4/10-4/17: LD & PF Tournament Results, TOC Tips, and Interpretation Conflation
Lincoln Douglas Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, LD debaters competed at the National Debate Coaches Association National Championships. Congratulations to Harker’s Ansh Sheth for winning the tournament. In finals, Ansh defeated Marlborough’s Olivia Ohr on a 2-1 decision (Lucas-Bolin, Midithuri, Fish*). Additional congratulations to Ansh for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
Public Forum Debate
Tournament Results
This weekend, PF debaters competed at the National Debate Coaches Association National Championships. Congratulations to Aumrita Savdharia & Stavan Shah and Ara Mehran & Roy Kapoor from Fairmont Prep for co-champing the tournament. Additional congratulations to Fairmont Prep’s Roy Kapoor for being the top speaker.
Full pairings and results can be found here.
VBI 2024 Staff Announcement
We are so excited to start announcing our instructors for VBI 2024! Every week, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the talented staff working at VBI this summer. This week’s staff feature is LD instructor Vishnu Nataraja.
Vishnu did Lincoln-Douglas at Dulles High School for 4 years. He qualified to the TOC his senior year with 10 bids. He also qualified to TFA State 3 times. He won the Mid America Cup, Finaled the University of Houston, Made semis of the TOC and the Glenbrooks, and was in late eliminations at St. Marks, Harvard, Strake Jesuit, and Greenhill. Vishnu mainly read theory and philosophy arguments. In his free time, Vishnu loves to play table tennis, ride his bike, and chill with his dog.
TOC Tips
The TOC and all of the prep leading up to it, especially in the last weeks, can be extremely stressful. Here at VBI, we care so deeply about your success and, more importantly, your wellbeing, that we’ve compiled a few quick tips from expert coaches in order to help you in the final days before and during the TOC.
“The TOC is not the end of your life—don’t act like it is. The TOC is where you’ll probably meet and see debate people for the last time (or for a while)—cherish the moment.”
“SLEEP! ...or if you’re going to pull all nighters, do it before the tournament, not during.” (Though VBI does not condone all-nighters either way.)
“Make sure to keep healthy—hydrate not diedrate, and make sure you eat balanced 2-3 meals a day. If you keep your balanced diet, you will debate at your best.”
“Prioritize sleep over night-before prep—it’s very easy to burn out, there’s a ton of prelims and the rounds are hard.”
“Play the long game—strategize with elims in mind.”
“Cut politics updates if you’re LARPing.” (We would note that this is a particularly salient tip on this topic right now!)
“Only cut cards during the tournament if you absolutely need to, which you usually don’t. You can probably find one faster on the wiki.”
Interpretation Conflation
by Jacob Nails
The single most common topicality objection in Lincoln-Douglas debates, which crops up on almost every resolution, is that the topic can’t be affirmed merely by defending it in a narrow subset of instances; in essence, plans are bad. But I believe that two quite different versions of this argument exist, and their frequent conflation leads to strategic confusion. The operative question to ask is: given that the affirmative can’t defend a plan, what must they defend instead? The negative has two main answers available:
(A) A generic generalization
One answer is that the affirmative must defend the resolution as a general principle/on balance/in the main. Generic generalizations aren’t quite equivalent to “most of” statements, and the threshold at which they are considered correct won’t necessarily land at precisely 50%+1. Importantly, though, they do tolerate exceptions and don’t represent categorical claims.
(B) A universal statement
A second possible answer is that the affirmative must defend the “whole res[olution],” which means proving it true in all cases (or at least nearly all cases with very minimal exceptions). This view sets the affirmative burden at or around 100% prevalence.
One reading or the other may be better supported on a given topic, depending on its wording. Sometimes the key term in question will be, e.g., a bare plural noun phrase, for which the most natural reading will be a generic generalization. On the other hand, a common trend in many recent resolutions has been the use of a categorical verb such as “ban,” “prohibit,” or “eliminate,” which suggests a sweeping policy with minimal or no exceptions. And the Nov-Dec ‘21 topic (“Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike”) used the adjective “unconditional” to rule out the possibility of qualifications on the right to strike.
The first and arguably most significant distinction between the two interpretations is in what they imply about the legitimacy of plan-inclusive counterplans (PICs). A PIC is a negative advocacy that agrees almost entirely with the affirmative advocacy, except with some key caveat which the negative will argue qualifies it as negative ground. For example, on the right-to-strike topic, the negative might agree that a just government ought to have a strong right to strike, but with an exception for essential services. If they can demonstrate that the limitation is justified, then they have demonstrated that the right to strike ought not be unconditional and thus disproven the resolution.
The affirmative will often argue that PICs are bad for debate and that topic interpretations that would legitimize them should be avoided. In allowing one side to narrow down the debate to a singular case, PICs carry all the same drawbacks as plans, but with the added drawback of that specification being late-breaking, after the affirmative has committed to a strategy in the first speech. So, the argument goes, if one side or the other will be allowed to defend a singular example, it is better that the affirmative side have that right, and therefore affirmative plans should be allowed.
The crucial detail that in my experience is all too often overlooked is that this argument is only even an eligible objection against universal interpretations, not general ones. If the topic is properly interpreted as a generic generalization, then PICs are not negative ground. A singular counter-example does not negate the resolution for the same reason that a singular example does not affirm it. Neither demonstrates their side correct as a general rule. Take a clearly general topic such as Nov-Dec ‘22 (“Resolved: The People’s Republic of China ought to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth”). The negative does not successfully negate this topic if they show a single economic concern trumping a single environmental one.
The PICs Bad argument does apply to universal interpretations though. If the topic asserts a categorical truth, then one counter-example suffices to disprove it.
The burden might not be exactly 100%. For example, on past topics using the term “eliminate,” debaters have produced evidence from court cases where “eliminate” was defined as “pretty much all” rather than “absolutely all.” So, maybe those topics are technically only nearly universal, which would rule out the most minute PICs. But any non-negligible exception would still constitute a valid negative PIC.
Many debaters like to raise the PICs Bad argument as one of their main offensive responses to topicality. They should be more careful to ensure it applies to the interpretation their opponent is forwarding.
The second concern is related to the first. I find that universal interpretations often too closely resemble general interpretations at the level of their offense.
Setting aside the obvious semantic considerations, the main pragmatic argument in favor of interpreting the resolution as a general principle is that it keeps the topic limited. Each debater is constrained to generalizable arguments for their respective side, and neither can shift the debate to some new narrower focal point that demands its own unique research and arguments.
This argument is far weaker as a defense of categorical topics. A categorical interpretation of the resolution will impose similarly stringent constraints on the affirmative, limiting the range of cases. But unlike a general principle reading, universal topics give expansive leeway to the negative to open the floodgates. Just as allowing the affirmative the leeway to defend a single instance might allow near unlimited plans, allowing the negative to win by way of one counter-example might allow near unlimited PICs.
Debaters should anticipate the obvious affirmative counter-argument of PICs. Unless you have a strong topic-specific reason why the resolution at hand allows for far more plans than PICs, I do not think it is wise to focus your primary offense for a universal interpretation on limits.
When defending a universal interpretation of the topic, I believe the negative is best served focusing their pragmatic offense on quality of ground, i.e. that even if plans and PICs are similar in number, PICs are more equitably debatable.
Debaters seem to treat plan-focused and universal interpretations of resolutions as being essentially identical in that they focus each round on one specific case, except that in the former case it is the affirmative with the right to steer the debate toward the case they prefer, rather than the negative. On this view, it’s hard to see how there could exist a differential in quality of ground when the same subjects are being debated in either world. But this view oversimplifies the matter. I made a diagram in MS Paint.
Plans and PICs exist at opposite ends of the spectrum (where the spectrum is what proportion of instances the topic holds true in). PICs test the controversy of whether the resolution is most likely true in 100% of cases vs only ~95%, whereas plans test whether the resolution is true in any cases at all. A Zimbabwe plan and a Zimbabwe PIC do not constitute the same subject of debate simply chosen by different sides. One asks if Zimbabwe should do the thing or nobody should, and the other whether everyone should do the thing or merely everyone but Zimbabwe. Each begets its own set of arguments.
Consider a few examples of categorical topics:
Jan-Feb ‘17 (“Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech”): Which is more controversial? That there exist at least some forms of constitutional speech that shouldn’t be restricted (e.g. your ability to say “Hi Mom, Love You”), or that there exist some justified limits on constitutional speech?
Jan-Feb ‘20 (“Resolved: States ought to eliminate their nuclear arsenals”): Again, which is more controversial? That there is at least one state that ought not have nukes (e.g. North Korea), or that at least some nuclear weapons states ought to exist?
Jan-Feb ‘21 (“Resolved: States ought to ban lethal autonomous weapons”): Some killer robots are good, or some killer robots are bad?
Nov-Dec ’21 (“Resolved: A just government ought to recognize an unconditional right of workers to strike”): There should exist some protection for the right to strike, or there should exist some limits on the right to strike?
In a bizarre coincidence, whenever the topic has a naturally categorical wording, the most debatable controversy ends up being between the categorical and close-to-categorical views, not between Never and At Least Once. I believe this to be at least prima facie evidence that NSDA topics may have an intelligent designer.
Here we have the basis for the Quality of Ground argument. In the abstract, an aff-chosen plan may be more debatable than a neg-chosen PIC, but on a topic like the free speech resolution, the Hate Speech PIC will offer more valuable debates than the Don’t Censor Texts to Moms Plan. The topic’s wording is a good to which end of the plans-PICs spectrum the controversy lies at.
So, unlike the general principle interpretation which can respond to PICs Bad with “No link, duh,” I think the categorical interpretation should be structured from the outset around defending that PICs on a given topic are legitimate and contestable ground.
Third, I find that negatives often do a poor job of explaining what a good affirmative case would look like under a general principle model.
One common answer is that the affirmative could have simply read the same case, but as an advantage in lieu of defending a plan. So, for example, if an affirmative case on the Lethal Autonomous Weapons topic defended that Bangladesh ought to ban LAWS because of the distinct risk they pose in the region, the negative could argue that defending only Bangladesh isn’t topical but that the affirmative could have instead defended bans on LAWS across the globe and then spent their time discussing Bangladesh anyway, as a contention in favor of that general advocacy.
This argument is not only weak but often strategically worse than useless. It paints the negative’s own vision of debate in a silly light. The case that the negative is suggesting their opponent read is borderline unwinnable, and I would expect a decent novice to figure out the flaw with “LAWS are especially dangerous in Bangladesh; therefore, LAWS ought to be banned globally.” That’s a good ol’ hasty generalization.
If the topic requires the affirmative to defend that something is generally true across dozens of cases, and then they spend their whole constructive proving it true in just one of them, the negative will respond, “OK, just do it only in that one case then” and have solved all of the affirmative’s offense. The negative interpretation ends up sounding like a worse version of the affirmative model of debate with extra steps.
I would focus less on making the negative interpretation sound like a minimal departure from the affirmative’s. If the debate is over the legitimacy of plans as a concept, your two interpretations will in fact be very different, and you won’t be able to coopt the main arguments for the affirmative model. Focus instead on painting a positive vision of what good debates would look like, e.g. by giving examples of generic advantages to the resolution with robust literature that doesn’t hinge on specifying a particular country. Rather than bending over backwards to figure out how their same one-country case can be read within the negative interpretation, your goal should be to demonstrate the existence of sufficient frameworks/contentions that would apply to the resolution in general that specifying further isn’t required for productive debate.
Whereas defending a universal interpretation means winning that the debate over isolated examples is better off happening on your end of the topic, defending a general interpretation means winning that debate shouldn’t be over those examples to begin with, but rather general trends and shared common arguments across contexts. And so each version of the topicality objection necessitates its own set of pragmatic arguments.
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.