Debating for boys

by William Horton Foster

One most important tactical reason for a constructive argument of your own is that you can never tell whether you have destroyed all of the enemy’s bridges. One forgotten approach may turn the position you fancied was impregnable into a trap from which there is no escape. You must remember further that in debate the question is as a rule a comparative one only; neither side is wholly in the right. For example when the case as stated lay between Peary and Amundson, or between Peary and Stanley, if you content yourself with disproving the claims of Amundson or Stanley without establishing the rights of Peary, you might so discredit the whole argument that to the mind of your judges the fame of some unnamed third person like Livingstone, or Du Chaillu or Kane or even Dr. Cook might intervene to give the decision to your opponent.

The skillful debater will, therefore, develop his campaign along two parallel lines; he will demolish the defenses of his enemy with one battery of arguments while he is advancing his own position with another arm of the service marching under the flag labeled Q. E. D.

The place of refutation in your argument, although essential, cannot be dictated. It will depend largely upon the course the debate takes. I can make certain useful suggestions, however.

Obviously you cannot refute until there is something to refute. If your audience—and your judges—is entirely impartial and unprejudiced, if you do not have to combat a preconceived position, you can probably safely content yourself with advancing your own position and leave the rebuttal of your opponent’s arguments until later. But if you are presenting some novel proposition or some unpopular idea which cannot be entertained unless certain hostile ideas are cleared away, you will win better attention if you demolish the fundamental ideas upon which the old theory rests before you present your constructive argument.

Rebuttal.—In rebuttal—which is simply refutation in action—you can readily give to your whole debate, or at least your side of it, a unity which might otherwise be lacking. You relate your work to the work of your comrades and to that of your opponents. You select his strong points; you minimize his weak ones. You shape his position into that form which best suits your views while at the same time you are advancing to your own attack. But to carry the military figure a little further, while you must therefore be prepared with a thorough knowledge of your opponent’s defenses, of his equipment of arguments, and, if possible, of facts, while you should have almost a foreknowledge of his probable lines of approach, you must always be capable of a quick shifting of your own position as he in turn varies his attack upon you. For be sure he will not be content to stand up and be fired at—you must be alert and resourceful and ready to meet any change of front on his part. The skillful debater will not be content unless he is prepared to meet any attack which may be made upon him.

Be sure, however, to have yourself so well in hand that your refutation will be as well organized as your constructive argument. More than that, you should not allow any acute break to appear between the two. What happened in a recent college debate in the East is an excellent demonstration of what should not be done. Neither the audience nor the judges had been told what was coming, and all were surprised when four minutes after each speaker began (he had twelve minutes in all) a bell rang. Instantly over the face of the speaker, as one of the judges told me, came a sort of “Thank Heaven” expression, and he forthwith swung off into a well-prepared argument on the constructive side of the case. Evidently each had been told to rebut for four minutes and then argue. To be sure that he would know where to stop the one and begin the other, the bell signal was arranged. The effect was ludicrous in the extreme.

There are four special kinds of rebuttal which you can use.

Reductio ad Absurdum.—If, for illustration, your opponent, in debating the question of child labor, insists that there is a certain nimbleness and quickness of the fingers in children which is necessary to the performance of certain industrial processes, you can well answer that if that is true of children of from fourteen to sixteen it is obviously more true of the age twelve to fourteen and so children of that age should be employed. If this deduction follows, you can argue, then it must be equally true of age ten to twelve and so on even to younger ages yet. If your opponent should question the soundness of this deduction, you could still further confound him by replying that when the employment of children of those ages was under discussion, those identical arguments were advanced in its support.

Enforcing the Consequences.—If, for example, in discussing conservation, if your opponent insists that a free and unrestricted cutting of timber should be allowed, you can show the result of such complete liberty, if carried to its logical results—the denuding of the United States of all its timber. It is not necessary, in urging either this form of rebuttal nor the one which has just preceded it, that the result be probable. It is enough for the result to be possible.