Logic, Rules and Intention: The Principal Aim Argument

Abstract

Stephen Mumford develops his view of sport spectatorship partly through a rejection of an argument he attributes to Best, which distinguishes between two categories of sports, the ‘purposive’ and the ‘aesthetic’, on the basis of the claim that they have different principal aims. This paper considers the principal aim argument and one feature of Mumford’s rejection of that argument, namely, Best’s observation that the distinctions to which he draws attention are based on logical differences. The paper argues that Mumford misconstrues Best’s argument by taking it to be about the intentions of players and athletes, while it is actually about a specific feature of the rules of each sport.

Keywords:

• Logic
• rules
• intention
• principal aim
• purposive sports
• aesthetic sports

Acknowledgements

The material in this paper emerged from exploring an element of a paper read to the North American Society for Aesthetics Pacific Division meeting in Pacific Grove, California on 9 April 2015. I’m grateful to Alva Noë, David Davies, James Hamilton, Sean Kelly and Christopher Thi Nguyen for questions and comments on the paper from which this developed. I’m also very grateful to Stephen Mumford for providing me with some of his work and for the interest he has shown in the work I am doing on this and related topics. As always, I’m very grateful to Graham McFee—in this case for inviting me to that conference, reading and commenting on this paper, and for innumerable discussions on the issues considered here.

Notes

1. Best (1978, 104) is referring to the distinction between purposive and aesthetic sports, but also see page 102 on form and content.

2. Best doesn’t use the expression ‘principal aim’ in describing the argument Mumford has in mind, however, he does refer to the ‘primary purpose’ (1978, 101) and to the ‘primary consideration’ (1978, 101), but he usually just refers to ‘the purpose’ or ‘independently specifiable purpose’ (1978, 104).

3. Someone might wonder whether Mumford thinks the differences psychological. There are at least two possibilities that would warrant an affirmative response of some kind, namely, that Mumford thinks the differences are psychological and not logical, or that Mumford falls into a form of psychologism in reducing the logical to the psychological. However, a third interpretation seems preferable—Mumford seems to treat the differences as if they were psychological differences because he focuses on intentions rather than rules. That interpretation seems the most charitable insofar as it doesn’t make an accusation of psychologism that would be hard to substantiate, and it also seems the most accurate as Mumford does not claim that the differences are not logical.

4. I have chosen ‘purpose’ rather than ‘primary purpose’ because Best usually only refers to the ‘purpose’, ‘aim’, ‘goal’, ‘end’ or even ‘point’ or ‘consideration’ (largely used interchangeably in this context—see 1978, 101–104), and only very rarely refers to the ‘primary purpose’ or ‘primary consideration’. His main emphasis is on the fact that there is an ‘independently specifiable purpose’ (Best 1978, 104), rather than on the idea of such a purpose being primary. Stressing that is not to suggest that he used the term ‘primary’ in error or accidentally, but rather to draw attention to the fact that it could be misleading to over-emphasise primacy when it is the idea of independent specifiability that is more prominent. Recognising that helps give a more accurate understanding of Best’s argument. However, to avoid the accusation of having misrepresented Best for my own purposes, I continue to refer to ‘the primary purpose’ on occasion in this paper where it seems accurate to do so, but have chosen not to refer to Best’s argument that way as there seems to me to be a greater danger of misrepresentation if care isn’t taken in relation to the role given to the term ‘primary’ in our understanding of Best’s argument.

5. Someone might be puzzled by the fact that Best seems to say that there is no gap between means and ends in aesthetic sports, and that the purpose in such sports cannot be specified independently of the manner of achieving it, yet at other times says that the gap isn’t quite completely closed, and that there is an externally specifiable aim. However, consideration of the contrast Best is drawing in each case clarifies the apparent contradiction. Specification of the purpose in aesthetic sports cannot be done accurately without consideration of the way in which that purpose is achieved (a dive is not just any way of getting from the board into the water). That marks a very important difference between aesthetic sports and purposive sports (where any way of achieving the purpose that is permitted by the rules will do). So in contrasting purposive and aesthetic sports, the difference in those two kinds of case in relation to the gap between means and end is wide, whereas in contrasting art and aesthetic sports it is important to stress that the gap between means and ends is never entirely closed in aesthetic sports because, for example, the diver must perform something that counts as a dive. The degree of creative freedom open to the artist is not that open to those in aesthetic sports. It is also important to stress here that the distinction between purposive and aesthetic sports is not a distinction between the competitive and the non-competitive; aesthetic sports are normally just as competitive as purposive sports.

6. McFee (2015, 209) illustrates this in relation to treating a purposive sport in such a way that it becomes a mixed sport when he points out that ‘[t]o give weight, reflected in the scoring, to aesthetic concerns in purposive sports would build in a concern with the manner of scoring that would transform the purposive sport, perhaps with the suggestion that, in gridiron football, a scrambled touchdown counted six points (as at present), but seven points for one from a run over thirty yards. Such a “mixed sport” would reflect “manner of execution”, but would not be gridiron football’.

7. Importantly, McFee (2015, 205) qualifies the relevant sense of the term ‘purpose’ in Best’s account by use of ‘[the goal]’.

8. It is possible to make the distinction perfectly well without failing to appreciate the overhead kick as an action in football if the focus is not aesthetic appreciation, but rather simply the attempt to score a goal by any means within the rules.

9. Best (1978, 108) thinks that these considerations help us understand the fact that we are more likely to watch a slow motion replay with a greater level of aesthetic appreciation than we have watching sport under normal circumstances. This, he suggests, is partly because, first, there is more time available to us to appreciate the manner in which the athlete executes the task, and, second, the purpose of the movements being performed is of less significance in relation to the action replay than it is while we are watching sport under normal circumstances. This second point is perhaps made more clearly by McFee’s (1985, 2004, 91; 2013, 414, 423; 2015, 83, 94, 111–12, 117, 120, 125, 208 and 214) example of the Goal of the Month competition, in which the purpose of the actions, namely, to score a goal, is completely removed as a consideration because it is achieved, by definition, in each goal that is part of the competition.

10. Trying to score a goal in this context just means doing things that contribute to the possibility of scoring, not some psychological piece of prior planning.

11. It’s rather difficult to find a term that captures everything of relevance here. ‘Playing the game’ and ‘playing the sport’ both seem inadequate as they fail to capture the activities of those taking part in individual sports. ‘Taking part’ isn’t right either because the whole point on this view is that those involved must be trying to win, yet one could, in some basic sense, take part without trying (or trying too hard) to win. I’ve chosen ‘in competition’ as the lesser of various evils. More importantly, ‘trying to do’ and ‘intending’ have the potential to cause all sorts of confusion both here and in the interpretation of Best’s texts more generally, but there are no suitable alternatives. The relevant contrast in this case is between what the rules specify is necessary to win, and what a player decides to try to do (a matter of personal psychology). That does not mean that there aren’t other ways in which we can use ‘trying to do’ or ‘intends’, ‘intending’, etc. that amount to much the same as the thing the rules specify is necessary to win, and we might also use terms such as ‘goal’, ‘aim’, ‘purpose’ or ‘end’ in such cases. For example, we might ask ‘What are you trying to do?’ and be given the answer ‘To score’, but we might also ask the question ‘What is your aim or goal?’ and receive the same answer, ‘To score’. In that sense, the thing that is the goal, aim, etc. is also the intention. That does mean that expressions such as ‘trying to …’ and ‘intending to …’ can cause confusion because I generally have to use them here in contrast to what the rules specify is necessary to win, yet Best sometimes uses them in the other way—as synonyms for ‘goal’, ‘aim’, ‘purpose’ or ‘end’, by which he means what the rules specify is necessary to win (it is in that sense that they are independently specifiable; we don’t have to ask individuals what they were trying to do). So in one sense of ‘trying to score a goal’ or ‘intends to score a goal’ most people playing football can be said to be trying to score a goal or to intend to score a goal (if, for example, they shoot at the goal), but that is a criterial ascription, not the identification of a piece of prior planning on the part of a player. Best (1992, 138) had a criterial view of intention, so the occasions on which he uses ‘trying to’ or ‘intends’ in this way shouldn’t be thought of as contradictions of the point being made in this paper, where the relevant contrast is between what the rules specify is necessary to win (which are criteria in the criterial view of intention) and the prior planning of any given individual.

12. There is a difficulty here in that one might regard the purpose argument and the principal aim argument as the same argument, nominally distinguished for the purpose of stressing the two understandings of the argument, or, alternatively, one might regard them as two different arguments—that the rather subtle way in which Mumford might be thought of as having misunderstood Best’s argument means that the argument that Mumford describes and rejects is just a different argument from the one Best makes. We often think of arguments as being individuated by conclusions, but differences in premises also individuate arguments. In this case, the difference need not even be in the form of words used in the inference, but rather in the meaning, or in what is said. The important thing is that there is a difference, and as a consequence, it seems most accurate to think of the purpose argument and the principal aim argument as two different arguments.

13. Suits (2005, 49–51) provides the technical terminology of ‘prelusory’ and ‘lusory’ goals, and some might think that jargon relevant here. In relation to the purposive/aesthetic distinction, McFee (2015, 207) draws attention to its resemblance to Suits’s (1995, 17) distinction between officiated and judged sports, but rightly explains why ‘Best’s is a more perspicuous way to contrast sports’.