Kritik

In policy debate (and less commonly in Lincoln–Douglas debates), a kritik (derived from German Kritik, meaning critique and traditionally pronounced as "critique", and often abbreviated K) is generally a type of argument that challenges a certain mindset, assumption, or discursive element that exists within the advocacy of the opposing team, often from the perspective of critical theory; it is often spelled in the normal English critique or is sometimes called a criticism, and takes the adjective form kritikal (meaning and pronounced as "critical").

A kritik can either be deployed by the negative team to challenge the affirmative advocacy or by the affirmative team to indict the status quo or the negative advocacy. Although many teams in pre-merger Cross Examination Debate Association debates advocated philosophical objections to plans and resolutions for several years prior to the advent of the "Kritik," the argument was more self-consciously developed by NDT teams at The University of Texas, coached by Bill Shanahan. Bill Shanahan and Shane Stafford created the anarchism CP that at the end had a vote neg on ontology and this started labor movements leading to an existing "single-citizen" argumentation paradigm which called for the judge to vote a single citizen's conscience rather than adopting the role of the federal government.

The Shanahan kritik is more a decision calculus than the kritiks which emerged on the college circuit in the early 1990s on the nature of language's intrinsic ambiguity. Early innovators of the kritik included CEDA teams from Cal State-Chico, Southwestern College (Kansas) and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. These pre-merger debaters combined elements of traditional "value objection" and criteria-based non-policy arguments with postmodern, metaphysical, and philosophical perspectives to create a powerful, though often amorphous, negative strategy. Though kritiks are now found generally in policy debate, their usage is also increasingly found in Lincoln-Douglas debate and NPDA and NPTE parliamentary debate. Kritik is an argument that a team brings up against a policy action that is being considered.