Forensics as scholarship: testing Zarefsky's bold hypothesis in a digital age.

• Author: Goodnight, G. Thomas
• Position: Report

FORENSICS AS SCHOLARSHIP: TESTING ZAREFSKY'S BOLD HYPOTHESIS IN A DIGITAL AGE

The study of argumentation underwent a stunning renaissance in the last half of the twentieth century. After World War II, one would not have given strong odds that argumentation would flourish to link communities of inquiry across the globe. Logic was attached to the formalism of deductive method. The sciences competed for status based on the purity of method and the power of technological applications. The social sciences carved up, mathematicized, and procedurally categorized human activities into social, psychological, social-psychological, and economic decision-making contexts. A general faith in positivist method had driven rhetoric into the byways of assisting straggling students with composition.

Rhetorical inquiry is now a global field. The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric Society of America, together with the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association and other organizations, promote critical, historical, cultural and public studies of rhetoric. Argumentation, too, draws from the field of communication but also pulls in interdisciplinary interests ranging from philosophy to computer science (van Eemeren, et al., 1996, pp. 163-355; Zarefsky, 1995b). The Alta Conference on Argumentation for over a quarter of century has promoted critical and theoretical inquiry and has been joined on a rotating, intercontinental schedule by the International Society for the Study of Argumentation located in Amsterdam; the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation based in Canada; and the Tokyo Conference on Argumentation in Japan. At the heart of these movements are intellectual leaders who have made a commitment to the theory and practice of human reasoning.

One such leader is David Zarefsky, now recognized widely as a luminary in the field of communication. As a scholar and teacher, he is best known for his work in public address, criticism, and argumentation, which spans the breadth of American rhetorical history. As the expansive reach of the essays in this special issue attest, Zarefsky's contributions to disciplinary development are substantial. This essay concentrates on one of his earliest and most sustained contributions: argumentation and debate.

Debate has long preserved a place for practical reason and argumentation in American universities. In public debate events, then later at intercollegiate tournaments, students, teachers, and audience members would gather to redeem the promise of an activity with ancient roots and durable salience. In United States colleges and universities, debate societies are among the oldest programs on campus. These programs have attracted students interested in testing the force of the better argument, and they have engaged in a vibrant "participatory culture" (Jenkins, 2006) for well over a century. Scholarly analysis of the practical and theoretical challenges involved in the debating enterprise created a path for the study of argumentation that shaped the larger academic field of communication (Hochmuth & Murphy, 1954; Keith, 1997; Zarefsky, 1995b).

Although the study of argumentation has gone global, debate continues to develop in relative obscurity, its participants absorbed by practice and its transitory conclusions evaporated into the internetworked society's digital ether. Yet debate remains a rich storehouse of communicative action. Debate entails a unique form of contention that draws its rules into itself, enabling conversations that link theory to practice and prompt participants to reflect constantly about how their performances relate to evolving norms and conventions of argument.

Academic debate's evolution has followed a trajectory structured by its status as a role-playing simulation exercise in which students entertain certain useful fictions (such as the notion that they have power to dictate government policy) to drive dialectic forward. Yet ironically, as the debating simulation has evolved, the membrane separating academic practice from the wider world has become more permeable. The advent of global, internetworked communication technology has stimulated a renaissance of argument invention, with new argumentative practices and forms of debate circulating each day. And as available means of persuasion and ways of engaging argument online have exploded, such platform developments have filtered back into intercollegiate debate practice.

The current moment offers a propitious opportunity to revisit Zarefksy's views on debate, first because they retain salience in light of the current challenges and opportunities facing the debate community--consider that his writings had a key impact on deliberations at the third National Developmental Conference on Debate hosted by Wake Forest University in June 2009. Additionally, recent advances in electronic dissemination of scholarly research are making some of Zarefsky's works available to a wider readership for the first time. Several of these articles and convention papers appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when the status of forensics as a scholarly practice was in significant flux. Zarefsky's bold conjecture was that the forensics enterprise could evolve in ways that would create new avenues of knowledge production, ones that would complement, not supplant, traditional modes of contest-round competition. Here, we test Zarefsky's bold hypothesis, considering whether his idea of argument as critical practice retains vitality as a paradigm for reading, evaluating, and participating in internetworked argumentation in a digital age.

We proceed by reconstructing Zarefsky's general view of debate as a method of inquiry (part one), his notion of forensics as a site for argumentation scholarship (part two), and his hypothesis-testing paradigm for debate (part three). This prepares the ground for discussion of criticism as argument in part four, and then speculation on the evolutionary path of the forensics enterprise in our closing segments.

THE DEBATE METHOD

As an intercollegiate debater, Zarefsky earned a sterling reputation as a precision wordsmith, capable of doubling the cogency of arguments in half the usual number of words. As such it is appropriate at this early point in the essay to sharpen the meaning of key terms in play, focusing first on the term debate itself. Following Douglas Ehninger, Zarefsky (1995b) views debate as a situated practice in which humans use argumentation to navigate through moments of uncertainty. In addressing the values of debate, Ehninger (1966) starts out, "We begin with the commonplace observation that there are in the world as a given fact of experience problem situations which invite a choice between mutually exclusive alternatives and which for reasons of personal satisfaction or public necessity men [and women] desire to resolve" (p. 184).

Humans have developed myriad rituals and procedures to resolve difficult situations where options appear mutually exclusive. Some of these approaches offer expediency (such as dice and administrative fiat), but the problem with chance or fiat is that such strategies tend to empty the human element from the decision-making process. Methods that appear neutral because of their formalism often obscure the underlying presumptions embedded within the view that is being forwarded as true, fair or efficient. As a method of inquiry, debate is not perfect, but it is superior to intuition, chance, or blind acquiescence to formal authority. "For at least two reasons," Ehninger (1966) writes, "debate is to be preferred to the other possibilities--first, it is more reliable than they are, and, second, it is more humane" (p. 184).

The debate process not only operates as a process of inquiry. It also involves "the practice of justifying decisions under conditions of uncertainty" (Zarefsky, 1995b, p. 43; also see Zarefsky, 1995a). Justifications offer critical reasons rather than certain proof and are "supported by what the audience would regard as good reasons warranting belief or action" (Zarefsky, 1995b, p. 44). Arguments thus are addressed communication constituting the practices of advocacy cultivating individual and collective judgment. "Decisions involve choices, for if there were only one alternative there would be nothing to decide" (Zarefsky, 1995b, p. 44). Better argument makes for better debate, and better advocacy makes for more informed public decisions. Good reasons improve the public realm, but there is a more personal side to the communicative process as well.

In putting forward the best reasons one has to make the case to support change or to question it, participants take a risk by exposing personal commitments to public commentary. Unlike the safe, embracing conversation of dialogue, debate invites confrontation, clash, and pushing positions to the limit. Like dialogue, taking such risks involves a commitment to reciprocity, respect, and advance of truth through advocacy. Debate as a "person-risking" enterprise involves partnership in the mutual task of argument and so stands as a communicative correction to the "coercive correction" of authority (Ehninger, 1970, p. 102; see also Johnstone, 1965; Natanson, 1965). In this regard, debate as an advocacy practice is self-corrective. Simultaneously, debating generates "practice in making reflective judgments" while it "develops and disciplines the critical faculties," thereby developing agency in respect to making better decisions and communication "choices in the future" (Ehninger, 1966, p. 183). Forensics gives concrete expression to debate's values; we explore these values is in the next section.

FORENSICS AS A SITE FOR ARGUMENTATION SCHOLARSHIP

Zarefsky left a large footprint on the intercollegiate policy debate record books. He was named top speaker at the National Debate Tournament (NDT) as an undergraduate student, and he...