inherency

[Brian R McGee <bmcgee@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>]

I cannot say that I am surprised by the recent inherency discussion. 
Inherency is the most poorly understood of the traditional stock issues and
is notoriously difficult to teach to beginning debaters.  I applaud Professor
Strickland's decision to bring a sense of history to the table.  While I
don't have his years of experience, the literature on inherency from the
1970s and early 1980s suggests that the negative demand for evidence of
structural inherency influenced debate practice for several decades. 
Moreover, as some already have suggested, high school coaches and judges
still exist who teach inherency as a structural concept, an "inherent
barrier."  When I came to Ohio State, I found my colleagues (who, by and
large, had little competitive debate experience) teaching inherency as an
exclusively structural phenomenon as recently as 1993 in our argumentation
and debate course.

Let me recommend the following article to anyone on the CEDA-L with the
slightest interest in inherency:

	Schunk, John F.  "A Farewell to "Structural Change": The Cure for
Pseudo-Inherency."  _Journal of the American Forensic Association_ 14 (1978):
 144-149.

Schunk argues that "the real nature of inherency must be expressed by the
question, `Can the problem be solved without the resolution'" (147)?  "In
other words, a negative does not have the option of defending an alleged
`non-structural repair' of the status quo if that action is demonstrated
to be a legitimate operation definition of the resolution being upheld by
the affirmative.  Surely all can agree that a negative at least has the
obligation of opposing the resolution.  For a negative to suggest adoption
of a change which is tantamount to the affirmative plan, the negative
first deny that the affirmativve's change is topical for the negative
position to make sense" (148).

Now, we should recognize that Schunk is writing prior to the debates over
resolution versus plan focus and in an era when the need for counterplan
non-topicality was assumed.  Today, those who accept the rationale for
topical counterplans would ask Schunk's question in the following way:
"Can the problem be solved without adopting the affirmative's (presumably
topical) plan?"  In other words, is the plan required to solve the
problem, or are other plan-competitive options better suited to addressing
this problem?

As reformulated, Schunk's perspective has several advantages.  First, we
find an attractive middle position between the antiquated insistence on
structural inherency and the reactionary response that inherency is never
a voting issue.  Second, we recognize that inherency argumentation is
alive and well in policy debate.  Today, we test inherency via the
counterplan.

Brian McGee
Ohio State

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