#RESOLUTIONISM HOW TO#
#RESOLUTIONISM PLUS#

All of these formal debates are centered around a resolution, because a resolution focuses a discussion enough to have a debate. Formal debates are held all the time, on topics ranging from politics to history to theology and almost anything else. Resolutionism reflects a real life conversation, or real life formal moderated debate. While planism does reflect the reality of debate in a legislature, it is confined to a simulation–we have to imagine we are in a legislature debating this policy. It is a clear way to have a back and forth debate about the truth of a specific statement. Resolutionism is all about the truth of the resolution. Planism can be a truth centered framework–it reflects reality (truth) by simulating a particular kind of real world debate about what is true in the context of a legislature. In a legislative body, there are preliminary questions about what committee to assign a bill to (topicality) but then the rest of the debate focuses on the plan. NCFCA’s rules say that TP simulates legislative debate. I actually see a major advantage to planism. There are some good non-pragmatic reasons to be a planist.

That is not what I’m sharing arguments for here. They usually agree with planism insofar as it fits with their pragmatism. Most planists (at least the ones who write blog posts or get into theory arguments with their friends) are planists because they are pragmatists. However, if you want to debate excellently, and particularly if you want to be able to apply debate to every other discipline in life, learning the reasons why things work the way they do is critical.

#RESOLUTIONISM HOW TO#

The average club coach doesn’t have the time or motivation to dive into debate theory, and most of them are doing great work teaching students how to debate. I don’t fault coaches and students that hold to traditionalism.

#RESOLUTIONISM PLUS#

That student’s students will then learn all of the original coach’s “rules” plus the next generations “rules” and things just keep going from there.

Then, once that student starts teaching others, their philosophy of debate will be built on their coach’s rules, plus things the student learned from experience. There is a process to it: a coach teaches a student about how debate works without explaining why it works. This is often the de facto philosophy of many debaters and coaches. This is the philosophy of debate based on all of the “rules” about debate that have accumulated over the past several decades. Then there is the fourth camp–what I’ll call traditionalism. Will putting together a hodgepodge of different debate theories based on what seems to make debate best on a case-by-case basis really make debate better? When debaters disagree on what makes debate the best (as they often do) you have a very subjective debate on going on–and many pragmatists say that this should be argued about regularly in debate rounds! I can’t think of a way to make debate worse than regularly arguing (in front of parent and community judges no less) about what is the best way to approach debate, with our only metric being “what we think would make this debate round better.” A Fourth Camp: Traditionalism My basic concern with pragmatism is that my focus in debate is on the truth, but I can’t help but note that pragmatism is also not pragmatically a good idea. I can’t help but make one more argument against pragmatism. That philosophy is concerning to me for the reasons discussed in the last post. There is also a third category of thinking that says rather than picking one of these two options, we should just go with what makes debate better on a case by case basis. The resolution sets the boundaries for what plans can be proposed, but once the affirmative proposes their plan, the plan becomes the “resolution for the round.” The debate then becomes centered around that plan, and whether it is a good or bad idea. Planism is the idea that debate is centered around the plan. For example, if I prove that sneaker tariffs are an import policy and prove that we should remove sneaker tariffs, I have proven that we should reform our import policy, hence proving this year’s NCFCA resolution.

Because policy resolutions call for reforming policy, the AFF proves the resolution true by proposing a policy that is an example of the resolution, and proving that the policy is a good idea. The AFF’s burden is to prove that the resolution is true. Resolutionism (also called “rez-centrism”) is the idea that debate is centered around the resolution. There are two main camps: resolutionism and planism. Today we are going to look at what AFF needs to prove to win a Team Policy round.