Don’t stop make-believing

ABSTRACT

How is it that we can rationally assert that sport outcomes do not really matter, while also seeming to care about them to an absurd degree? This is the so-called puzzle of sport. The broadly Waltonian solution to the puzzle has it that we make-believe the outcomes matter. Recently, Stear has critiqued this Waltonian solution, raising a series of five objections. He has also leveraged these objections to motive his own contextualist solution to the puzzle. The aim of this paper is to defend the Waltonian solution. The general upshot is that, contra Stear, a make-believe based solution to the puzzle is viable after all.

KEYWORDS:

• Puzzle of sport
• Walton
• Ken
• make-believe
• fiction

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Amanda Cawston, Alfred Archer, Georgina Mills, and Carlo Garofalo for useful discussion and feedback, and to Richard Woodward for lengthy discussion about the Waltonian approach in general.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, my parents are both huge Alabama fans, and can get quite emotional when they win/lose.

2. Pinning down exactly down what activities are sports or competitive games is tricky business. However, thinking about paradigmatic instances can give us a sufficient, even if rough-and-ready, grasp: football (both Association and American), basketball, cricket, tennis, and baseball are all the sort of thing that I mean by ‘sport’, while DOTA 2, Monopoly, Warhammer 40k, and chess are examples of competitive games.

3. Obviously, some sport outcomes do matter, and we care about them in virtue of some instrumental value. For example, Stear (Stear 2017, 276) mentions Uday Hussein threatening to amputate the legs of the members of the Iraq national football team if they lost (see, e.g., Kuper and Szymanski 2009, 278). However, we can set those cases aside and focus exclusively on those that, in our sober moments, we all agree lack this instrumental value.

4. For more on the difference between sport and competitive games, see, e.g. Suits (1978) and Schnieder (2001).

5. This and the following are slightly modified versions of the presentation in Stear (2017, 276–7).

6. In brief, the cognitivist theory of emotions holds that some kind of cognitive activity (e.g. judgements, evaluations, thoughts, etc.) are necessary constituents of emotions. For more on cognitivism, see, e.g. Solomon (2003), Neu (2000), and Nussbaum (2001), and for criticisms of cognitivism, see, e.g. James (1884), Prinz (2004), and Deigh (1994). Here, I simply accept the plausibility of (PF1), and leave the debate about the nature of emotions for another day.

7. Fictional realists claim that fictional entities (characters, events, objects, etc.) exist, while fictional anti-realists say that they do not. Pre-theoretically, anti-realism is extremely plausible. However, there is much debate about the matter. For an overview of the debate, see Friend (2007). For a sustained defence of fictional anti-realism, see Everett (2013) .

8. For further details about Walton’s broad theory, see, e.g. Walton (1990, 1993) and Woodward (2014).

9. The solution also involves taking it to be the case that, fictionally, we do believe that the outcomes matter a great deal, which is compatible with the truth of (PS1) and (PS2).

10. This presentation glosses over several irrelevant finer details.

11. Figure from Rovell (2016).

12. Remember that I, like Stear, treat ‘sport’ and ‘competitive game’ interchangeably. For a case against esports as (proper) sport, see Parry (2018).

13. Whether all videogames are fictions in Walton’s sense is debatable. For further discussion, see, e.g. Tavinor (2005, 2009), Robson and Meskin (2016) and Meskin and Robson (2012).

14. And, for what it is worth, it is not clear how Stear’s own solution to the puzzle gives us a way for delineating between the rational and irrational cases.

15. It is worth noting that one can accept Strong- or Weak-SMB while denying the Waltonian solution to the puzzle: thinking that participating in sport involves engaging in a game of make-believe does not entail thinking that make-believe explains any puzzle case. Compare the paradox of fiction. Accepting a Waltonian account of fiction does not entail accepting the Waltonian, quasi-emotion solution to the paradox. In fact, the Waltonian account of fiction as games of make-believe is compatible with numerous paradox solutions, including, but not limited to, Walton’s own.

16. One potential approach might be to appeal to Walton’s conception of categories of art (Walton 1970), and use these to help delineate different ‘categories of make-believe’. But I leave this issue for another day.

17. To avoid any undue complications, we can also stipulate that, in this case, I am behaving rationally.

18. For more on permissions to imagine, see Williams and Woodward (ms), Wildman and Woodward (2018), and Wildman (2019).