Sport, Rules and Values Sport, Rules and Values presents a philosophical perspective on some issues concerning the character of sport. Central questions for the text are motivated from ‘real life’ sporting examples, as described in newspaper reports. For instance, the (supposed) subjectivity of umpiring decisions is explored via an examination of the judging of ice-skating at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games of 2002. Throughout, the presentation is rich in concrete cases from sporting situations, including cricket, baseball, American football, and soccer.
While granting the constitutive nature of the rules of sport, discussion focuses on three broad uses commonly urged for rules: in defining sport; in judging or assessing sport (as deployed by judges or umpires); and in characterizing the value of sport – especially if that value is regarded as moral value. In general, Sport, Rules and Values rejects a conception of the determinacy of rules as possible within sport (and a parallel picture of the determinacy assumed to be required by philosophy). Detailed consideration of some ideas from classics in the philosophy of sport, especially writings by Bernard Suits and William Morgan contextualize this discussion. Overall, this work exemplifies the dependence of philosoph- ical considerations of sport on ideas from philosophy more generally.
Thus it sketches, for example, the contrast between rules and principles, an account of the occasion-sensitivity of understanding, and the place of normative and motivating reasons within practical reasoning. The book’s argumentative structures originate in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein without explicitly being an exposition of those ideas. It views philosophy as addressing the specific issues of particular persons, rather than approaching perennial problems. In this way, the view of sport, and of sporting practices, that it supports has the flexibility to approach new issues.
The result is a distinctive and appealing conception both of sport and of its philosophical investigation. Graham McFee is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brighton; and Vice President of the British Society of Aesthetics. He has written and presented extensively, both nationally and internationally, on the philo- sophy of Wittgenstein and on aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of dance. Sport, Rules and Values Philosophical investigations into the nature of sport Graham McFee First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 Graham McFee All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-29987-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67229-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-32208-1 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-32964-7 (pbk) Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Sport, rules and values 1 Organization of the text 1 Some central ideas for this text 4 Hope for a philosophy of sport? 8 A view of philosophy? 9 The audience for this work 11 PART I Rules in explaining sport 13 1 Definiteness and defining sport 15 The issues 17 Why define? 21 A definition (of sport) is neither possible nor desirable 22 Mistakenly thinking one has a definition 24 Rule-following and definition 27 The philosophical point (or lack of it) of definition 28 What is in common? 31 2 Rule-following and formalism in sport 33 Formalism: explaining sport in terms of rules? 34 Criticisms: the adequacy of formalism? 36 Some defence of formalism 39 Constitutive and regulative uses of rules 43 Some general considerations about rule-following 44 Some implications for formalism 47 An occasion-sensitive view of meaning and understanding 49 Rule-following and understanding 52 vi Contents 3 Rule-following and rule-formulations 53 Formalism extended: the idea of more kinds of rules 54 Alternatives to formalism – the ethoi position 56 Two versions of ethos account 58 Ethos: a normative account 61 Rules and the purposes of sport 64 More fundamental criticisms 66 Rules and rule-formulations 68 4 Practices and normativity in sport 72 A view of practices 72 Ethos, practice and normativity 75 Customs and rules 77 Conclusion to Part I 83 PART II Rules in judging sport 85 5 Aesthetic sports, publicity and judgement calls 87 Just about every call is a judgement call 88 Two kinds of sports? 90 What is subjectivity? 92 Two bad arguments for the subjectivity of judgements 93 Objectivity and options 96 Aesthetic sports: the importance of judgement 97 6 Principles and the application of rules 101 The need to apply the rules (even for purposive sports) 102 Some cases? 103 Principles and discretion 105 A parallel: the moral reading of the American Constitution? 108 7 Spoiling, cheating and playing the game 112 Spoiling – ‘legal’ cheating 112 The spoiling example 113 The issue of generality 115 Finding the real rules? 116 Some other cases 117 Contents vii Cheating and rule-following 118 What is wrong with cheating? 121 Why obey rules? 122 Conclusion to Part II: the moral imperative is intrinsic 126 PART III Rules in valuing sport 127 8 The project of a moral laboratory; and particularism 129 Sport’s moral dimension? 130 Explanations and qualifications 132 The argument 137 Investigation of the premises 138 Particularism and moral judgement 141 Thinking about the moral laboratory 144 Problem: the moral nature of sport? 145 Outcomes 148 9 The value of sport 149 Reasons for participation in sport 150 Normative and motivating reasons 151 Normative reasons, rules and sport 155 The persistence of value 160 The remaking of value-formulations 163 10 Relativism, objectivity and truth 165 The denial of the coherence of relativism 167 The postmodern challenge: incredulity towards metanarratives 168 Understanding and the concrete 171 The postmodern challenge II: reason and science 173 One sporting world? 175 Conclusion: Sport, rules and philosophy 177 Notes 183 Bibliography 190 Index 197 H Acknowledgements Ancestors of parts of this work have been previously published (although all sections are extensively revised here). So my thanks for permission to recycle material to: Greenwood/Praeger for McFee (forthcoming) in Introduction; Leisure Studies Association for McFee (2000c) in Chapter 8; Meyer & Meyer for McFee (2000d) in Chapter 9, and sections of which I was the primary author from Keech and McFee (2000) in Chapter 10; Routledge for McFee (2000b) in Chapter 7, McFee (1998b) in Chapter 10.
This work has debts to many people: I hereby thank them all. Some of my key ideas have been presented to national and international conferences, or to other interested parties. But, in roughly its present form, this text grows primarily from teaching the Philosophy of Sport to students in the Chelsea School at the University of Brighton, to whom my thanks are due. I single out for special thanks: Myrene, my wife, for all her help, both material and intellectual, as well as her aid in preparing the text; Katherine Morris for support, for discussion of some key themes here, and for giving me sight (again) of some unpublished work of Gordon Baker’s; Mike McNamee as series editor, and especially for encouraging me to cast the text in terms of what I had to say about the study of sport; Paul McNaught- Davis for financial support (as Head of the Chelsea School) and moral support; Alan Tomlinson for discussion of many topics, and especially for encouragement with study of Olympism (and joint work on it).
Finally, my gratitude is due to the late Gordon Baker who contributed immeasurably to my understanding of philosophy in general and Wittgenstein in particular, through conversation and through commentary on things I had written. When I envisaged completing this book, I saw myself acknow- ledging specifically Gordon’s contribution to (not to say, complete reshap- ing of ) my view of rule-following. His death in 2002 raised a question about whether this was an appropriate way to recognize his massive contribution to my thinking on this issue alone – putting aside others – a huge debt going far beyond those places where I draw explicitly on some of his writings. Although we discussed some of these issues (to my benefit), Gordon did not see this text – it would have been better if he had! I would not seek to saddle him, much less his memory, with any of my ‘readings’.
But, equally, x Acknowledgements I do not want to imply that I would be presenting even any version of this view of the philosophical project without his friendship for roughly the past twenty-five years. I would certainly have dedicated the book to Gordon, had I thought it worthy. Were it not hubristic (and gross inflation of my powers), I would imagine his response to my efforts as John Wisdom expected Wittgenstein to view his: that giving a whole book to a small issue in philosophy was still ‘. not sufficiently hard working – a bit cheap and flash’ (Wisdom 1952: 1 note).
But, of course, I would have willingly accepted the censure, since it would have been discussed point by point, with unfailing good humour. Introduction 1 Introduction Sport, rules and values A common-sense idea – also propounded by some sociologists of sport – connects the idea of sport to systems of rules; and (ideally) to formalized and codified rules. For example, Eric Dunning and Ken Sheard (1979) argued that one feature of modern sports, marking them out from folk games, was the use (or presence) of a codified system of rules. Whatever one makes of the detail here, the initial intuition – connecting sport and rules – seems sound: on the face of it, we cannot have sports untrammelled by rules nor can there be sporting actions (such as the scoring of tries or touchdowns) without such rules.
And this intuition has been explored and exploited by many writers on sport.1 The central ideas in this text, though, are first that misconceptions con- cerning the nature and operations of rules distort accounts of sports while, second, a clearer conception of rules can clarify some of the issues con- cerning both the nature and value of sport – and even solve (or resolve) some of them. Moreover, the misconception and the clarification both turn on views of determinacy, and especially on the nature of the requirement (if any) for determinacy within philosophy. As those who know my other writings might expect, I find the appro- priate discussion of rules and rule-following in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But this text is not an exposition of Wittgenstein, nor does it argue explicitly that this conception of rules should be ascribed to him, although I have included quotations from Wittgenstein to emphasize key points, sometimes giving references to places in his work where exemplifica- tion (and additional argument) might be sought.
Rather, Wittgenstein’s insights into the nature of rules and of rule-following are deployed to help understand the nature of sport, with explanation of those insights (to the degree needed) as we go along. Organization of the text This text is in three main parts. The first considers the role of rules in defining sport; the second looks to rules used in judging sport – hence, to the role of judges or umpires; the third considers how the value of sport might be explained in terms of rules, especially moral rules. 2 Introduction The first part primarily concerns ideals of definiteness: it is often assumed that rules do, or should, completely circumscribe a particular sport, such that we can exhaustively characterize or define that sport in terms of those rules.
This assumption imports three kinds of mistakes: a mistake about the possibility of definition; a mistake about the need for definition; and a mistake about the connection of rules to definiteness.