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  • Caselist.CitesClass[45]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[46]

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Caselist.CitesClass[45]

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1		-2017-02-15 19:41:21.771
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Caselist.CitesClass[46]

Cites

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	1	+Interpretation: The aff must defend and can only garner offense from the desirability of the hypothetical enactment of the resolution.
	2	+Most predictable—the agent and verb indicate a debate about hypothetical action
	3	+Ericson ‘3: (Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
	4	+The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ~-~--“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
	5	+Violation: CX confirms that they’re not defending res.
	6	+Standards:
	7	+1) Procedural Fairness ~-~-- affirming the predetermined subject of the resolution is a prior question to substantive debate because the aff can’t just determine what we’re debating about ~-~-- if they run a racism bad aff without resolution context, how am I supposed to contest? ~-~-- that denies a role for the debate, destroys research and turns accessibility. The aff has devolved into a monologue that can’t properly be contested. Topicality ensures a balance of ground.
	8	+Dascal and Knoll ‘11: Professors Philosophy at Tel Aviv University (Marcelo and Amnon, “‘Cognitive systemic dichotomization’ in public argumentation and controversies” Argumentation: Cognition and Community. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation, p. 1-35)
	9	+4.1 Adapting critical discussion to the public sphere according to the PD view In several publications, including his recent book published in 2010, Frans van Eemeren claims that critical discussion is a general model which is adequate for handling differences of opinion in the public and political spaces: The standpoints at issue in the difference of opinion can pertain to any kind of subject and they can be descriptive as well as evaluative or prescriptive…can be encountered in all areas of life, from the family circle…to…political arenas (van Eemeren 2010: 1-2). He opposes positions whose ‘exclusionist’ outlook rejects the normative approach to the political sphere on the grounds that “normative statements can never be subjected to a reasonable discussion” (ibid.: 2), because—he argues—the discussion of politics “is an area of vital interest to all of us and should clearly not be excluded from argumentative reasonableness” (ibid.: 3)—a view with which we are prone to agree. Nevertheless, he admits that in the present situation critical discussion is far from being systematically and successfully applied to that vital area: “In representative democracies, however, the out-comes of the political process tend to be predominantly the product of negotiations be-tween political leaders rather than the result of a universal and mutual process of deliberative disputation” (ibid.). Political debates, therefore, are ‘quasi-discussions’, i.e., “monologues calculated only to win the audience’s consent to one’s own views”, rather than ‘genuine discussions’, i.e., serious attempts to have an intellectual exchange, which is typical of critical discussions (ibid.). In order to overcome this situation, “democracy should always have promoted such a critical discussion of standpoints as a central aim. Only if this is the case can stimulating participation in political discourse enhance the quality of democracy" (ibid.). This can be achieved, however, only by following “the dialectical rules for argumentative discourse that make up a code of conduct for political discourse and are therefore of crucial importance to giving substance to the ideal of participatory democracy” (ibid.: 4); thereby fully acknowledging that “education in processing argumentation in a critical discussion is indispensable for a democratic society (van Eemeren 1995: 145-146). The reasons provided for the failure of the adoption of the critical discussion model in reality ranges from a general allusion to human nature (“in real-life contexts, it has to be taken into account that human interaction is not always automatically 'naturally' and fully oriented toward the ideal of dialectical reasonableness "; van Eemeren 2010: 4) to specific political sphere argumentation handicaps (unwillingness of people “to subject their thinking to critical scrutiny”; “vested interest in particular outcome”; “inequality in power and resources; “different levels of critical skills”; and “a practical demand for an immediate settlement”; van Eemeren 2010: 4). Although these causes may have some explanatory value in some cases, in our opinion their modus operandi is not accounted for and, what is more important, they do not cover the full spectrum of challenges that the successful use of critical discussion in the public and political spheres must face, as we have seen (cf. sections 2 and 3). No wonder that van Eemeren himself raises the question “whether maintaining the dialectical ideal of critical discussion in political and other real-life contexts is not utopian” (ibid.), to which he replies by admitting that "the ideal of a critical discussion is by definition not a description of any kind of reality but sets a theoretical standard that can be used for heuristic, analytic and evaluative purpose” (ibid.). This ideal seems to be so inspiring that it remains valid as a pure theoretical ideal, “even if the argumentative discourse falls short of the dialectical ideal” (ibid.). In the light of the substantial gap between the normative ideal and the actual practices of public and political argumentation that PD’s description and explanation provides, a number of doubts arise: Are there structural, rather than merely contingent obstacles in idealized critical discussion that prevents even its approximate use in the public sphere? Can a theory that claims to be a praxis based normative system fulfill its promise if it sets up a threshold that no one who tries to apply it to the public sphere can reach? Doesn’t the very fact that argumentation is excessively idealized in the model PD proposes cause the gap by distancing people concerned by public issues from argumentation at all? All these doubts suggest that a powerful structural phenomenon like the existence of CSDs in the public sphere is perhaps overlooked by PD and requires, for its overcoming, a radically different approach. 4.2 Discrepancies between the PD approach and reasonable argumentation in the public sphere The discrepancies in question have to do with basic parameters relevant to every argumentative process, namely: (A) The discussants’ goals and targets: what do they expect to achieve through the argumentation process and what is it capable of providing. (B) The preconditions for initiating a critical discussion: what are the discussants presumed to know and accept of these preconditions. (C) The argumentative process that is supposed to lead to the achievement of the discussants’ goals. (D) The influence of context and agents on the argumentative process. 4.2.1 Goals Assuming that argumentation is a voluntary endeavor, the parties are presumed to engage in it if and only if: (i) the process will serve their goals; (ii) these goals cannot be achieved by different, better means. (i) PD describes as follows the aim of engaging in an argumentative process: Argumentation is basically aimed at resolving a difference of opinion about the acceptability of a standpoint by making an appeal to the other party's reasonableness. (van Eemeren 2010: 1, with reference to van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 11-18) The difference of opinion is resolved when the antagonist accepts the protagonist's viewpoint on the basis of the arguments advanced or when the protagonist abandons his viewpoint as a result of the critical responses of the antagonist. (van Eemeren 2010: 33) Simply put, the basic assumption is that a critical discussion’s aim consists in putting forth a certain position by one of the parties for the critical examination of the other, who calls it into question. The latter undertakes to refute the former’s position, while its proponent is committed to defend it. Four stages (see below) are supposed to ensure a valid performance of the refutation and defense tasks. The essential point is that at the end of the four stages the parties clearly agree whether the proponent’s position has been refuted or not and, accordingly, change their position (either retracting it or withdrawing from his questioning). In ‘mixed’ disagreements, in which the antagonist not only questions but also puts forth an opposed position, the same process takes place sequentially, i.e., at first one side (A) attacks trying to refute the other’s (B) position, and after this stage is concluded, they switch roles and the second side (B) proceeds to attack the first (A) in the same fashion. Regardless of whether the described process is indeed capable to yield a conclusive decision about the refutation of a position, and of whether the linearity of the refutation process makes sense, it is obvious that debates in the public sphere are for the most part ‘mixed’. Furthermore, in so far as these debates involve dichotomous positions (rather than just opposed ones), it is necessary that at the end of the PD process one of the parties accept the position of the other. It is also worth noticing that, contrary to deliberative democracy approaches, which in some cases approve the attempt to reach agreement in a (public) debate as a form of justification of political systems, PD claims that it is not a consensus theory at all. Instead, it conceives itself as a theory based on Popper’s critical rationality, i.e., as having as its principal goal to provide each party with the means—i.e., refutation attempts—to test critically its position: The conception of reasonableness upheld in pragma-dialectics insights from critical rationalist epistemology and utilitarian ethics conjoin … The intersubjective acceptability we attribute to the procedure, which is eventually expected to lend conventional validity to the procedure, is primarily based on its instrumentality in doing the job it is intended to do: re-solving a difference of opinion. … This means that, philosophically speaking, the rationale for accepting the pragma-dialectical procedure is pragmatic—more precisely, utilitarian italics in quoted text. … However, based on Popper's falsification idea, this is a ‘negative’ and not ‘positive’, utilitarianism. … Rather than maximization of agreement, minimization of disagreement is to be aimed for. (van Eemeren 2010: 34) The distinction between maximization of agreement and minimization of disagreement purports to stress that PD doesn’t view agreement as the suitable end of the process, but just as “an intermediate step on the way to new, and more advanced, disagreements” (van Eemeren 2010: 26n). Nevertheless, no explanation is given of how these “more advanced disagreements” are engendered as a part of the dynamics of the critical process, nor what is the role or value of such disagreements in the public sphere or elsewhere. This may be due to the fact that PD’s ‘critical discussion’ is not tuned to the generation of new positions or ideas but only to the testing of extant ones, thus echoing once again Popper, now in his focus on the justification rather than on the discovery of theories (see sections 4.2.4 and 5). In any case, it is quite clear that the only practical result of the critical discussion à la PD of opposed positions on a public issue is to determine whether one discussant succeeded in refuting the other’s position, thus obtaining the adversary’s agreement, who will then share his/her position, at least for some time. In this respect, PD’s critical discussion is close to Habermas’s ‘reasonable argumentation’, whose aim is to reach consensus.15 In spite of the apparent difference between a critical examination of a position aiming at its refutation or at its acceptance, even van Eemeren admits, to some extent, their similarity. He points out that “the pragma-dialectical procedure deals only with ‘first order’ conditions for resolving differences of opinion on the merits by means of critical discussion” (van Eemeren 2010: 34), and stresses that there are ‘higher order’ conditions, ‘internal’ and ‘external’, that are “beyond the agent’s control”, conditions that are similar to Habermas’s “ideal speech conditions” (van Eemeren 2010: 35n). Anyhow, whether according to PD the main goal of the critical discussion process in the public space is to create the opportunity for refutation or for agreement (meaning that one of the discussants acknowledges that his position is wrong), the essential assumption of this process is that the participants in it in the public sphere (or elsewhere) must be aware that one of them holds a wrong position and will have to explicitly acknowledge this. Is such a goal, especially when conceived as the ultimate aim of the proposed argumentative process, feasible and acceptable in the public sphere? In our opinion, there are at least four reasons for arguing that it is a utopian, hence unacceptable goal, if one takes seriously what should be expected from argumentative practice and theory in the public sphere. First, because PD deserves a critique similar to the one leveled against the Popperian version of critical rationalism it espouses,16 which defends a theory of knowledge “without a knowing subject” (Popper 1972); obviously, such a-contextual position becomes even more problematic if applied to the public and political spheres, where it must operate in a context essentially involved with practical rationality. Second, due to its analogy with theories such as Habermas’s that were discussed in this section as well as in 2.2—an analogy that deserves additional criticism because, unlike Habermasianism, PD overlooks the relationship between the political and public context and argumentative practice. Third, because of PD’s total overlooking of the role of CSDs in public argumentation (cf. 4.2.2). And fourth, due to unilateral value judgments of positions in the public sphere, which lead to simplistic criteria of refutation or acceptance in a domain where complexity is the rule (cf. 2.1.1 and 4.2.3). (ii) Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that the refutation goal as claimed by PD is central, feasible, acceptable, and useful in public argumentation. Aren’t there better ways to achieve this goal? The refutation and defense moves stipulated by the PD critical discussion model include, on the one side, the antagonist’s critical remarks or demands and on the other, the proponent’s replies. We believe that it must be assumed that neither the critique nor the replies are previously known to the contenders, which is why they have an interest in engage in the argumentation process: presumably, the expression of both, counter-arguments and defensive-arguments, is good to both sides. In spite of its usefulness in certain situations, this kind of exchange does not amount to the full manifestation of the dialectical critical process, wherein the context and co-text of the dialectical exchange, as well as the cognitive interaction that takes place and evolves throughout the exchange, play a decisive role in the design and ‘inner’ justification of each of the participants’ moves. Argumentation strategies that take into account these resources and make full use of their potential are no doubt setting up another, broader span of goals for the argumentative process, and are more likely to achieve these goals more effectively than they certainly would achieve their PD more limited counterparts (cf. 4.2.4 and 5). 4.2.2 Preconditions The ideal PD critical discussion can only be realized if some preconditions are satisfied. The most important ones are a) a clear-cut identification of the standpoint that provokes the disagreement, b) the decision of the parties to engage in a discussion, and c) the participants’ commitment to obey the procedural rules. As we shall see, these preconditions share a common assumption, which calls into question the feasibility of using critical discussion in the public sphere. (A) This precondition assumes that it is possible to isolate rigorously the subject matter of a critical discussion, so as to conduct a focused discussion that makes use only of relevant arguments. This precondition is quite strict, for whenever both discussants defend contrary standpoints, their disagreement should be treated as two separate fully fledged discussions: “… if another discussion begins, it must go through the same stages again—from confrontation stage to concluding stage” (van Eemeren 2010: 10n). (B) This precondition subordinates the decision to engage in the discussion to the evaluation that the discussants share enough common ground to pursue it adequately: “After the parties have decided that there is enough common ground to conduct a discussion …” (van Eemeren 2010: 33). (C) This precondition stresses the ‘contractual’ character of a critical discussion, which requires explicit mutual commitments by the discussants. Its rationale is that without such commitments the aim of the critical discussion, i.e., the resolution of the difference of opinions, will not be achieved, which makes engaging in the discussion pointless: “There is no point in venturing to resolve a difference … if there is no mutual commitment to a common starting point, which may include procedural commitments as well as substantive agreement” (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 2004: 60). These ‘first order’ preconditions, as they are labeled in PD (cf. van Eemeren 2010: 33), are the conditions that candidates to participate in a critical discussion must fulfill if they intend to do so and can afford it personally (a ‘second order’ condition) and politically (a ‘third order’ condition).17 In addition, the first order conditions demand from the prospective discussants a clear, distinct, and detailed picture of the scope of the discussion that they are about to engage in. This means not mixing up the various differences of opinion that the discussion may involve, and being able to separate them properly as the subject matter for independent discussions; a further requirement is the anticipated identification of the pieces of the ‘substantive agreement’ forming the starting point in order to ensure that they are sufficient for conducting the discussion up to a satisfactory closure.
	10	+2. Engagement ~-~-- the debate becomes irresolvable because of the aff’s refusal to engage in the topic. A general topic is impossible to engage in effectively – debate requires a specific point of difference.
	11	+Steinberg and Freeley ‘8: *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making pp45
	12	+Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about this statement. (Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas, proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the summer of 2007. Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement "Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context? What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania." Negative advocates might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the following discussion.
	13	+3) Conclusivity ~-~-- even if the 1AC is factually correct, failure to subject their claims to testing by a well-prepared opponent produces groupthink that prevents effective advocacy – treat their claims as false until there’s structural fairness.
	14	+Poscher ‘16: Director at the Institute for Staatswissenschaft and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg (Ralf, “Why We Argue About the Law: An Agonistic Account of Legal Disagreement”, Metaphilosophy of Law, Tomasz Gizbert-Studnicki/Adam Dyrda/Pawel Banas (eds.), Hart Publishing, forthcoming, dml)
	15	+Hegel’s dialectical thinking powerfully exploits the idea of negation. It is a central feature of spirit and consciousness that they have the power to negate. The spirit “is this power only by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it. This … is the magical power that converts it into being.”102 The tarrying with the negative is part of what Hegel calls the “labour of the negative”103. In a loose reference to this Hegelian notion Gerald Postema points to yet another feature of disagreements as a necessary ingredient of the process of practical reasoning. Only if our reasoning is exposed to contrary arguments can we test its merits. We must go through the “labor of the negative” to have trust in our deliberative processes.104 This also holds where we seem to be in agreement. Agreement without exposure to disagreement can be deceptive in various ways. The first phenomenon Postema draws attention to is the group polarization effect. When a group of like‐minded people deliberates an issue, informational and reputational cascades produce more extreme views in the process of their deliberations.105 The polarization and biases that are well documented for such groups106 can be countered at least in some settings by the inclusion of dissenting voices. In these scenarios, disagreement can be a cure for dysfunctional deliberative polarization and biases.107 A second deliberative dysfunction mitigated by disagreement is superficial agreement, which can even be manipulatively used in the sense of a “presumptuous ‘We’”108. Disagreement can help to police such distortions of deliberative processes by challenging superficial agreements. Disagreements may thus signal that a deliberative process is not contaminated with dysfunctional agreements stemming from polarization or superficiality. Protecting our discourse against such contaminations is valuable even if we do not come to terms. Each of the opposing positions will profit from the catharsis it received “by looking the negative in the face and tarrying with it”. These advantages of disagreement in collective deliberations are mirrored on the individual level. Even if the probability of reaching a consensus with our opponents is very low from the beginning, as might be the case in deeply entrenched conflicts, entering into an exchange of arguments can still serve to test and improve our position. We have to do the “labor of the negative” for ourselves. Even if we cannot come up with a line of argument that coheres well with everybody else’s beliefs, attitudes and dispositions, we can still come up with a line of argument that achieves this goal for our own personal beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. To provide ourselves with the most coherent system of our own beliefs, attitudes and dispositions is – at least in important issues – an aspect of personal integrity – to borrow one of Dworkin’s favorite expressions for a less aspirational idea. In hard cases we must – in some way – lay out the argument for ourselves to figure out what we believe to be the right answer. We might not know what we believe ourselves in questions of abortion, the death penalty, torture, and stem cell research, until we have developed a line of argument against the background of our subjective beliefs, attitudes and dispositions. In these cases it might be rational to discuss the issue with someone unlikely to share some of our more fundamental convictions or who opposes the view towards which we lean. This might even be the most helpful way of corroborating a view, because we know that our adversary is much more motivated to find a potential flaw in our argument than someone with whom we know we are in agreement. It might be more helpful to discuss a liberal position with Scalia than with Breyer if we want to make sure that we have not overlooked some counter‐argument to our case It would be too narrow an understanding of our practice of legal disagreement and argumentation if we restricted its purpose to persuading an adversary in the case at hand and inferred from this narrow understanding the irrationality of argumentation in hard cases, in which we know beforehand that we will not be able to persuade. Rational argumentation is a much more complex practice in a more complex social framework. Argumentation with an adversary can have purposes beyond persuading him: to test one’s own convictions, to engage our opponent in inferential commitments and to persuade third parties are only some of these; to rally our troops or express our convictions might be others. To make our peace with Kant we could say that “there must be a hope of coming to terms” with someone though not necessarily with our opponent, but maybe only a third party or even just ourselves and not necessarily only on the issue at hand, but maybe through inferential commitments in a different arena. f) The Advantage Over Non‐Argumentative Alternatives It goes without saying that in real world legal disagreements, all of the reasons listed above usually play in concert and will typically hold true to different degrees relative to different participants in the debate: There will be some participants for whom our hope of coming to terms might still be justified and others for whom only some of the other reasons hold and some for whom it is a mixture of all of the reasons in shifting degrees as our disagreements evolve. It is also apparent that, with the exception of the first reason, the rationality of our disagreements is of a secondary nature. The rational does not lie in the discovery of a single right answer to the topic of debate, since in hard cases there are no single right answers. Instead, our disagreements are instrumental to rationales which lie beyond the topic at hand, like the exploration of our communalities or of our inferential commitments. Since these reasons are of this secondary nature, they must stand up to alternative ways of settling irreconcilable disagreements that have other secondary reasons in their favor – like swiftness of decision making or using fewer resources. Why does our legal practice require lengthy arguments and discursive efforts even in appellate or supreme court cases of irreconcilable legal disagreements? The closure has to come by some non‐argumentative mean and courts have always relied on them. For the medieval courts of the Germanic tradition it is bequeathed that judges had to fight it out literally if they disagreed on a question of law – though the king allowed them to pick surrogate fighters.109 It is understandable that the process of civilization has led us to non‐violent non‐ argumentative means to determine the law. But what was wrong with District Judge Currin of Umatilla County in Oregon, who – in his late days – decided inconclusive traffic violations by publicly flipping a coin?110 If we are counting heads at the end of our lengthy argumentative proceedings anyway, why not decide hard cases by gut voting at the outset and spare everybody the cost of developing elaborate arguments on questions, where there is not fact of the matter to be discovered? One reason lies in the mixed nature of our reasons in actual legal disagreements. The different second order reasons can be held apart analytically, but not in real life cases. The hope of coming to terms will often play a role at least for some time relative to some participants in the debate. A second reason is that the objectives listed above could not be achieved by a non‐argumentative procedure. Flipping a coin, throwing dice or taking a gut vote would not help us to explore our communalities or our inferential commitments nor help to scrutinize the positions in play. A third reason is the overall rational aspiration of the law that Dworkin relates to in his integrity account111. In a justificatory sense112 the law aspires to give a coherent account of itself – even if it is not the only right one – required by equal respect under conditions of normative disagreement.113 Combining legal argumentation with the non‐argumentative decision‐ making procedure of counting reasoned opinions serves the coherence aspiration of the law in at least two ways: First, the labor of the negative reduces the chances that constructions of the law that have major flaws or inconsistencies built into the arguments supporting them will prevail. Second, since every position must be a reasoned one within the given framework of the law, it must be one that somehow fits into the overall structure of the law along coherent lines. It thus protects against incoherent “checkerboard” treatments114 of hard cases. It is the combination of reasoned disagreement and the non‐rational decision‐making mechanism of counting reasoned opinions that provides for both in hard cases: a decision and one – of multiple possible – coherent constructions of the law. Pure non‐rational procedures – like flipping a coin – would only provide for the decision part. Pure argumentative procedures – which are not geared towards a decision procedure – would undercut the incentive structure of our agonistic disagreements.115 In the face of unresolvable disagreements endless debates would seem an idle enterprise. That the debates are about winning or losing helps to keep the participants engaged. That the decision depends on counting reasoned opinions guarantees that the engagement focuses on rational argumentation. No plain non‐argumentative procedure would achieve this result. If the judges were to flip a coin at the end of the trial in hard cases, there would be little incentive to engage in an exchange of arguments. It is specifically the count of reasoned opinions which provides for rational scrutiny in our legal disagreements and thus contributes to the rationales discussed above. 2. THE SEMANTICS OF AGONISTIC DISAGREEMENTS The agonistic account does not presuppose a fact of the matter, it is not accompanied by an ontological commitment, and the question of how the fact of the matter could be known to us is not even raised. Thus the agonistic account of legal disagreement is not confronted with the metaphysical or epistemological questions that plague one‐right‐answer theories in particular. However, it must still come up with a semantics that explains in what sense we disagree about the same issue and are not just talking at cross purposes. In a series of articles David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have reconstructed legal disagreements in semantic terms as metalinguistic negotiations on the usage of a term that at the center of a hard case like “cruel and unusual punishment” in a death‐penalty case.116 Even though the different sides in the debate define the term differently, they are not talking past each other, since they are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the same term. The metalinguistic negotiation on the use of the term serves as a semantic anchor for a disagreement on the substantive issues connected with the term because of its functional role in the law. The “cruel and unusual punishment”‐clause thus serves to argue about the permissibility of the death penalty. This account, however only provides a very superficial semantic commonality. But the commonality between the participants of a legal disagreement go deeper than a discussion whether the term “bank” should in future only to be used for financial institutions, which fulfills every criteria for semantic negotiations that Plunkett and Sundell propose. Unlike in mere semantic negotiations, like the on the disambiguation of the term “bank”, there is also some kind of identity of the substantive issues at stake in legal disagreements. A promising route to capture this aspect of legal disagreements might be offered by recent semantic approaches that try to accommodate the externalist challenges of realist semantics,117 which inspire one‐right‐answer theorists like Moore or David Brink. Neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics provide for the theoretical or interpretive element of realist semantics without having to commit to the ontological positions of traditional externalism. In a sense they offer externalist semantics with no ontological strings attached. The less controversial aspect of the externalist picture of meaning developed in neo‐ descriptivist and two‐valued semantics can be found in the deferential structure that our meaning‐providing intentions often encompass.118 In the case of natural kinds, speakers defer to the expertise of chemists when they employ natural kind terms like gold or water. If a speaker orders someone to buy $ 10,000 worth of gold as a safe investment, he might not know the exact atomic structure of the chemical element 79. In cases of doubt, though, he would insist that he meant to buy only stuff that chemical experts – or the markets for that matter – qualify as gold. The deferential element in the speaker’s intentions provides for the specific externalist element of the semantics. In the case of the law, the meaning‐providing intentions connected to the provisions of the law can be understood to defer in a similar manner to the best overall theory or interpretation of the legal materials. Against the background of such a semantic framework the conceptual unity of a linguistic practice is not ratified by the existence of a single best answer, but by the unity of the interpretive effort that extends to legal materials and legal practices that have sufficient overlap119 – be it only in a historical perspective120. The fulcrum of disagreement that Dworkin sees in the existence of a single right answer121 does not lie in its existence, but in the communality of the effort – if only on the basis of an overlapping common ground of legal materials, accepted practices, experiences and dispositions. As two athletes are engaged in the same contest when they follow the same rules, share the same concept of winning and losing and act in the same context, but follow very different styles of e.g. wrestling, boxing, swimming etc. They are in the same contest, even if there is no single best style in which to wrestle, box or swim. Each, however, is engaged in developing the best style to win against their opponent, just as two lawyers try to develop the best argument to convince a bench of judges.122 Within such a semantic framework even people with radically opposing views about the application of an expression can still share a concept, in that they are engaged in the same process of theorizing over roughly the same legal materials and practices. Semantic frameworks along these lines allow for adamant disagreements without abandoning the idea that people are talking about the same concept. An agonistic account of legal disagreement can build on such a semantic framework, which can explain in what sense lawyers, judges and scholars engaged in agonistic disagreements are not talking past each other. They are engaged in developing the best interpretation of roughly the same legal materials, albeit against the background of diverging beliefs, attitudes and dispositions that lead them to divergent conclusions in hard cases. Despite the divergent conclusions, semantic unity is provided by the largely overlapping legal materials that form the basis for their disagreement. Such a semantic collapses only when we lack a sufficient overlap in the materials. To use an example of Michael Moore’s: If we wanted to debate whether a certain work of art was “just”, we share neither paradigms nor a tradition of applying the concept of justice to art such as to engage in an intelligible controversy.
	16	+This topicality shell outweighs their case and role of the ballot for six reasons:
	17	+A) Even if their method is good, it isn’t valuable if it’s not procedurally debatable – they don’t gain any access to their offense because the round isn’t structurally fair.
	18	+B) The best solutions are formed with critical contestation from multiple sides – it’s more likely we make a good liberation strategy if both debaters can engage and test it.
	19	+Deliberative debate models impart skills vital to respond to existential challenges – this means that I should be able to engage the aff on a substantive level.
	20	+Lundberg ‘10: Christian O. Lundberg Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Tradition of Debate in North Carolina” in Navigating Opportunity: Policy Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311
	21	+The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech—as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims, informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy decisions that impact them, to son rhroueh and evaluate the evidence for and relative merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly infonnation-rich environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO) argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment. This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediatcd information environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been assigned . . . students in the Instnictional debate) group were significantly more confident in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so~-~-~-~-These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases. There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144) Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity. Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt, a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy in an increasingly complex world.
	22	+C) Debate is about weighing dissenting opinions, not to just have a performative monologue in which an ethical issue is inherently true or undeniable. Aff can’t just have a moral high ground in which they just claim racism or ableism to be inherently bad without resolution context.
	23	+D) They force the neg to extreme generics like cap, neolib, or intersectionality against the aff, which is super predictable for them. ALMOST EVERY AFF DEBATER HAS ENORMOUS BACKFILES OR SPECIFIC CASE ANSWERS FOR THESE K’s? Yeah, that’s a BS grounds limitation of the neg. It’s funny that this T shell is more specific to the aff than the substantive ground you allow.
	24	+E) I came to this debate to debate the topic, not what you want us to debate.
	25	+The Voter is Jurisdiction.
	26	+You as the judge don’t have the jurisdiction to vote on arguments that aren’t substantively debatable and can’t be proven true in the debate space. Three warrants:
	27	+1. The ballot says vote for the better debater, my standards prove why they aren’t.
	28	+2. You have the obligation as a moderator to make sure that they adhere to structural commitments and that debate can actually have debates.
	29	+3. The lack of ability to engage means you as a judge cannot vote for them because then it wouldn’t be a debate, but rather a performative monologue.
	30	+If you don’t feel comfortable voting on Jurisdiction, vote on Fairness – Two warrants
	31	+1. Fairness is necessary for education insofar as each side must have an equal opportunity to make educational arguments. To deny someone that opportunity in the pursuit of education is to deny them the validity of another educational argument.
	32	+2. The reason that people do debate is because of the competitive nature of the activity, as evidenced by my opponent’s arguments for the ballot. Some debaters will run any argument, no matter how unfair, to win the ballot. That spoils the competition for the opposing debater… in this instance, me.
	33	+Topicality is an issue of competing interpretations. A reasonability paradigm only justifies competing interpretations because there is no metric for what is reasonable without comparing interpretations against one another.
	34	+AND, drop the debater and drop the arg are functionally the same in this round, so drop the debater on T.
	35	+T is the highest layer of the debate – it comes before the AC.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-02-15 19:41:23.31

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	1	+x

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	1	+x

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	1	+30

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	1	+1

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	1	+Sunset bhat Neg

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	1	+T - Non-Topical

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	1	+Stanford