We stan an endless series. Should I even still number these?

The stock issues of policy debate are one of the finest rubric/hermeneutic educational tools ever created. It really has incredible power for helping people invent reasons, one of the most difficult things to do rhetorically particularly if you don’t think critical thought, judgement, or thinking are forms of mediation.

The stock issues are made fun of these days and I doubt they are even taught to competitive debaters anymore. Instead, we get this weird idea that policy debate is about accusation – “your language indicates you have committed a crime” is the format of most debating arguments these days. The priority of finding “how they link” is the focus of most tournament-debate pedagogy, which is little more than trying to find an accusation that sticks to their speeches.

Tabling the debate over the value of a pedagogy of binary opposition (not sure what side I’d be on there to be honest), we can contrast a stock issues approach to thinking about composing a debate by thinking of it as a series of questions that are not answered, in fact, we cannot know the answer to those questions. We can only phrase the questions the best way we know how in order to figure out what we want to say about the topic. Ergo, we then figure out what the topic means, what it is about, and how to know the resolution/motion best. We do have an image for the stock issues approach:

The stock issues approach is a hermeneutic precisely because it generates mastery over knowledge. It generates an ordering principle from which the speaker can generate what is known about the opponent’s case, the topic, the evidence, etc. This is the rhetorical power of the stock issues. It opens up a number of unanswered questions about the resolution or the opposition and encourages students to seek answers. Any evidence they find will not be custom-made for the issue they face, so some alteration will have to happen. This is where mastery is derived; they have to figure out how to order the knowledge they have to where everything will pop into line, fall into place so others will see it. As you have probably already noticed, this is the mirror-image to the way WUDC/Worlds debating works, where one demonstrates familiarity with the world and the ‘obvious’ ways a principle masters the issue at hand, but there are no revolutionary calls for the re-ordering of that debated world.

The kritik – perhaps the most popular argument in policy debate (if you don’t consider it a malformed disadvantage) has this same structure as well. There are questions we can ask about the opposition’s discourse that we can never know the reasons for, but we can know the results of. We can show how what they say indicates that they have been mastered by others.

I think that the stock issues are an essential way to teach for my upcoming course because they provide students a way to master any controversy involving a policy choice, and generate important questions (doubts) about its relationship to other forms of information/evidence. The stock issue that still hangs around in the morass of contemporary policy debate is “sovlency” which is the most telling of the five – we can say that all issues dissolve into whether or not we get desirable results, desirable outcomes from the policy, the paradigm formerly known as “policy systems,” now “policy maker.” This stock issue can serve as metonymy for debate as a whole – “Solvent-cy” perhaps, as all discourse becomes understandable and teleological when articulated ‘substantively’ as the suspension of particles in a fluid.