Fun with ArgumentsEdmund Zagorin

Ingredients

• 3 people• A device that can measure time

Wait…3 people?

Yes.• Anatol Rapaport, the game theorist famed for his

negotiation tactics in Cold War arms control notes a difference between “fights,” “games,” and “debates”

• “Fights” involve two or more contestants and require that a winner establish victory by force

• “Games” involve two or more contestants and require that a winner establish victory by achievement within a prior set of rules

• “Debates” involve two or more contestants and require that a winner be established by a third party or observing audience

And yes, you can have an argument between two

people

It just usually isn’t really all that fun.

Then you’ll want the audience to select a

“resolution”• The resolution should be a normative (“should”) statement rather than a descriptive (“is”) statement. While there are arguments to be had about descriptive statements, their conditions are usually only resolvable by appeals to observation or hypothesis testing

• Resolutions should be controversial and interesting to the audience. Since this debate is “for the sake of argument”, participants will take sides decided by coin flip — not according to personal/emotional investment

• For example: The United States should create a Universal Basic Income of $35,000 for all US citizens.

Then, create a structure• The person who is defending the resolution is

called affirmative or “aff”, the person negating the resolution is called negative or “neg”

• The aff speaks first, let’s say for three minutes, answers thirty seconds of questions, then the neg gets two minutes of prep time, then the neg speaks for three minutes and answers thirty seconds of questions, then the aff gets two minutes of prep time and speaks for two minutes, then the neg gets two minutes of prep and speaks for two minutes

How the Audience Decides

• Did both participants answer each other’s arguments?

• Did both participants establish that their arguments mattered?

• Did participants engage in direct clash, or win a turn?

Wait… What?So to answer this, we’ll need to know

a little bit about how arguments work.• A resolution is typically supported by advantages

that are made significant through a value statement.

• For example: “Advantage 1: Economy: Without UBI, automation will cause mass unemployment that will devastate the economy. This is true because more than 70% of the workforce is susceptible to automation, especially as AI grows. Because 60% of US economic growth depends on consumer spending, mass unemployment could collapse the economy.”

• This shows the three parts of an argument: a claim, a warrant, and data.

So how do I negate?• There’s a handy three-point argument method for

defensive negation: 1. deny linkage claim using data 2. identify alternate causalities to the outcome 3. argue that the impact/value isn’t significant

• “1. Most jobs are not susceptible to automation because the labor market is elastic — that’s why mass unemployment did not happen during the Industrial Revolution. 2. There are many reasons the economy is screwed, like global warming and unregulated financial bubbles 3. If 2008 didn’t collapse the economy, then AI automation won’t do that much damage — the economy is resilient”

So does the negative win the debate if they win those 3

arguments?• Nope! Because those are all “defensive

claims”, they are reasons why UBI might not be that helpful at resolving a significant impact (economic collapse) but not a reason why UBI is *bad*

• To win the debate, the negative needs offense, which means they need to construct a DISADVANTAGE to weigh against the aff’s ADVANTAGE

So what would that look like?

• First the negative establishes a brink, e.g. The US is in massive amounts of foreign debt and cannot borrow any more

• Then a link: UBI would cost a ton of $$$, causing the US to either a default on Chinese loans or a mass cut in social services — crossing the brink

• Then an impact: Borrowing money would cause further T-Bill devaluation, crushing the economy. Cutting social services would immiserate millions

So wait, what’s the difference between offense & defense

again?• A defensive claim says WRONG to an

affirmative claim — it is typically an argument against the accuracy of a claim (e.g. what they said is WRONG)

• An offensive claim says BAD to the aff’s resolution as a whole — it is typically an argument that the aff plan results in a negative consequence that outweighs the benefits (e.g. what they advocate for is BAD)

But wtf is “direct clash” or a “turn”?

• “Direct clash” refers to when one opponent answer’s exact warrant for a claim, rather than answering the claim with a counter-warrant, e.g. “AI automation crushes the economy because mass unemployment” would have direct clash with the defensive negation “AI automation increases employment” — if you answer the warrant, you have already answered the claim

• “Turn” refers to when one opponent establishes offense via a DISADVANTAGE that accesses the aff’s impact — e.g. devaluation of T-Bills crushes the economy, thereby making the potentially positive effects of UBI meaningless

What about when both sides are winning parallel offense (“turns”) and neither side is winning any defense?

• You mean when both sides win that the other side crushes the economy?

• Yeah.• That’s when cost-benefit analysis comes

in, primarily using relative comparisons based on magnitude, timeframe and relative risk

Oh yeah?• Yeah. That’s what the last speech is for.• Really?• Yeah. The first speeches are for making

arguments. The last speeches are for comparing their significance.

• So you shouldn’t make brand new DISADVANTAGES in the last negative speech

• Truth. It’s generally frowned upon to make arguments in the last speech that your opponent is unable to rebut.

So that’s it, huh?

• Pretty much. I mean, it’s more complicated but that’s the general structure.

What’s the best thing you learn from arguing?

• How to listen. In order to answer a person’s arguments sequentially and respond to their warrants, you have to listen and take notes.

• You also learn what it means to win an argument, and why winning any single argument actually matters very little

But I thought that was the whole point…??

• No, the point is to say why what you said mattered. And you have to do so comparatively

• The people who are the best at this are able to make very few claims and have lots of warrants and examples that illustrate this

Why is that true?• Because the structure of human persuasion

is very malleable, and follows roughly our ability to remember what we have heard in a conversation

• We are not recorders — we don’t remember the whole thing, just snippets that our brains can use to store a sense/shadow of what happened

• That’s why, across cultures and styles of argument, there’s only one consistent marker of persuasion: REPETITION REPETITION REPETITION

But so what are the parts of an argument?

• “Claim” - the part of an argument