Kritik Enthymemes (Bob Overing)

I’ve written previously about enthymemes in debate here and here. First theorized by Aristotle, an enthymeme is basically an argument that skips a step, often a step so obvious that the audience doesn’t need any help to connect the dots. For example, “Candidate X will raise taxes on businesses, which will hurt the economy, so don’t vote for X” omits premises like “voters should care about the economy.” But that premise might be obvious enough that it can be safely omitted.

In debate, the enthymemes judges accept change along with the metagame. For instance, “perm do both” wouldn’t have meant much to judges before counterplans were popular in LD, and they may have required additional explanation. Now, “perm do both” is commonplace and generally requires little explanation in the first speech.

Kritiks are now common and judges are familiar enough with the typical literature and moves that much has become enthymematic. One-line arguments including the terms “fiat illusory” and “social death” that five years ago would have required a lot more development now stand for complex, far-reaching arguments.

I judged a debate at Yale involving a kritik that was a mix of a traditional cap K and Deleuze, and the neg extended several cards in the 2NR to make a “social death” claim from which the neg spun out implications like ‘the aff can’t solve’ and ‘progress is impossible.’ Of course, I’m familiar with this style of argument, first popularized with afropessimism, then queer pessimism, and now you can probably have any type of pessimism you want. The problem in this debate—which may or may not be true of the other pessimism Ks—is that the arguments for the social death claim simply did not imply that the aff can’t solve and that progress is impossible. But because I know that this is what ‘social death’ now means in debate, and that the negative expected that a dropped ‘social death’ claim entailed these conclusions, am I supposed to just fill in the gaps?

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling the awkwardness of this position. A very similar scenario occurred in semis of the 2015 Loyola, which I briefly blogged about here. Monica Amestoy and I voted on an afropessimism kritik, and John Scoggin sat for the aff. He claimed that the ontology warrants were underspecified. Knowing the literature a lot better than John at the time (I read afropessimism almost every neg round my junior year in college), I already knew the arguments and their implications. The neg won the ontology debate, so pretty much any link turn or case outweighs argument was irrelevant. It’s very possible that I filled in the gaps, but where’s the line? It’s especially tough to decide because the neg gets two speeches in LD, so the debates will inevitably be more abbreviated and late-breaking than those of our cousins in policy.

A third example is a semis round at Berkeley I watched several years ago, where one debater made the argument that ‘conditionality allows the negative to kick the counterplan and his commitment to combatting oppression, like a slavemaster kicks a slave.’ This was the extent of the argument in the 1AR, which all three judges took to be a complete argument and to outweigh the 2NR block, which also impacted to combatting oppression. It is completely enthymematic: it does not explain why conditionality should be a voting issue (neither does much paragraph theory), it does not explain why having multiple neg options means rejecting the need to combat oppression, and it does not explain the significance or utility of the slave analogy. Yet, I can imagine—and I don’t need to because it happened—that many judges would vote on this argument.

The same problem arises to varying degrees with ‘role of the ballot,’ ‘fiat illusory,’ ‘ontology,’ ‘epistemology,’ ‘serial policy failure,’ ‘root cause,’ ‘reps shape reality,’ ‘discourse first,’ ‘cruel optimism,’ etc. When many of these arguments were first pioneered in policy debate, they were extensively justified and every premise was spelled out. Then they became popular and known, and less and less was required to win the argument. In LD, adoption was accelerated because of policy crossovers, use of policy wikis, attending policy camps, etc.

The use of kritik enthymemes causes a variety of problems that don’t arise in other contexts, or at least seem magnified in kritik debates. Two weeks ago, I emphasized three aspects of common non-topical K debates that produce lower quality debates than debates about the topic: (1) recycled evidence, (2) reduced clash, and (3) inaccessible jargon. All three are exacerbated by kritik enthymemes. Acceptance of enthymemes encourages recycled evidence: why cut a new card to justify reps first / pre-fiat impacts when you can spin out all the implications you need from somewhat pithy Smith or Vincent cards? An identity-type debater can say ‘theory makes me jump through hoops’ or ‘policymaking is inaccessible to me,’ and judges will fill in the gaps. Acceptance of the kritik enthymeme reduces creativity and innovation since you can get more mileage out of the existing short card or argument than a new one that might require justifying all the steps.

Kritik enthymemes also reduce clash, especially when they have far-reaching consequences on judge evaluation. For example, if a judge accepts ‘fiat illusory’ or one or two sentences including that term to mean that the affirmative can’t weigh their impacts or the debate should only be about pre-fiat impacts, the negative’s burden is significantly weakened. Of course, there may still be strategic benefit to engaging the affirmative head-on, but acceptance of the enthymeme diminishes the utility of doing so. This example is particularly powerful because ‘fiat illusory’ on its own is essentially meaningless: no one thinks the plan actually passes as a result of voting aff! The implicit steps are absolutely critical to the completion and effect of the argument.

In this way, kritik enthymemes are often strikingly similar old school LD tricks like presumption/permissibility triggers, skepticism triggers, hidden a prioris, hidden NIBs, etc. They are high-impact, low-investment arguments that if dropped, warp the round in often unrecoverable ways. The same objections to the sketchiness of these strategies—clash, reciprocity, ground, etc.—apply to floating PIKs and short kritik framing arguments as well. Kritik framing, as a departure from assumed or traditional framing, should require more explanation, not less.

And as if kritik debates weren’t inaccessible enough, the use of enthymemes turn them into a powerful tool for excluding debaters who aren’t in the know. When a judge understands the full implications of one of these abbreviated arguments and the opponent doesn’t, there is a huge accessibility problem. It’s a bit like running theory on a novice, a gotcha tactic that exploits asymmetries in knowledge at the expense of debate, except in the kritik context, the missing steps are even more opaque. It might take three minutes of CX for an unfamiliar affirmative to understand the basic gist of an afropessimism kritik’s ontology argument, and even then, they’re at a massive disadvantage. Perhaps ironically, many of the staunchest defenders of kritiks—coaches, debaters, and camp directors—stress their benefits to accessibility and inclusion, but the effect (when argued enthymematically) is often the opposite.[1]

This puts the judge in an impossible position. It seems unfair to punish a debater who doesn’t know the relevant literature or terminology sufficiently to answer the enthymeme. It also seems unfair to punish a debater who expects—rightly so—that the judge knows the enthymeme, so in their eyes, they’ve completed the argument.

An objection at this point might be that debate is insular and exclusive by its very nature, which I agree with, but that doesn’t get us from is to ought. A debater who learns the tricks of the trade and reads up on kritik literature should be credited for doing so, but there’s a fuzzy line between demonstrating kritik knowledge and skill on the one hand and exploiting an opponent’s ignorance of the inside baseball of LD debate.

There are some additional downsides to kritik enthymemes I haven’t mentioned. The first is the obvious one – they enable a lack of explanation, which is a core debate skill. But that’s true of most enthymemes in debate. More specific to kritiks: they make judge prefs matter more than ever. I have spent more time looking at prefs in the past three seasons than I did in my first three or four seasons coaching because if I have a debater who reads Baudrillard, we get a massive edge from preffing judges who know Baudrillard; and vice versa. This is unique to kritik debate because of its inherent abstraction, complexity, and density of the literature. If we’re a topical policy team, it’s definitely in our advantage to have a judge who knows about the topic, but that advantage is minuscule compared to the Deleuze or afropessimism debater who has an in-the-know judge in the back.

Every advantage to tabula rasa judging – the view that the judge should generally be an impartial umpire – is a disadvantage to increasing the importance of judge prefs. It’s unfair to the competitors who expect impartial adjudication. It increases variance in outcomes, so lower skilled debaters are more likely to beat higher skilled debaters. It makes tabroom procedures like weighting mutuality vs. high preference and other tabulation policy choices much more important.

What’s the solution? Judges need to hold the line. The reasonableness of the assumed or implied premise should dictate what the judge accepts as true or false. It is reasonable for judges to assume basic facts about the world and even supply definitions of jargon, such as when judges fill in the meaning of an RVI or conditionality (not the warrant). While the definition of “RVI” makes clear the argument’s implications, the definition of many kritik terms does not. It is not reasonable for judges to assume far-reaching implications from kritik arguments or assume warrants based on a their own understanding of the literature.  If a debater cannot explain their recycled Deleuze or Wilderson evidence in CX, they shouldn’t get the benefit of your knowledge of the argument. If they can’t explain it in rebuttals sufficiently, they shouldn’t get the benefit of simply having read the card. Judges need to make a more concerted effort to be what they purport to be—impartial adjudicators—and assume no background knowledge of the arguments. Anything else is interventionist.

This is true of kritik, theory, policy, and moral philosophy debates. Too many and too strong assumptions are inimical to fair judging. I’m starting to think the same conclusion is especially true in the context of theory spikes about aff skew (the missing premises should not be assumed). In sum, judges shouldn’t fill the gaps for arguments from other domains either, but they should be especially wary of doing so when the costs to innovation, clash, accessibility, and impartiality are as high as they seem in kritik debates.

End Notes

[1] For this point, I am indebted to a pseudonymous commenter “Harvey Birdman” on another blog, who has since deleted the comment. Birdman put it bluntly: “Students from wealthy prep schools, surrounded by phalanxes of highly experienced and connected coaches, regularly advance and win major tournaments…with non-topical arguments decrying some form of privilege or inequity.…Critical arguments are weapons…obscure, jargon-laden and intimidating…[B]eating them requires tremendous knowledge of the “inside baseball” culture of circuit debate…” If anyone is interested in the full text of the comment, contact me.