Defensive refutation
Countering the truth: deciding what information is the truth (facts, statistics, information, etc.)
Pointing out the missing steps in their logic: deciding which steps the opposite side missed out on in their debate.
Explaining why the argument is "non-unique": the debate given by the opposite side is the same, generic spiel and doesn't have any new facts to back it up.
The argument is not comparative: the topic being debated is not comparative and cannot be compared to anything else.
Raising empirical objections: that which follows from a situation or fact, not due to the logic of language, but from experience or scientific law. The redness of the coil on the stove empirically implies dangerous heat.
Weighing arguments: deciding which arguments are more important to speak about or which ones should be left out.
Logical fallacies: a logical fallacy is, roughly speaking, an error of reasoning. When someone adopts a position, or tries to persuade someone else to adopt a position, based on a bad piece of reasoning, they commit fallacy.
Causation/Correlation fallacy: intuitively, causation seems to require not just a correlation, but a counterfactual dependence. Suppose that a student performed poorly on a test and guesses that the cause was his not studying. To prove this, one thinks of the counterfactual- the same student writing the same test under the same circumstances but having studied the night before. If one could rewind history, and change only one small thing (making the student study for the exam), then causation could be observed (by comparing version 1 to version 2) . Because one cannot rewind history and replay events after making small controlled changes, causation can only be inferred, never exactly known. This is referred to as the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference - it is impossible to directly observe causal effects.
Naturalistic fallacy (is/ought fallacy): the naturalistic fallacy is often claimed to be a formal fallacy. It was described and named by British philosopher G.E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica. Moore stated that a naturalistic fallacy is committed whenever a philosopher attempts to prove a claim about ethis by appealing to a definition of the term "goo" in terms of one or more natural properties (such as"pleasant", "more evolved", "desired", etc)
Begging the question: where the conclusion of an argument is implicitly or explicitly assumed in one of the premises.
The false dilemma: two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options, when in reality there are more.
Offensive responses - TURNS - concede the premise or warrant of the argument being made but explain why this premise or warrant is a reason to vote for the refuter's side.
Link turn: a link turn requires that the affirmative control the uniqueness, that is whether the disadvantage will occur in the status quo. In the above example, in order to link turn effectively, the affirmative would need to win a non-unique argument.
Impact turn: an impact turn requires impact calculus, that is: the reasons economic decline would make war less likely must outweigh the reasons it would spur war. For this reason, Impact Turns are usually run with No Impact arguments.
Refutation: arguing against constructive arguments made by the other debater.
Blocking an argument: pre-preparing arguments by writing attacks ahead of time to common arguments.
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