CHAPTER IXREFUTATION
Not only will your careful analysis of the question formulate your own argument, but it will prepare you to refute that of your opponent. Put just as much care into this part of your preparation as into any other. State to yourself his probable points just as strongly and clearly as you can. If you can put his case better than he, when you come to your refutation, so much the better, provided you are equipped to answer adequately. Of course you can’t spend time enough to answer every point he has made—make up your mind which are the essential ones and strike at them. This selection will be comparatively simple if you have properly analyzed your question in the first place, but will be impossible if you have slighted that part of your work.
Do not be misled, however, into thinking that refutation itself is easy or of slight importance. It is neither. It calls for the exercise of all of your skill in selecting the essentials and ignoring the non-essentials. The young debater, moreover, is often impaled upon one or the other horn of thedilemma—too much or too little. If you see no side of the case but your own, your beautifully constructed argument may fall to pieces when your opponent, perhaps using some unpretentious fact which you, in your innocence, had entirely overlooked, knocks out the keystone of your arch of logic and your structure falls to ruin. On the other hand, you may demolish one after the other of your opponent’s positions and yet present no counter claims for your own side of the case. If you prove your opponent to be all wrong, you do not thereby prove yourself all right. You must establish your own position and not content yourself merely with destroying that of your enemy—you must be constructive as well as destructive.
Here again the analogy between debate and the later debate of life runs close and sure. The man who in the activity of his group—whether his lodge, his club, his society, his church, his city, or his State—has nothing but criticism to offer is of but little value. It is easy to say “you can’t, you can’t.” Such a statement is as valueless as it is easy.
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 mustremember 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 Stanleywithout 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. Butif 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 childrenof 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.
The Dilemma.—In this method of refutation you show your opponent has only two arguments to advance, that neither of them is true and that therefore his case falls unproved. No better illustration of the effectiveness of this method can be given than a reference to the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates. You will remember that Douglas declared he believed both in squatter sovereignty and in the Dred Scott decision. The one said that the people of any territory had the right to decide forthemselves whether they would or would not exclude slavery, while the Dred Scott decision meant that a slaveholder could recover his slave in any territory into which he might escape. You see the two positions are logically inconsistent. When, therefore, Lincoln asked Douglas as he did in these debates, this question, “Can the people of a territory, prior to the formation of a state constitution, in any lawful way exclude slavery?” Douglas was compelled to face a perfect dilemma. If he answered “yes” he would repudiate the Dred Scott decision—he wanted the support of the South. If he answered “no,” he would repudiate the doctrine of squatter sovereignty and offend the North. In endeavoring to meet the difficulty, he maintained that while a territory could not exclude slavery it could legally enact such unfriendly legislation that it would be impossible for slavery to remain. Lincoln practically had Douglas defeated before the judges of that debate—the American people—when he showed the absurdity of Douglas’ attempted escape from his dilemma. Lincoln showed that in effect Douglas said that slavery could lawfully be excluded from a place where it had a lawful right to be. The debate—and this famous “dilemma” was the spectacular part of it—made Lincoln president.
Residues.—This method is simply an enlargement of the difficulties of the dilemma. Whenmore than two possibilities are presented and you demolish one after the other of them your hope is that nothing may be left of his case—that the residuum may be zero.
Analyze Your Opponent’s Case.—As your opponent is speaking, note his points with care. Apply to them the principles we have discussed in earlier chapters.
Is his reasoning based upon premises which you can disprove?
Has he ignored the real issue?
Are his alleged causes merely coincidences, or are there other contributing causes which lessen the force of his conclusion?
Is his observation of facts faulty and are his generalizations unsound and based upon insufficient and unfair instances?
Apply these tests to his arguments and you will render your task of refutation easier. But in your refutation, be sure you refute. Don’t think for a minute that either heat or violence or sarcasm is a good answer. Neither can the testimony of one witness be rebutted by that of another unless the latter’s knowledge of the matter is shown to be the greater. And the strength of refutation lies in the skill with which you make your audience believe your witnesses are more worthy of belief than those of your opponent, provided always that is the fact.