Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[14]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[14]

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,1 +1,1 @@
1		-2016-10-15 17:24:17.862
	1	+2016-10-15 17:24:17.0

Caselist.CitesClass[17]

Cites

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,20 @@
	1	+Interpretation: Debaters may not specify a particular country or group of countries in the plan text, they must defend all countries.
	2	+Violation:
	3	+Standards:
	4	+1. Textuality. Bare plurals lack determiners.
	5	+Carlson 77 Greg N. Carlson (linguist) “A Unified Analysis of the English Bare Plural” Linguistics and Philosophy 1977 413-457 D Reidal Publishing Company, Dordrecht Holland. NS 8/26/16
	6	+ABSTRACT. It is argued that the English 'bare plural' (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the 'generic' use of the bare plural (as in 'Dogs bark') and its existential or `indefinite plural' use (as in 'He threw oranges at Alice'). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a.
	7	+“Countries” is a bare plural which means plans aren’t T.
	8	+Debois 16 Danny (champion of TOC, NCFL Grand Nationals, the Minneapple, The Glenbrooks, and the Harvard Invitational (twice), coaches Harvard-Westlake) “Topic Analysis by Danny Debois” September-October 2016 LD Brief
	9	+Importantly, “countries” in this resolution is a bare plural—i.e. there’s no article or demonstrative in front of adolescents like “the” or “these” indicating which adolescents the resolution is talking about. Bare plurals indicate that the resolution is a generic statement, and consequently, in order to textually affirm, aff advocacies have to be why in general countries have to prohibit nuclear power, not why specific countries should prohibit it.
	10	+Impacts:
	11	+A) Topicality Rule
	12	+Nebel 15 Jake “The Priority of Resolutional Semantics” vbriefly February 20th 2015 http://vbriefly.com/2015/02/20/the-priority-of-resolutional-semantics-by-jake-nebel/
	13	+1.1 The Topicality Rule vs. Pragmatic Considerations There is an obvious objection to my argument above. If the topicality rule is justified for reasons that have to do with fairness and education, then shouldn’t we just directly appeal to such considerations when determining what proposition we ought to debate? There are at least three ways I see of responding to this objection. One way admits that such pragmatic considerations are relevant—i.e., they are reasons to change the topic—but holds that they are outweighed by the reasons for the topicality rule. It would be better if everyone debated the resolution as worded, whatever it is, than if everyone debated whatever subtle variation on the resolution they favored. Affirmatives would unfairly abuse (and have already abused) the entitlement to choose their own unpredictable adventure, and negatives would respond (and have already responded) with strategies that are designed to avoid clash—including an essentially vigilantist approach to topicality in which debaters enforce their own pet resolutions on an arbitrary, round-by-round basis. Think here of the utilitarian case for internalizing rules against lying, murder, and other intuitively wrong acts. As the great utilitarian Henry Sidgwick argued, wellbeing is maximized not by everyone doing what they think maximizes wellbeing, but rather (in general) by people sticking to the rules of common sense morality. Otherwise, people are more likely to act on mistaken utility calculations and engage in self-serving violations of useful rules, thereby undermining social practices that promote wellbeing in the long run. That is exactly what happens if we reject the topicality rule in favor of direct appeals to pragmatic considerations. Sticking to a rule that applies regardless of the topic, of the debaters’ preferred variations on the topic, and of debaters’ familiarity with the national circuit’s flavor of the week, avoids these problems. A second strategy denies that such pragmatic benefits are relevant. This strategy is more deontological. One version of this strategy appeals to the importance of consent or agreement. Suppose that you give your opponents prior notice that you’ll be affirming the September/October 2012 resolution instead of the current one. There is a sense in which your affirmation of that resolution is now predictable: your opponents know, or are in a position to know, what you will be defending. And suppose that the older resolution is conducive to better (i.e., more fair and more educational) debate. Still, it’s unfair of you to expect your opponents to follow suit. Why? Because they didn’t agree to debate that topic. They registered for a tournament whose invitation specified the current resolution, not the Sept/Oct 2012 resolution or a free-for-all. The “social contract” argument for topicality holds that accepting a tournament invitation constitutes implicit consent to debate the specified topic. This claim might be contested, depending on what constitutes implicit consent. What is less contestable is this: given that some proposition must be debated in each round and that the tournament has specified a resolution, no one can reasonably reject a principle that requires everyone to debate the announced resolution as worded. This appeals to Scanlon’s contractualism. Someone who wishes to debate only the announced resolution has a strong claim against changing the topic, and no one has a stronger claim against debating the announced resolution (ignoring, for now, some possible exceptions to be discussed in the next subsection). So it is unfair to expect your opponent to debate anything other than the announced resolution. This unfairness is a constraint on the pursuit of education or other goods: it wrongs and is unjustifiable to your opponent. Another deontological argument might appeal to legitimate authority. The NSDA is the only entity with the legitimate authority to determine the topics. This process begins with a committee: anyone can sit in on the committee’s meetings and suggest topics on their website. The process ends with a democratic voting procedure. Some philosophers believe that democratic procedures generate obligations to obey rules. This would yield an obligation to debate the resolution as worded. And some philosophers believe that legitimate authorities can generate reasons that exclude (not merely outweigh) other considerations that would usually be relevant. In general, if your teachers instruct you to do something, then you don’t get to weigh up the reasons for or against it; you just have to do it.3 Similarly, although the fact that some proposition would be good to debate would usually be a reason to debate it, or a reason for the NSDA to propose it and for debaters to vote for it, that fact is irrelevant and no longer a reason if that proposition is not the chosen resolution. Here is a third kind of response to the view that we should directly appeal to pragmatic considerations when evaluating topicality. This view justifies debating propositions that are completely irrelevant to the resolution but are much better to debate. Once you say that pragmatic benefits can justify debating a proposition that isn’t really what the resolution means, or that the resolution means whatever it would be best for it to mean, there is no principled way of requiring any particular threshold of similarity in order to be an eligible interpretation of the resolution. This means that the pragmatic approach justifies affirmatives that have nothing to do with the resolution. Of course some see no problem with non-topical affirmatives whose impacts outweigh the reasons to debate the resolution. But suppose you want a principled response to such strategies. You have one if you take seriously the idea that the debate should be about the resolution, and the idea that the proposition expressed by the resolution is independent of what proposition would be best to debate. Without a commitment to debating the proposition that the resolution actually means, I don’t think there is a principled response to such strategies, as I discuss below.
	14	+Pragmatic considerations just prove we should change the topic. Thus, reasons why plans are good aren’t competitive.
	15	+Nebel 15 Jake “The Priority of Resolutional Semantics” vbriefly February 20th 2015 http://vbriefly.com/2015/02/20/the-priority-of-resolutional-semantics-by-jake-nebel/
	16	+The first premise is just the topicality rule. The second premise is that X is the semantically correct interpretation. Pragmatic considerations for or against X do not, in themselves, support or deny this second premise. They might show that it would be better or worse if the resolution meant X, but sentences do not in general mean what it would be best for them to mean. At best, pragmatic considerations may show that we should debate some proposition other than the resolution. They are(if anything) reasons to change the topic, contrary to the topicality rule. Pragmatic considerations must, therefore, be weighed against the justifications for the topicality rule, not against the semantic considerations: they are objections to the first premise, not the second premise, in the argument above.
	17	+2. Limits
	18	+3. Ground
	19	+Voters:
	20	+Fairness, Education, Jurisdiction, DTD, CI, No RVI

EntryDate

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+2016-10-15 17:24:19.841

Judge

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Eric Melin

Opponent

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Loyola DK

ParentRound

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+14

Round

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+3

Team

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+Strake Jesuit Li Neg

Title

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+SO - T - Nebel v2

Tournament

...	...	@@ -1,0 +1,1 @@
	1	+St Marks