2008 TOC Video: Los Altos DM vs. Kinkaid BT
posted by Bietz on May 12th, 2008
SANTA MONICA, Cali. — Today, VBD Original Videos features a round between Los Altos’s Daniel Moerner on the affirmative and Kinkaid’s Becca Traber on the negative.
This was a semifinal round at this year’s Tournament of Champions. The decision was a 4-1 for the negative; the judges were Ryan Lawrence, Tom Evnen, Larry McGrath, Dan Meyers, Tim Hogan. Evnen dissented.
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Posted from: 74.36.136.254
May 12th, 2008 20:05
Trichotomy. Legit.
Posted from: 63.246.171.199
May 12th, 2008 20:40
I loved this round.
Did Becca’s round with Jake get recorded?
Posted from: 74.70.112.133
May 12th, 2008 20:48
What were the rfd’s?
Posted from: 24.205.209.139
May 12th, 2008 20:56
This is a really good round. Congrats to both of you for being hard core.
Posted from: 74.36.136.254
May 12th, 2008 20:58
@2: Yes, the Becca-Jake round was taped.
Posted from: 12.205.118.84
May 12th, 2008 21:11
Trichotomy actually is a word.
Posted from: 64.12.116.76
May 12th, 2008 21:18
Great round… If any of the judges or someone who was in the room could try and summarize the RFDs I think a lot of people would be appreciative. I’m sure the question of why RFDs aren’t taped has been answered numerous times, but I think most people acknowledge that hearing RFDs are some of the most valuable teaching tools, so if possible we should try and find a way to tape them in the future (or alternative method if it worked… post ballots, someone summarizing after the video, etc)
Posted from: 69.105.108.177
May 12th, 2008 21:43
becca psychologically dominated
Posted from: 24.205.209.139
May 12th, 2008 21:53
I loved the last extinction scenario off schell.
Posted from: 70.251.247.24
May 12th, 2008 23:17
Damn good round, congrats to both of you for a great season.
Posted from: 128.54.165.135
May 13th, 2008 02:16
im kinda annoyed by ppl making the arg that they can’t make negative existential claim without giving warrants for them. even if it is a little more obvious than others, i haven’t heard someone make the arg warranted. Plus, it doesn’t seem like it means anything here because permissibility is different than positing a category of existence. Other than that I really like the AC.
That being said, i really dig the Zizek NC. Finally, a debater who uses good zizek cards that’s not coached by Navot…
This is just a phenomenal round though. both debaters are incredibly smart and deserve all the success the have had. Congrats to both Becca and Moerner.
Posted from: 204.8.195.66
May 13th, 2008 09:47
becca is soooooo good!
Posted from: 140.247.241.116
May 13th, 2008 11:55
Kamil: the argument is that “there is no moral constraint preventing use of force to prevent acquisition” is a negative existential; permissibility follows from lack of moral constraint, so the conclusion is “assume its permissible until proven otherwise”. The warrant is that there’s no way we can have exhaustive evidence that there isn’t something, only that there is. This is sort of obviously true for empirical claims: we don’t have omnispatiotemporal knowledge of the universe, so we can’t know that there has never been and never will be some entity of some type somewhere in spacetime. For a priori knowledge, I suppose it is possible to know the truth of negative existentials (e.g. “there is no prime integer greater than 3 and less than 5″, or something). Presumably, even if ethics is an a priori discipline (it may or may not be), it doesn’t have the kind of exactness (yet?) to allow us to run tests on negative existentials.
Posted from: 75.32.132.251
May 13th, 2008 12:43
this is an awesome round, and a lot less scandalous. great job becca and daniel
Posted from: 128.54.49.106
May 13th, 2008 14:11
It’s not exactly true for empirical claims (I mean, if you don’t adopt a Kantian then you can’t make negative existential claims) because you can say that I am not in New York rt now. of course, maybe that is not how it really is, but under more Kantian notions, I can say that I am not somewhere. Now, you cannot say that something does not exist, sure, but you can say that something is not the case. In this instance, I would say that a claim to morals isn’t positing a category of existence within the arg (it doesn’t apply to notions of space/time), but rather is applied A Priori.
While the knowledge might not be a priori it is applied in an a priori manner (there is no temporal nature to the res, so the position is categorical). in that way we can say that a moral is not the case or something is not permissible because it is an a priori judgment.
I mean, ethics as a discipline does not effectively use A Priori knowledge, but it can and ought to use it if it is to be an effective system of ethics.
I dunno, maybe I’m completely wrong here and have misunderstood the argument. You wouldn’t mind emailing/FBing me if I am wrong would you?
Posted from: 65.2.1.212
May 13th, 2008 14:44
Haha, she’s pretty clever.
I mean, granted… but it was nice to see a round that wasn’t so tense.
Posted from: 66.233.57.238
May 13th, 2008 15:01
i remember tim hogan’s rfd was essentially that he read the spike from the AC (definition of ‘is’) and the text said that moerner could only exclude specific solvency scenarios/turns, and he only considered the overstretch one a specific scenario, so he voted on the turns off schell. at least, that’s what i understood from it. maybe i’m actually deaf.
Posted from: 140.247.241.116
May 13th, 2008 16:25
Kamil,
A negative existential isn’t the same as a claim that uses negation. An existential claim says “There is some x”. A negative existential says “It is not the case that (there is some x)”. Contrast that with your non-existential “KM is in NY”. Obviously, you can know “KM is not in NY” if, for instance, one sees you in Illinois. This isn’t an existential though – it doesn’t assert that you exist or don’t exist. It presupposes you exist, then says something about you.
On ethics and the a priori – if you are a naturalist about ethics (e.g. if you think that “good” means “pleasurable” and “right” means “maximizes pleasure” or alternatively, if you think “X is good” represents the same fact as “X is pleasurable” even if “good” doesn’t literally mean “pleasurable”), then you don’t need to appeal to the a priori. Other views might have to.
Posted from: 68.209.198.15
May 14th, 2008 09:13
which octas round was filmed?
Posted from: 24.174.12.201
May 14th, 2008 16:39
Wade–I know Rebar and Joan’s was
Posted from: 206.77.0.155
May 15th, 2008 12:42
I think Wes and Ben taped that one though. Bietz might have taped another one
Posted from: 209.98.146.245
May 19th, 2008 00:57
Eric–
Any ordinary negation of a subject-predicate sentence can be turned into a negative existential. -P(t) iff -Ex(Px & x=t), so Kamil’s claim that he’s not in New York is equivalent to “There does not exist anyone in New York identical with Kamil Marchant”. This is maybe sort of trivial, but the point is that there are all sorts of empirical negative existential claims that, if not metaphysically certain, are at least pretty darn well evidenced. “All men are mortal,” i.e. “There are no immortal men,” strikes me as a pretty safe bet, for instance. The claims don’t have to be spatiotemporally bounded, either, though claims of that sort, like Kamil’s, provide pretty obvious counter-examples to your claim as well. I’m perfectly happy to claim that there are no men anywhere, past or present (or probably even future), who are immortal (or five hundred feet tall or faster than speeding bullets or whatever). Of course there’s still some degree of uncertainty to most of these claims (though not, probably, to claims like “There are no men who are also lobsters/galaxies/natural numbers”), but “You can’t assert anything in debate rounds except logic certainties” strikes me as a pretty hard position to maintain.
As regards ethics, you’re probably right that the evidence we have for believing negative existential claims about ethical constraints, obligations, etc is much weaker than the evidence we have for believing similar empirical claims. But the same could be said about any sort of claim in ethics, whether atomic, quantified, negated or whatever. Our understanding of ethics still lags a long way behind our understanding of the empirical world, but there are still some ethical claims of various logical forms that I think we should be happy to at least tentatively endorse. “There is no moral obligation binding people to murder babies” seems to be at least decently well-evidenced within any meta-ethical framework (either there are no moral obligations period, or we can discern them via inspecting our moral intuitions which say we probably shouldn’t murder babies, or we can discern them by examining the precepts of pure, Kantian reason which also say don’t murder babies, or we can take ethical terms to denote mental states like pleasure and pain which tend to be negatively impacted by baby murder, or…). Again, not absolute certainty, but pretty good epistemic grounds for belief.
My beef with this whole brand of argumentation and its popularity in the last couple years is that it ultimately does boil down to this sort of ridiculous, exaggerated skepticism that could equally well be taken as casting doubt on propositions of any other syntactic form (the basic skeptical claim is, “you can’t be omniscient so you can’t verify claims of this sort,” but our lack of omniscience unfortunately gets in the way of attempts to verify claims of all sorts of sorts). Moreover, the people who defend this argument to the hilt tend to be the same people who go crazy over much more reasonable, substantive skeptical claims, claims that say something more than “You can’t be absolutely, positively, knock-down certain of X, so you can’t assert it.” I think the best response is that, by the same logic, you lack justification for believing that there’s no big, angry, heavily tattooed guy with a tire iron standing outside the room waiting to beat you bloody if you vote for this argument, so you better just be on the safe side and vote for me instead.
Posted from: 209.98.146.245
May 19th, 2008 01:07
It’s also worth pointing out that the fact that this argument has been run on like the last seven topics, not one of which is in fact phrased as a negative existential, serves as a pretty good indication of just how many claims can be plausibly rewritten as negative existentials (in many cases to the point of provable logical equivalence), which it turn demonstrates just how weirdly extreme the skeptical position being taken up really is. Perhaps more to the point, you can almost always rewrite both the resolution and its negation as negative existential, the upshot of which I suppose is that the judge should just be too flummoxed to make any decision at all (in the case of this resolution, as against your re-writing of the res, one might offer “There are no nuclear weapons such that it is just for the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of them by nations that pose a military threat” or “There are no nations that both pose a military threat and are such that it is just for the United States to use military force to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons” or “There is no English preposition spelled ‘f-o-r’ such that its substitution for ‘x’ in the sentence “It is just x the United States to use military force to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by nations that pose a military threat” yields a truth of English.”)
Posted from: 68.12.97.241
May 25th, 2008 18:23
when will the rest of the rounds be postd?
Posted from: 129.93.5.132
March 5th, 2009 12:32
I’m currently a college debater and my partner and I run trichot quite frequently. However, I’ve never heard of it being run in high school. Could anyone provide me with some info (since the video has been taken down) of how trichot it run in high school?
I realize this video and the posts are almost a year old so the liklihood of my question being answered is slim but if anyone stumbles across this and can provide insight I would greatly appreciate it.
Posted from: 71.139.45.71
March 5th, 2009 15:31
Commiej:
When I ran the case in this round, the argument was pretty simple:
It just argued that moral evaluation may seem to be a dichotomy: Actions are right or wrong. However, the concept of “right” action is itself a dichotomy. Actions can be right if they are obligatory or permissible. (Note that this is a simplification–the dichotomy is really (obligatory ^ permissible) v (!obligatory ^ permissible), since obligatory actions are permitted.) We have to accept this because some acts are not obligatory but still seem to have moral worth–since these actions are not wrong, we must create a new category of right actions to contain them.
Because of this, moral evaluation is really a trichotomy–actions can be obligatory, permissible, or impermissible. So to prove that it is just to do X requires winning that it is obligatory or that it is merely permissible. This position was a test case to demonstrate that proving mere permissibility is simpler and more strategic.
If you have more questions feel free to email me.
Posted from: 24.90.223.119
March 15th, 2009 16:20
Why were the videos taken down? I really wish I could watch this.