Recent developments in Policy Debate create the need to develop new types of arguments, to set parameters for what is "fair game" for argumentation in a Policy Debate round. In order to establish the basis for these new arguments, a little background is in order.

"Topicality" was established many years ago as an instrument of fairness. In Policy Debate, the Affirmative has the advantage of knowing what case they're going to run - it is therefore up to the Negative to anticipate what the Affirmative may say. To make sure that the Negative's job can be accomplished, the ground occupied by the Affirmative must be predictable. Thus we have a Resolution - which sets the basis for the Topicality argument - and we have Topicality, which is the tool used by the Negative to make sure that the Affirmative's interpretation of the Resolution is predictable; other standards of Topicality, such as "limits", "grammar" and "fairness" are all geared to make sure the negative team can predict what they may encounter in a debate round, so that they can prepare.

Fair enough.

But what if the Negative tries a new tack? Consider this scenario: rather than respond to the Affirmative, the Negative takes an approach which is entirely divorced from what the Affirmative says, or even from what the Resolution says, and is therefore not predictable by the Affirmative.

Would not, in such an instance, the Affirmative now require a tool to limit the Negative ground? Would not the same predictability and limitation arguments set an appropriate standard to be applied to the Negative, to limit what the Negative can say in order to guarantee the Affirmative the ability to prepare?

Consider a more specific scenario: after the First Affirmative Constructive, the First Negative gets up, takes out a CD player, and plays a beat-box rhythm - the speaker "performs" a rap song, and then she sits down. When queried during cross-examination as to what she was doing, the First Negative says that her song was an act of "performance" which functions as a protest to the limiting constraints of policy debate, and that the judge should vote negative to endorse her performance.

Why does she do this rather odd thing? Well - you may believe she's sincere in her cross-examination answer. Or, you may believe that what she's doing is trying to catch the affirmative off-guard by doing something very unusual and impossible to predict, in order to gain a strategic advantage in front of a potentially sympathetic judge.

This sort of tactic is still very unusual on the high school level, but it is increasingly less unusual on the college policy debate circuit, and it calls for the need to consider what is theoretically available to deal with such a tactic.

I would like to suggest a new argument, which I call "Counter Topicality", to provide the Affirmative a tool which they can use to answer a Negative "performance". Here's the premise: the Resolution does more than limit what the Affirmative may say in a debate round. The Resolution also limits what the Negative may say. Whereas the Affirmative is limited by the set of cases defined by the words in the Resolution, the Negative is limited by the set of arguments which "compete" with the Resolution.

So rather than the Negative getting all of the ground which is not the Affirmative, the Negative is limited to all of the ground which is "competitive" with the Resolution. Let's stop for a moment and recall what "competitiveness" means in a debate sense. A Negative Counterplan is said to be "competitive" with an Affirmative Plan, and thus a basis to reject the plan, when it is demonstrated that the counterplan solves an Affirmative advantage while avoiding a disadvantage accrued by the Affirmative. The test of "competitiveness" is a "permutation". The Affirmative tries to "permute" the counterplan by asking if adopting the plan plus all or part of the counterplan would avoid the disadvantage. If you can permute a counterplan, the counterplan does not have a "net benefit" over the affirmative (since you can do both at the same time without incurring a disadvantage that the counterplan alone avoids). Thus if the counterplan is permutable, it does not "compete" with the plan, and therefore fails to disprove the desirability of voting for the Affirmative.

One can extend the debate conception of "competition" to the resolution. Just as a counterplan must compete with the plan, the negative framework must compete with the resolution. For example, does an indictment of debate in general compete with the resolution? No - in the same way that, if you're playing basketball, a criticism of the game of basketball does not function to outscore a team which is actually playing the game; you can't beat a team who scores a hundred points in a basketball game by arguing that the game is bad. In order to win in basketball you literally have to be competitive on the same game-playing basis as the other team. It's worth stating again: you literally have to compete with the other team.

In policy debate, the playing basis is the Resolution, and the mode of scoring for the negative, in this framework, is operating in a framework which competes with the resolution, such that the judge cannot simultaneously accept the negative framework and accept that the resolution is true.

This "counter-topicality" paradigm should not be confused with Hypothesis Testing. Hypothesis Testing is a paradigm in which the Negative must disprove the Resolution. Counter-Topicality does not merely force the Negative to prove the Resolution false (which would still allow for any argument which is not the Resolution); rather, Counter-Topicality limits the set of Negative frameworks to those which compete with the Resolution, as a matter of fairness and education.

Returning to the example above, even if one decides that playing a rap song as a protest against the process of debate is interesting, such an act fails to compete with the Resolution - the rap performance operates on a different level, as a posture against debate itself. That level is one of an infinite number of frameworks which might be taken by the Negative, which do not compete with the ground delimited by the Resolution. The simple permutation test demonstrates that you can simultaneously say the Resolution is true even if you agree that the performance shows that policy debate is limited or even undesirable.

Another way to define the ground available to the Negative in a Counter-Topicality framework is to say that the negative team is limited to frameworks which prove that one "should not" adopt the Resolution. Since it is obviously impossible to simultaneously say the Resolution should be adopted and that it should not be adopted, a "should not" posture competes with a "should" posture. Again, this may sound like Hypothesis Testing - the key difference to keep in mind is that Counter-Topicality is a framework of limitation. The Negative is not simply tasked to disproving the Resolution; rather, the Negative is also now limited in their argument or framework choices to those positions which compete with the resolution. This is fair in the same way that the requirement that the Affirmative must be topical is fair.

Now, let's take a step back and approach the issue from a different posture - let's say it is bad to limit what the negative can say. Let's say that the negative should be able to do whatever they want. Can you maintain that position and still reasonably expect the Affirmative to be able to prepare? If "performance" is fair game for the negative as a tactic, stop and think about how many different things a negative could do so as to switch the ground being covered in the debate. The number is truly infinite. It was this concern as applied to Counterplans which resulted in theory arguments which forced Counterplans to be competitive. Without competitiveness, you could have "plan-plan" debates, where the Negative simply proposes a plan which is different than the Affirmative. Such a tactic would again allow for an infinite number of possible alternatives by the Negative. Just as the possibility of an infinite number of possible negative counterplans brought the concept of "competition" to be used as a tool to limit counterplan ground, a theory argument must now be constructed to allow the Affirmative to limit down the myriad of possible alternative negative frameworks which could be constructed.

This new conception of debate - that the negative is limited to arguments which compete with the resolution - has other consequences. First, it also limits the type of Critiques which can be run. Critiques would also have to be competitive with the Resolution, as opposed to being simply linked off of any word which the Affirmative says that the Negative deems objectionable. For example, given this year's topic, criticisms of the United States' endorsement of United Nations Peacekeeping Operations would be fair game, since you could not simultaneously endorse those criticisms and endorse the resolution. However were the affirmative team to use a "bad word"... for example, if an affirmative speaker made a sexist remark, criticisms of that remark would not be a basis for a negative ballot, because while it may be bad or objectionable that the Affirmative used sexist language, that bad act does not compete with the Resolution (you can simultaneously reject the sexist language and endorse that the resolution is correct).

Is the very fact that the Affirmative can "get away" with bad language in a Counter-Topicality framework an argument against the framework? There are other tools available to the judge to punish bad language other than to vote negative - such as docking speaker points. Second, one may argue that the issues of fairness and preparation are higher standards, because debate is impossible without them. Once you allow language criticisms, you simply fall back into the framework where arguments which do not compete with the resolution are acceptable - and you need to find an alternate line which allows those arguments but limits out the infinite number of performances which the negative may resort to as an alternate approach to the affirmative. Further there is no limit to the number of things about the affirmative team or about the language that the affirmative uses, or about the debate process itself, that the negative could argue is objectionable - and an increasingly large number of these may be much harder to predict than the use of sexist language; this is why the Counter-Topicality framework is preferable, and that the Negative must be limited to arguments which compete with the resolution. Such a framework still gives the Negative a lot to say, and it allows the Affirmative to reasonably prepare. (One "real world" example - if a Senator was arguing against sending troops to Iraq, but used bad language in making her point, would you re-ject her arguments and send troops to Iraq as a rejection of her discourse? Or would you simply think worse of her, but in the absence of arguments which compete with the idea that sending troops to Iraq is bad, endorse the policy position that we should not send troops to Iraq?)

In summary, the use of new tactics by Negative teams in policy debate rounds demand the evolution of debate theory, to guarantee a fair process. Without fairness to both sides, preparation for a debate would be impossible, and the activity itself would therefore wither away.
(David Glass is President of the NDCA)