“Tactics”
Training Session 9 May 2014
Problem 1:The Ultra-Soft line
• How to avoid doing this.
– Two checks: Fairness and Tactically
• Why it is a bad idea?
– Strong potential to ‘collapse’ a debate and make it
difficult for the teams to find any meaningful ‘clash’
– Hard to give meaningful analysis
• What to do in Opposition
– Clearly create space
• What to do in Closing Government
Problem 2:The Problem-Solution Gap
• Especially from opening it is important to identify a
significant harm in the SQ that you are trying to solve,
as a result of this you need a model that will effectively
deal with it.
• Often teams go to soft line and fall into the trap that it’s
morally inconsistent to be consciously aware of a great
and pressing problem, but then think it is defensible to
do very little about it.
• Be careful to make it exactly clear with in speeches
how your actions leads to a solution
• How to exploit this problem if made by an opposing
team
Problem 3:The Illusion of “Sameness”
• Quite often debaters will analyse an entire category of
thing, which should rightly be seen as a larger number
of discrete entities that have a small number of things in
common but nevertheless possessing significant
difference.
• Any time an opposition talk about a one of these
categories as though they are homogenous, you can
confidently assert that the situation is more complicated
than that and then provide the analysis for why these
differences within the group are reasonable, important
and how they will complicate the fair application of the
oppositions model.
Capturing Presumption
• Some arguments are simply more plausible
than others.
• Ways to use this to your advantage:
– Use Frameworks
– Place your ideas in the context of commonly held
presumptions (e.g. free expression is important in
democracy).
– Precedence
Balancing Interests
• Often, it is the case that judges see merit in cases on
both sides of the house - why, then, should they give
you the win?
• Convince the adjudicators that your position best
accommodates the various (legitimate) interests of all
parties involved. Three steps:
– Identify stakeholders and their interests
– Show how your opponents’ case creates an imbalance
– Show why your proposal better balances.
Countering Arguments with Goal
Analysis
1.
Mitigation: show that their model makes marginal moves towards their
goal — this is rarely enough in isolation, cos some change is better than
none
2.
Contravention: show how, counter-intuitively, their model moves them
further from their goal
3.
Consequences: show that the consequences outweigh the pursuit of their
goals
4.
Counter-proposals: This is a risky tactic. But it can occasionally work to
provide a model that will better achieve their goals without the bad stuff
you’ve outlined
5.
Goal Contestation: Show that their goal shouldn’t be the primary goal.
Often this is the least persuasive use of goals analysis