Truth makers for judgement calls

Abstract

Truths of sport seem to admit a certainty that is not to be found in other domains. I offer a diagnosis of this phenomenon. Awards in sport have a performative force: the making of an award thereby deems that it so. There are other elements, however, that have equal importance. There is an epistemic element in that umpire or referee must make a judgement about the award. This must be based on the metaphysical element, which is some fact or state of affairs in the world. Such a tripartite account allows that referees can make mistakes or that they can deliberately make an unjustified award. Because such awards are performatives, however, such facts about sport will not typically admit rational doubt.

Keywords:

• Judgement
• truth
• truth maker
• performative

Notes

¹I adopt the convention of using angled brackets, <p>, to demarcate the truth-bearers.

²It will be seen below, however, that not every truth about sport has the kind of certainty that is being discussed here. There are also some ordinary empirical, broadly scientific, claims in sport such as that there are 22 players on the field or that a certain player is 1.8 metres tall.

³Note that <it is not the case that (either it will rain or it will not)> cannot be true as it contradicts the law of excluded middle. The original statement is thus unfalsifiable on purely logical grounds. This need not be the case for all unfalsifiable statements. <Team A has won the match> may be unfalsifiable though its negation is logically consistent. In that case, if the statement is unfalsifiable, there must be some reason for that other than pure logic. I suggest such a reason later in this paper.

⁴This is not to deny that a result can be later revoked, for example, if a competitor is found to have broken rules. Until that point, it may be indefeasible that the competitor was the winner. After the victory is rescinded, it is indefeasible that they were not the winner.

⁵Indeed, whether a team or player has obeyed the rules will itself be a judgement call, though this is not to deny that an official will also have a distinctive role of enforcing the rules of the game.

⁶This is not to deny that the referee may consider various forms of evidence in forming their judgement, including the judgements of others. By the etiquette of snooker, for example, a player usually reveals a foul to the referee when they judge themselves to have fouled and the referee has not seen it.

⁷Austin's distinction between performative and ‘constative’ statements, the latter describing some state of affairs, has remained controversial. The key problem is how all statements would not take on a performative quality. Certainly all utterances can be seen as actions, hence speech act theory (Searle, 1969). While this is the case, however, the distinction between a performative and a constative remains useful in this context. Anyone other than the appointed official declaring team A the winner would not make it so.

⁸This is not to deny that there may be situations in which it is legitimate to violate the norm. A referee who has been threatened with death by the state unless they favour one team over another might well be cleared of moral responsibility.

⁹Teams may leave the field only with the permission of the referee. Where teams have left the field without permission, in modern times, there have been some severe penalties imposed by the game's governing bodies.