Barr,+Timothy

Debate Coach for the University of Pittsburgh.

Most of my competitive and adjudicating experience came from my time on the international collegiate debate circuit. While I am an admirer of American styles of debate and deeply interested in the history of these forms and the contemporary norms and values at American collegiate tournaments, I am, nonetheless, a non-native.

This "foreignness" in my training is relevant to you in the following way: the positivism in debate judging seems to me a curious thing. MPJ and the idea of having a judging philosophy seems like a strange way to train debaters, from a competitive, pedagogical, and political standpoint. So while I would describe myself as a //tabula rasa// judge, I should clarify exactly what is blank on my slate.

In a debate, you must make arguments (claims supported by some reasoning or appeal) and you must respond to your opponent's arguments. As a judge, I am here to decide the quality of these arguments and the responses, not to tell you how much I enjoy a particular line of thought or how repulsed I am by the way you interpreted a card in the round. I am happy to judge "clash of civilization" debates, because even different civilizations can speak to one another if they make arguments. I have no "preference" for Kritiks, performance, or policy arguments: they simply must be made well and be able to respond to the other arguments in the debate.

This also means that I do not have a prescribed philosophy to help me evaluate thorny issues, like if a disad has not proven its impact's magnitude. This is a potential site of argument, and the debaters must decide how to argue it. I will explain in the RFD why I have made certain decisions, but I assume that there is something in the round that will help me evaluate these issues if they are relevant.

There is more than one way to respond to an argument. I find the terminology of "dropping args" to reinforce a positivistic sense of arguments.

My philosophy follows:

When Banzan was walking through a market, he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer. "Give me the best piece of meat you have," said the customer. "Everything in my shop is the best," replied the butcher. "You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best. So it is with these koans.

Or, one might say, so it is with these debates.