So-called “kritiks” are all the rage in some Lincoln-Douglas circles these days. Many people seem confident in labeling this or that argument a kritik, and many also seem eager to embrace or to banish kritiks in general. I do not have a view about the goodness or badness of kritiks as such because I do not know what they are. Strikingly absent from much of the written discussion of kritiks is a definition of the concept.

I shall argue for the following conclusion: Either a kritik is strategically uninteresting or a kritik is irrelevant. For simplicity’s sake, I shall assume kritiks are deployed exclusively in the first negative speech, but nothing important hangs on this assumption; at the cost of a few more words my argument could be revised to encompass kritiks introduced in any LD speech. If you believe that kritiks are both interesting and relevant, perhaps my little argument will irritate you into giving a usefully clear definition of “kritik” and showing how the defined concept eludes my dilemma. Here, then, is the argument, with commentary following each bold-faced premise:

Premise 1: EITHER (a) a kritik (i) makes an argument concluding that the resolution is false, (ii) attacks the logical validity of an affirmative constructive argument, (iii) attacks the truth of a premise of an affirmative constructive argument, or (iv) attacks the relevance of the conclusion of an affirmative constructive argument; OR (b) a kritik does none of (i)-(iv). This unwieldy premise is really just a truism: it says that either a kritik does at least one of four things or it does none of those things. So anyone should be able to grant Premise 1 even without knowing what the four things are. But it may help readers to digest subsequent premises if I say a bit about what it would mean for an argument (including a kritik) to do each of (i)-(iv). An argument that did (i) would simply be a constructive argument—an independent reason to think the resolution was true or (for our purposes) false. An argument that did (ii) would attack an opponent’s constructive argument by claiming that its conclusion did not follow logically from its premises. An argument that did (iii) would challenge the soundness of an opponent’s argument by claiming that the falsehood of one or another premise undermined our confidence in the truth of the conclusion. And an argument that did (iv) would claim that the conclusion of an opponent’s argument differed from the assigned resolution and so was irrelevant to the debate. These are four possible things a kritik might do, and my interest in these four possible roles will become clearer below. But for now it is important to stress again that this first premise is really just a tautology. It does not say anything definitive about what a kritik does; rather, it says of each kritik that either that kritik does one of the four listed things or it does not. The premise is logically akin to the claim that either you are seated now or you are not—whatever you are doing now, this claim is true of you.

Premise 2: If (a), then a kritik is strategically uninteresting. Of course, “(a)” here refers to the first horn of the dilemma expressed in Premise 1. This premise claims that if a kritik is just a way of doing any of (i)-(iv), then the kritik is strategically uninteresting. This is because (i)-(iv) are all common, well-established things to do in a negative constructive speech. The typical NC combines constructive arguments against the resolution [(i)] with attacks on the affirmative’s constructive arguments [(ii)-(iv)]. There is nothing strategically novel about any of these approaches. I have qualified the kind of uninterestingness at issue as strategic in recognition of the fact that the content of this or that kritik may be very interesting, as may the content of this or that non-kritik.

Premise 3: If (b), then a kritik is irrelevant. The LD negative must attack the affirmative’s arguments for accepting the resolution as true and provide independent arguments for rejecting the resolution as false. If a kritik does none of (i)-(iv), it does neither of these things and so accomplishes nothing relevant to the negative’s burden. This claim will look plausible only if (i)-(iv) really exhaust the ways of satisfying the negative’s burden. (i) certainly exhausts the ways of satisfying the constructive part of the negative’s burden—to provide independent arguments that the resolution is false—because (i) just is providing independent arguments that the resolution is false. The only real question is whether (ii)-(iv) exhaust the ways of satisfying the other part of the negative’s burden— to attack the affirmative’s arguments for the resolution’s truth. And I believe that (ii)-(iv) do exhaust the ways of refuting a constructive argument. One may attack the argument’s validity, the argument’s soundness, or the relevance of the argument’s conclusion. But if one grants that an argument is logically valid, has no false premises, and establishes the relevant conclusion, then one has granted the argument. If anyone can find a way to attack an argument while granting these three things—i.e., without doing any of (ii)-(iv)— then I might have to revise Premises 1-3, but such revisions would probably not threaten my conclusion.

Conclusion: So either a kritik is strategically uninteresting or a kritik is irrelevant. This conclusion follows from Premises 1-3 via the classical argument form constructive dilemma. Where P, Q, R, and S stand for any propositions, a constructive dilemma is any argument that satisfies this schema: (1) Either P or Q. (2) If P, then R. (3) If Q, then S. (4) So either R or S. My argument about kritiks obviously satisfies this schema and so is valid. If you accept Premises 1-3, you are also committed to the conclusion. Since Premise 1 is a truism, if you reject the conclusion, you must reject either Premise 2 or 3. This completes my argument about kritiks. If you accept the argument, you may come to think, as I do, that calling an argument a “kritik” says nothing very interesting about it. My best guess is that more often than not, the language of kritik serves an expressive function, to indicate the speaker’s enthusiasm or contempt for a particular argument. If this is right, the kritik label reveals more about the psychology of the person applying it than it does about the argument to which it is applied. And this, in turn, means that no one single all- purpose reaction is appropriate to arguments labelled kritiks, whether that reaction be admiration, credulity, fear, scorn, or outrage. Whatever else they are, kritiks are arguments, and they can be criticized in the same way other arguments can be criticized: as invalid, unsound, or irrelevant. Here as elsewhere, there is no substitute for thinking through the merits and demerits of each argument on its own terms.

(Jason Baldwin (University of Notre Dame), an accomplished debater and teacher, writes frequently about LD for the Rostrum.)