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Abstract
Philosophy of sport orthodoxy maintains the following three theses: (1) all sports (or all refereed sports) are games; (2) games are as Suits defined them; and (3) sprints are sports. This article argues that these three theses cannot be jointly maintained and offers exploratory thoughts regarding what might follow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I presented an earlier version of this paper to an audience at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport, held at the Faculty of Sport, the University of Porto. I am grateful to participants at that event for helpful reactions, and wish particularly to thank Steffen Borge, Scott Kretchmar, Doug McLaughlin, Bill Morgan, Angela Schneider, and Tom Hurka for continuing discussions. I also thank John Russell and two anonymous referees for this journal for productive questions and challenges.
Notes
1. Suits had maintained in his earlier work, including in The Grasshopper, that all sports are games. His subsequent contention that judged sports are not games (Suits 1988, 1989) has not been widely accepted. (For criticisms see Meier 1988, 1989; Kretchmar 1989.) I do not attempt to adjudicate this intramural dispute in this paper, for followers of early and late Suits agree in affirming thesis (1) as stated in text. The difference is that adherents of early Suits maintain that judged sports are games too. That is, they would delete the parenthetical as unnecessary. For them, thesis (1) is potentially misleading insofar as it implies that judged (i.e., non-refereed) sports are not games, but it is not false.
2. Suits’s account is, famously, a definition of what it is to play a game – or (better) what it is to engage or participate in a game – and not a definition of what is a game. Thesis (2) aims to translate Suits’s own definition of the former into a definition of the latter.
3. See, e.g., Suits 2005, appendix; Meier 1988, 23; Suits 1989, 4; Kretchmar 1989, 38. To be sure, when discussing sprints commentators frequently characterize them as ‘games’– even as paradigmatic or indisputable games – and don’t mention their being ‘sports’. But it is clear in context that the author believes that sprints, if games, fall into the subset of games that are sports. I have found nobody claim that sprints are games but not sports. So I believe that the sprint thesis is secure as a description of the orthodox view that I mean to question.
4. What I am terming facilitative rules are closely analogous to what the natural law tradition, following Aquinas, calls determinatio – the process by which the norms of natural law become specified or concretized into positive law. For a succinct introduction to determinatio, see Waldron 2010, 1–3.
5. Some may object that an activity that produces a state of affairs should not be opposed to a state of affairs because a more capacious description of a state of affairs could include the activity. That’s a quibble. The distinction in text could be made regardless of how we conceptualize states of affairs.
6. Suits recognizes that people will be disposed to characterize many goals in this way (e.g., Suits 2005, 45), but seems not to appreciate the potential significance. As I discuss in the next section, the closest he comes to addressing the worry I present in this section is in a discussion of mountain climbing. In that discussion, he suggests that mountain climbing is distinctive (albeit not unique) because it is non-competitive (Suits 2005, 85). I do not believe that is a relevant distinction for purposes of the concern that I am presently developing.
7. Fifteen years ago, Angela Schneider and Robert Butcher challenged Suits’s conception of prelusory goals by observing that the goals of games ‘sometimes cannot even be stipulated without a discussion of [the] means’ (1997, 44). I believe they were precisely right. They advanced this claim, however, in support of a more far-reaching contention that ‘the notion of a ‘pre-lusory goal’ is incoherent as defined’ (1997, 39). My discussion of baseball and Monopoly is intended to demonstrate that I do not endorse that more ambitious challenge.
8. I accept, at least for present purposes, Suits’s argument (2005, ch. 4) that the prelusory goal of game-playing or game-participating can depend upon concepts created by the game institution.
9. For other examples that are deployed to make much the same point see Geras 2009, 194–99. I believe that his examples might be less effective than the one I offer because it is unclear to what extent they truly involve rules. But others might find his example as effective as mine, or more effective.
10. In actual practice, the lighting of the candles comes first. I have changed the order of prescribed behaviors because doing so provides me with a somewhat simpler and cleaner candidate for a prelusory goal when I turn to creative recharacterization, below. But this is merely an expositional convenience; nothing of substance depends on my taking liberties with the actual practice. Moreover, it is exceedingly implausible that the order of behaviors in a religious ritual of this sort would affect whether the activity is a game.
11. Are these properly denominated ‘means’? See infra note 13.
12. This should be uncontroversial so long as this characterization of the prelusory goal is permitted. And it should be permitted if the alternative to a version of the Suitsian game thesis that respects a phenomenological constraint on the specification of the prelusory goal is one that is wholly unconstrained. That is my assumption in this section. Here, though, I wish to acknowledge that the two lightly sketched variations on the Suitsian game thesis that I have presented might not exhaust the range of possibilities. In theory at least, any number of intermediate positions between wholly constrained and wholly unconstrained specifications of the prelusory goal could be identified. But because a tenable intermediate position must be principled, not ad hoc, and because I do not know what the tenable intermediate positions would look like, I have analyzed matters as though there are only two polar alternatives. This endnote is intended to clearly flag that the story might look different if an appropriate intermediate approach to the problem of specifying a prelusory goal could be articulated and defended.
13. In at least one place, Suits suggests that constitutive rules must rule things out, not in. Suits 1989: 4-5. That would complicate my analysis if true. But I think it very dubious. Consider the rules of baseball that require runners to touch each base en route to the next. If these are not constitutive rules it is hard to imagine what else they might be. (For additional criticism and a helpful distinction between problems that are introduced in reaching a state of affairs and while reaching a state of affairs, see Kretchmar 1989, 39.)
14. I am grateful to Bill Morgan for pressing me for this clarification.
15. Scott Kretchmar has previously criticized Suits for paying insufficient attention to games of chance. However, it is revealing – and supportive of my argument here – that Kretchmar does not conclude that Suits’s formal account of games (or of game-playing) should be revised to accommodate such games. With respect to the lusory attitude in particular, Kretchmar maintains that people who commit to the rules governing games of chance do so ‘solely for the sake of the activity such commitments make possible’ (2008, 150).
16. For an endorsement of option (C) with which I have some sympathy see Tasioulas 2006, 239.