12/20-12/27: Truth-Testing and its Discontents
Tournament Update
Due to the holidays, LD and PF debaters did not compete at bid tournaments this past weekend. Best of luck to everyone debating in the coming weeks, and stay tuned for future tournament results!
Truth-Testing and its Discontents
by Jacob Nails
I. Truth-Testing
In a debate round, the affirmative should affirm the resolution, and the negative should negate it. Since the resolution is a proposition, doing so will amount to debating whether the resolution is more likely true or false. This view is usually termed the “truth-testing” paradigm. Simply stating it plainly suggests its main appeal: it is the most straightforward and obvious understanding of the burdens of each side. It is nonetheless a frequent point of contestation, as well as a frequent source of misunderstandings. I aim to dispel some of them here.
As I recently argued, the primary function of topicality is to ensure a common understanding among debaters, coaches, and judges around the country about what is to be debated, and so the goal of topicality should be to identify the most straightforward and obvious interpretation of the resolution. The same basic logic applies to the burdens for each side. A common understanding of what the terms in the resolution mean is insufficient if debaters disagree on what to do with that resolution. If one debater reads it as satire and the other a metaphor, they still lack common ground. I think the Schelling point around which debaters can most naturally converge is to take the topic at face value and debate its literal truth, without further bells and whistles.
In a 2009 Rostrum article, Jason Baldwin put it thusly:
The resolutional truth paradigm, in combination with a reasonable specification of burdens (such as the symmetrical one I suggested above) is the picture of simplicity and common sense. There is no mystery about what proposition is to be the subject of the debate. It is the resolution, the proposition that intuitively (I am tempted to say, blazingly obviously) the debate is supposed to be about. This fact allows everyone involved to begin with a shared understanding of burdens, of what will count as winning the LD game, and thus allows debaters to prepare effectively before rounds, and judges to assess arguments during rounds, within a common framework of predictable expectations.
Rejecting the resolution as the subject of debate opens a Pandora’s Box of incompatible and less clear alternatives. For the reasons summarized above, insofar as we remain within the realm of academic debate, all of the alternatives will be propositions, and whatever debate occurs will involve arguments for their truth or falsity. Examples of such alternatives include the proposition that the world would be a better place if people routinely thought in terms of the concepts employed in the resolution, the proposition that the affirmative case successfully proves the resolution, the proposition that the world would be a better place if the judge behaved as if she believed the resolution, and the proposition that the judge should vote for the affirmative debater. Once we depart from the resolution itself as the proposition to be debated, I see no non-arbitrary way to select the relevant proposition from among these and many other possibilities. And insofar as many of these alternatives embed some interpretation of the resolution in a more complex framework, the alternatives will necessarily be more complex and less clear than the resolution itself.
Perhaps the most common argument debaters give for truth-testing is that it is in some sense constitutive of debate itself and thus the only possible paradigm one could arrive at. This goes too far. The very existence of disagreement suggests that truth-testing is not the sole answer conceivable. It is just the most obvious one (and therefore the best). The problem, as Baldwin suggests, is not a lack of alternatives but a surfeit of them, leaving too much room for debaters to gerrymander their own preferred set of burdens.
II. Comparative Worlds
Baldwin’s prognosis has been vindicated by the ensuing 14 years of paradigmatic debate. Debaters arguing against truth-testing will most often offer the alternative of a “comparative worlds” paradigm (sometimes referred to as “offense-defense”), but it’s less a paradigm than a basket of paradigms, for if one asked five different debaters to define it, they could expect approximately five different answers.
Adam Nelson, an early advocate of comparative worlds (and the author to whom Baldwin was responding), defined the paradigm as follows:
it seems much more reasonable to treat the resolution as a way to equitably divide ground: the affirmative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to the value judgment implied by the resolution and the negative advocating the desirability of a world in which people adhere to a value judgment mutually exclusive to that implied by the resolution.
Few nowadays would accept Nelson’s stipulation that competition be limited to mutual exclusivity, and I’m not sure how many would agree that the relevant worlds are defined by imagining collective acceptance of the topical judgment. The choice to focus on “desirability of a world” is also a point of contention that will be returned to.
So what do most debaters mean when they argue for “comparative worlds”? The justifications they give in favor of the paradigm may give some clues. A recently in-vogue argument that I find revealing is: Truth-testing is a bad paradigm because it doesn’t allow the negative to win by kritiking their opponent’s discourse. To quote from a recent round I judged, “Use comparative worlds-… our interp includes all methods of debate- they exclude Ks which prevents deconstruction of harmful mindsets or racist language- independent reason to reject.” It is of course true that truth-testing would not give debaters free rein to win on arguments that don’t pertain to the truth of the resolution, but the implication is that comparative worlds somehow allows these arguments. How exactly? I don’t think there’s any sensible definition of the paradigm that would make “my opponent not using language I find racist” a competitive world to compare against the resolutional world. Arguments of this sort leave me suspicious that what many debaters really mean by “comparative worlds” is “only wholesome arguments are allowed, not the icky cheaty type” with no principled line for what that includes.
I will outline what I take to be the most plausible version of “comparative worlds” and then address other implications of the paradigm debate that I believe to be misunderstood or mistaken.
III. Skepticism
The best argument for comparative worlds is as an antidote to moral skepticism. The “adherence” portion of Nelson’s definition is the key element here. By shifting the debate from credence in the resolution’s truth to adherence with its dictates, comparative worlds takes the force out of skeptical arguments.
I find ethicist Jacob Ross’s definition of “accepting” a theory (as opposed to merely “believing” it) to be a good approximation of what a comparative worlds paradigm might be asking us to do by “adhering” to the resolution:
The term ‘acceptance’ is used in many ways by philosophers, but I will use it to refer to an attitude taken toward a theory or proposition in the course of practical reasoning or in the guidance of action. By “to accept a theory,” in relation to a given decision problem, I mean “to guide one’s decision on the basis of this theory.” More precisely, to accept a theory is to aim to choose whatever option this theory would recommend, or in other words, to aim to choose the option that one would regard as best on the assumption that this theory is true. For example, to accept utilitarianism is to aim to act in such a way as to produce as much total welfare as possible, to accept Kantianism is to aim to act only on maxims that one could will as universal laws, and to accept the Mosaic Code is to aim to perform only actions that conform to its Ten Commandments. … Thus, we may say that one accepts a theory if one deliberates on the supposition that this theory is true or if one adopts it as a premise in practical reasoning.
Because skepticism and nihilism are indifferent to what one does, they are rendered functionally irrelevant if the question is what to act on rather than what to believe, or at least so Ross’s argument goes:
Let us begin by considering theories according to which it doesn’t matter what one does in a given choice situation, that is, according to which none of one’s options is better or more choiceworthy than any other. We may call such theories “nondiscriminating.” There are several ways in which a theory can be nondiscriminating. First, it might imply that each of one’s options is equally good. We may say that such a theory is uniform in relation to the set of options under consideration. Such uniform theories allow for the simplest illustration of why absolutely deflationary theories should be rejected.
Suppose I think that a uniform theory is probably true, but I’m not absolutely certain, because I think there is a small chance that some nondeflationary theory may be true. We may suppose that I have a degree of credence of .99 in a uniform theory, TU, and a degree of credence of .01 in some nondeflationary theory, TL. Now suppose I’m trying to decide whether to send a trolley to the right, which would result in ten deaths, or to the left, which would result in five deaths. Theory TL, let us suppose, implies that I should send the trolley to the left, while TU, being uniform, implies that either option would be equally good. I could therefore reason as follows.
Given one possibility (that TL is true) it would be better to send the trolley to the left, and given the alternative possibility (that TU is true) both options would be equally good. Thus, the option of sending the trolley to the left dominates the option of sending it to the right, and so the former option has a higher expected value. Therefore, I should send the trolley to the left.
And this is the same conclusion I would arrive at if I deliberated on the basis of TL alone. Whenever I have credence in two theories, one uniform and one nonuniform, the conclusion I would come to on the basis of the latter theory alone will be the same as the conclusion I would come to by taking into account both theories and reasoning probabilistically. Therefore, no harm is done by excluding the uniform theory from consideration and accepting the nonuniform theory.
Unless one can prove nihilism correct with absolute certainty, it will act as non-unique defense, and the net direction of offense will still point the same way. Contrast with a truth-testing paradigm in which such arguments make for possible strategies, as proving nihilism more likely true than false would render any statement affirming the existence of a moral obligation (such as the resolution) more likely false than true.
I don’t think it’s a great thing that there exists a generic argument that negates essentially every single topic and can be recycled season to season, so if comparative worlds neuters skeptical strategies in favor of topic-specific arguments, that’s a point in its favor. And accepting a resolution as opposed to believing it does not seem like the most contrived understanding of what to do with a topic. While I ultimately don’t find this argument compelling, I think it’s within the realm of reason that someone else could weight the pragmatic necessity of evading skepticism high enough and the value of simplicity and consilience low enough that they’re willing to adopt a next-most-obvious paradigm.
One downside worth noting is that Ross’s view doesn’t only eliminate skepticism but any theory that is indifferent between the options presented, and on some topics that may exclude core topic-specific arguments as well. For example, on the Nov/Dec ’11 topic (“Resolved: Individuals have a moral obligation to assist people in need”), the main negative ground focused on beneficence being permissible but not obligatory. A comparative worlds take on this topic would have the negative arguing that helping others is actively bad. Oof. Or, for a more recent example, this year’s national tournament (on the topic “Resolved: Government employees have a moral obligation to leak classified information to address injustice”) featured many negative debaters contesting whether leaking was obligatory rather than whether it was desirable and exploring alternatives like supererogation. Comparative worlds would foreclose such strategies. And that’s a danger one incurs when one starts ruling out on pragmatic grounds otherwise resolutional strategies.
IV. Consequentialism
I have judged many debates in which the central clash was between a consequentialist framework and a non-consequentialist one that got sidetracked by a proxy war over paradigms rather than substantive disagreements on the merits of each side’s ethical theory. A sizable chunk of debaters appear to believe that winning their side of the truth-testing versus comparative worlds dispute is essential to winning the framework. I believe this view is, for the most part, a mistake.
Some will argue that a truth-testing paradigm precludes consideration of consequences. The debate is merely over an abstract ethical truth that we as non-policymakers have no power to implement, and so there are no consequences to consider. To quote one example, “Util NCs don’t negate under truth testing- they only provide a more desirable world but doesn’t [sic] prove the resolution false.” This is wrong. If consequentialism is true and the resolutional action would produce the best consequences, then it is true that it ought to be done. For a consequentialist, the action that would bring about the most desirable world is the one we truly ought to do. The idea that one needs some special debate license to roleplay as a policymaker and pretend to implement the resolution rests on a gross misconstrual of fiat. Likewise for counterplan fiat: it is not true that we ought to do something if it would foreclose an even better action; demonstrating an opportunity cost proves the resolution false.
On many topics, one could raise more tailored objections about the object of evaluation. For example, the most common definitions of “open borders” on the Jan/Feb ’23 topic (“Resolved: Justice requires open borders for human migration”) considered it an ideal of justice that arguably rendered transitional costs irrelevant and would have excluded some types of utilitarian concerns, but a consequentialist could certainly still have something to say about whether open borders would be ideal. Truth-testing only counsels that each topic be taken at face value, and so such arguments would hinge on the topic at hand, with very few if any excluding consequentialist arguments entirely.
V. Non-consequentialism
Whether comparative worlds precludes non-consequentialist considerations is a murkier matter. Taking the name “comparative worlds” literally would suggest yes. By redefining the resolution to be about which world is more desirable rather than which action one ought to take, not just skepticism but all non-consequentialist arguments are excluded because they don’t bear on the desirability of an end state.
Consequentialism holds that an action’s rightness depends entirely on its consequences. Non-consequentialism describes any moral theory that believes other considerations have relevance. A central tenet of such theories is that there exists a distinction between the right and the good, where the right concerns which actions are morally correct to take and the good concerns which outcomes are better or worse. For example, a non-consequentialist might agree that pushing a fat man in front of a trolley to save five lives produces net good outcomes but object that it’s still not right because there’s something wrong with intentional killing besides the consequences (maybe it’s not virtuous, or violates a divine commandment, or couldn’t be willed as a universal maxim without contradiction, etc.).
Occasionally, Lincoln-Douglas topics that seem to focus on the good will crop up, such as Nationals ’13 (“Resolved: Oppressive government is more desirable than no government”), but the large majority of topics are worded to focus on whether one “ought” to take some action or similar phrasing that clearly suggests a focus on whether an action is right or wrong, not merely good or bad. On many of these topics, ethical issues make up a large portion of the literature.
And yet, if you take the resolutional question and reframe it so that it is not a question of what we ought to do but of which world is the more desirable one, as comparative “worlds” implies we should, considerations of the right cease to be relevant even if non-consequentialism is correct. The deck is stacked for the consequentialist. Rather than prove that morality is exclusively determined by consequences, all resolutions are simply defined to be questions of consequences.
That comparative worlds carries this implication was one point on which Baldwin and Nelson agreed, albeit from opposite sides of the ponens/tollens divide. As Baldwin notes:
> The paradigm decrees, as a matter of the rules of the debate game rather than a substantive issue to be settled within in it, that all that matters is the relative desirability of the resulting worlds. The resolutional truth paradigm, by contrast, remains properly neutral on the issue. … Nelson has granted in correspondence that the world comparison paradigm does exclude non-consequentialist normative theories in just the way I have described. But he believes that this is an acceptable cost because he alleges that non-consequentialist theories bestow an unfair advantage on the debaters who use them. I confess that I do not understand this objection.
Same.
Any paradigm that excludes such a large swath of topic arguments from even being options on the table in direct contravention of the topic’s wording seems flatly ridiculous, self-serving, and indefensible. It’s also anti-democratic in that it moots any ability for debaters and coaches to meaningfully choose between empirical and philosophical topics if the implicit rules of the game will inevitably retcon any ethical topic into an empirical one.
Nelson aside, I’m not sure how many other defenders of “comparative worlds” hold this view about its implications. Taking Policy debate as an example, debaters in that event tend to speak of “actions” and “worlds” interchangeably. Their topicality interpretations will regularly demand that the affirmative defend “a topical world” or the “hypothetical consequences” of the resolution. If you take them at their word, there is broad consensus that the rules of the game in Policy rounds procedurally exclude non-consequentialist ethics. On the rare occasion that debaters do raise ethical arguments, though, this argument is never applied. I don’t think very many in Policy debate believe that ethical considerations are procedurally excluded by a definitional focus on consequences. The debaters are just so used to assuming consequentialism that they talk of “worlds” loosely without considering any potential distinction between the right and the good. I suspect something similar is true for many Lincoln-Douglas debaters forwarding a comparative worlds paradigm; they aren’t intending the “worlds” requirement quite as literally as Nelson did.
For this reason, I prefer to use the other common term “Offense-Defense” myself when referring to paradigms in this ballpark. The adherence-over-belief aspect of the paradigm doesn’t exclude (most) non-consequentialist arguments—Ross himself references Kantianism. Talking of “worlds” is dangerous because it carries radical and implausible implications if taken literally that I don’t think many debaters mean to imply.
VI. Tricks
Another conflict for which the truth-testing versus comparative worlds clash regularly serves as a proxy is the debate over the legitimacy of “tricks.” Truth-testing is alleged to allow tricks-based strategies and comparative worlds to be better at excluding them. The difference between paradigms in this regard is greatly overstated.
The nature of “tricks” is hard to pin down. Everyone has some conception of the sorts of strategies they find shady and underhanded, but they don’t all agree on what the components of a “trick” are. With that caveat of non-consensus, my best attempt at defining “tricks” is as arguments whose primary strategic value doesn’t come from their quality qua argument. They are presented in a (generally brief and unclear) way that is intended to induce the opponent to miss them, misunderstand them, or mis-allocate time to them. And they usually have high-impact implications such that there is a major risk to leaving them unaddressed. Examples include frivolous theoretical rules, definitions that render the topic tautologically correct or contradictory, or logical paradoxes with implications like trivialism (all statements are trivially true).
Below is an example from a recent round of an argument that would count as a “trick” by virtually anyone’s standards:
Every statement is conditional. Reject uncarded answers---Stanford knows better than a highschooler. [According to] SEP no date, ‘if p, then q statement with true antecedent and false consequent must be false any other combination conditional is true.’ If the AFF is winning, then vote AFF. Denying the premise proves the conclusion---I get the ballot.
This excerpt comes from the speech of a debater with a very successful track record. It is, unfortunately, complete gibberish. As best I can make of it, the debater has conflated two unrelated tricks, the “conditionals” argument (which has been around since at least 2008 and is extremely bad) and Curry’s Paradox, in a way that accurately articulates neither.
How could an “argument” like this win rounds? After all, it lacks a component necessary of any argument—a discernable warrant. Alas, all too many judges fear giving a decision of “I couldn’t understand that” or “I don’t think that claim was warranted.” A judge might already know of Curry’s paradox and mentally fill in the gaps for a debater who says just enough of the relevant buzzwords to hint at it, or they might have a vague awareness of the existence of arguments that liberally employ conditional logic and a lack of confidence in themselves to deny that the above is actually one of them.
Judges should only vote based on arguments that they could articulate—warrant and all—back to the debater they are voting against, and only if they can say that the explanation given by the winning debater meets that standard. The best solution to tricks is responsible judging. But judges willing to vote on tricks have always been around and likely always will, so it is only natural that debaters might look for alternative solutions in the form of an anti-tricks paradigm for debate.
But why is it that truth-testing is too conducive to tricks? Nelson raised this objection back in 2008:
[T]he truth-statement model of the resolution imposes an absolute burden of proof on the affirmative: if the resolution is a truth-claim, and the affirmative has the burden of proving that claim, in so far as intuitively we tend to disbelieve truth-claims until we are persuaded otherwise, the affirmative has the burden to prove that statement absolutely true. Indeed, one of the most common theory arguments in LD is conditionality, which argues it is inappropriate for the affirmative to claim only proving the truth of part of the resolution is sufficient to earn the ballot.
It would be quite unfair indeed if the affirmative burden were to prove the resolution not only merely true but really most sincerely true. But the problem with an absolute-truth paradigm lies in the “absolute” and not the “truth.” The negative burden should not be to prove “any risk” that the resolution is false. And the example of “conditionality bad” has aged like a fine milk. That argument was already well on its way out in 2008, and the term “conditionality” will carry a wholly different meaning to current debaters. If truth-testing had that connotation then, it oughtn’t now.
To the extent that truth-testing retains a pro-tricks veneer, I believe this mostly comes from the fact that it clearly and precisely defines who wins when. That’s a virtue of a good paradigm, but it also means that debaters with a legalistic bent will have a clearer idea of what counts as “technically” affirming or negating and an easier time identifying loopholes.
Comparative worlds, by virtue of not being rigorously defined, leaves open room for the hand-wavy implication of “my opponent’s unsporting and tricky arguments probably aren’t an example of right and proper world comparison debate, somehow!” But on closer inspection, comparative worlds avoids few tricks at all. It still involves proving the truth of some claim, just a more complicated one in which the resolution is embedded (e.g. “A world where the resolution is adhered to is the most desirable”), so arguments proving literally all statements true aren’t evaded. It still has to define which worlds/actions count as affirmative and negative ground by reference to the resolution’s text, so tricky definitions that give all ground to one side remain a problem. It says nothing about theory arguments. And even if it did rule out all types of arguments that at present are the main subjects of “tricks,” it doesn’t challenge the underlying problem of under-warranted arguments or judges that give them too much credence, so the same tactics could just as well be employed to prove other claims.
To its credit, comparative worlds does nullify the value of arguments about moral skepticism. Skeptical arguments aren’t inherently tricky, and one could mount a rigorous defense of skepticism grounded in real scholarship, but in practice it is one of those “high-impact” implications that is strongly associated with tricks. So comparative worlds scores a point there. However, I would wager that any definition of comparative worlds, laid out in full, will open up some new tricks of its own for debaters to nitpick as it inevitably builds in new clauses and constraints for debaters to meet. For example, Nelson’s model, in effectively mandating consequentialism, turns the generic set of indicts to consequence calculation that debaters typically raise against utilitarian frameworks into an inherent problem with evaluating the resolution at all. If these arguments are less common at present, it is only because comparative worlds does not receive close scrutiny.
VII. Works Cited
Baldwin, Jason. “Truth or Consequences: A Response to Nelson’s World Comparison LD Paradigm.” National Forensic League. Rostrum, Vol. 84, Issue 4. December 2009. https://www.speechanddebate.org/wp-content/uploads/December-2009-Complete-Rostrum.pdf
Nails, Jacob. “Two Dogmas of Fiat.” Victory Briefs. 28 December 2019. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/two-dogmas-of-fiat-by-jacob-nails
Nails, Jacob. “Circuit Debaters Ain’t No Different.” Victory Briefs. 1 November 2023. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/1025-111-ld-and-pf-tournament-results
Nebel, Jake. “Genericity on the Standardized Tests Resolution.” Victory Briefs. 12 August 2019. https://victorybriefs.substack.com/p/genericity-on-the-standardized-tests-resolution
Nelson, Adam. “Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Lincoln-Douglas Debate.” National Forensic League. Rostrum, Vol. 82, Issue 8. April 2008. https://www.speechanddebate.org/wp-content/uploads/April-2008-Complete-Rostrum.pdf
Shapiro, Lionel and Jc Beall. “Curry’s Paradox.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Winter 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/curry-paradox/
Tarsney, Christian. “It’s Time for the ‘Conditionals’ Argument to Die.” NSD Update. 21 April 2012. Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20220815041636/http:/nsdupdate.com/2012/its-time-for-the-conditionals-argument-to-die/
Jacob Nails is Head Researcher at Victory Briefs. He debated 4 years for Starr’s Mill High School (GA) in Lincoln Douglas debate, graduating in 2012. As a competitor, he won the Georgia state tournament, cleared at NSDA nationals, and qualified to the TOC. In college, he qualified twice to the National Debate Tournament in policy debate. Jacob has 7 years of experience coaching LD debate, including coaching debaters to top seed at the TOC, as well as Top Speaker awards at Harvard, Yale, and Bronx. He has taught at over twenty sessions of the Victory Briefs Institute.