possible issue that could be supported under a motion. Parametrics helps sustain interest and challenge for a whole year’s worth of debates by keeping everyone on their toes with what could count as support of the motion. Think of it as debating “case studies” across a year where the list of case studies is not provided, nor is it ever really complete in any sense.

Why does WUDC not have such a system? Looking at the parametrics example I think we can come up with an answer – it just doesn’t fit what we are trying to do. I think again, we have two different models of what debate is for. In WUDC, the tradition is to develop speakers who can appeal to a broad public, whatever that might be. In American formats, the goal is to appeal to a particular expert, or even a person who is one of many experts. The analogue would be a lawyer adapting her appeal based on what she knows about this particular judge’s view of different legal issues, distinct from the specific matter in the case. I think that’s where WUDC and American formats split.

The desire to create things like judge paradigm lists and long discussions about the “right way” to counterprop don’t really have a place in Worlds. But there are people who confuse these specific practices with “good debating” on the whole, and want them present in Worlds. All judges in Worlds have one paradigm – the reasonable person. They are to evaluate arguments based on how reasonable and relevant they are to the debate. They are not to judge a team based on how well they used the normative rules of fairness to help them out. We have no need of a complex normative system of rules to debate about (you could argue we have our norms and practices, and you’d be right – but we don’t systematize them for use during debates).

Those who wish to add or include the insights of debate “theory” into worlds should question whether they desire to add it to improve Worlds or to improve their comfort with worlds. Adding the grammar of another language to make learning a new language easier will not help your fluency, just make you more comfortable and more angry when nobody understands you. Distinguishing comfort from improvement in regards to debate “theory” is a huge amount of sediment to overcome.

American Debate Sediment 1: Student Judging

There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix.

Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a sediment on top of American debating; a sediment left there by decades of debate practice influenced by a positivist view of language within a legalistic, punitive system of rules.

The sediment is thick. The metaphor here is not dusting, but more nautical archaeology. Nautical archaeology of ancient Greece or something. It’s a lot of sticky mud. And pulling it off too quickly threatens the treasure below. There is a high risk the patient will reject the new organ of WUDC style debate that is being slowly transplanted across the country.

This is the first of a few posts about these concerns. They are in no particular order.

Student Judges


Debate’s history in the United States has always been a faculty directed program. There was a brief period of time in the history of Colonial Colleges that debate teams were student run, at the dawn of tournament debating. The rise of the Speech Communication department along with the G.I. bill ended that, but it still remains as a relic only at the most elite of American Universities (the most persuasive theory being that elites who attend elite schools do not need any directed or professional speech instruction; people will simply believe them based on class, wealth, power, or simply networking with friends of dad solves the need to be persuasive. Also the name on the degree doesn’t hurt).

This sediment has led to some very comfortable rules. Judges are all graduates, done debating. They are responsible employees of the University. They are to speak as a teacher, or perhaps an expert. They judge the debate based on expert opinion on debating.

Worlds Style debate has no such system or luxury. The development of the consensus system is a judge training system built into the format. It also serves as a simulated public – a very different idea than the judge as “debating expert.” There are no experts in Worlds debate; there are simulated publics, there are “reasonable persons” judging each debate. Breaking judges are selected, in theory, based on the most attentive and responsible of the judges at the tournament.

I don’t know where or if the fear is a motive here. But one huge assumption is that debating is to be preferred to judging. If a student can debate, they should. Judging comes later. They could unfairly tip the ballance, they might not know enough to make a good decision – and they might not understand the rules of debating well enough to judge it. They might also be bad teachers.

The result of these fears is a comfort that is misplaced, putting one or two judges in a round as long as they know what they are doing. They are comfortable having expert single judges judge a room, which is problematic. All the arguments are directed toward a public ear, not a private expert reviewing the case. There is a shortage of judges because debate directors have to fight the feeling that putting a student in as a judge is a waste. Deliberation solves this, because deliberation forces the students to make and remake the arguments they’ve heard. They have to repeat them, explain them. They also have to articulate how they clashed with every other team in the round. In short, they have to develop a critical debating mind, and they do it through articulation with and to others. They also have to hear the articulation of others, and reflect on it. They must reflect and speak about the rhetoric of others. This is better debate training than any professor at the chalkboard can provide.

Couching judging as 50% of the experience of being a Worlds debater might help us overcome this. The argument must be made that the pedagogy depends on both. We must use the metaphor of the card, or the cross examination, or research, or something like that to convince those transitioning over or adding to their existing adversarial debate program that student judging is a requirement, not an option.

Everyone benefits from this. The more judges, the more something that was lost can be located in a round. The more the judging students can see how judges work, and how decisions should be made. They gain valuable exposure to a variety of argument in practice. And they learn how to explain why and how it worked for them. Students before judging explain why they were persuaded circularly (i.e. “It’s good because it is true, and it’s true because it is good”). After making them judge, they are much better at giving reasons why they were moved, instead of just assuming it was truth moving them around.

Many of the older coaching generation will have trouble accepting students flipping from judging to speaking between tournaments. Questions of eligibility and fairness will appear. But in Worlds, no divisions are needed, as we are not learning an expertise-based argumentation style. Natural language argumentation is available everywhere. We just express the warrants with more explicit language (not swearing, ha ha, very funny you) and more direct expose of interactivity. And that might be a good thing. Well, it’s good if a reasonable person can understand it and assent to it.

Will a student be a bad teacher? The student is the only teacher available. Teacher, understood as a figure of authority, or someone holding onto a sacred and complex set of disciplinary rules, is not a good understanding. The experience is what teaches in Worlds style debating, not a particular expert judge. The experience of the debate teaches, both in the doing and the decision. Everyone learns from the interaction, and they learn something about how people are moved by words.

American Debate Sediment 1: Student Judging

There are several issues standing in the way of the creation of an American national circuit of WUDC debating. All of them are quite serious issues, and they are going to take a generation to fix.

Fix? Not really the right word. Brush away, clear away, something like that. For these are best considered a sediment on top of American debating; a sediment left there by decades of debate practice influenced by a positivist view of language within a legalistic, punitive system of rules.

The sediment is thick. The metaphor here is not dusting, but more nautical archaeology. Nautical archaeology of ancient Greece or something. It’s a lot of sticky mud. And pulling it off too quickly threatens the treasure below. There is a high risk the patient will reject the new organ of WUDC style debate that is being slowly transplanted across the country.

This is the first of a few posts about these concerns. They are in no particular order.

Student Judges


Debate’s history in the United States has always been a faculty directed program. There was a brief period of time in the history of Colonial Colleges that debate teams were student run, at the dawn of tournament debating. The rise of the Speech Communication department along with the G.I. bill ended that, but it still remains as a relic only at the most elite of American Universities (the most persuasive theory being that elites who attend elite schools do not need any directed or professional speech instruction; people will simply believe them based on class, wealth, power, or simply networking with friends of dad solves the need to be persuasive. Also the name on the degree doesn’t hurt).

This sediment has led to some very comfortable rules. Judges are all graduates, done debating. They are responsible employees of the University. They are to speak as a teacher, or perhaps an expert. They judge the debate based on expert opinion on debating.

Worlds Style debate has no such system or luxury. The development of the consensus system is a judge training system built into the format. It also serves as a simulated public – a very different idea than the judge as “debating expert.” There are no experts in Worlds debate; there are simulated publics, there are “reasonable persons” judging each debate. Breaking judges are selected, in theory, based on the most attentive and responsible of the judges at the tournament.

I don’t know where or if the fear is a motive here. But one huge assumption is that debating is to be preferred to judging. If a student can debate, they should. Judging comes later. They could unfairly tip the ballance, they might not know enough to make a good decision – and they might not understand the rules of debating well enough to judge it. They might also be bad teachers.

The result of these fears is a comfort that is misplaced, putting one or two judges in a round as long as they know what they are doing. They are comfortable having expert single judges judge a room, which is problematic. All the arguments are directed toward a public ear, not a private expert reviewing the case. There is a shortage of judges because debate directors have to fight the feeling that putting a student in as a judge is a waste. Deliberation solves this, because deliberation forces the students to make and remake the arguments they’ve heard. They have to repeat them, explain them. They also have to articulate how they clashed with every other team in the round. In short, they have to develop a critical debating mind, and they do it through articulation with and to others. They also have to hear the articulation of others, and reflect on it. They must reflect and speak about the rhetoric of others. This is better debate training than any professor at the chalkboard can provide.

Couching judging as 50% of the experience of being a Worlds debater might help us overcome this. The argument must be made that the pedagogy depends on both. We must use the metaphor of the card, or the cross examination, or research, or something like that to convince those transitioning over or adding to their existing adversarial debate program that student judging is a requirement, not an option.

Everyone benefits from this. The more judges, the more something that was lost can be located in a round. The more the judging students can see how judges work, and how decisions should be made. They gain valuable exposure to a variety of argument in practice. And they learn how to explain why and how it worked for them. Students before judging explain why they were persuaded circularly (i.e. “It’s good because it is true, and it’s true because it is good”). After making them judge, they are much better at giving reasons why they were moved, instead of just assuming it was truth moving them around.

Many of the older coaching generation will have trouble accepting students flipping from judging to speaking between tournaments. Questions of eligibility and fairness will appear. But in Worlds, no divisions are needed, as we are not learning an expertise-based argumentation style. Natural language argumentation is available everywhere. We just express the warrants with more explicit language (not swearing, ha ha, very funny you) and more direct expose of interactivity. And that might be a good thing. Well, it’s good if a reasonable person can understand it and assent to it.

Will a student be a bad teacher? The student is the only teacher available. Teacher, understood as a figure of authority, or someone holding onto a sacred and complex set of disciplinary rules, is not a good understanding. The experience is what teaches in Worlds style debating, not a particular expert judge. The experience of the debate teaches, both in the doing and the decision. Everyone learns from the interaction, and they learn something about how people are moved by words.

Rejecting the “Righteous Four”

Doing some last-minute preparation before our departure for New Haven in the morning for the Yale IV, which generally involves printing out maps, train schedules, hotel confirmation numbers and tax exemption forms. Prepping for a tournament is pretty easy after doing so many so close together – one of the things about adjusting to BP style is the run-up to the big tournament happens in the fall, since Worlds is held over the Winter intercession. This means spring is lighter in feeling, even though the U.S. Nationals is an important tournament. But it’s not the same as the October-December blast of tournaments. In policy debate, the run-up ends either in February/March, when the regional qualifiers for the NDT are held, or CEDA nationals, or perhaps both depending on your preferences and your orientation to and within debate.
One big difference was pretty clearly pointed out to me in a couple of conversations I had surrounding the Hart House tournament at The University of Toronto. This was a fabulous tournament, but a few American debaters started a conversation about how wrong it was that they might have been forced into taking positions they found morally offensive. They were ok with losing though because their arguments were “right.” I call this idea the “theory of the righteous four.”
This theory postulates that it’s not only fine, but morally acceptable to get ranked a four in a debate where you, by virtue of your position on the table, had to say or engage in argumentation that you find morally or ethically objectionable from your own political views. If you (rightly) refuse to engage, you will get ranked four. But that’s ok, because you are on the side of justice, rightness, virtue, and many other noble truths in life.
When I first came to coach in the Northeastern U.S. in 2001, I first encountered this idea. I found it baffling – a bizarre at best, unhealthy at worst conflation of speech in debate and personal politics. The best description I mustered to myself at the time was that it was a simple logical fallacy – substitution of effect for cause – that made people think, “because she’s saying this she must believe it.” But surely, only the most rank amateur would believe such a post hoc. But there were a number of students around the circuit that would say to me during the criticism, “Don’t you dare indict my voice.” The conflation of debate with personal advocacy I found then to be confusing and dangerous, and I believe the same thing now.
First, it’s a fallacy – probably a good idea to reject “effect for cause” reasoning. But the more critical claim at work here is the political function of a debate tournament. If you believe that debate is important because it is one of the last places where every idea can be treated on its merits with fair, critical evaluation then you have to accept, I think, that occasionally you will have to inhabit ideas that are not your own. These ideas are not always better ideas than your own; they can easily be ideas that you have had, or that you entertained and rejected on ethical or moral grounding. But either way, you should still embody them again, and in a manner that is not a straw dog, but a serious, strategic attempt at defending the idea.
The reason why is in service to debate as a whole. Good ideas glimmer more when the light of their alternative is present. Better, more persuasive accounts of thoughtful ideas can be crafted if someone smart is taking the other, more insidious side. Everyone benefits if a fair, persuasive attempt to represent all appropriate (read: kairotic) arguments are attempted in the debate. Relevancy and attention to nuance must be considered as well. In the end, the benefits of debate are extended when the debate is handled for the sake of debate, and not individual personal politics.
Here is what happens under the “righteous four” model – all of the discourse in debate shifts to the left. Instead of developing insights into argumentation that has a large representation in the public, the discourse becomes about “out-lefting” one another. If nobody will inhabit the “reprehensible” ground, then no chance appears for understanding why an argument we believe to be a priori “evil” would ever find assent. I would also suggest that those who refuse to take up objectionable positions within debates ensure a future of assent to those same reprehensible positions – they intellectually disarm all participants in the round from valuable defensive practice against such ideas. Just because you don’t prefer a certain weapon doesn’t mean that you should forgo training in how to defend yourself from that weapon.
A great example of this is the recent Hart House IV final round – This house would not contact undiscovered human populations. After a fairly good proposition case was established, the Opening Opposition speaker stood up and did something incredible – the first words out of her mouth were, “Madam Speaker, we kinda like exploitation.” Brilliant. Is it because it’s offensive? Because it’s rejected by modern conceptions of the good, liberal politics and the like? Is it because it advocates violence and mayhem and that’s cool? Not any of these. It’s because it is an argument that is both relevant and contains the potential for great intellectual investigation within the context of this debate.
The debate was framed around the idea that contact, historically, leads to exploitation. I think it is intellectually responsible in the service of debate to offer the idea that exploitation is a situational term. Politically, this loaded language can do a number on an audience. It is up to the skilled debater to give it the nuance and articulation it needs to become a believable point. Is it really exploitative in all cases? Is the connection definitely solid? And in which instances would we prefer “exploitation” over the alternative of no contact whatsoever? These are the major clash points that arise from entertaining an idea that many, especially those in the academy fields of anthropology, sociology and others would find to be a repugnant position. Everything hinges on the definition, and the nuance of the speaker in establishing that definition and its limit.
Unfortunately, the speaker backed off of pursuing this line of reasoning possibly due to the laughter and reaction of the audience. But it’s a shame she did. I think they could have won with a careful analysis of what this means, instead of the fear of a neo-liberal “bad word” can generate. “You said a dirty word” is not that persuasive a reason to reject someone, unless you are a High School teacher.
In certain debate communities, such as NPDA and American Policy debate, you can find regions where people do occupy ground where, if the audience is unskilled in the basics of debate practice, their personal view might be mistaken for their advocacy. I think we in the BP community want to provide the same excellent tradition of switch-side argumentation that these other communities have provided. Avoiding the sentimentally nice idea that “I lost because I refuse to compromise my principles” is a very important step in the service to much larger principles of intellectual rigor, argumentative development, and persuasive realism – all of which serve the members of the community in their development not as political radicals, but something much better: Moderates who critically examine public discourse and are not afraid to entertain the idea that they might not know it all, they might need more information, and more time might be needed to figure out what’s best – all of which work very well in the service of pluralistic democracy.

Expert Adjudicators or Extra Adjudicators

I was having coffee with a good friend of mine and colleague from the debating world recently, when the subject of debate theory came up. My colleague mused about how lucky American debaters were to have such a rich tradition of theory behind what they do.

At the time, I disagreed. I like BP/WUDC debating because ideally it acts atheoretically. The arguments occur in natural language, and the debate about “what counts” as an argument doesn’t happen beyond the point of calling out a fallacy, a weak warrant, or a fabrication. Argument theory as it exists in American debate formats relies extensively on argument theory as a block to arguments made, and therefore theoretical arguments (i.e. Your model is not a theoretically acceptable model because it does not specify which agent will enact the model) are as much the heart of the debate as the research, evidence, and disadvantages\advantages. In BP, arguments are not theoretically rejected per se, they are rejected upon the grounds of their persuasiveness.

Argumentation wise I still hold this view, but recent judging experiences and recent adjudications have me thinking that the adjudication system needs a method and a theoretical justification behind it.

Here are some things on my mind considering adjudication that debate scholars could and should address:

1. When, if ever, are solo judged rooms ok?
It seems to me that there are possible justifications for this, but I am not convinced by any of them as they all rely on the theory of “judge as expert in argumentation.” This theory is a carry over (hold over?) from American policy debate, a format that I believe operates under a theory of creating a forum to practice persuasion among simulated experts. BP on the other hand appears to operate under the idea of practicing persuasion for a simulated public. The loss of the simulated public change the game to a simulated expert appeal, with debaters practicing a narrowing of argumentation for the one specific adjudicator’s tastes instead of broadening appeal for a whole panel. This is distinct from American policy debate panels where you can go for 2 of the panel and ignore the outlier judge.

2. Is the purpose of paneled judging to reach consensus or to agree?
During a recent final round where I was a panelist, we went to adjudicate where the chair asked us for an initial idea as to who won. When we all said what we thought, he said “okay” and started to walk back in. I protested, saying we need to discuss the decision. The response was amusement. “Why talk if we all agree? Should we pretend to disagree?” I didn’t have a good response other than a gut feeling that simple agreement was not the telos of consensus judging. I think some work here using theories of deliberation, discussion and the re-articulation of argument in the public sphere might help us appreciate the consensus portion of the adjudication more than the agreement portion of the deliberation.

On the verso, what happens when there is no discussion, or a discussion that goes past each other? What happens when a wing refuses to accept the community norms? My situation as a chair was having a wing who refused to judge the debate on the community norm of “who was most persuasive?” He said it was a bad way he didn’t buy, and he was an argumentation expert. When I forced him to talk about persuasiveness, he couldn’t – he talked about their style in a superficial manner. What can be said or done about such a judge? It seems a body of theory would help bend this sort of judge to a more reasonable and more functional role within the BP community.

3. Are wing judges extra judges? Are chairs expert judges?
By now I suppose you realize I’m going to say no to both. But the scholarly potentials here are interesting. What if the role of the chair is not expert on debate, but discussion leader? I think the decision becomes a different one if that’s the function of the chair. If the function of the chair is to be expert, are they a technical one or one based upon experience? Either way will change the function of the adjudication.

As far as wings go, I think most people accept the idea that wings are chairs in training. This is a fantastic charitable attitude that I think does not exist outside of this format. The strike system in American policy has eliminated the idea of judge training, as well as the idea that rhetors should alter their message for audiences.

A strike system (this means choosing adjudicators that will not hear you during a tournament) is a move more toward a truth-seeking or positivist format of debating. However, some say should be given to debaters about the variety of judges that will hear them. After all, in rhetorical situations, many rhetors select whom they address and do not speak to all or everyone. Perelman even points out keenly that philosophers who claim to be addressing the universal are imagining that category based upon the best critical qualities of thought of their era.

The wing system theoretically addresses this problem by putting judges in the chair that are “trusted” which mean, I think, are consistent with the best sorts of judging of the era. They are to act as expert in some ways, but through guiding the discussion and making sure all wings are heard. Another theory might be that the chair can persuade the wings as to his or her credibility, so the panel is more like a simulated segment of the public, rallied to vote in one way or another by an enthusiastic citizen. And I’m sure there are other models that might be instructive to pursue.

Unfortunately there is no theory to support all of this yet, and often panelists are thought of extra judges. Panels of 3 are common, when a panel of 5 would be more justified. A 3 person panel indicates the need for a split in a solo, expert based decision process without consensus. Rounds are run with a solo judge under the assumption that it will be just the same as if there were wings. But I like so many other chairs know that many times a wing has caught some detail that makes me re think my orientation to the debate. This is an invaluable element of the debate, key to the format, and a backing of some scholarly work on the theory of BP debating would make it easier and more consistent, especially among Americans where the tradition of expert, professional scholar-coaches is bending WUDC format away from the elements that make it unique and pedagogically vibrant.