Debatalist No. 1 - General Constructive

Where can competitive norms come from?

Axioms

Preface

This dialogue aims to convince a target category of reader-interlocutors. It assumes that principles of truth are meaningful and that the reader-interlocutor exists. A wager argument¹ justifies the first three assumptions: if the inverse were true, and things were merely vacuously true or false, there would be no need to modify conduct toward any purpose in any way. So, if one is under the impression that we can alter our conduct, one should do it as if non-vacuous truth exists, for that is the only possible condition of achieving some preferable purpose.

The fourth assumption is deliberative. This dialogue does not intend to convince non-debaters; being against participating in a debate is a valid stance. It may be the ideal one. We only claim to explore the implications of there being some purpose to participating in debate.

The fifth assumption is definitional. It lays out the terms of what a debater is. Encoded in the fifth assumption is the agency of the reader-interlocutor. Additionally, conducting a dialogue to convince assumes the agency of the other end of the dialogue, since agency is required for that individual to decide to change their position.

Propositions

1. A thing is identical to itself.²

2. A proposition and its negation cannot both be true.³

3. A proposition is either true or false.⁴

4. The reader-interlocutor is a non-administrating debater that exists.

5. A non-administrating debater is an agent who intends to affect some competitive two-sided debate meaningfully.

Defining Debate

Defining a Debater

The reader-interlocutor (distinct from the reader-explorer, who is not intended to be persuaded) is a debater. What does that mean? Being a debater admits at minimum action per belief in some form of existence of a debate. This is because a debater must intend to affect (change, in some way) a debate meaningfully. Suppose debate is illusory (because the external world is illusory). In that case, the debater must still conduct themselves as if they can meaningfully change it to be a debater. Someone who does not seek to intentionally change debate (either by lack of foresight, willpower, or concern) is not exercising their agency (the ability to select which actions one takes) concerning a debate. For the calculation of debates, these personal agents are roughly equivalent to inanimate, random processes such as an earthquake occurring during a round.

Defining Meaningful Change

A debater intends to change a debate meaningfully. This definition draws a division between meaningful and non-meaningful changes which may prima facie seem unjustified. We shall justify it by reductio ad absurdum. If all changes to debate are non-meaningful, then nothing about one’s conduct with debate matters. The same uncertainty argument as agency here applies—if action can either be meaningful or non-meaningful, then one should act as if action is meaningful since there would be no repercussions of being wrong in a world where action isn’t meaningful, but for acting as if action isn’t meaningful does generate negative consequences in a world where action is.

The other case is if all changes to debates are meaningful. In this event, the precise pattern of photons entering is a meaningful change for debates. Thus, somebody outside can understand their intended engagement in a debate as manipulating the amount of light that enters the room at any given moment to be optimal. 

In other words, ‘exploding’ meaningful change to include any change to the situation of a debate creates a finite but massive number of ‘different types’ of debaters. In addition to the reductio ad absurdum, this position is also unintuitive. We seem to understand that there are changes to a debate that one can make that matter and changes that one can make that do not. The problem is defining precisely what occurs that matters. Even the most radical kritikal debaters would not suggest that the precise placement of the Affirmative’s laptop is meaningful.

Some believe meaning is subjective, and thus all changes can be meaningful. This subjective nature of meaning merely helps us explore a potential objective meaning that should precisely define roles concerning a debate.

What is Meaning? (Subjectively)

We have been vague about what meaning is. Meaning is equivalent to ‘purpose,’ or the ‘final cause’ per Aristotle (though not exactly)⁵. Though the final cause is easiest to understand through consequentialism or teleology, it is not necessarily consequentialist or teleological.

Since the debater is an agent who intends to change a debate, there must be some intention therebehind. This is a general rule: for each agential intent, there is an intention (the former a what, which envelops the where, when, and how, and the latter a why?). Agents exercise choice when selecting their intents, and their intentions cohere when they’re rational (they do not simultaneously intend things with contradictory intentions).

The intent-intention schema is intrinsic to agents. Agents select courses of action. This implies that they are not random or predetermined. Thus, there is always some purpose behind an agentially-selected action.

An agent who wishes to change debate absent an intention is not an agent, as they did not select that course of action. Agents that seem to choose ‘randomly’ (i.e. absent intention) only for debate are merely creating a pseudo-random illusion of lacking intention.

This subjective, per-agent understanding of meaning falls into the same trap as the explosive understanding of meaning. Because different agents can have different final causes for engaging in debate, some agents could value the photon arrangement in the debate. Thus, a purely subjective understanding of debate leads to two problematic ideas:

1. There is a meaningful role in a debate for the photon mitigator, the sound-system tuner, the laptop adjuster, the window-blinds closer, the judge fanner, and the airhorn blaster to the furthest extent that meaning can be defined.

2. Two meaningful changes to debate can exist in contention—that is, there is no way to objectively establish that somebody’s intended change to debate (say, to destroy all laptops) is bad or not preferable.

Solipsism and P-Zombification

There are two positions the reader-interlocutor could take admitting the agency of the self but denying the existence of other agents. These positions would theoretically resolve the problems of subjective meaning in a debate since the only ‘objective’ intention occurring in debates is the one the only agent (oneself) intends. These are solipsism, which claims that there is no ability to know of an external world, and p-zombification, which claims that all other supposed ‘agents’ are not actual agents, lacking some quality that permits agency for the self.

First, solipsism fails. In the solipsist imagination, the self must either be ordered temporally (different states of the self exist at different ‘points in time’) or must not be ordered temporally (the self is instant). This argument does not presuppose the objective existence of time, or that time is not an illusion—it merely supposes that the inner world can understand itself through the passage of some concept of time or as an instant.

If the self is not ordered temporally, then it cannot be an agent; but the status of the reader-interlocutor as someone seeking convincing mandates conduct and belief as if they are an agent. Why can an instantaneous self not be an agent?

Agency is the ability to select a different course of action, thought, speaking, et cetera. If the mind operates instantaneously, there can be no choice; when one considers choosing a new favorite song, the favorite song either has already been selected or hasn’t been. Thus the syllogism below refutes the adoption of timeless solipsism:

1. If the self understands itself absent time, all of its states exist.

2. The self cannot select different states if all of its states exist.

3. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themself as if they can select different states.

4. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themselves as if all their states do not exist.

5. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themself as if they understand themself ordered by time.

This argument is generally imported from Kant⁶. Understanding oneself temporally has significant implications. Temporality as an order of understanding one’s states cannot be a state that one adopts, since that would subjugate a frame of understanding to what is being understood, making the frame altogether worthless.

Consider an agent that rightly always presupposes that they are an agent. Their state is as follows: they have not yet decided on the question of one and two together equaling three (1). Since they are an agent, they can select to believe either that one and two equals three (2) or that one and two do not equal three (3). These are two additional states. If the states that they will at some point hold (the initial state (1) and either (2) or (3)) are only perceptually differentiated by a non-temporal dimension, then it can be said that ‘currently’ (since absent temporal differentiation, all things are ‘current’) they have the state (1) and (2) (but they are differentiated along a distinct, non-temporal dimension surely); but this denies their agency since they could not have selected to hold (3) given that it is already an existent condition they hold (2).

If temporal understanding was another mere state they could adopt, they might now understand themself through time (A), but in the future either understand themself through time (A) or not understand themself through time (B). Agency demands that they select their states, but if they are permitted to select the state (B), their agency would ‘dissipate’ as demonstrated above. It is intuitively nonsensical that one’s agency can be leveraged to dispose of itself, but it is also presupposedly impossible: they presuppose that they maintain agency. Thus, understanding oneself through time cannot be an agential state, but something imposed as a condition of agential states.

So, an absolute temporal dimension separating different states for an agent is necessary. As demonstrated above, this temporal dimension cannot dissipate—it must be persistent. This persistent condition cannot be for the agent something internal to themself, since their existence through different states along a temporal dimension can only ever occur when first the temporal dimension exists.

Thus, the dimension that an agent sorts temporally must be external to them. From here, refuting solipsism is easy:

1. If the reader-interlocutor is an agent, there must be a temporally understood external dimension as a condition of their agency.

2. If there is a temporally understood external dimension as a condition of their agency, then there is an external world.

3. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themself as if they are an agent.

4. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themself as if there is a temporally understood external dimension to them as a condition of their agency.

5. The reader-interlocutor should conduct themself as if there is an external world.

Now that conduct modification should proceed as if it were a certainty that an external world exists, p-zombification fails. P-zombification is an empirical claim about the world—that others do not possess agency. Unfortunately, it is wholly unevidenced. Empirical perception demonstrates that people act similarly enough to suggest agency. There is no real evidence indicating that others have no agency.

The ultimate conclusion of this aside is that a debater cannot credibly claim sole agenthood that permits them to do ‘as they will’ with a format on the basis that they are the only significant agent participating.

Is There an Objective Final Cause?

A debater is an agent who intends to change some debate. All debaters have their subjective intention for changing debates. These intentions can be, and often are, in contention.

Is there a debater whose subjective intention is more important (perhaps even universally, supremely, or most important)? Yes, but not under the common understanding of the word debater. The word ‘debater’ does not mean merely the competitors—it means everyone who wishes to change a debate meaningfully. The axiom section added a ‘non-administrating’ caveat. An administrating debater also intends to change a debate format meaningfully.

A debate format collects all those debates that meet a certain set of standards.

Which comes first? The debates, or the format? For non-competitive two-sided debate formats, either can be prior. It is conceivable that a format forms merely nominally and claims membership of a set of debates that would have occurred independent of the format.

A non-competitive debate format does not in its debates lack a winning and a losing side—someone does still win and lose debates within a non-competitive debate format (individual debates can be competitive members of a non-competitive format—competition merely suggests that among the set of competitors (two debaters or the entire format), the structure has a method of determining the strategically superior), and that may be decided through the presence of a judge. A non-competitive debate format has no standard or system for ascertaining the ‘best’ competitors across the format’s range of competitors.

Competitive two-sided debate formats involve a structure for multiple of them to occur that provides a result showing the ‘best’ (perhaps most strategically successful) competitor. This means that, for competitive two-sided debates, the format must always come first. There must be a format to provide a structure of arbitrating between different finite debates about which competitor is ultimately superior

Thus, competitive two-sided debates are categorized by format, and debaters are identified by format. One is not a policy debater, but an NSDA High School Policy Debater. There is no springboard scrimmage policy debate round, but a round of NSDA High School Policy Debate at the springboard scrimmage. People instantiate themselves as NSDA High School Policy Debaters by exercising their agency to engage in NSDA High School Policy Debates.

A format is designed by an administrator, which is a type of debater. In this model, the administrator is seen as an agent, however, it is instead a network of individual agents with one authority at the ‘top,’ similar to how both sides in a debate are represented as one agent (the debater), but involve two personal agents.

A format can either be complete (capable alone of deciding whether a debate falls within or outside of it) or incomplete.

Some suggest the possibility of a format constituted not by an agent but by some cosmic coincidence, such as an arrangement of matter somewhere in the universe creating an army of robots that enforce a particular vision of debate for agents elsewhere. This format would be unintended, but one structured by an agent would be intended.

There are two critical realizations. The first is that unintended formats must be incomplete.

Consider that a predetermined rule has multiple interpretations that must be arbitrated, and for it to be predetermined the truth of those interpretations must be arbitrated somewhere. Then a codification of varying interpretations of those interpretations must exist to clarify the predetermined rule. Semantic ambiguity exists in perpetual competition, for which descending rules must be created ad infinitum. X means Y, Y means Z, and Z means A, ad nauseam. This system must be codified to be predetermined or unintended—it cannot ‘apparate’ once the issue arises. However, infinite semantic rules cannot be codified owing to the ability of things that do not codify semantic rules to exist, especially in proximity to this body of codification (such as debaters). This is because each rule codified requires some existence as a body with extension (concrete, noumenal existence). If there are infinite rules, they infinitely occupy space and informational content.

Thus, a complete system for arbitrating rules in a debate (that can resolve every dispute) must be discretionary—that is, an agent will decide whether conduct falls under predefined rules when the conduct arises. So, there is a triple bind:

1. An agent lays down the structure for a debate. This is a complete debate structure.

2. An inanimate object lays down some finite rules for the debate’s structure and disputes therebeyond are unresolved. Here, there is no complete debate structure.

3. An inanimate object lays down finite rules for the debate’s structure, and an agent resolves disputes. This is identical to scenario #1, except that the administrating agent has elected to use the inanimate object’s partial rules.

Moreover, a format intended by an agent cannot be incomplete. Any dispute that reaches the agent will always be decided, whether arbitrarily decided or not. Thus, the format has a comprehensive mechanism for delineating the type of debates if intended.

The most obvious objection to this characterization is that debate formats need not be complete. This would mean there are indeed formats that non-agents can administer. 

This understanding precludes our ability to say that all debate formats can sort objectively which debates are examples thereof and which are not—that is, the scope of the format is subjective. Arranged Intergalactic Robot Varsity Team Debate says speeches must last 4 minutes; however, one cannot objectively condemn another when they give a speech that is 13 minutes by their understanding if they posit a different understanding of the term minutes since no agent exists to ascertain the distinction in the context of the format.

It is impossible to objectively derive competitive norms of conduct for such a format since subjective positions can arbitrarily redefine any conduct as per what a debate is.

Thus a competitive norm of conduct results from a complete debate format, given by an agential administrator. This agential administrator must intend something for the debate format due to being an agent. This intention is the ‘objective’ final cause since other agents submit themselves to the format as administered.

Why do agents submit themselves to the administered format? There are two levels of argumentation.

First, personal arguments that concern the potential for the agency of the person before the debater is instantiated:

1. One can select from multiple formats and agree to the costs and benefits of the one they choose because they avoid the costs and benefits of other formats.

2. One can choose instead to create and participate in their format if the existing ones are unsatisfactory.

Second, debater-level arguments that concern the potential for the agency of the debater as instantiated:

1. Since the debater is instantiated as a debater of their format, and thus tacitly acknowledges some existence of their format, the administrative propositions are a priori for the debater as an agent. These a priori accepted propositions are the only source of competitive norms that the debater can point to before experiencing a debate, so they have an epistemic obligation before experiencing debates to assume that the only competitive norms with evidence are the proper competitive norms. This prior standpoint should be persistently utilized to discover competitive norms due to the way competitive norms are modeled.

2. All debaters agree to these propositions as a precondition for encountering each other in the format.

Sovereignty of the Administrator

The ‘objective’ rule is not necessarily independent of preference or opinion since it certainly results from the administrator’s preference or opinion. It is objective because all debaters of the format with that rule engage with it meaningfully insofar as that rule sorts what ‘counts’ as a debate in that format.

If the Anti-Child Abuse Circuit specified that their debate format must not contain debaters hitting each other with sticks, then a debate where the debaters did that would not be among the debates conducted under their format. It would be a ‘bastard.’

Thus, the debate format provides the structure for ascertaining which debates are members of that format.

The Recognition of the Ballot: The Objective Final Cause

The administrator recognizes the existence of some debates and neglects others. It authorizes that debates are examples of, for instance, the NSDA High School Policy Debate format, and it sometimes declines to authorize that for other debates.

Thus, a format is defined by the final cause of the administrator administrated through the recognition of ballots. A competitive two-sided debate involves two debaters who are the competing two sides, and one debater who decides the result of the competition. The administrator is an external debater who structures this debate.

Therefore, the nexus of debate’s objective meaning is the recognition of the ballot as a representation of the debate’s events. To meaningfully change debates, one must alter the ballot as recognized. 

The exhaustive definitions that follow result from this principle of organizing:

1. The analytic concept of competitive two-sided debate (involving competition, two sides, an exchange, and a decider).

2. The rules for the above are laid down by the administrator.

Exhaustive Definitions

1. A competitive two-sided debate format is the entirety of the valid output determined by the administrator either created by proposition-evaluators to represent proposition-exchanges between two proposition-exchangers or partially or completely fabricated by the administrator.

2. A competitive two-sided debate is a proposition-exchange between two proposition-exchangers as represented by output recognized, structured, and potentially partially fabricated by an administrator and created by a proposition-evaluator.

Defining Ways to Engage With A Debate Format

Administrator

The administrator defines the scope of a debate format by recognizing a set of debates which are instances of the format.

Proposition-Evaluator

The proposition-evaluator represents an exchange of propositions between two proposition-exchangers on an output recognized by the administrator.

Proposition-Exchangers

Proposition-exchangers exchange propositions to sway the proposition-evaluator’s recognized representation of the debate.

Interlopers

Interlopers do not have a defined role in the debate as per the administrator but still exercise their agency to alter the recognized output of debates. There are two types of interlopers:

1. Benign interlopers. These interlopers attempt to alter a debate by conversing with agents with a defined role (i.e. coaches). They are harmless since the administratively authorized debaters have ultimate control over their conduct. These agents are more or less circumstances that contingently influence agents.

2. Malicious interlopers. These interlopers attempt to alter a debate by obstructing the agents with a defined role from fully exercising their agency (i.e. killing a debater mid-speech, stealing and falsifying the ballot). They are harmful since they prevent the debate from going as the administrator structures it. Thus, they can ‘bastardize’ debates by making them fall outside the administrator’s scope.

Competitive Norms

The category of debaters has an objective set of competitive norms that govern their behavior. The extent of this article will be the competitive norms that govern non-administrating debaters. However, analysis of interlopers will be lacking (since the only real rule for interlopers is generally ‘it is permissible to influence, but not obstruct other debaters’).

This is important to recognize now: some competitive norms are derived from the definition of a debate format, that is, they are implied by:

1. The existence of a competitive two-sided debate.

2. The existence of an administrator.

3. The existence of a proposition-exchange.

4. The existence of two proposition-exchangers.

5. The existence of a proposition-evaluator

6. The existence of a proposition-evaluator’s output.

7. The existence of structuring conditions for the recognition of the proposition-evaluator’s output.

8. The content of those structuring conditions.

A competitive norm is a unique proposition since being ‘competitive’ means it implicates who should receive strategic success and who should not. Distinct norms (such as ‘be nice to people’), however, do not purport to alter the result of the debate. This implies that the competitive norm contains inside of it two sorts of judgments:

1. A competitive prescription ethically bars a proposition-exchanger from taking or failing to take some action.

2. An evaluative prescription calls for (merely in this case) the intervention of the proposition-evaluator to remedy a failure to abide by a true competitive prescription.

A competitive prescription absent an according evaluative one is unenforceable, and an evaluative one absent a competitive one is not a competitive norm, but instead a proper hermeneutic for evaluation if true and intervention if false.

Instantiation

You are a person and you are a debater. When you play a debater, you tacitly admit some intent with debate and conduct that treats it as meaningful. That is, you ‘instantiate’ a distinct understanding of your person as a debater that takes the definition of the debate format as a given.

Everybody instantiates as a debater differently—but the only universally held understanding is the presentation of the debate format as defined. This understanding is ‘a priori’ for the debater because it is an absolutely-accepted antecedent for several conditional propositions that are a priori.

Analytic a priori understandings are contained in a proposition of the debate format as defined.

Synthetic a priori understandings are derived from two or more propositions of the debate format as defined.

A posteriori understanding is derived from an experience a specific debater has had.

Now that we have established a systemic basis to speak of judgments as judged by debaters, we should venture into what can be said about competitive norms from there.

Brief Aside on Instantiation and A Priori Judgments

It might seem arbitrary and irrelevant to suggest that persons are ‘instantiated’ as debaters when they enter a format and ponder questions. Instantiation is merely a helpful model for understanding a certain trait of a priori conditionals when combined with the tacit acceptance of certain truths for debaters.

We have already established that engaging with debate tacitly accepts some facts about a debate format, such as the fact that the propositions presented by the administrator that structure the format are presented.

Take the following conditional statement which is an a priori judgment:

If P and E, then N.

P is a proposition accepted by engaging in a debate format.

E is an ethical proposition, but we argue that E could merely mean ‘there is some metaethic.’ We posit that agents should accept E a priori. For any existing metaethics, it is likely true that one should cohere with the format.

N is a resulting competitive norm from the combination of the ethical proposition with the ones conceded by entering the debate format.

The reader-interlocutor is a debater in a given format and has thus tacitly accepted P. Given that we are correct that E, this reader-interlocutor insofar as they are a debater should accept N more or less ‘a priori,’ given that the initial conditional is a priori. This is where instantiation comes from.

Categorical Predictability

The Current Flawed Theoretical Basis

A competitive norm advocated for by debaters (but strategically only by proposition-exchangers) is a prescriptively-argued and allegedly objective fact—it is true for all proposition-exchangers and enforceable for all proposition-evaluators. To argue for one, proposition-exchangers put forth ‘interpretations,’ or a rule the judge should enforce either with what arguments they should consider on the flow, or as independent voting issues.

Examples of this are as follows:

1. Failure to specify the agent past ‘the United States federal government’ of the affirming plan in the 1AC is impermissible.

2. The introduction of ‘new’ opportunity costs after the 1NC is impermissible.

3. Claiming the ability to cease arguing for opportunity costs to an affirming plan is impermissible.

4. The introduction of allegedly credible propositions initially authored by Nick Bostrom is impermissible.

The problem with such interpretations is betrayed by their lack of adherence to their name. ‘Interpretation.’ The rules put forth by debaters do not root from interpreting some propositions already given to debaters, but instead from the whole cloth thoughts of a certain debater’s ego-addled mind. For these arbitrary non-interpretations, there tend to be two justifications.

1. Debatability

The main method by which such rules are justified is debatability. Debatability is something of a zeitgeist in debate and is rooted in an anthropological phenomenon we call the Procedural Turn, which will not be explored much in this dialogue. By our definition, the debatability of an interpretation is the net quality of debates in a format where a competitive norm is fully predicted, agreed upon, and followed by all debaters. This includes post-prediction ‘education,’ ‘fairness,’ ‘ethicality’, and ‘black scholarship’ (and the like) which are differing ethical values that emerge as a quality of debates. Pre-prediction fairness is an issue our model solves, but not a justification therefor.

The problem with such a justification is the assumption that the rule is fully predicted. A litany of problematic topics could be justified under a model where the most debatable interpretation is the one used. For example, one could argue that debates over a US ‘no-first-use policy’ would best provide equal ground for the affirmative and negative, and educate debaters about nuclear policy. However, it would be considered ridiculous if a negative team used this as a topicality argument against affirmatives advocating intellectual property reform.

The above no-first-use rule has no resolutional grounding, which means it is exactly as arbitrary as the interpretations posed in the four examples above. There is no non-arbitrary line for excluding predictability considerations to delineate which interpretation should be considered for its debatability value. A model where both teams follow only the most predictable burdens, though against current convention, is preferable to racing to the best unpredictable interpretation.

The clear articulation of why these debatable but unpredictable interpretations should not be considered is that the benefits of debatable interpretations cannot be accessed without prior knowledge of them.

2. Contingent Predictability

Another proposed argument for justifying arbitrary rules is contingent predictability. For our purposes, contingent predictability is the probability that a debater could have predicted a given norm. It is called contingent because it is primarily based on facts that are not necessarily true for debaters. There is no such thing as 0 contingent predictability—since, at any time, a debater could have a stroke and predict any norm one could imagine.

An example of a potentially contingently predictable interpretation is the following:

The negative rejoins the 1AC as an object of research - vote affirmative if their representations are positive, and negative if the reading of their research is harmful.

Kritikal debaters often read this interpretation to garner offense against the affirmative’s representations. However, it has no basis in priorly known propositions. Many debaters may recognize it through community involvement and experience, but one who prepares research around their predictable burden would be unprepared to debate under such an interpretation.

Example 3 above is another common example of an argument made contingently predictable - camp lecturers and coaches spread concepts of ‘status’ for opportunity costs after being invented out of thin air by Second Affirmative debaters who failed to understand their resolutional burden.

There are several problems with adopting contingent predictability: 

1. The first problem with contingent predictability is the impossibility of defining an interpretation’s scope of community knowledge. The only potential objective metrics could be through how many times a position appears in round reports on OpenCaselist. However, even this is flawed as it makes it impossible to determine at the beginning of a season, or else it becomes unlimited to all years and even college topics. There is no way to tell other than a judge arbitrarily determining that an argument is common enough to be predicted. 

2. The second problem comes with the assumption that an average debater has sufficient community knowledge. By having this be an expectation for debaters, we raise the barrier-to-entry of the activity to needing full community knowledge of positions which is obviously unreasonable.

3. The third problem is intuitional. Nearly all debaters queried seem to reject the idea that one could make an argument ‘more predictable’ by emailing it to their competitors pre-tournament, or by populating the caselist with it. However, these debaters usually fail to understand where precisely predictability comes from if not contingent.

However, one deeper issue with contingent predictability cuts into the concept of the competitive norm. A competitive norm is more or less contingently predictable when some a posteriori judgment assesses that a set of proposition-exchangers could predict it. Let us imagine that the prevalence of the representations kritik makes its interpretation contingently predictable for some proposition-exchanges—specifically for those who participate in the /r/policydebate subreddit. A competitive norm absent qualification claims to be universal. However, the norm would surely possess a higher value of contingent predictability if it were only enforceable for users of the /r/policydebate subreddit. Thus, the affirmative hearing the subreddit warrant for the contingent predictability standard should suggest the following counterinterpretation:

For affirmative debaters who use the /r/policydebate subreddit, the 1AC should be evaluated as a research project.

Then, the affirmative explains that they do not use the subreddit. However, this tricky negative has definitive proof of a profile that the affirmative owns and actively uses on the subreddit. The affirmative in this case should delve deeper into the contingent predictability warrant—because of a string of posts in 2022, the representations kritik became much more widely known. Thus, the affirmative proposes:

For affirmative debaters who read a post concerning representations kritiks on the /r/policydebate subreddit, the 1AC should be evaluated as a research project.

However, the negative can prove that the affirmative read these posts—indeed, they left multiple comments across them. The affirmative racks their brains one last time and realizes that their ability to predict the argument is located in an experience they had with the posts. Thus, they propose:

For affirmative debaters who sufficiently comprehended the post concerning representations kritiks on the /r/policydebate subreddit, the 1AC should be evaluated as a research project.

The negative, knowing in their heart that the affirmative comprehended it but unable to prove it, and having the burden of proof due to the intuitive concept that the affirmative has the best knowledge of themselves, loses to the counterinterpretation because it best fulfills contingent predictability.

This is true for all contingently predictable competitive norms—a counterinterpretation that limits the competitive norm to the set that accessed the contingent fact will always be more contingently predictable, but the experience of prediction is inaccessible and never directly implied by any external fact—not the debaters reading a post, not them replying, not them emailing asking for chains, et cetera. There will always be a lack of comprehension, a forgetfulness, a lack of understanding that the argument was genuine, or a lack of ability to see that the argument was for competitive debate that prevents the external perception that this debater has encountered some concept from necessarily concluding that they have attained prediction of it. Thus, the most contingently predictable counterinterpretation is as follows:

For affirmative debaters who have predicted the representations kritik, the 1AC should be evaluated as a research project.

If it is not obvious, this interpretation is a less faulty, but never applicable example of debatability. It assumes that the competitive norm is predictable by only enforcing it for debaters who have predicted it. Thus, it neglects the issue of predictability altogether. This returns to the issue of debatability with one logical escape: everybody meets this interpretation, because nobody will admit that they have predicted it. The model collapses.

Categorical Predictability

We believe in a model called categorical predictability. We call it ‘categorical’ because it purports to value competitive norms being universal for the category of debaters.

Here is a definition that we believe exhaustively outlines what is categorically predictable:

A competitive norm is categorically predictable if it is logically derivable from judgments that are, for the instantiation of the debater, a priori. In the case of and only in the case of judgments that have an explicit ambiguity (such as semantic ambiguities) that the administrator has not ruled upon, a posteriori judgments that exist independent of the agency of some debater (as instantiated, rather than as a person) can evidence competing interpretations to resolve the ambiguity. Competitive norms that rely solely on a priori judgments are either categorically predictable (1) or unpredictable (0). Competitive norms that rely on one or more a posteriori judgments are as categorically predictable as the probability of the a posteriori judgments’ combined truth (positive real number on the unit interval).

This definition may need to be clarified. Refer to the dialogue from earlier on the administrator and the significance of the administrator’s rules. All debaters tacitly accept the administrator’s propositions upon entering the administrator’s debate format. Thus, they instantiate these propositions as if they are a priori due to unconditionally accepting the antecedent of an a priori conditional.

Thus, the a priori judgments are the administrative propositions and the definition of two-sided competitive debate.

Categorical predictability resolves debatability’s failure by ensuring that all proposition-exchangers have an equal opportunity to foresee a competitive norm. This stops the infinite regress caused by the incentive to arbitrarily rebuild an entire style of debate based entirely on what contains the highest quality of debates inside of it.

We have two other thoughts on categorical predictability’s relationship to debatability:

1. Categorically predictable norms are generally debatable, and much of the discourse that claims they are not is usually fearmongering. This is not an exhaustive claim. If it were false, it would hardly matter. It is an a posteriori exploratory observation as to the cowardice of debatability defenders.

2. While categorical predictability at zero and one hundred always trumps debatability concerns, it is not yet clear that categorical predictability in interim values cannot be ‘outweighed’ by significant debatability concerns. We will attempt to establish categorical predictability’s singularity in a later dialogue⁷.

Categorical predictability also resolves all of the failures of contingent predictability. 

1. It lacks the scope issue entirely, since instead of measuring predictability through what perhaps could be predicted—such as the content on the Caselist, on emails, and online forums. Categorical predictability measures itself through what must be able to be predicted—logical derivations of administrative propositions that all debaters tacitly accepted upon engaging with the format. A later dialogue will model hilly conic Plinko to better explain the concept of logical derivations, especially in the context of positive real number predictability norms.

2. It resolves the issue of equity. While contingent predictability and debatability make sacrifices and bracket new debaters, marginalized debaters, disabled debaters, or excluded debaters out of the activity, categorical predictability does not. It finds its value in propositions that all these debaters have accepted as a precondition of becoming debaters.

3. Categorical predictability resolves the intuitional issue by revealing its true nature. The intuition gap is a division between debaters who believe debate has some real structure to base our conduct around, and those for whom debate is more or less a sandbox with no intrinsic structure. The former generally accept categorical predictability over time, and the latter either are convinced to become the former, or remain anarchic.

Finally, categorical predictability also repairs the structural problem of contingent predictability. A categorically predictable norm is categorically predictable for all debaters—there is no regression to debatability.

Categorical predictability is therefore the only potential means of adjudicating predictability and the rightness or goodness of competitive norms.

1. (Adam Humphrey, Chinmay Khaladkar, & Adhi Thirumala, 8-24-2024, "Notes No. 2 on Debatalist No. 1 - Epistemic Wager Argument," The Debatalist Papers, https://debatalistpapers.substack.com/p/notes-no-2-on-debatalist-no-1-epistemic, accessed 8-24-2024)

2. (N.A., 9-20-2022, “Identity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity/#TherPhilProbAbouIden, accessed 8-17-2024)

3. (N.A., 10-3-2024, “Contradiction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contradiction/#LNCInde, accessed 8-17-2024)

4. (Elaine Rich & Alan Kaylor Cline, 2014, “Reasoning: An Introduction to Logic, Sets, and Functions,” University of Texas, https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~dnp/frege/subsection-87.html, accessed 8-17-2024)

5. (N.A., 3-7-2024, “Aristotle on Causality,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality/#FourCaus, accessed 8-17-2024)

6. (Immanuel Kant, 1787, “Critique of Pure Reason,” KantWesley, https://kantwesley.com/Kant/CritiqueOfPureReason.pdf, accessed 8-17-2024)

7. A forthcoming dialogue; could be among the Notes or the Debatalist series.