American policy debate fundamentalists have found a new phrase to martial in their panicked defense of their practices. I don’t know why they feel so threatened; policy debate can easily co-exist with many different debating styles. But fundamentalism ensures that there is an either/or, a very significant conflict where the stakes are the highest they could be.
Recently I’ve seen a new subtle defense surfacing in the form of the phrase “Evidence-based debate.” This is meant to differentiate policy debate, with its requirement that all arguments are supported by published material that is made available to both sides, from other debate formats that don’t require this. American policy debate fundamentalists are the ones who are circulating this term as a means of distinguishing their practice, or trying to make it superior by creating types of debate that simply do not exist either in theory or practice
There is no form of debating, academic, competitive, or otherwise, that would not be evidence based. Evidence and proof are central elements, required elements, I would say, to any model of debate that is based on reason in persuasion.
The practice of distinguishing debate and evidence-based debate is not a useful one for either production or criticism. Debate without evidence is not debate. The distinguishing feature of debate is the use of arguments that must have some sort of evidence to make the argument work. This evidence must be explained to the audience. If you accept this distinction, you open up a number of non-debate forms of speech to being called debate – such as diatribe, ranting, or just statements made to others for the point of persuasion. It explodes the category of debate to a point where it is no longer heuristically valuable.
If we look closely at policy debate, we find it to be a paradox when it comes to evidence. It is, at the same time, a form that valorizes a level of skepticism that is a destructive level of incredulity while also holding one particular form of evidence as unquestioningly superior to all others. This practice replaces the reasonable audience with a mechanism or procedure that trumps the presence of human beings as the audience. It replaces a human audience with a very clever algorithm for decision making that people just don’t do without a lot of special training.
The second part of the paradox is an incredible, all-in attitude toward published information as being the only and the best qualification for conviction on a claim.
It is the practice of policy debate evidence that gives the most weight to the persuasive defense of policy debate offered by Ed Panetta when he argued that the primary reason to teach policy debate is to train skilled bureaucrats. Policy change, he argued, does not happen at the level of the persuasive speaker anymore. It’s the technical master behind the scenes who can manipulate a field of complex requirements and lots of information who gets things done.
We could say all forms of debate are evidence-debate, but policy debate is evidence-dependent, that is, the artificial and alien concept of evidence forwarded by policy debate fundamentalists creates a culture of skeptic-addicts. The goal of the debate encounter is to valorize published text to the point where it atomizes. CERN in Switzerland is the metaphor for policy debate, the atomization of the category of persuadability into its sub-atomic particles. Instead of a democratic practice, we get a democratic absence, or an absence of any believable substance. The absence of belief.
DIscussion and the value of perspective is also not only diminished through this practice, but it’s also blatantly rejected. Anecdotally, anyone who has had policy debate experience knows the scene of finding the perfect piece of evidence for an argument, sharing it, and stating, “They’ll have nothing to say.” Perfect evidence in the world of American policy debate, creates silence instead of vibrant discussion.
One defense that might be martialed for this fundamentalist phrasing would be that there are anlogs from the professional world – evidence-based practice has been commonly written about in social work, medicine, and many other fields for years. So debate is just catching up to the real-world. There’s debate, and there’s evidence-based debate, which is better.
However the analogy breaks down once you read the work on evidence-based practices. These practices are not meant to be mechanistic, hard-and-fast rules for the use of evidence in these fields. They also do not valorize evidence, reminding practitioners that all evidence must be understood by the situation and the participants. There is no evidence that pierces through the situation, arranging all things in a way that conclusively moves opinion to one side, as evidence is ideologically meant to function in American policy debating.
Such policy debate fundamentalism recalls models of pedagogy from the Zen Buddhist tradition, where students often get stuck halfway to enlightenment on the idea that reality is not what it appears to be. “the pencil laughs at you,” says the half-baked monk. The deep acceptance/high skeptic paradox has taken hold.
This is merely a stopping point on the path to enlightenment. Outside of Buddhism, we could say that this is a sophomoric attitude. In my field of rhetoric, this is the point where the student frequently says, “Everything is rhetoric! The table is rhetoric! We are rhetoric!” Although an important recognition of the power of rhetoric as a perspective, this is by no means the conclusion that rhetorical studies draws, nor is it close.
The phrase “evidence-based” debating is a panicked, defensive move that doesn’t accept the idea that debating is whatever audiences believe it to be, functioning however we allow it to in those moments. There is no such thing as “debate” per se, but that doesn’t mean that a solid, absolute definition based on some sort of arbitrary rules is needed. Instead, exploration of the notion of debate and how we allow it and disallow it to exist in particular discursive contexts would be a very valuable element to bring into our debate pedagogy. Evidence? How can you prove to be that this is evidence? Or in the words of Stephen Toulmin, “What have you got to go on?”