New Evidence for Inherency

“(b) In order to “prove inherency,” the Affirmative must, by a preponderance of the evidence and argument, prove that the “harms” cannot be eliminated and/or that the “advantages” cannot be obtained, and/or the “goals” cannot be attained ////without a change of policy.////”

That last phrase should be “without topical action.” This is pretty important actually because if it was just a “change in policy” then the negative would not be able to run a CP. Especially if the negative establishes an argument like “reform is not increase”* they can demonstrate that merely increasing funds to X or Y would solve the problem.

*Not too controversial an argument I think, for the record under this kind of argument I would argue that both sides are allowed to provide funding, (extra-topicality being legitimate, insofar as the team doesn’t derive advantages from the extratopical portions like ‘deficit spending good’) but only increasing funding while working through the present system is not enough to make the aff topical.

—This now gets into the stuff you didn’t want to discuss in your original post. If you don’t want to that’s cool but there aren’t alot of other NFA-LD blogs/forums so I’m posting here.

My second response is that demonstrating inherency requires slightly more than what you suggest. I contend that demonstrating inherency requires demonstrating what in the present system causes the problem to continue. There are several interpretations on what this means, I’ll work with 3.

Before I go further, here’s the difference between how each of our definitions of inherency would play out in a round:

Yours: Psychiatrist Johnny King says that as things are now, patients will continue to receive inadequate care.

Mine #1: Prof. Jerry Stevens says that the reason patients don’t receive enough care is that there aren’t enough psychiatrists

Mine #2: Psychiatrist Larry Green says that the reasons patients don’t receive enough care is that there aren’t enough psychiatrists because the APA limits the amount of training facilities because that ensures their profits stay high.

Mine #3: Prof John Fitzpatrick says that the reasons patients don’t receive good care is that they receive drugs that shouldn’t be on the market because the FDA is required by law to let people buy whatever drugs they want.

Here’s the difference:

Yours: ‘The squo won’t solve the problem’
#1: ‘The squo won’t solve the problem because X’ (I think its possible I’m misreading you, and yours and #1 are the same).
#2: ‘The squo won’t solve the problem because a certain [b]agent[/b] with the [b]motive[/b] and [b]means[/b] to do so causes that problem to continue.
#3: ‘The squo won’t solve the problem because some law or something created by a law (like the funding mechanism for the program) leads to the problem being perpetuated.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but I think it sort of establishes main theories of inherency.

Anyway, #2 describes attitudinal inherency, #3 describes structutal inherency as typically defined**.

**I think I’ve read structural inherency as including administrative structures, I’ll have to look into this.

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Note: Throughout this post there are statements talking about the status quo. Where this is written, this should be properly phrased “absence of the resolution.” The resolution could describe the status quo, in all actuality.

As a quick-follow up, at the moment I find myself in the camp of #2 and #3 are what inherency should be defined as.

I want to look into this issue more but I need to learn more about fiat first to better understand inherency. Specifically, it is claimed by Zarefsky that structures are caused by attitudes, so only attitudinal inherency is relevant. I’m unsure how this interacts with laws created by the actor in the resolution, so I don’t know yet.

These are some good inherency articles I’ve read, which isn’t that many great ones because I don’t get access to JAFA until camp starts:

Contemporary Debate, book by Patterson and Zarefsky, 1983

The Role of Causal arguments in Policy Controversies, Zarefsky, found in book Advanced Debate: Readings in theory practice and teaching

A Farewell to “Structural Change”: The Cure for Pseudo-Inherency, John F. Schunk JAFA Winter 78

The reason I find these two preferable are because they demonstrate what causes the problem to be perpetuated. Without that knowledge, the evaluator has no way to know how effective the solution will be.

It demonstrates WHY solvency works. If your plan was ‘magically create 5000 new psychiatrists’ then you solve for your inherency (lack of doctors). But since your inherency is ‘there aren’t enough education facilities for psychiatrists,’ for your inherency to match your solvency your solvency would need to remedy that problem (just offering psychiatrists a free education wouldn’t solve the problem, because there aren’t enough facilities). Essentially, your solvency and inherency evidence must meet at the same point.

The reason it is necessary to give a reason for WHY there aren’t enough schools is this:

The problem that there aren’t enough schools to train psychiatrists to help patients raises a number of possible explanations. It COULD be that the APA is blocking creation of schools, making this problem of lack of schools inherent to the status quo. But, the simple fact that there aren’t enough schools doesn’t necessarily mean something is blocking the creation of schools. In fact, 50 schools could already be in construction to train psychiatrists, and thus the harm will go away as soon as they are complete, making the harm not inherent to the status quo. The answering of the ‘why’ question is essential to demonstrating inherency.

Tiger

Also I suppose its annoying to leave ideas in 3 separate posts but my ideas were kind of scattershot as I wrote this.