[Editor's Note: The first three sections of this article appeared in last month's Rostrum, and readers should consult those sections for explanations of arguments and terminology mentioned below. The article is the second of three on the use of logic in LD. The first article, in October, introduced basic logical theory; the current article applies logic to aspects of casing; and the third article, in January, will apply logic to cross-examination and rebuttal strategy.]

IV. Value Premise(s)
In many regions, LD cases are expected to begin with a statement of a "value premise" and "criterion." Each of these items is expressed by a single word or phrase; together, they are supposed to provide standards by which judges should evaluate subsequent arguments. Sometimes the value premise is drawn straight from the resolution, as when the resolution mentions morality or justice. At other times, the value premise is chosen by the debaters as the single most relevant axis of evaluation for a generic "ought" statement. The criterion is typically thought of as a more detailed specification of the content of the value premise. For example, if a debater proposes a value premise of morality, she might go on to propose a criterion of maximizing the balance of pleasure over pain. The point would then be that the resolution is true if the course of action it prescribes is moral, and that that course of action is moral if it maximizes the balance of pleasure over pain. This is only a rough sketch of a very confused and confusing area of LD theory.

I am going to challenge the traditional value premise/criterion model, but I want first to acknowledge its merits. It is the model I was taught and used as a debater. It has served a valuable function by imposing order on cases that might otherwise have been unshapely piles of unrelated points. It can give judges a helpful focus for assessing the relevance of various claims at the end of a round. I have myself written a sympathetic exposition of the model (see the November 1997 Rostrum).

However, the model has many shortcomings. First, it is notoriously hard to say precisely how the value premise is related to the resolution and how the criterion is related to the value premise. Debaters often speak of the value premise as "supporting" the resolution or of the criterion as "fulfilling" the value premise, but it is hard to know just what these descriptions mean.

Second, because value premises and criteria are nouns or noun phrases, it is often unclear how they connect with the claims unique to either side of the resolution. Suppose the resolution is that "The possession of nuclear weapons is immoral." If the affirmative says, "My value premise is morality," what should this lead us to expect from his arguments? Will he be claiming that someone or some action is moral? The resolution would lead us to think the affirmative will be claiming that something is immoral. If so, why is the affirmative's value premise morality? If the affirmative succeeds in proving the possession of nuclear weapons immoral, he won't have proven that any person or action is moral. Instead, he will have shown that a certain action is not moral. So in what sense will anyone have "fulfilled" or "upheld" morality? And who would have done it-the affirmative debater, or the (non)possessors of nuclear weapons?

A third problem with the traditional model is that it does not distinguish between necessary and sufficient conditions for satisfying a value. Suppose the value premise is morality and the criterion is respecting innocent life. Does that mean that if an action is moral, then it respects innocent life? Or does it instead mean that if an action respects innocent life, then it is moral? In the former case, respecting life would be a necessary condition of morality; in the latter, a sufficient condition. The simple terms that compose a traditional value premise and criterion obscure this important logical distinction.

A fourth problem, and perhaps the central problem, with the traditional model is that it separates the value premise and criterion from the contentions, where the substantive arguments are thought to be. Since many debaters are confused about how the value premise and criterion are supposed to function and they have what seem to be self-contained arguments in their contentions, they end up ignoring the value premise and criterion and focusing only on contention arguments. Defenders of the traditional model will say (rightly) that this results from a misunderstanding of the model. However, that misunderstanding is widespread enough that the model is falling out of use among people who find it too unwieldy to apply.

These disadvantages give us reason to search for a better way of organizing LD arguments. To anyone wedded to the traditional model I have been criticizing, it should be a striking fact that moral and political philosophers who write about some of the same issues debated in LD never appeal a value premise or criterion (in the LD sense). Instead, their arguments resemble the formally valid sets of premises and conclusions we have examined above.

The key point to notice is that there are no missing steps in a formally valid argument-there is nothing left that a value premise or criterion could add. The premises of a valid argument are sufficient to prove its conclusion, and if that conclusion is the resolution or its denial, the argument proves enough for LD purposes. I suggest that LD cases be composed of valid deductive arguments with no logically independent value premises or criteria. So the model I am proposing really amounts to the model of deductive argument that philosophers have been using for centuries.

This model avoids the four problems with the traditional value premise/criterion model I outlined above. I will not explain in detail how, but interested readers can examine a valid argument in the light of each problem and see that the problem does not arise for the argument.

Do I suggest abandoning all talk of value premises? No, because many judges are expecting to hear debaters offer value premises and may penalize debaters who do not. (It may also be worth noting that the NFL's official "Lincoln-Douglas Debate Guidelines" state that LDers should establish value premises and values criteria. They go on to define values criteria as "a system upon which to judge values," but they do not say anything very helpful about what that means.) Fortunately, the valid argument model gives us a ready candidate for a revised version of the value premise that is not logically irrelevant to the constructive arguments. Where r is the conclusion of a constructive argument, the value premise will generally be the conditional premise in which r appears as consequent (if the argument employs modus ponens) or in which ~r appears as antecedent (if the argument employs modus tollens). Because our sample argument above employed modus ponens, the value premise would be (2), since this is the premise whose consequent is the conclusion (the resolution) which we are proving.

A major difference between this model and the traditional model is that the value premise is now a complete sentence rather than a noun or noun phrase. This is all to the good, since a premise is, by definition, a sentence or proposition. In fact, it is mysterious how a word or phrase could ever have come to be called a value premise in the first place. While the new value premise avoids the problems with the old model, it can still serve a similar function if it appears near the beginning of a case or argument. It still provides the audience with a standard or goal to use in evaluating the success of the argument. It tells listeners when they will have a sufficient reason to conclude that the resolution is true-namely, when the debater has shown the antecedent of the value premise to be true (or, in the case of a modus tollens argument, the consequent of the value premise to be false).

The fact that this value premise is pulled straight out of a valid argument also calls attention to the fact that it must be explained and defended just like any other premise if the argument is to succeed. Many debaters using the traditional model simply announce a value premise and criterion without really justifying their selection. It is easy to get by with this if the value premise and criterion play no essential role in the structure of one's arguments. But in the new model, constructive arguments will not be convincing unless the value premise is also convincing. This premise will always be a normative premise, and it will typically be the most important and controversial normative premise in an argument. Therefore, the value premise will often merit extensive explanation and support in its own right. Depending on the structure of the argument, it may be appropriate to spend more time arguing in support of one's value premise than in support of any other single premise of one's argument. Establishing this premise will often be the most philosophically challenging task of an LD case. This model makes better sense of the importance many judges place on "the standards debate." These judges want to see debate over conflicting normative premises, and the new model is well suited to promote just such debate.

A case that contains more than one independent argument may have more than one value premise. If separate case arguments require separate value premises, each premise should be stated and defended separately. Many traditionalists will view the possibility of multiple value premises in a single case with suspicion, and I share their concern. A case with multiple value premises may end up sounding incoherent or even inconsistent. I am inclined to think that for most students most of the time, developing arguments under a single value premise is the best strategy. I have found that LD students invariably regard themselves as exceptions to such generalizations; to any students reading this, I can only say, I mean you-you should probably try to construct cases with a single value premise.

Recognizing the rare situations when multiple value premises might be appropriate requires a skilful sensitivity to the particulars of combinations of arguments which I cannot impart through this article. Here is the extent of what I can say in general terms: Multiple value premises are likely to work best in cases which seek to prove that some practice is immoral or not justified. There are many ways for actions to go wrong, so distinct value premises might identify distinct sufficient conditions for an action's immorality or unjustifiability; each independent contention could then prove the action immoral or unjustified by showing it failed to satisfy the requirements stated in one of the various value premises. But, as I say, it is usually safer and clearer to choose contention arguments that work together under a single value premise.

I have proposed a revised understanding of the value premise, but is there any place for a revised version of the criterion in my model? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that value premises of the kind I am recommending often function as criteria: they give judges standards or goals by which to measure an argument's success. In fact, often the new-style value premise will contain a phrase that, by itself, could function as an old-style criterion. For example, in (2) above, the notion of keeping promises, which occurs in the antecedent, might serve as a criterion for morality, which occurs in the conclusion. When the resolution itself mentions a value term (such as "morally obligated" in our example), the complete new-style value premise will contain both the old-style value premise and the old-style criterion.

But when the resolution does not mention a value term, there may be two normative premises, one of which is naturally treated as the value premise and the other of which is naturally treated as the criterion. Suppose, for example, that instead of directly mentioning moral obligation, our resolution said simply that the U.S. ought to mitigate international conflicts. Now what had been a single premise (2) may be split into two separate premises: one which says that if the U.S. is morally obligated to mitigate conflicts, then the U.S. ought to mitigate conflicts, and one which says that if the U.S. promised to mitigate international conflicts, then the U.S. is morally obligated to mitigate international conflicts. The first of these premises might be called the value premise since it proposes moral obligation as the relevant ought-making relationship. And the second might be called the criterion since it proposes promise keeping as a necessary condition of satisfying one's moral obligations.

In situations of the first kind I discuss, where a value term appears in the resolution, I believe proposing a criterion distinct from the value premise would be unnecessary and confusing. The value premise already contains the term which would have been treated as the criterion in the old paradigm, so nothing of substance is lost by simply dropping talk of the criterion. In these cases, the criterion is simply part of the value premise.

However, in situations of the second kind I discuss, where the resolution does not mention a value term (typically using an open-ended "ought" instead), it may be wise to retain a distinct criterion. In these cases, the value premise and criterion will each be a complete conditional premise of the argument. Where r is the conclusion (the resolution or its negation), qgr will be the value premise, and pgq will be the criterion. If this is not immediately clear to you, study the example from the paragraph before last to see how such new-style value premises and criteria might be related. Like so much else in debate, deciding whether to retain a distinct criterion requires careful judgments about particular resolutions and arguments.

Finally, is there a way to present genuine premises as value premises and/or criteria without alienating traditional judges who expect words and phrases rather than sentences? I believe there is. A debater may simply pick the most value-laden word or phrase from her value premise or criterion and state this term as the (old-fashioned) value premise or criterion. She may then follow this word or phrase with a complete statement of the full premise. For example, a debater might say, "My value premise is respecting gender equality. In other words, if pornography disrespects gender equality, then government censorship of sexually explicit materials is justified." This statement should then be followed by an explanation and defense of the premise.

V. Contention Development
The toughest thought-work of case construction is now complete: extensive research has uncovered numerous argument ideas, and the best of these have been formally mapped and analyzed to show exactly which premises are required to sustain the conclusion and also what kinds of support will be needed to sustain the premises. One, two, or at most three of these mapped arguments have been selected for inclusion in the constructive speech itself, and authentic value premises have also been identified. The work that remains to transform these skeletal arguments into a presentable LD case falls largely into the domains of rhetoric and composition-subjects we will not take up here. But the logic-centered model of argument does have a few implications for this final stage of casing which we should notice.

The first implication is one at which I have already hinted: Each contention should be a distinct valid argument concluding in the resolution or its negation. This means that if only one really strong constructive argument emerges from your research and brainstorming, you should expect to have a one-contention case. Some LD traditionalists have a fetish for two- or three-contention cases and will split a single argument into more than one contention if necessary. I cannot see what is gained by this practice, and I have often seen something lost. Students instinctively think of their contentions as free-standing argument units, and when pressed for time, they will sometimes abandon one contention (usually the last of two or three) in order to defend another. In the case of truly independent arguments, this strategy, while not ideal, need not be disastrous. But in the case of a single argument spread out over several contentions, the maneuver is fatal. No one contention in such a case provides a self-contained reason to believe or disbelieve the resolution. If one contention falls, the others are worthless. If that same single argument had been presented as one contention instead of two or three, the student would have been less likely to think of any part of the argument as dispensable.

Of course, the ideal is to present two or three truly independent arguments to affirm or negate the resolution. It is worth spending a lot of time in research and planning to try to discover two or three such arguments. But sometimes there really is only one excellent constructive argument, and to include another one or two mediocre arguments in the case would dilute the power of the strong argument. Since different arguments will appeal to different people, you should run your contention candidates by a variety of peers and adults (including plenty from outside debate) before you narrow your case to a single argument. It will often be worth including a second or third argument which you personally find uninspiring if other people find it persuasive.

The second implication of logic-centered argumentation for case writing is that each premise of a valid argument should be explicitly stated and defended. The key normative premises may be stated and defended as value premises before the contentions proper begin. But each premise should find its way into the case somewhere.

A premise need not be stated exactly as it appears in the argument map. To ensure formal validity, the argument map forced you to state most premises as if-then conditionals. Most such conditionals can be phrased more naturally in your case as non-conditionals. For example, consider this premise of our specimen argument above:

(1'') If the U.S. signed Treaty T, then the U.S. promised to "use all reasonable means, diplomatic and military, to restore peace to war-torn regions of the world."

No one would really talk like this in a persuasive speech. You could communicate the same point of the conditional (1'') with this non-conditional sentence:

By signing Treaty T, our nation promised to abide by all of its provisions, including the requirement that we, quote, "use all reasonable means, diplomatic and military, to restore peace to war-torn regions of the world."

Anytime you rephrase a premise from your argument map, you should be very careful that your rephrasing communicates exactly the same thought as the old premise. You will have preserved that equivalence of meaning if, roughly, the old premise is true only if the new premise is true, and the new premise is true only if the old premise is true.

Note that premises should be stated and defended. Occasionally an argument will contain an especially obvious premise that needs no defense, other than one or two restatements in different words to make the point clear for listeners. But most important premises, including definitional premises, are controversial to one degree or another and should be defended. A crude rule of thumb is that each premise should receive a paragraph's worth of explanation and defense. This rule is crude because a few premises (as we have noted) will require little or no defense, whereas some premises may require many paragraphs to establish. Sometimes defending a premise requires constructing a mini-argument of which the premise is the conclusion. These further arguments can normally be incorporated into expansions of the argument map, as illustrated above.

At this point, clever readers may wonder if it's really possible to defend every premise. If a premise is defended with a further argument, won't that argument itself contain premises which must be defended, and so on, to infinity? This reaction is correct-it is impossible to deductively prove every premise on which an argument depends. At some point, the formal arguments must end, and the base-level premises must be treated as postulates (OK if they are obviously true) or motivated by non-argumentative appeals (e.g., appeals to moral intuitions or emotions). Some people think LD should be about "pure logic," but that is not possible as long as LD is supposed to yield substantive conclusions. To get off the ground, every argument must begin with some premises that are simply asserted. No substantive conclusions follow from logic alone; this is just a fact about logic, not a shortcoming of LD.

Empirical premises will require empirical evidence, although you will keep a better grip on your audience's attention if you explain most of the empirical background in your own words and quote outside authors only briefly to confirm crucial details or conclusions. Reading long quotations is never impressive. It suggests the speaker has simply lifted his arguments wholesale from other sources and may not really understand the research. Whenever you use empirical evidence, you should sandwich it between your own explanation of its source, content, and significance for the argument. Evidence is not self-interpreting. You must be scrupulously accurate in the ways you characterize the claims of your cited authors. It is tempting to exaggerate a source's limited claim so that it better supports the sweeping claim of your premise, but doing so is dishonest, and responsible judges will not reward the practice.

Normative premises will require non-empirical support. Sometimes quoting a particularly clear or persuasive source (such as a philosopher) can bolster such a premise, but often you will have to resort to your own persuasive powers. One of the classic ways in which philosophers argue for their own normative premises is by the use of examples or analogies. Most of the normative principles that might apply to a given resolution are broad enough to apply to other issues as well. One of the traditional purposes of moral and political philosophy is to furnish a relatively small number of principles that will apply to many different situations. So chances are, the normative principle to which you appeal has a wider application. Pick some obvious non-resolutional situation to which the principle might apply. Describe a possible moral decision in that situation about which you and your audience will share moral intuitions and about which your princple gives the proper outcome-the outcome that matches everyone's intuitions. This non-resolutional example may then count as some evidence that the normative principle is correct.

For definitional or analytic premises, you will need, at a minimum, to explain in full detail just why the premise is necessarily true. When appropriate, you should also quote authoritative definitions to support your claim. Consider a premise as trivial as, "If John is a bachelor, then John is a man." You might defend this premise by saying, "A bachelor is, by definition, an unmarried man. All bachelors, therefore, are men, so if John is a bachelor, he's a man, too." This explanation did not cite authoritative sources, because it assumes that every adult English speaker knows the definition of "bachelor." But if the claim were about a more technical or obscure concept, such as genetic engineering, the Second Amendment, or globalization, then quoting an expert source that described the concept would probably be necessary.

Ultimately, there is no formula for adequately explaining and defending each premise of an argument. Distinguishing the three types of premises as we have can be some help, but each premise will require a unique treatment. The best way to see how different sorts of premises can be supported is to study how they actually are supported by scholars in the relevant disciplines or by high-quality public intellectuals.

By thinking of contentions as arguments and premises as the basic units of contentions, you can avoid the confusion that debaters often inject into rounds by their attempts to break contentions into different "subpoints." It is often unclear just how the various subpoints are distinguished from one another and how they are functioning in a constructive argument. Anyone who wants to retain talk about "subpoints" in his or her cases should probably think of each premise as a distinct subpoint. I don't find most explicit subpoint talk helpful or attractive, but people who do should conform such talk to the logic of their arguments.

A third implication of the logic-centered approach for contention building is that premises must be presented in an order the audience will find persuasive and easy to follow. You might think that the best order of premises for any argument will be the order you have used in your argument map, but this is not always so. The argument map itself represents only one valid formulation of the argument; the same premises could have been ordered differently and still have yielded the same conclusion. So the map does not settle much about the order of presentation.

We have already seen that where q is the conclusion of your argument, the conditional premise pgq in which q occurs as the consequent will typically be the value premise that is appropriately presented before the other premises of the argument. Apart from LD convention, there is a good rhetorical reason to present this premise first. By doing so, you are setting a fixed target for yourself. Consider this simple modus ponens argument:

• (4) Capital punishment deters crime.
• (5) If capital punishment deters crime, then capital punishment is morally justified.
• (6) So capital punishment is morally justified.
  
  

Here, (4) is an empirical premise, while (5) is clearly normative. If you presented the argument in just the order it is mapped above, some listeners might have the following reaction: "He just researched what capital punishment does, discovered it deters crime, and then cooked up an ad hoc moral principle to conclude that if capital punishment does whatever it does, it must be moral." In other words, it may look as if you have set a moving target for yourself-whatever capital punishment does, that's what you claim makes it morally justified. If instead you present (5) before (4), your approach looks more principled. It looks as if you have first identified what quality makes a punishment, any punishment, morally justified, and then gone out into the world (so to speak) to see if capital punishment does, in fact, have that quality. The substance of your claims has not changed, but the argument may be more effective for some listeners.

As far as the other, non-value premises go, you will have to use your best judgment about the most effective order of presentation. Generally, you should be moving more or less sequentially through your argument map, but sometimes you may want to work from start to finish, other times from finish to start. Before you begin actually writing the contention, you may want to write each premise on a separate slip of paper and then experiment with different orderings to see which will make the argument most accessible to your audience.

A fourth and final implication of the logic-centered approach for case writing is that you must make the logical structure of your arguments clear to your audience. You cannot just assume that by presenting and defending a set of premises which do, in fact, entail an announced conclusion, you will have persuaded your audience that those premises really do entail that conclusion. Because you have spent much time researching and formulating the argument and have studied it in skeletal form, it is easy for you to see the logical relationships among its various parts. But your listeners are meeting the argument for the first time when they hear your case, and they may not be accustomed to tracing the logical implications of different premises.

The best way to ensure that your audience grasps the logical character of your argument is to call their attention to it at various points throughout your case. You do not need to use the jargon of premises, validity, modus ponens, and the like, nor do you need to retrace in explicit if-then form the full shape of the argument. But you do need to preview arguments before you make them and review them after you have made them. You can preview arguments near the beginning of your case or at the start of each contention. A suitable preview for the sample argument we mapped in Part III might be, "In my first contention, I will show that the United States is obligated to mitigate international conflicts because it has promised to do so in certain treaties." The equally brief review might be of all contentions together at the very end of the case.

In addition to previewing and reviewing, you need to flag distinct premises and logical connections throughout each contention. You can do so by smaller-scale previews and reviews within the contention ("First, I will argue that the U.S. is morally obligated to keep its promises") and also by the use of logical conjunctions like "since," "because," and "therefore."

The basic point is that as a speaker, you are responsible not merely to present logically valid arguments, but to make the validity of those arguments clear to your audience. The logical relations between your premises will be no more clear to many listeners than the truth or falsehood of individual premises. Just as you must persuade your audience to believe each premise of your argument, so you must persuade them that the premises, taken together, form a logical whole.

We have covered a lot of ground in this article. A logic-centered approach to arguments has implications for interpreting burdens, conducting research, outlining contentions, framing value premises, and organizing contentions. Next month we will explore its implications for cross-examination and rebuttals.2

1. My doubts about the traditional model have been influenced by R. Eric Barnes's excellent treatment in his LD textbook Philosophy in Practice: Understanding Value Debate (Clark Publishing, 1996).

2. Thanks to Eric Barnes for helpful criticisms of an earlier version of this article.

(Jason Baldwin jbaldwin@nd.edu is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. A nationally successful debater and coach, he has directed the LD curriculum of the Kentucky National Debate Institute since 1997. Many of his past Rostrum contributions can be found on NFL's online archive.)
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