“Chain Reaction,” Rostrum (Volume 74, Number 4), December 1999.

I know I date myself by keeping my notes on these little index cards. It has been 20 years since I was a high school debate student and 10 since I was a coach. As a person who literally grew up in this activity, but who now has the perspective that a little distance brings, I am here today to pay tribute to you, the coaches—especially those of you who have spent your careers in coaching and devoted your lives to this activity.

It is an honor to be once again in your midst. As my wife, Eileen, and I made the trip from Macon this morning to be with you, I had a feeling about bringing her here. I realized that it was the very same kind of feeling I had when I brought her to meet my family and to see the place where I was raised.

You coaches have a remarkable impact as teachers. You have a profound effect on the intellectual growth of your students and, because of the great amount of time you invest in your students, you have an effect other teachers seldom can: You are role models and counsellors and friends.

Your powerful influence as teachers extends beyond the students currently in your program. Coaches are often relied upon by students after graduation. That’s a sign of how you are mentors who guide students in their continuing education, their careers, and their lives.

As I see it, coaches set in motion a chain reaction of good effects. When you teach skills and substance and serve as role models, your effect on students starts a chain reaction that extends through the students’ lives and to the lives of the persons they encounter. It is difficult to imagine the sum total of the chain reaction caused by a devoted career coach. And thinking about the sum total of the chain reactions caused by all the people in this room simply boggles the mind.

Part of your effect is the result of the skills you teach—communication skills, argument skills, and research skills. And part of it is the result of attitudes you encourage in your students—attitudes about hard work and determination, about thorough preparation, about learning from mistakes, about competing fairly, about losing and winning with grace. You even encourage intellectual curiosity, itself.

For me, the skills and attitudes I learned in debate have meant everything. I recall a moment in the fall of 1971 like it was yesterday. I remember going to school as a ninth grader one day that fall and going to the glass trophy cases of the Marquette High School forensic team. I was looking to see if my name was on a list posted there, a list of those selected by the coach, Jim Copeland, to be on the team. Seeing my name on that list was the critical moment in my education. The lessons I learned from my coach served me well when I became a coach, and later as a law student and as a prosecutor in the trial court and the court of appeals. As a prosecutor, those lessons were also invaluable to me when trying to solve difficult problems and make hard decisions. Mr. Copeland used to have a saying: “Evidence is where you find it.”

Now there is a generation of federal prosecutors in Chicago, a group I was fortunate to help train, who are familiar with that concept. And let me also add that the lessons from debate also were with me when I first stood, somewhat petrified, in front of a law school class last fall.

Don’t mistake me. I’m not just saying those lessons helped me in my pursuits and in achieving any success I’ve had. I’m saying they made those pursuits possible.

Beyond the skills and attitudes, let me mention an often neglected facet of your teaching: the substantial body of knowledge acquired by your students. Debate students study about complex issues of public policy. In the fall of 1971, we were debating a topic concerning the jury system. I bet there were not many ninth graders who, when asked by their parents what they wanted for Christmas, gave the answer I did. I wanted a copy of The American Jury, the famous book by Professors Harry Kalven and Hans Zeisel. If ideas are the currency of our political system, your students leave high school with hefty savings accounts.

How many times have you heard a news report about some startling new development, only to realize that you heard about it years ago in debate? For example, the first time I encountered the notion that there were forces that might cause the collapse of the Soviet Union resulting in dangerous regional instability was in a high school debate over a decade ago. Silly academic dream-world arguments? I say if you want a glimpse at the issues of 2005, listen to a high school debate today.

Of course, exposure to the complexity of issues and the value of research imparts another critical lesson to students. In an age when politics seems driven by polling data based on quick and easy responses to general propositions, it is your students who are most likely to respond by saying “What are the specifics of the plan?” or “I’d have to do some research to give you an intelligent answer.”

Finally, I want to remark about an even more neglected fact about your work, and that is the achievement of the learning you do. Being a coach is to be enrolled in a continuing graduate course in public policy.

You are members of what might be called “The Academy of Debate.” The knowledge acquired over the years by career coaches is formidable. As a person who graduated from “The Academy of Debate”, I envy the breadth and depth of your continuing education. This group is a great resource with tremendous potential to do good.

And so I congratulate you on your careers in coaching. I know it is consuming, hard work. But when you are next pacing a dank, dark school corridor late on a weekend evening, waiting for the last round to end and the long drive home, please be mindful of the chain reaction of good effects you continually set off, and remember that it touches people—at that very moment and for generations.

Jim Fleissner has been a Professor of Law at Mercer University since 1994. As a high school debater at Marquette University High School, he reached the semifinals of NFL Nationals and was the champion of CFL Nationals, the Bicentennial Forum in Philadelphia, the Motor City Special in Detroit, the Ruby Krider Tournament in Tennessee, and the National Round Robin in Washington, DC. After high school, Fleissner coached at his alma mater and at the Kinkaid School in Houston. He earned a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1986 and has had a distinguished career in both academia and government service.

Is it because debate has ultimately shaped who we are, as people? Is it because we are perpetually drawn to the rush of competition, in an oddly addictive sort of sense, like moths to lamps? Or is it just because over the past four years, we’ve come to feel like we are part of a community, and that is a community that we can never truly walk away from?

In a sense, maybe all of these things are true, to some extent. I could never hope to generalize the reasons everyone and anyone debates—but I can maybe at least speak for myself and safely assume that some of this resonates with some of you, too.

So, after thinking about it, here are my “Top Five Reasons We Still Keep Coming Back (and if you haven’t figured it out yet, the Top Five Ways You Know You Are a True Debate Dork)”:

5. We really, really can’t resist making fun of Layne Kirshon and his silly limericks. It’s just too amusing. In fact, this pretty much goes for making fun of things he does, in general.

4. Something in us is hard-wired now to want to do debate work. In some strange sense, we really did enjoy those nights when we had to stay up late, subsisting on caffeine, cutting cards into the early hours of the morning. While it’s true that we’re all enjoying just relaxing, hanging out with our other friends now, and eagerly awaiting graduation…we do sort of miss the hard work. It gave us something we felt like we wanted to fight for.

3. Debaters, in some sense, resemble Rachel Berry from “Glee” (only not quite as psycho…most of the time). We are, at heart, performers. We may not feel like performers when we read at hyperspeed, but we still enjoy the limelight, nonetheless. We love the feeling of giving the 2NR or the 2AR, feeling like we’re right about what we’re saying—it’s kind of a rush, for us. That’s why we enjoy cross-ex—it’s a performance, and we like putting on a show. So, what is a performer without a stage?

2. We really will miss each other. Over the last four years, we’ve made up a community, and it’s one that’s hard for us to forget. The Class of 2010 has been a pretty fantastic one, on the whole. There are many of you to whom it will be difficult to say goodbye.

1. We are, at heart, debaters—in literally everything we do. Whether we continue participating in this activity in college or not, we really are debaters. I’m almost positive I’m not the only one who still likes playing devil’s advocate, just because I can. We like arguing. It wouldn’t matter whether we actually quit debate or not—this would still be true. We can’t turn on the news without thinking about how the story relates to debate (you know you watched all of those CNN stories about healthcare, thinking about whether the politics DA would be viable that weekend). When we start a research project for school, we not only try our hardest to pick topics that relate to debate, but we feel awesome about the fact that we have access to a zillion databases that most of our classmates don’t (yes, I have, on occasion, used Project Muse for AP Lang/Lit). There really isn’t anything we do in the world that doesn’t somehow tie itself back to debate, in our minds. We are, really and truly, debaters—in every sense of the word.

To those of you who aren’t debating in college—it’s been a great four years, it really has. Congratulations on everything you’ve achieved.

To those of you who are…well, it’s not over…we’ll meet again. ☺

Let’s apply the Chaudoin method to the Carroll evidence that has been heralded as the bringer of death for Consult:

Before doing that, let’s observe that this “piece of evidence” fails the old debate test of “claim + warrant = argument.”  I feel like a novice saying this, but, there’s no warrant in that card.  Also note that this is really unfair to Jamie because we’re talking about a footnote, not his actual argument.  I blame the author of the post for this silliness in the first place.

1)      Do the predictions logically flow from the assumptions:

No.

This footnote seems to conflate “allowing a veto” with “subservience of foreign policy to the whims of other countries.”  It also seems to ignore the potential for the US to decide when to consult and when not to consult.

2)      Are real world data consistent with these predictions?

No.

This footnote doesn’t mention any, so this is really a nonstarter anyways, but we could easily think of some pretty prominent examples where allowing other countries to veto foreign policy would have saved us some serious mockery.  Had the US actually consulted the UN on Iraq II, Jon Stewart would be out of a job.

3)      What are some more rigorous academic arguments related to the subject? (Khalilzad and a Friedman rant/op ed don’t count).

-          We might check out articles by Chapman and Reiter, or Chapman alone that are about the rally round the flag effect and international effects of consultation.  We might develop a better notion of “cooperation” by reading Carrubba’s “Courts and Compliance in International Institutions” etc.  Ikenberry’s “After Victory” is about hegemons “smoothing” their power trends by binding themselves to particular institutions.

Here’s another quick way to apply the Chaudoin method.  Ask: “Does the piece of ‘evidence’ I’m reading have all the depth of a Fox News transcript or does it actually make an argument?”

—-

In academia, the term “evidence” means “observations about the world that may or may not be consistent with the hypothesis they’re designed to test.”  In debate, the term “evidence” means “some shit somebody got published.”

Observe the difference…

Professor: “I think that X causes Y and as evidence I have measured X and found it to be correlated with this measurement of Y.”

Debater: “I think that X causes Y and as evidence I present to you this article from Foreign Affairs that says ‘X causes Y.”

It isn’t hard to tell which one I think is actual evidence and which one is paraphrasing someone else’s publication that may or may not contain evidence.

It isn’t accidental that debaters use the second interpretation as opposed to the first one:

Reason 1 (not debate’s fault):  Debate is about prediction.  “I think if you do policy X then Y will result in the future.”  It is not about empirically testing hypotheses.  “In the past, did policy X tend to result in Y or Z?”  It is hard to predict the future and doing so with empirics necessitates certain assumptions that may or may not be “true.”  This is a fundamental problem that is not debate’s fault because assumptions aren’t testable.

Reason 2 (sorta debate’s fault, but not really):  The core principles of debate do not lend themselves well to in depth evaluation of evidence or to in depth research sources.  In 8 minutes, I can probably summarize the theory and evidence in a Foreign Affairs article.  (Actually, I could probably explain the entire volume with “none and none” but I digress).  I would be hard pressed to do the same with American Economic Review article.  Google scholar some and see if I’m wrong.  I could give you the tagline like “Risk aversion explains behavior in a first price auction laboratory settings better than prospect theory” but I would not be able to cover the theories involved or the evidence, at least not so that you could reach the same point on the research frontier as the article.

I won’t say speed or emphasis on taglines are bad.  They most certainly are not.  Conciseness and organization are just as important as depth.  (I vaguely remember some cards about speed and memory, irony much?)  But realize that the setup of debate ensures a ceiling on the quality of evidence debate.

Reason 3 (probably debate’s fault):  I’m going to assume the 3NR is at the frontier of debate thought both because I know (two of) the authors and because it seems pretty darn astute.  Bill, I’m sure you rock; we just haven’t met.  But even the frontier minds emphasize only one half of theory testing: logical consistency.

A theory can be evaluated in (at least) two ways:

1) Logical consistency:  I start with these assumptions.  I derive this prediction.  Logical consistency asks “does this prediction logically follow from these assumptions?”

This is the one that debate focuses on almost entirely, probably because we all possess good logic skills and that’s part of why we selected ourselves into the activity.

2) Empirical consistency: Are real world data consistent or inconsistent with the hypotheses derived from the theory?

There are two words to look at, “data” and “consistency.”  Bill and Paul’s responses to Roy’s Toulmin revision get at this nicely.  “Data” refers to observations from the world used to measure a certain concept.  “Consistency” refers to the way in which you think about sets of observations to determine whether or not they are consistent with a theory.  Some potential objections are “the researcher didn’t measure something correctly,” “the researcher did not account for this other thing,” etc.

Two easy solutions:

1. Focus on implementing the Chaudoin method (I don’t know who Toulmin was, but he has the word “tool” built in and he’s probably old and won’t care if I steal his method’s spotlight.)  After reading evidence as a debater or judge, ask “does the claim follow logically from the assumptions used to generate it?”  Next, ask “how convincing are the empirics used to test this theory?”  I would be willing to bet that 50% of debate “evidence” fails the first test and 95% fails the second.
2. Cut longer cards.  You don’t gotta read it in the round, but the judge probably will afterwards.
3. Read journals that are more academic:  Google something like “political science journal rankings” for a list of the top political science ones (APSR, AJPS, IO, etc) or do the same for economics (AER, QJE, JPE, etc) or for any other relevant disciplines from sociology to biology.

Implementing the Chaudoin method will win you 50-60 more rounds next year.

Full disclosure: I debated competitively for a long time before moving on to a PhD program in Political Science.  I study empirical methods and game theory which for sure affects my opinions on this subject as well.

Also, I’m trying to get Roy to put me on as a guest writer on the 3NR, so maybe commenters should back me up.

One of the major conversational topics was speaker points. I don’t think we need to lay the blame on the 100 point scale. I think the newness of the 100 point scale just refocused attention on an issue that has always been with us. Only three women received a speaker award (given to the top 20) at Kentucky. NONE were in the top ten. I realize it is unrealistic to expect parity in terms of success in numbers until we see parity in terms of participation, but there is an added oddity to these numbers. This was the break down:

1-10: 0 women
11-20: 3 women
21-30: 5 women
31-50: 1 woman

Does this bunching of women around and just below the speaker award cut off point suggest something of a speaker award glass ceiling? Georgia State didn’t show quite the same breakdown, but still only 5 women in the top 40. Gonzaga was somewhat better. I counted at least 10 women in the top 50 (apologies for an inaccurate count as some of the names were unfamiliar to me).

The dearth of successful female debaters creates bigger issues. It becomes self reinforcing when there are fewer successful role models available for hire as coaches at both the assistant and director level as well as for lab leaders at summer institutes. When competitive success is a necessary perquisite for being hired, it’s difficult to find qualified applicants even when you’re actively seeking them out. There are just too few to go around. I know how hard it can be to get these kinds of jobs when you weren’t well known as a successful debater, but I can’t imagine how much harder it must be for women who haven’t had/didn’t have competitive success.

The last major issue that came up informally in a round was the issue of gendered language. Maybe I’m getting old, but I debated in an era where it was close to taboo. There were probably a lot of contributing factors, including the testimony of numerous women on edebate and other forums that it was an important issue or the success that debaters like Rachel Saloom and Sarah Holbrook had running the argument, but it seemed like something that (for the most part) debaters just didn’t do. However, I am noticing the practice more each year. I have to add that this is a problem I encounter more at the high school level. This comes up in all the same ways (turning in evidence that contains gendered language, referencing arguments a female debater made as “he said”, etc.). I think maybe we should be doing more to make young debaters aware of progress the community has made so we don’t forget or regress.

I do have one caveat about the issue of gendered language. It seems to me that I hear more women in debate say that they don’t care or are unconcerned about the issue. Let me be clear that I’m not calling for teams to dust off their gendered language files and run them whenever the first opportunity presents itself. If this community has made some progress in terms of being receptive to women, and if that progress means that women no longer feel the use of gendered language affects their willingness to participate in the activity, then that is probably a good thing. However, if it is a problem and it does matter, say something. Whether it is a simple correction, a post-round heads up, or a formal argument is up to you.

This is a guest contribution by Whit Whitmore, Assistant Debate Coach at the University of Michigan and Woodward Academy.

* the differences between versions of the critique
* affirmative link turn strategies
* the “ethics” impact
* impacts and impact framing
* how to explain the alternative

You can download the podcast directly (right click to save) or subscribe to our feed with iTunes to receive each podcast as it is released. Please feel free to post questions and comments.

Hey everyone, if you liked using this and have any questions/suggestions/troubles, you can email me at alexgulakov@gmail.com or AIM me at cloudheat16.

@Whit
Here’s what I use that’s directly related to online research.

fasterfox – makes webpages “endless”, so you don’t have to click “Page 2″ in some news articles or search results, you just keep scrolling; also lets you search google right from the url bar: the dropdown combines your visited sites history with the top results from google right as you type, so you never even have to visit google. make sure you disable “Auto Copy Selected” (for compatibility with Debate Copy) and maybe disable that annoying text popup bubble

evernote – lets you clip and save notes of anything. you should install both the software program and the addon. in the program options, you can assign a hotkey like F6 and that will clip either the selected text or the website to your notebook. I use it to organize literally everything I find; you can search, organize, or go back to original source later.

feedly – it makes RSS simple. subscribe to your favorite websites and it gives you a daily digest. I think it’s organized better than Google Reader

pdf download – you can set it to either ask you to download & open the PDF or load it as text in your browser.

LibX – puts links in Google Scholar results to my university library; you can also reload a page of a commercial database you find through google- like sagepub or jstor- through your university proxy. you should download it from your university website. use the addon “Menu Editor” to remove the annoying context menu entries it adds

readitlater – saves webpages for offline viewing. you can set it to automatically backup everything you add to it. I don’t use it anymore, but when I went places without reliable internet access I used it to backup the online caselist and maybe a few articles.

===

If you are an IE or Chrome user and would like to use the Save Google Books feature, right click on any bookmark, select “Properties” or “Edit”, and change the URL to the code below. Press it while on a Google Books page to open a popup with the page image at the highest resolution possible.

—

#1 – About this rule of math.

There’s no rule that says every x maps to a single value of y or z. Doing so assumes that y and z are functions of x. Not totally relevant to the argument, except that it is perhaps a way of arbitrarily choosing this over a model that would incorporate several impacts as different curves. Also, I hate math fallacies.

#2 – This is just a model.

I love math and I wish debaters incorporated more of it, but a model for policy comparison should be derived from the real world of policymaking, not the other way round. The fact is that we all know what it means for “passage” of the plan. It means it goes through congress. Immediately in zero time. Yes, an unrealistic assumption but one that serves us well. To say that because the word instantaneous is used here and that instantaneous in math has a meaning that precludes continuity (more on that in a second) is silly. It’s just word play.

“Instantaneous actions are undefined on a timescale. They are represented by open circles. So if you can agree that fiat should be instantaneous, then you would draw an open circle at the origin (where the x and y or x and z if you are using two biaxial graphs, or x,y and z if using a triaxial graph). The origin represents ‘right now’ and the positive x-axis represents the future.”

That’s where the jump is made. There’s no real reason this has to be the case. If the model ignores a relevant consideration, junk the model, don’t pretend something meaningful doesn’t happen.

#3 – A little calculus will clear this up.

Let me suggest a model that incorporates it.

First, I’m gonna refer to K impacts ‘Z axis’ as imaginary… and Policy impacts ‘Y axis’ as real, cause let’s be honest, that’s how it is.

Since the values of Y and Z are arbitrary you can (and logically should) say that Y and Z are identically zero for all X<0. It makes sense because the SQ is the baseline against which the plan effects are measured but changing this doesn’t really effect the model, you just have to change up the integral a little later.
What happens at zero?

x=0 represents passage of the plan. At zero, the moment of passage, there’s an open circle at the origin, since the SQ (which we assigned to zero on Y and X) is ceasing to be.

I’ll also suggest that there may be a second open circle at x=0 for some y and y values.

Where is that exactly? LIMIT AS x DESCENDS TO ZERO OF f(x), where f(x) gives the y and z values mapped from a given x value.

If you haven’t seen limits before, think about the version of the model I’m criticizing. The limit is what happens as you trace the curve of impacts back along the values of X towards x=0 and get arbitrarily close to 0.

Now, the calculus. I submit that the debate should be decided by a simple integral. The integral of f(x) over all values of x where f(x) is defined. (this end value is to account for the claim that discursive implications can stop at 1.5 hours or some arbitrary point). Obviously since the SQ goes back indefinitely into the past and is pegged to zero, we can say that the integral of f(x) over all negative x is zero.
And this works. Although f(x) is not defined at zero if you integrate the positive and negative values of x seperately and add them you get the integral I just mentioned. At the zero point (speaking of how I feel) x is undefined but taking oen, or any finit enumber of discrete values out of an integral operation, doesn’t change the value.

So, that’s how impacts work here. Now, back to politics. The reason politics was uncomfortable in the old model is that you were just tracing a net impact trying to use discrete values at various points of time. Integrating the condition over all points is more realistic because, for instance, a plan with initial big bad effects but long-term small effects might be beneficial. You know this by integrating over the long term.

The effects of passage are what induce the discontinuity. If you pass plan and that process of passage, condensed into an arbitrarily small time causes loss of capital and nuclear war then you go from an OK status-quo to an instantaneously bad situation. On the other hand if you don’t talk about politics, becuase you are doing something awful like going for biopower, or worse the cap K then, truthfully, the limit as x goes to zero from teh positive side of f(x) is zero. The reason is simple human capability. If the plan goes into effect arbitrarily close to the origin people need at least a nano-second to deal with the effects. After that nanosecond you start seeing impacts and the curve moves up or down along the Y and Z axes. Passage is a construct to compress a certain subset of those reactions into an instant, represented by the discontinuity.

Is my model arbitrary. Kind of. So is the other one. So, we return to the original point. What model accurately represents the world, not how can we create math to exclude things. In the real world capitalism rules, political capital matters and Indians killed the giant North American sloth.

FYI

It’s a little unclear what the net value referred to in the original model is, and that matters. Let’s say f(x), which maps x values to y and z values is a measure of all net impacts up to that point. So if y(5) — meaning the y value attached to time 5 — is positive then at that point all net effects including everything after passage is positive. So overall, adding everything since time 0 we’re better off. If that’s what f(x) does, then my model doesn’t work. I treat f(x) as the position at that point in time, relative to the SQ, but it doesn’t account for past times. In fact it could have discontinuities. It might be that the initial effect is a food spike so at every point up to some x, say x=5, things are neg. More people starving constantly. Then at time 5 i have some advnatage about a conference that will succeed because of the plan and once it succeeds no one will ever die again and humanity experiences eternal bliss (what like you’ve never heard a worse argument). Then suddenly f(x) jumps to the positive realm. Because that jump is a discrete instant it doesn’t effect the integral. But I figured I’d clear it up.

Debaters have quite well adapted various technological advances to be used for debate purposes, but this has also changed the nature of what we refer to when we think of debate. Someone not involved in a debate might conceptualize of it as it might have had looked like when it first began, but before it started internal adaptations to technology. The thoughts that come to mind when most of us think about debate (and the things that stand out to outsiders that have observed us for a bit) are probably cutting lots of cards, organizing files, carrying around tubs, then assembling all those blocks and card into a speech.

Much of the time we spend in debate involves copying paragraphs from a book or webpage, writing a sentence summary of it in order to have that sentence qualify as something like a single brick from which files are created, using a document map to build a table of contents. “Cards” were invented because it wasn’t practical for debaters to carry books around to quote from in support of their arguments; note cards were used. These cards were essentially in the same format of authoritative snippets and personal summaries that we use today. Having these types of “cards” to back arguments became a norm, a computers only furthered this need for more cards. The need was created by a lack of fast access to authoritative texts during spoken speeches, but because we continued to use that same formatting norm, faster access via information digitization only furthered that need to reduce information into files and tubs ready at our reserve.

Picture what academic competitive debate might look like it if began for the first time today, and there was new technology written specifically to adapt to the needs that these debaters would have as a result of being debaters. If you think of how the mind works, your thoughts aren’t organized top-down (like a Word document where you have to scroll down) but through relative connections. So the new debater (if debate began today) might hear or make an argument and then connect that to five related responses in his mind. Debate would start off a simply listening to opposing arguments, and needing to make mental associations to offer the best responses. If you take that last sentence as the primary need that a person choosing to do debate has, then the question is: in what ways should technology adapt to meet this need, without creating extrinsic demands and dependencies.

For a start, I think evidence might be mapped out like a web diagram – the argument to respond to in the center circle, with associated argument responses in their own circles in a secondary ring, and arguments associated with those further down. So what might evidence research look like? Creating files made sense before computers since files resembled a book, but with computers we’ve continued to use that same organization format for organizing cards into files. We’ve grown much more dependant on these files with computers and the internet. The debate process has become split between the debating that goes on in a speech and the file creation stage.

Here’s what it might look like if technology available today was repurposed and adapted to the needs that debaters would have solely as a function of being debaters (not as a function of inheriting the needs created by the limits of former technology.) When using the internet to do research in either digitized books or articles, you’d highlight text right on the webpage. You would “tag” what you have highlighted not through a sentence summary but through keywords. These keywords function like chains that would form the backbone of something I’ll refer to as an argument root. From this root, today’s equivalent of files would “grow” by having more associated snippets tagged on to it. The technology would store the entirety of the source document as well as your highlighting of it to your computer or a central team server. You would also add analytical arguments to this root; they would be chained by their keywords to references to other sources.

Today, files are walled-in and separate from other files. Think of what a politics file looks like today. We’d generally expect to find a 1NC, then a uniqueness section, links, internal link extensions and so on, organized from the top going down; we’d flip through all the pages to find the relevant new uniqueness cards, then go to our tubs to pull out a theory file to answer a theory indict of politics, get something from the internal links file, find an impact card for add-on and so on. While this was the best we could make of available technology at one point, it is clearly not how our minds conceptualize arguments – answers to politics theory should obviously be tagged with both theory and politics.

These roots would be very easy to merge with prior research you or someone else has done because the snippets are associated by their content, keywords, and the tags you have added. Right now, document files are static since you need to reorganize and rewrite them to update with new content or reference other files. A dynamic model of organization would work like the mind, which makes mental associations across the spectrum of available knowledge. The research a team does throughout the year might be referred to as their argument garden. (The names might sound odd, but think about why we call it storing cards in tubs.) Some schools would choose to keep these gardens closed to only their debaters, but there’d probably be at least a few that everyone could contribute to.

There would be a very important ancillary benefit to a public, or “open” garden. Information on the internet is organized pretty poorly now – pages related to a given webpage can only be found through a search engine, not through “browsing” or “surfing” the web more into that area (hyperlinks are the start of a solution, but obviously the author chooses which links to include and they do not update as new sources are found.) Debaters could perform an important service by organizing that information a) based on logical associations and b) based on article or webpage snippets as opposed to linking to the entire document. Knowledge would be organized by argument or idea instead of by webpage. After the season, some schools might chose to open their gardens by merging it with the public one. Whatever the debate topic was – there would be a great resource to anyone interested in developing their personal stance on it. It would resemble Wikipedia in some ways, but would have a much greater variety or arguments associated for and against that viewpoint. Wikipedia tries for a neutral point of view, whereas an open debate garden could provide all points of view so that people can understand the most popular and most “round winning” arguments against their personal beliefs. I think many people today have lost faith in the existence unbiased media sources or the authority of field experts; the neutral stance is only possible through presenting every ideology available. Today, when most people are provided an opposing point of view they’re usually only given a reductionist strawperson argument; this service would provide an easy way to view what’s actually the best and most reasoned argument for the other side so that people have a chance to understand what those opposed to them truly believe, in their own unfiltered words.

Returning to how a debate round might look like, debaters would likely “flow” the speech of their opponent by entering the keywords of that argument as the center bubble in the argument web. From that, the most relevant associations from the root you’ve assembled in your reading on the topic will pop-up and you can pick and drop analytics and “cards” you find relevant to form your own speech. These wouldn’t really be cards in the format we use today. They would not be taken or “cut” from their original source in any way. The root could also change dynamically as the source on the internet might be updated. This way, you could browse the source your opponent used, and maybe make a contextual indict of that. This note would be tagged on to that article so that everyone using the same garden as you would instantly have that indict visible as well. Your research would be “cutting for” every part of the topic at once, since you wouldn’t be researching files with a narrow topic but reading good articles overall and tagging paragraphs and sentences that might be relevant to this or that in the future. Much like online social bookmaking, multiple users could tag part of an article and you might be suggested the most popular tags or related article snippets. You could browse forward to what others have suggested you read and tag on that topic, as well as generally popular articles in that area. This system would enable you to research many, many times fasters than in today’s system, and you would be able to find relevant snippets in online articles for responses immediately after hearing their argument; no longer would research and argumentation phases be split.

This system would be designed to aid you in organizing your response; and it would also reward closer listening to their argument. The closer you listen, the more specific the response snippets can be – you might have less of the paragraph highlighted if their argument was a shortened version, for example. Debate rounds would look like the concept of debate was imagined in the original sense, and the technology would work only in the background to assist you in the argumentation and response, but without creating new needs to be met and without changing the way you approach listening and responding. You wouldn’t listen to a speech as “frontlines” or “offcase” but as keywords of the main argument their source is making. The strategism of debate has compartamentalized arguments into positions, so the focus now is more on refuting the position as a whole as opposed to the specific nuances of the argument. This is in part because the files are static and organized into responses before the round and before listening to the different arguments of that position. If a team emphasizes more on a particular argumentative point of a position, with the new system that would represent a larger argument bubble and have more response snippets and more highlighted versions of snippets of that webpage (since the entirety of the source is stored locally) associated to it.

Obviously all this would be done on a computer, but there’d be just the one window open where you are flowing – and at the same time, you are picking the best out of what’s displayed as a likely response. The responses you find or make on the spot would be added to your root, and the ones that you extend, go for, or win on would be given more chance of showing up again. This mimics how if you win on an argument, you’re more likely to repeat it. In essence, all the gathered snippets of knowledge from web pages, databases, articles and books would be stored right behind your flow and show up when needed – this imitates the way the mind stores all the knowledge you’ve amassed on a topic and makes mental associations when you hear a related argument. This close parallelism means the needs created by citing authoritative sources to support your argument is less likely to create additional needs, norms, or practices that for policy debaters get in the way or alter the idea of debate as thought of by most people. This concept would also have the ancillary benefit of creating a more logically-fluent storage and browsing model for information, and maybe influencing future generations to make other things – like internet websites, newspapers, and books – less separated into different files, or “walled-in,” and instead more dynamically oriented.

Bracewell & Giuliani partner Scott H. Segal dropped some weighty material during last Sunday’s closing session of the National Debate Development Conference (NDCC) held at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Segal, former Emory debater and now one of the Beltway’s top “Hired Guns” cued conferees’ attention to the “Speech or Debate” clause of the U.S. Constitution:

Article I, Section 6: “The Senators and Representatives […] shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.”

Segal announced plans for the NDCC alumni networking working group to lead an effort aiming to establish a “Speech and Debate Caucus” in the U.S. Congress, beginning first with surveys of members, proceeding to formal enactment of the caucus. This represents an exciting development for American academic debate communities, something that would give us a formal political presence in the nation’s leading deliberative body. What exactly might this mean? Segal hinted at the possibility that a Speech and Debate Caucus would be positioned to advocate for Urban Debate League funding, and press to restore the federal government research assistance program, where in previous years the Government Printing Office would publish a detailed sourcebook on that year’s high school and college debate topics.

But this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Segal also referenced an important U.S. Supreme Court case, Gravel v. United States (408 U.S. 606, 1972). Here, the Court broadened the scope of the Speech or Debate Clause by extending its coverage to legislative aides (not just members of Congress):

PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Defendant senator filed motions to quash subpoenas in a grand jury criminal investigation, asserting that requiring witnesses to testify violated his privilege under the Speech or Debate Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, ß 6, cl. 1. The United States Court of Appeals for the First District affirmed the district court’s denial of the motions but modified the protective order. Plaintiff United States appealed.

OVERVIEW: The U.S. petitioned for certiorari challenging the ruling that aides and other persons could not be questioned with respect to legislative acts and that an aide to a member of Congress had a common-law privilege not to testify before a grand jury with respect to private publication of materials introduced into a subcommittee record. The senator also petitioned for certiorari seeking reversal of the court of appeals’ decision insofar as it held private publication unprotected by the Speech or Debate Clause and asserting that the protective order of the court of appeals too narrowly protected against inquiries that a grand jury could direct to third parties. The Court held that the Speech or Debate Clause applied not only to a member but also to his aides insofar as the conduct of the latter was a protected legislative act if performed by the member himself, but did not protect illegal conduct. The Court noted that the courts had extended the privilege to matters beyond pure speech or debate in either house, but only when necessary to prevent indirect impairment of such deliberations. The Court vacated the court of appeals’ judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings.

OUTCOME: The Court vacated the court of appeals’ judgment and remanded the matter to the court of appeals for revision of the protective order in accordance with the Court’s opinion.

Consider some implications of the “indirect impairment” doctrine established here. Does this doctrine mean that any person or organization taking actions that indirectly impair speech or debate in the U.S. Congress are potentially violating the U.S. Constitution? How far would this extend? What forms of injunctive relief might be available? Such questions are certainly ripe for research and reflection. While these are fascinating abstract issues, a more concrete aspect of the issue involves a resolution adopted later in the day at the NDDC conference:

The NDDC endorses the establishment of a U.S. Congressional Speech and Debate caucus and encourages that caucus to foster debate research and scholarship, including the publication of a CRS topic area packet, and support of a participatory design process oriented toward refinement and development of an open source digital debate archive.

This resolution reflects NDDC conferees’ sense that a digital debate archive (facilitating a transition to paperless debate and generation of “authority 3.0″ metrics) should be built with open source code, using a participatory design process. These objectives may conflict with other plans soon to be unveiled, as rumors circulated during the NDDC conference that a commercial entity may be on the brink of releasing proprietary software designed to deliver archive functionality to academic debate communities. It is likely that such a commercial venture would feature “Big Design Up Front” development, conforming to the “Waterfall model” of software engineering.

It is perhaps even the case that patent protections held by the corporation commercially marketing digital debate archive software could establish a legal basis for exclusivity, potentially blocking development of the participatory design process called for in the NDCC resolution. To date, commercial debate ventures utilizing electronic archiving (e.g. Planet Debate, Evazon) have not advanced aggressive exclusivity claims to quash open source efforts that might infringe on its patents. But this day may be coming soon, especially if a new profit-driven commercial entity enters the playing field. Members of the academic debate community would do well to start deliberations regarding this contingency, which would likely shape the trajectory of speech and debate in contexts far beyond the U.S. Congress for years to come.

[Cross-posted on eDebate]

These questions about publicity and publication have received extended treatment recently on debate lists and discussion boards, with conversation sparked by specific events. On the high school level, controversy swirled in the wake of revelations that a high school coach apparently published a topic-relevant article using a pseudonym with fictitious credentials (Marburry, 2009). Then two Center for Strategic and International Studies analysts (CSIS JY, 2009, 8) successfully persuaded college debaters and forensics specialists to select nuclear weapons policy as the 2009-2010 intercollegiate policy debate topic area, in part by claiming, “there will be a demand for your expertise in the policy analysis community.”

Roughly speaking, the act of publishing entails preparing material for public uptake, and then announcing the event to facilitate circulation. For many years, this process was structured largely as an economic transaction between authors and printing press owners, with editors often serving as gatekeepers who would vet and filter material. Readers relied on markers of professionalism (quality of print and ink, circulation, reputation of editors) to judge the relative credibility of publications. In the academy, referees employed similar metrics to assess a given writer’s degree of scholarly authority, metrics that were rooted in principles of publication scarcity and exclusivity – that a scholar’s caliber was in part demonstrated by his or her ability to persuade editors to publish their work.

Acceleration of Internet communication and the advent of digital online publication destabilized these arrangements fundamentally. Publication, previously a one-to-many transaction, has become a many-to-many enterprise unfolding across a complex latticework of internetworked digital nodes. Now weblogs, e-books, online journals, and print-on-demand book production and delivery systems make it possible for a whole new population of prospective authors to publish material in what Michael Jensen (2008), National Academy of Sciences Director of Strategic Web Communications, calls an “era of content democracy and abundance.”

In content abundance, the key challenge for readers and referees has less to do with finding scarce information, and more to do with sorting wheat from the proverbial chaff (the ever-burgeoning surplus of digital material available online). The pressing nature of this information-overload challenge has spurred invention of what Jensen (2007) calls “new metrics of scholarly authority” – essentially, new ways of measuring the credibility and gravitas of knowledge producers in a digital world of content abundance.

For Jensen, traditional “authority 1.0″ metrics, such as book reviews, peer-reviewed journal publications, and journal “impact factors,” are gradually being supplanted in popular culture by “authority 2.0″ metrics such as Google page ranks, blog post trackbacks, and diggs. Jensen’s point is not that these new metrics of scholarly authority are necessarily superior to the old measurement tools, or that they are especially reliable or appropriate for assessing any given author’s credibility (especially in an academic context). His point is that they are developing very fast, and becoming more widespread as markers of intellectual gravitas:

Scholarly authority, the nuanced, deep, perspective-laden authority we hold dear, is under threat by the easily-computable metrics of popularity, famousness, and binary votes, which are amplified by the nature of abundance-jaded audiences. (Jensen, 2008, 25)

While Jensen (2008, 25) sees this current trend from an era to content scarcity to an era of content abundance as a “revolutionary shift,” a “cultural U-turn so extreme it’s hard to comprehend,” he also eschews determinism by stipulating that this “is a transformation we can influence.” One key avenue of influence entails invention and refinement of what Jensen calls “authority 3.0″ metrics – sophisticated instruments that track and measure knowledge creation and dissemination in ways that blend traditional “authority 1.0″ principles such as peer review with newfangled digital tools like Reference Finder (a National Academies Press “fuzzy matching” search tool) and Microsoft’s Photosynth.

How does this relate to the world of policy debate? Certainly the new metrics present tools for debaters to measure the credibility of online publications, a task that is becoming increasingly salient as digital material increasingly finds its way into contest rounds (see e.g. Alderete, 2009; Phillips, 2009). But there are also other connections. Jensen’s brother was a successful high school debater under Randy McCutcheon at East High School in Lincoln, Nebraska, so Jensen knows all about inherency, index cards and spewdown delivery. And in the debate community’s early efforts at collaborative online knowledge production (such as DebateResults, Planet Debate, Cross-x.com and caselist wikis), Jensen sees seeds of new metrics of scholarly authority.

Consider what takes place in a debate tournament contest round, one held under today’s conditions of digitally networked transparency. Debaters present their research on both sides of a given topic, citing evidence to support their claims. Those claims (and increasingly, the precise citations or exact performative elements supporting them) are often transcribed and then uploaded to a publicly available digital archive. The yield is a remarkably intricate and detailed map of a whole set of interwoven policy controversies falling under the rubric of yearlong national policy debate resolution. Who cares about this? Of course debaters and forensics specialists preparing for the next tournament take interest, as the map provides a navigational tool that leverages preparation for future contests. But recall the CSIS JY (2009) pitch to college debaters and forensics specialists researching nuclear weapons policy: “There will be a demand for your expertise in the policy analysis community.” Let us reflect on how this demand could manifest, and how intercollegiate debate might meet it halfway.

* Professional training. On a most basic level, the CSIS JY “public merits” case for the nuclear weapons policy topic area is colored by the legacy of William Taylor, former vice president and now senior adviser at CSIS. Taylor created a fellowship program that brought recently graduated intercollegiate debaters to Washington, D.C. for work at his highly influential security think tank. Since 1997, a host of former debaters have utilized their debate research skills in applied policy analysis for CSIS, often on nuclear issues. Meanwhile, other former debaters have ascended to prominent posts in academia, where they often mentor scholars on nuclear policy. In this respect, debate training on nuclear policy today might result in career advancement in a research field tomorrow, where there is “demand” for the unique type of skill-set honed in the crucible of debate competition. These types of opportunities could be cultivated further by through informal recruitment channels, information exchange, and perhaps development of additional fellowship programs modeled on the CSIS Taylor initiative.

* Digital debate archive (DDA) as a public research resource. With refinement (perhaps through incorporation of Django, GeNIe and SMILE web tools), online caselist wikis could be transformed into publicly accessible databases designed to provide policy-makers, journalists, and others resources for interactive study of the nuclear weapons policy controversy. Let’s say a reporter for the Global Security Newswire is following the START arms control beat. She could visit the DDA and not only pull up hundreds of the contest rounds where arms control was debated; she could click through to find out how certain teams deployed similar arguments, which citations were getting the most play, which sources were cited most frequently by winning teams, and which citations on arms control were new at the last tournament. Such post-mortem analysis of the debate process could enable non-debaters to “replay the chess match” that took place at unintelligible speed during a given contest round (Jensen, 2009; see also Woods, et al., 2006).

* Authority 3.0 metrics. The marriage of a DDA with Jon Bruschke’s ingenious DebateResults online resource could pave the way for a host of new statistical measures with great salience for a wide array of audiences. Internally, the debate community could benefit from development of a new set of measures and corresponding rewards associated with research outcomes. Who are the most productive individual researchers in the nation? The most original? Which debater or forensics specialist has the greatest “research impact factor” (a possible metric measuring the persons whose arguments tend to be picked up and replicated most by others in contest round competition). A system for tracking and publishing answers to these questions could open up a new symbolic reward economy, with potential to counter the drift toward sportification entailed in strict tournament-outcome oriented reward structure. The same system could be used to track frequency and mode of source citations, yielding statistics that could answer such questions as: Which experts on nuclear weapons policy are cited most frequently in contest rounds? Which experts are cited most broadly (on a wide range of sub-topics)? When a given expert is sided by one side, who are the experts most likely to be cited by the opposing side? Scholars are increasingly using similar data to document their research impact during professional reviews (see Meho, 2007). Since the intercollegiate policy debate is driven by an intellectual community committed to the rigorous standards of evidence analysis and argument testing, a strong case could be made that citation in that community is more meaningful than an website hit indicating that a scholar’s work product was viewed by an anonymous person browsing the Internet (this is a good example of the difference between a 3.0 and 2.0 scholarly metric).

* Publication of policy analysis. One exemplar of this mode of engagement comes from the 1992-1993 intercollegiate policy debate season, when the University of Texas extended its advocacy of a Flood Action Plan affirmative case beyond the contest round grid:

The skills honed during preparation for and participation in academic debate can be utilized as powerful tools in this regard. Using sophisticated research, critical thinking, and concise argument presentation, argumentation scholars can become formidable actors in the public realm, advocating on behalf of a particular issue, agenda, or viewpoint. For competitive academic debaters, this sort of advocacy can become an important extension of a long research project culminating in a strong personal judgment regarding a given policy issue and a concrete plan to intervene politically in pursuit of those beliefs. For example, on the 1992-93 intercollegiate policy debate topic dealing with U.S. development assistance policy, the University of Texas team ran an extraordinarily successful affirmative case that called for the United States to terminate its support for the Flood Action Plan, a disaster-management program proposed to equip the people of Bangladesh to deal with the consequences of flooding. During the course of their research, Texas debaters developed close working links with the International Rivers Network, a Berkeley-based social movement devoted to stopping the Flood Action Plan. These links not only created a fruitful research channel of primary information to the Texas team; they helped Texas debaters organize sympathetic members of the debate community to support efforts by the International Rivers Network to block the Flood Action Plan. The University of Texas team capped off an extraordinary year of contest round success arguing for a ban on the Flood Action Plan with an activist project in which team members supplemented contest round advocacy with other modes of political organizing. Specifically, Texas debaters circulated a petition calling for suspension of the Flood Action Plan, organized channels of debater input to ‘pressure points’ such as the World Bank and U.S. Congress, and solicited capital donations for the International Rivers Network. In a letter circulated publicly to multiple audiences inside and outside the debate community, Texas assistant coach Ryan Goodman linked the arguments of the debate community to wider public audiences by explaining the enormous competitive success of the ban Flood Action Plan affirmative on the intercollegiate tournament circuit. The debate activity, Goodman wrote, ‘brings a unique aspect to the marketplace of ideas. Ideas most often gain success not through politics, the persons who support them, or through forcing out other voices through sheer economic power, but rather on their own merit’ (1993). To emphasize the point that this competitive success should be treated as an important factor in public policy-making, Goodman compared the level of rigor and intensity of debate research and preparation over the course of a year to the work involved in completion of masters’ thesis. (Mitchell, 1998)

Regarding the latter engagement mode, publication of policy analysis, it is illuminating to compare the 1992-1993 Texas Flood Action Plan initiative with Justin Skarb’s recent publication of debate-related research on solar-powered satellites with Space Review. While the work products stemming from both projects evince a level of polish and detail that is de rigueur for advocates trained in the art of policy debate, there are significant differences. One significant difference concerns representation of authorship status to external audiences, with the Texas project backed by the actual identities of the debaters and forensics specialists who worked on the development assistance topic, and the Skarb piece carrying the pseudonym “John Marburry” (replete with fictitious qualifications). Although use of pen names by authors is uncommon, it is sometimes justified under special circumstances, and even celebrated in fantastic cases. However, in these exceptional instances (e.g. former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer’s publication of a book by Brassey’s as “anonymous”), usually readers gain confidence that the editor knows the author’s real identity, and sanctions use of a pen name for a justified reason. As Space Review editor Jeff Foust’s account attests, this did not appear to be the case in the Skarb affair:

“I added the note crediting Skarb the same day the article was originally published (April 27), after getting a request to do so from ‘Marburry’ (he said that the omission was an oversight because ‘neither of them’ were sure the article would even be published, and that if it was not possible to do so it was fine with him.)  At the time I had no reason to believe that Marburry was not who he said he was, or that he was the same person as Skarb.  I am waiting to hear back from Marburry/Skarb regarding this situation.” (Foust, 2009)

A second level of distinction is that the Texas project transparently links contest round research with public advocacy, drawing explicitly upon the academic debate experience to ground public claims regarding undesirability of the Flood Action Plan. In contrast, the Skarb piece is opaque with respect to its origin as a work product flowing from debate research on the 2008-2009 interscholastic alternative energy topic. The result of such opacity is a missed opportunity for Skarb to highlight the methodology of debate as constitutive of his work product, an aspect that CSIS JY suggests may be especially appealing for external audiences.

To more fully unpack this final point, it may be useful to revisit David Zarefsky’s (1972, 1979) theory of academic debate as hypothesis testing. During the heyday of policy debate’s “paradigm wars,” hypothesis testing had its share of adherents, some in the judging ranks who applied the paradigm as a tool for adjudication of individual contest rounds, and others in the debating ranks, who used the paradigm to justify certain argumentative strategies (e.g. multiple, conditional and contradictory negative counterplans).

Lost in this process of reduction was Zarefsky’s vision of academic debate as a vehicle to transport the theory and practice of argumentation to wider society (see e.g. Sillars & Zarefsky, 1975; Zarefsky, 1980). Hypothesis testing, in this wider frame, was a construct for establishing the gravitas and authority of forensics specialists in conversations about the nature of argumentation beyond the contest round setting. Here, the analogy linking debate to scientific hypothesis testing was not designed to show how debate itself was a scientific process, but rather to alert external audiences to the fact that academic debate, while deviating significantly from established patterns of scientific inquiry, features its own set of rigorous procedures for the testing of argumentative hypothesis. Skarb missed a chance to leverage his claims regarding solar power satellite policy by making a similar point, an oversight that future attempts of a similar sort might do well to bear in mind.

Gordon R. Mitchell is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the William Pitt Debating Union at the University of Pittsburgh.  This article is a guest contribution to The 3NR.

REFERENCES

Alderete, T. (2009). Just musings and questions. Standards for Evidence thread. Cross-X.com website. May 13. http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=992035&highlight=alderete+skarb&page=4

CSIS JY. (2009). Nuclear policy topic paper — draft. April 23. Cross Examination Debate Association website. Online at http://topic.cedadebate.org/?q=node/11.

Foust, J. (2009). Personal correspondence with the author. May 14.

Jensen, M. (2007). The new metrics of scholarly authority. Chronicle of Higher Education, June 15. Online at: http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm.

Jensen, M. (2008). Scholarly authority in the age of abundance: Retaining relevance within the new landscape. Keynote address at the JSTOR Annual Participating Publisher’s Conference. May 13. Online at: http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/jstor.htm.

Jensen, M. (2009). Personal correspondence with the author. February 27.

Marburry, J. (2009). Space-based solar power: right here, right now? Space Review, April 27. Online at: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1359/1.

Meho, L.I. (2007). The rise and rise of citation analysis. Physics World, January, 32-36.

Mitchell, G.R. (1998). Pedagogical possibilities for argumentative agency in academic debate. Argumentation & Advocacy, 35, 41-60.

Phillips, S. (2009). SPS article controversy. The 3NR: A Collaborative Blog about High School Policy Debate. May 11. Online at: http://www.the3nr.com/2009/05/11/sps-article-controversy/

Sillars, M.O. & D. Zarefsky. (1975). Future goals and roles of forensics. In J.H. McBath (Ed.), Forensics as communication: The argumentative perspective (pp. 83-93). Skokie, Illinois: National Textbook Company.

Woods, C., Brigham, M., Konishi, T., Heavner, B. Rief, J., Saindon, B., & Mitchell, G.R. (2006). Deliberating debate’s digital futures. Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, 27, 81-105.

Zarefsky, D. (1972). A reformulation of the concept of presumption. Paper presented at the Central States Speech Association Convention. April 7. Chicago, Illinois.

Zarefsky, D. (1979). Argument as hypothesis-testing. In David A. Thomas (Ed.), Advanced debate: Readings in theory, practice and teaching (pp. 427-437). Skokie, Illinois: National Textbook Company.

Zarefsky, D. (1980). Argumentation and forensics. In J. Rhodes & S. Newell (Eds.), Proceedings of the summer conference on argumentation (pp. 20-25). Annandale, Virginia: Speech Communication Association.

[cross-posted on eDebate and Cross-x.com]