|
Topicality: Is it Reasonable to be Reasonable ????
Steven D. Dolley, Bates College 1984
- Waging War on Poverty |
|
In the recent past, topicality has been argued much more frequently, and in much greater depth, than ever before. It is not now uncommon for entire college debate rounds to focus on the issue. This trend has begun to expand to high school forensics, and if past experience is any guide, this expansion can be expected to continue for some time. One of the most intriguing and complex facets of the growth of topicality has been the expanded importance of standards for assessing definitions of terms in the debate resolution. The importance of such standards should be obvious. As Robert J. Branham has noted:
Traditionally, the affirmative has been required to provide reasonable definitions of propositional terms. Few early debate texts or articles explored exactly what this required. Most of them were satisfied to predicate the standard, explain that it (for some reason) was implicit in the right to define terms, and stress that the affirmative need not defend the best possible definitions. While such terse examinations answered a few basic questions, they were not sufficient to resolve the type of complex lexicological grappling which Branham described. How, then, did reasonableness become the traditional standard? When answering this question, one needs to bear in mind how greatly academic debate has evolved over an extremely short period of time. Definitional standards were not particularly relevant in the days of old because there was no plan. The resolution itself was the proposal the affirmative team defended, and most topics were free of linguistic ambiguity. There are few ways to interpret propositions such as "The Monroe Doctrine should be renounced as United States foreign policy," "The Marines should be withdrawn from Nicaragua," or "Prohibition should be universally adopted." With the development of the affirmative plan as a specific policy operationalization of the resolution, topicality became more and more a question of boundary setting. The resolution functioned as an area within which the plan must fall to be topical, but most affirmative advocates were loathe to defend its entirety, hoping instead to focus discussion on their specific, narrowly-defined proposal. Goodnight, Balthrop and Parson explained an affirmative team's obligation under this view:
Resolutions themselves began to change with these changes in perspective, and soon many of them could not be rationally or intellectually defended in the abstract "The United States should significantly increase its foreign military commitments" and "The United States should significantly change its foreign trade policy" being two recent examples. The number of plans broadened with these broader topics, as did the number of proposals defended that were of tangential or tenuous relationship to the resolution. Such plans, charmingly dubbed "squirrels," raised the blood pressure of many negative debaters, spurring them to challenge the connection between plan and resolution. Often these challenges sprang from a dearth of other salient arguments, but equally often there was a valid question to be asked. Unfortunately, in the early days of the topicality boom, it was all too easy for affirmatives to postulate their frequently bizarre definitions, and blithely dismiss negative objections to them with the incantation, "We need only be reasonable:" Negatives soon tired of losing again and again to the magic spell of reasonableness and began to explore the nature and requirements of this hitherto innocent standard. It did not take them long to discover, as Ballentine's Law Dictionary said, that "what is reasonable depends on a variety of considerations and circumstances. It is an elastic term which is of uncertain value in a definition."3 Being (in the words of Corpus Juris Secundum) "a factual expression not ascertainable by reference to rule, law or formula, and .'. not subject to exactness of definition",4 the term reasonable was a puddle of mercury that slipped through their hands, defying capture. The most many discovered of the standard was that it could be contrasted with rationality and the realm of formal logic, having "taken on more and more the pragmatic idea of simple common sense."5 This discovery was more harmful than helpful, since it seemed to require a good deal of subjective assessment. As political scientist James Rosenau discovered:
He explained why such an approach fails miserably to forward the goals of formal analysis:
Negative debaters were hardly satisfied. Such a standard painfully reminded them of their desperate appeals to the gallery: "Ask the timekeeper: Ask the bus driver: They'd tell you in a second that isn't what 'foreign trade' means:" Some even recalled excursions into the forensic occult. when they had attempted to conjure forth the mysterious "spirit of the resolution" to do battle with the affirmative's powerful reasonableness chant. Recollections of their lack of success followed hard upon. and many of them decided that such a lax standard as reasonableness could not be tolerated. They belittled a guideline so loose that it foreclosed no interpretations whatsoever. so long as they were "not absurd; not ridiculous." The more articulate among them grumbled. "This de facto delimits the resolution:" They then gave up "trying-to count what is not number and measure what is not space." and sat down to draft new topicality standards. Many debaters and debate scholars have suggested that affirmative and negative definitions should be compared. and the better definition employed. Recently this standard has gained rather wide acceptance as an alternative to the murkiness perceived in reasonableness. and the 1984 National Debate Tournament went so far as to require that judges use "that definition which obtains (enjoys) superior analytical and evidential support drawn from the (relevant) subject matter area(s) introduced in the round of debate."10 While considerable more strict than its predecessor it in fact seems to be an abandonment of the traditional affirmative right to define the better definition standard does not answer the more fundamental question of what we should demand of definitions. To be "better" is to possess "good qualities in a greater degree than another."11 but exactly what good qualities are seeking to maximize? Back to square one! Better definition is in fact a suprastandard. that is, a way of assessing definitions vis-a-vis one another once and only once the qualities sought in a definition have been firmly identified. So the lines of battle lie. and so up to now the combat has raged. Since a judge must vote one way or the other. each individual skirmish has been resolved. but the war of reasonableness versus better definition is far from being won by either camp. It has often been waged as a take-no-prisoners dispute in which compromise, middle ground. or alternatives to the two sides are dismissed as impossible. As a result. the possibility that the flaws in the traditional reasonableness standard may not be terminal ones has been largely neglected. This is unfortunate. since the means for salvaging this standard lie. ironically enough, in its most maligned characteristic its flexibility and dependence upon circumstances. It cannot be denied that what is reasonable is inherently a judgment call. However. the term does not allow such 1udgment to be arbitrary and here the chain of argument against reasonableness begins to snap. Contrary to what some assert. "reasonableness is not what extremists upon the one side or the other would deem fit and fair ..."12 Rather. "conduct is reasonable if it is consistent with that of the prudent man in like circumstances." 13 Thus. prudence and consideration of the given circumstances of word usage are inextricably part of any reasonable process of definition. A definition must be appropriate to the situation at hand to be accepted under this refinement of reasonableness. We might call the criterion circumstantial suitability, and operationalize it in the form of a three-part question: Is the given definition an appropriate one for this word, in this sentence, in this situation (i.e., a competitive academic debate)? Each part of this criterion will now be considered in turn.
Each word in any statement performs an interdependent but distinct function. One does not say, "I cat want a drink dog of water cow," simply because one enjoys hearing the sound of these animal names. The meaning potential of the sentence is destroyed by the addition of superfluous words. By the same token, one could not say, "I want a," or "I a drink of water," and hope to convey the same meaning; a critical symbolic component has been left out of each. Philosopher William P. Alston wrote:
Thus, each and every word in the resolution is important, both individually and as a component of the larger. sentence structure. Since words function as symbols, representing in visual or oral shorthand some other thing or concept, commonality of symbolic reference is crucial to comprehension and communication. Suppose a debater says during cross-examination, "May I have your arm, please?" In reality he wishes to examine the plan. The odds are good that this form of request will not obtain him a copy of the plan, but a confused stare, or accusation of perversity. He has not used the common symbolic referent of the word "arm." As linguists Myers and Myers have emphasized:
When debate resolutions are written, words are used in accordance with their normal symbolic reference, be these clear or multifaceted; to ignore this fact and strike out onto arbitrary morphological ground is to emasculate language and neglect the purpose of the ,framers of the sentence being interpreted. Another way in which one can abuse the literal meaning of words is to engage in various sophistic forms of equivocation in other words, play games with shades of word meaning. Most words have a number of possible definitions, but those definitions are not interchangeable at random. Different ones are appropriate in different circumstances. Suppose the topic were "That the United States government should not involve itself in war." It seems clear that "war" is here being used to mean "a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations."16 If an affirmative were to run a case advocating elimination of food stamps, AFDC, and Medicaid, they would be using the word in a completely different sense "efforts to combat crime, disease, poverty, etc." 17 Technically, "war" can mean this, but this is not the sense in which it is Utilized in the above hypothetical topic. Questions of equivocation and misuse of metaphors are tricky ones, and the lines between proper use and abuse fine. Debaters must be on the lookout for this type of behavior because, while tactically advantageous, it can severely distort the meaning of the topic as it was designed for debate. As a character once said in an H. G. Wells novel, "You can show black is white by argument ... but you will never convince me."18 One other such abuse should be mentioned here, and that is deliberate neglect of field context. One highly relevant word meaning guide is the discipline in which a word is used. Lawyers use some terms to mean different things than farmers, and seismologists use some terms much differently than motorcycle gang leaders. To use the motorcycle gang definition of "rumble" in a scientific treatise on earthquakes would be laughably inappropriate. Similarly, a banker would be mystified to hear second negatives jammer about "solvency," and likely would wonder what bearing "the quality or state of being ... able to pay all legal debts"19 has on the outcome of the debate. To neglect field context is not the same as defining "cat" as "dog," but it can have the same distorted outcome, and should be avoided when it engenders confusion rather than clarity.
Maintaining the literal meaning of each word is crucially important, but cannot be achieved completely be examining isolated definitions. As those familiar with sentence diagrams from their elementary school days know, words do not come together in a continuous string, but branch off and weave together as they modify one another in a multitiered fashion. Rhetorician I. A. Richards warned that "a word or phrase when isolated momentarily from its controlling neighbors is free to develop irrelevant senses which may then beguile half the other words to follow it." 20 The words "hot" and "dog," for example, have quite clear meanings, but to combine these two meanings and use that as the definition of a "hot dog" would be incorrect, and a disgusting lunch besides. Words must be defined in a manner appropriate to their interaction with the words around them. A second determinant of context in the sentence is grammar. Many words serve different grammatical functions in different situations, and their meaning shifts drastically from one context to another. The work "all" is illustrative. When used as an adjective, it means "the whole amount or Quantity of,"21 as we are well aware. When a knife-wielding felon says, "Give me all your money," you had best hand over the entirety of your cash if you wish to acknowledge the literal meaning of his statement and avoid internal bleeding. However, "all" works quite differently when it becomes an adverb, meaning in that situation "entirely; totally; altogether."22 To eat all-beef patties does not mean to gorge oneself on every burger in the world, and to be voted All-American does not transform a quarterback into every US citizen. To define a word being used as one part of speech when it is being used as another renders the word less than useless. Third, the syntactical structure of the sentence must be accounted for. Some words have different definitions in different types of sentences. The word "any" is one such word, as college debaters learned a few years ago. Zeno Vendler, a logician at Cornell University, used the example of a basket of apples and the statement "Take any." Here the syntactical context is permissive, and as Vendler stressed, "any" cannot mean "all":
If the sentence were altered to make it prohibitive rather than permissive, it would read "Do not take any." Here, "any's" function would be similar to "all" i.e., all apples are denied to you. Debaters must be cautious when dealing with these subtle but significant shifts in meaning. Often extensive research in dictionaries, encyclopedias, compilations of legal definitions such as Words and Phrases, and grammar texts will be necessary. An affirmative relying on first glance impressions, or gut feelings about what the framers must have meant, will drop many topicality ballots to a team that has methodically explored the implications of the resolution's syntax.
At this point, we run out of hard-and-fasts. If an affirmative definition meets these two categories of a priori considerations, it mayor may not be reasonable. The final determination is based on circumstances, and of course, the relevant circumstances are a competitive round of academic debate. I will not take a position on the age-old "broad versus narrow definition" dispute. However, there are some considerations that should be examined before the debate boils down to questions of personal taste for a broad or a narrow topic. The first is the question of bounds. To make a resolution debatable, one should seek to define it in a way that provides a predictable and limited scope of potential affirmative cases. Indeed, the purpose of any definition in any situation is to provide some conceptual limits on the meaning of a term. The U. S. Supreme Court has recognized that "to define is to limit, and that which is left unlimited ... is not defined." 24 Such limitation is especially important in debate. If an affirmative can defend any proposal under a resolution, there is no sense in having a topic in the first place. Absent the advance warning of a common topic, no negative team could ever have a prayer of preparing arguments that would deal with the issue under discussion. Further, an all-encompassing resolution leaves the negative no position they can defend, if one accepts the assumption that the negative may not defend a topical position. The bottom line is that any negative position could be usurped by the affirmative as their own, since it would be topical. Second, the topicality defense must guarantee the inclusion of the affirmative in the resolution. This is not so if the plan does not become topical until and unless something occurs as the result of its adoption. Since topicality is seen by many as a question of jurisdiction, the plan itself must be topical to be relevant, and must be topical at all times. The courts have agreed, ruling that "jurisdiction is fundamental and must be continuing in the court throughout the proceeding, because it is jurisdiction alone that gives the court power to hear, determine, and pronounce " judgments on the issues before it."25 To meet the resolution "by effects" makes topicality at least somewhat dependent upon solvency, and thus fails to meet this requirement of fundamental and continuing jurist diction. **** A definition failing to meet the above criteria would seem to be inappropriate to the relevant situation, academic debate. Such failure should be a sufficient reason to reject use of the definition, since "'without an explicit statement of the purpose of the inquiry there are no criteria of the adequacy of defining."26 While these criteria are suggested as a clarification of what I believe the reasonableness standard was originally intended to mean, they can also serve as guidelines for seeking the better definition. A judge would simply employ that definition which more completely satisfied these standards. In other words, the same questions would be asked, but the answer would not be "yes" or "no," but the affirmative's definition or the negative's. Debate about debate is often interesting, useful and necessary, but debates about issues in the real world we all live in are even more so, and ultimately are more ill1portant. We can maximize the amount and depth of analysis we devote to such issues if we can resolve our meta-disputes quickly. Clear standards for such resolution, one hopes, will speed up the process. We would do well to heed the words of argument theorist A. Craig Baird: Explanation of terms ... is basic to all good argument as well as to all expert analysis of a problem. The semantic pitfalls are at best numerous. Perhaps half of the disputations in debate and misunderstandings in discussion would be avoided if speakers or writers cleared up at the outset the language difficulties and continued to seek such clarification throughout the program. (27) So gather your definitions, think out and type out your standards blocks, and in the immortal words of Phil Esterhouse, "Hey!"Let's be careful out there!"
|