Debatability is a Nonsensical Standard

Debates over competing interpretations need a rework.

0. Introduction

For theoretical interpretations, debaters commonly make the argument that one interpretation would correct a certain side bias. This is called ‘debatability,’ or the property of an interpretation to be theoretically easier for either side to engage, assuming everyone could predict it. For example, on topicality, teams commonly say:

Prefer it:
1. Limits - our interpretation prevents an exponential increase in possible affirmatives, that make the negative research burden unmanageable.
2. Ground - forcing affirmatives to meet our interpretation ensures we have core generic disadvantage links and credible portions for counterplans to compete off of.

This is the most typical form of a debatability argument. To most debaters (and judges), this seems like a legitimate concern of which voting to resolve would be valuable. In this article, I’ll make the argument that this should be of zero concern whatsoever, and that an interpretation’s categorical predictability should be of the sole concern.

I want this article to be easily accessible, so I’ll briefly summarize categorical predictability. For a full explanation, check out Debatalist No. 1 - General Constructive.

Categorical predictability is defined as an interpretation’s ability to be predicted by all those who enter a tournament. For example, any tournament rule is categorically predictable because all debaters who entered the tournament agreed to those rules beforehand. For this reason, the resolution as a stasis for debates is categorically predictable as well.

1. Current Arguments Against Debatability

Predictability as a prior to debatability is a concept that is not new whatsoever. The argument that normally is made for this is that predictability turns debatability, as neither team can access the benefits of a debatable interpretation absent prior knowledge of it during prep.

My only criticism of this argument is the way in which predictability is defined. The distinction between categorical predictability and contingent predictability must be known. Contingent predictability (once again, in brief summary) is the property of an interpretation to be predicted based on community norms/past rounds. For example, the idea that debaters should disclose affirmatives at least 30 minutes before the round start is contingently predictable. Most debaters know this rule exists despite it not being prescribed by most tournament rules.

This distinction is important for a few reasons.

First, as is a problem for debatability, it breaks logic. It may be well known that there are counterplans competing off of ‘should’ being immediate. However, the affirmative should not necessarily need to disprove these counterplans with deficits, because should definitely does not actually require immediacy. If the negative’s interpretation is used for contingent predictability, the affirmative would have lost despite their plan not having actually been disproved.

Second, it is fundamentally immeasurable. Anyone could assert that a certain position gets run often, or that ‘everyone knows about it.’ That requires a subjective judgement that is truly non falsifiable.

Third, it’s exclusionary. Novice debaters or small school debaters who may not have easy access to knowledge about the national circuit would be at a disadvantage as they could be less aware of ‘common’ interpretations.

Other than this concern about contingent predictability, I agree with the original criticism about predictability turning debatability. In fact, this criticism is best illustrated by the following interpretation:

The affirmative must present a plan that affirms the following resolution:

Resolved: The United States should restrict its nuclear forces in one or more of the following ways:
-adopting a nuclear no-first-use policy;
-eliminating one or more of the legs of its nuclear triad;
-disarming its nuclear forces.

This interpretation I will say is very debatable (this may be untrue, but go with it for the sake of example). Imagine the negative team argued that the IP topic is unworkable, and therefore we should use this better topic. An infinite number of such interpretations are possible, and justified under a world where we use debatability.

A possible counter argument to this is that such interpretations should have some basis in the resolution to then be considered for debatability. This is nonsensical. I could analytically define patents to be a no-first-use policy to justify this interpretation, which would technically provide some resolutional basis. Only the most precise interpretation is predictable, the rest are incorrect definitions of the word and substituting them in for debatability is inherently non resolutional.

2. Debatability is Unknowable

Calculations for debatability cannot be checked for accuracy or have really any objective determination.

a) Debatability arguments are unwarranted assertions.

Nobody has done a full analysis of every argument present in the literature base, which makes knowing what positions can exist that could skew rounds toward one side completely impossible. For example, let’s say under topicality I was to make the following argument:

Their interpretation wrecks affirmative ground---every AFF loses to the Prevarity DA.

The ‘prevarity DA’ does not exist. I told ChatGPT to make up a cool sounding legal word and that is what it told me.

But how would any judge be able to verify this? In the current state, most judges are coaches or are somewhat involved in topic research to give some judgement, but it is still subjective. Maybe you just never found the prevarity DA in your research, but trust me—it exists, it’s unique, links to every AFF, and has an impact that outweighs!

Many times, T debaters read cards to indicate a certain argument about the literature consensus for debatability, like number of patent cases that could be an AFF. At best, this could work for limits. While this is a step up, it will never be able to solve the problem outlined above. Evidence would have to prove literally every part of your argument, not only that such patent cases exist, but that they would be strategic in debate and dodge generic links. This is obviously impossible, as cards are unlikely to exist for most arguments.

b) At best, such assertions are status-quo descriptive, which are never unique.

Currently, process counterplans are widely run and seen as core negative ground on this topic. It seems that if we were to take them all away, the negative would lose many more rounds. What we don’t know, however, is that maybe if everyone focused their prep on disadvantages instead of these counterplans, maybe they would find ground and wouldn’t need process counterplans.

Such theory interpretations for side bias can never have impact uniqueness, because community norms for what arguments win are not consistent. Some teams read cards about win rate statistics to prove that conditionality must correct for that bias. Can we prove that in the status quo most negative teams read conditional 1NCs? We can’t, it’s down to the judge’s subjective community knowledge. This was cited as a problem in the previous subpoint as well, so I suppose it is important to explain why that is problematic. The reason for this is that it incentivizes a level of judge intervention. If debaters cannot objectively prove a certain argument, it’s down to whatever the judge feels is true about what arguments are strong. That yields a greater level of unfairness, since decisions would have to be arbitrary.

3. There Can Be No Consequences

Debatable interpretations allow us to just reinterpret our model to revoke consequences of it. To explain this, I’ll use the following example of a T-subsets debate:

1NC:
Vote negative for topicality---'in' means 'throughout,' but the affirmative does not strengthen IPR protection throughout all patents.

2AC:
Prefer 'in' to mean 'within the limits of.' The negative's interpretation justifies PICs out of any individual patent.

2NC:
PICs are no big deal. We can theoretically limit them out if they are illegitimate.

I believe that assuming debatability to be the metric, there is no reason the 2N’s argument is flawed. If an interpretation justifies bad things, we can just arbitrarily limit out those bad things. This is not even an extreme example of this—imagine the negative complained that disadvantages wouldn’t link under the affirmative’s interpretation. The affirmative could just “you get the link, because you can just argue the negative is behind if you didn’t get that link.” This applies to any interpretation and makes disproving it impossible, because you can infinitely limit it down to exclude bad parts of it. Process CPs are hard to debate? How about you artificially get deficits to more easily beat them.

4. An Intuition Argument

Now that I’ve shown some reasons why debatability is a poor metric, I’ll also make the argument that all of us deep down know that categorical predictability is the best standard.

While prepping an argument, our sole concern is to make it undebatable. We prep strategic arguments that the affirmative will have a hard time beating. We want the DA with a really strong link or a counterplan that has little to no deficits. If debatability was truly a concern, nobody would cut good arguments because they would just lose to theory. Debaters would be left with lackluster positions that don’t reward good research, which is significantly worse than if we relied on the resolution alone.

One could argue that debaters would just have to prepare justifications for why the argument should be allowed. But the only way to actually prove that counter arguments exist is to say them out loud, else it falls into the problem outlined in section 2. If debaters had to say counter arguments to their own position for debatability’s sake, then even debatable arguments would lose on the spot!

5. “We Would Lose Good Norms”

A common criticism of relying on predictability alone is that debate largely relies on contingent norms based on debatability at large. The best example of this is wiki disclosure. Wiki disclosure is a great norm that has expanded access and reduced inequality in the debate space, and importantly yet it has been almost entirely enforced by in-round theory arguments.

The problem with this criticism is that it assumes theory to be the best solution to this. Instead of relying on debaters in rounds to make debate more equitable, we should instead be pushing tournaments to require disclosure in their rules, which makes it predictable. Greenhill has adopted this procedure which proves it is possible, and tournament directors would likely be open to such an input if coaches and donors pushed for such norms. It’s better to codify these norms than to make people lose unpredictably over them.